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.
Since 2015 the Netherlands has undergone a welfare system transformation which has impacted healthcare governance and the redistribution of responsibilities and austerity measures. Key was the devolution of formerly centralised services and support to municipalities, which in turn necessitated a strategy for social innovation in which local partners develop new practices for social care and well-being. Regional learning networks (RNSWD) have been set up to address wicked problems and encourage innovation in the social welfare domain.
Although the RNSWD are highly diverse in structure and approach, they do share a common transformative rationale for their approach. Learning facilitators hold key, preconditional roles, often being (politically neutral) action-researchers from the affiliated RNSWD, but sometimes also boundary workers from (stakeholder) practice organisations. Agenda formation was generally determined collaboratively by network members, comprising themes such as collaborative issues and new conceptions of care and well-being practices. All networks apply peer supervision or deliberative procedures.
The main conclusion is that processes of liberation and empowerment of network professionals are fundamentally intertwined with a learning approach to social innovation: dialogue and supervision create a space for reflection on existential questions regarding the organisation of care and social support, and what this means for professional and personal identities.
Although the contribution of social entrepreneurship to social innovation is becoming increasingly acknowledged in theory and practice, it is less apparent in relation to social work. This chapter aims to contribute to a better understanding of social entrepreneurship in relation to issues of social innovation and social work. We will do this by focusing in particular on work integration of vulnerable groups, one of the most dominant impact areas in which many social enterprises are active and which most directly relates to the traditional domain of social work. The chapter analyses specific examples from the UK and the Netherlands to discuss how social enterprises have contributed to systemic change in the social domain, and what its possible implications could be for the future of social work.
Written by leading experts from across Europe, this book provides a grounded exploration of innovation in the practice, research and education of social work. It focuses on the role of participation, collaboration and co-creation as key drivers of social innovation within these fields, providing practical examples of social entrepreneurship, people-centred design and participatory led innovation.
The positive outcomes of local social innovations are analysed in the wider European framework, with reflections and recommendations for advancing innovation in policy, service provision, education and research.
This chapter describes how service user involvement in social work education and research is related to social innovation. The involvement of service users can in itself be seen as social innovation, but also facilitates learning and research processes that increase the knowledge and competences of future social workers to work in socially innovative ways. We discuss the content, process and empowerment dimensions of social innovation in cooperative methods with service users in social work education and research.
By presenting selected examples from education and research, we discuss their potential in the production of new or newly combined knowledge; the goal of addressing social problems that respond to normative needs; the added value for social work education, social work research, the profession and service users; the transformation in social relations or social structures along the lines of the fight against injustice, inequality and inaccessibility.
Written by leading experts from across Europe, this book provides a grounded exploration of innovation in the practice, research and education of social work. It focuses on the role of participation, collaboration and co-creation as key drivers of social innovation within these fields, providing practical examples of social entrepreneurship, people-centred design and participatory led innovation.
The positive outcomes of local social innovations are analysed in the wider European framework, with reflections and recommendations for advancing innovation in policy, service provision, education and research.
In this chapter, we investigate whether social innovation is a useful notion for social work and, if so, how social work can contribute to social innovation. We distinguish three dimensions. The first dimension is how social work can (co-)create innovations in the field of social services contributing to social quality and well-being. We argue that social work research has a supporting function in these processes, as it provides the empirical and theoretical basis for a critical stand and for innovation.
The second dimension is how social work can contribute to the ‘social’ in all kinds of innovations, meaning that social quality is put at the centre. This includes taking a critical stance towards the use of ‘social’ in various innovation contexts, to remain diligently focused on what the true social benefits are for people. The third dimension is to look at the innovative character of social work itself, as a profession and an academic discipline, since playing a role in social innovation means that we as professionals and researchers must be innovative ourselves. Innovation competencies therefore need to be part of the body of knowledge of social work and part of the curricula of social work education.
The European Commission frames social innovation as a top-down process and a product handed down to staff on the ground. It is an approach that sees invention as exceptional and privileges quantitative evaluation research that sets out models and specifications of practice. There is little space for discretion and creativity. In practice, though, discretion on the ground is central to the development of new and responsive social services. It bridges the abstracted world of models and specifications of practice handed down by evaluators and policy makers and the messy world of practice. But while practical creativity is widespread, it is liable to be denigrated as non-compliance. However, horizontal creativity reflects the imagination and pragmatism of day-to-day practice, where practitioners and service users negotiate needs and co-create services. It recognises that what works for one person or community may not work for another and may not work again for the same person or community at another time. Discretion is central to this approach – the context in which creativity is nurtured and can operate. Common criticisms of horizontal creativity are that it atomises practice, which means that practitioners constantly reinvent the wheel and that it cannot engage strategically with social issues.
Community incubators, specifically the Norwegian ‘Unlimited’ incubators that are the focus of this chapter, are spaces typically associated with social innovation processes and products. This chapter shows that they can also be a natural home for social work and community development. Results of research undertaken in three ways – semi-structured open interviews, formal evaluation and open input from participant experience – are presented. Aggregated indicators show that Unlimited incubators support individuals and communities to achieve a stronger sense of belonging, greater cohesion and increased inclusion. In addition, they can catalyse innovative solutions to local, national and global challenges. Key to achieving such impact is having clear ambitions for the incubator around human aspects such as relationship-building, equity and mutual support, this in addition to providing tools and support to create value through establishing social enterprises. The incubators work best in a context of close public sector collaboration, co-financing for stability and a location within the neighbourhoods they strive to create well-being in.
Social work, community work and social innovation are intertwined in Unlimited incubators. It is this that gives them a unique position in Norway that could, with careful replication, have major impact on the long-term future well-being locally and more widely.
This chapter examines strategies for addressing power imbalances, bias and disempowerment in the research process from the perspective of both care-experienced and non-care-experienced researchers. Also, this chapter reflects on practical advice for those engaging with care-experienced people in research and doing so can create more authentic, empowering and meaningful experiences for care-experienced participants in ways that reduce fear of shame, stigma, tokenism and re-traumatisation.
Street-involved children are recognised as a social concern worldwide. In South Africa, there are an estimated 250,000 street-involved children, living mostly in the larger centres of the country. Street-involved children’s lives are characterised by hardship and stigmatisation; they live on the very edges of society. However, street-involved children demonstrate considerable resilience in their daily lives as they navigate and negotiate their way to accessing resources necessary for their daily lives and future goals. This study entailed qualitative interviews with nine young adults who had lived on the streets prior to coming into care, and then been taken up into the residential care of a children’s home and had since aged out of care. The study examined the accounts of the resilience of these nine care-leavers while living on the streets. The findings show that, while on the streets, participants demonstrated resilience in building family-like connections, networking people for resources and reflecting on their learning through life experiences. The authors argue that recognising and celebrating these resilience factors when working with former street-involved children in care will enable them to incorporate these resilience processes into a repertoire of resilience enablers for life.
