Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Chapter 10 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This interdisciplinary collection charts the experiences of young people in places of spatial marginality around the world, dismantling the privileging of urban youth, urban locations and urban ways of life in youth studies and beyond.
Expert authors investigate different dimensions of spatiality including citizenship, materiality and belonging, and develop new understandings of the complex relationships between place, history, politics and education. From Australia to India, Myanmar to Sweden, and the UK to Central America, international examples from both the Global South and North help to illuminate wider issues of intergenerational change, social mobility and identity.
By exploring young lives beyond city, this book establishes different ways of thinking from a position of spatial marginality.
Spanning the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers’ politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on childcare, work and gender.
The book illustrates how maternal workers continue to organize against low pay, exploitative working conditions and state retrenchment and provides a unique theorization of feminist divisions and solidarities.
Bringing together social reproduction with maternal studies, this is a resonating call to build a cross-sectoral, intersectional movement around childcare. Maud Perrier shows why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for post-pandemic times.
In the past, youth has been seen as a transition into the labour market, but today young people’s identities are increasingly wrapped up in their value as workers.
In this book, young people describe the meaning of work in their own words. Drawing on these narratives, the author reveals how their identities are intertwined with the dynamics of labour and value in post-Fordist capitalism and how social inequalities are manifested through the practices and ethics that young people draw upon to cultivate an economically productive self.
Illuminating the rapidly changing social conditions that mould youth identities, this book represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of youth and work.
Based on up to date qualitative and ethnographic research, this book examines youth education-to-work transitions in the UK. Using the theoretical lens of a Foucauldian governmentality approach, the authors consider the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of youth employability training and demonstrate how different employability schemes planned and operationalised in diverse geographical and economic landscapes work in practice. The book examines and compares a range of employment entry route programmes and reveals the tension between employability and good quality employment, and the ways in which young people from varying social and regional backgrounds are positioned very differently within this.
After the financial crisis of 2008 youth unemployment soared across Europe, leaving a generation of highly qualified young people frustrated in their search for secure, meaningful work.
With contributions from over 90 authors and more than 60 individual contributions this collection summarises the findings of a large-scale EU funding project on Strategic Transitions for Youth Labour in Europe (STYLE).
Including the often overlooked and unheard voices of young people themselves, this eclectic range of contributions discuss the distinctive characteristics of the current phase of youth employment.
It provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes of European youth unemployment and assesses the effectiveness of labour market policies across the region.
Shortlisted for the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2019.
What’s it really like to be a mother with a career working flexibly?
Drawing on over 100 hours of interview data, this book is the first to go inside women’s work and family lives in a year of working flexibly.
The private labours of going part-time, job sharing, and home working are brought to life with vivid personal stories.
Taking a sociological and feminist perspective, it explores contemporary motherhood, work-life balance, emotional work in families, couples and housework, maternity transitions, interactions with employers, work design and workplace cultures, and employment policies.
It concludes that there is an opportunity to make employment and family life work better together and offers unique insights from women’s lived experiences on how to do it.
Women are encouraged to believe that they can occupy top jobs in society by the example of other women thriving in their careers. Who better to be a role model for career success than your mother? Paradoxically, this book shows that having a mother as a role model, even for graduates of top universities, does not predict daughters progressing in their own careers.
It finds that mothers with careers, whilst highly influential in their daughters’ choice of career path, rarely mentor their daughters as they progress. This is partly explained by ‘quiet ambition’ – the tendency of women to be modest about their achievements. Bigger issues are the twin pressures from contemporary motherhood and workplace culture that ironically lead career women’s daughters to believe that being a ‘good mother’ means working part-time. This stalls career progress.
Based on a large, cross-generational qualitative sample, this book offers a timely and original perspective on the debate about gender equality in leadership positions.
