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
The wider political context within which this study is set is one of radical reform of the welfare state in the UK. This chapter discusses and highlights key elements of the current policy context, especially reform of welfare and social policy, and reflects on these in light of some of the key findings. It also, uses the circumstances reported to shine a light on the type of policy approach that is necessary to respond to the complex individual and family circumstances that are revealed by the research, covering such topics as illness and disability, childcare provision, income adequacy and employment, fuel poverty, an integrated set of local services.
This chapter investigates how respondents interpret and engaged with key ‘public encounters’, especially those involving perceived negative constructions and expectations. It is especially interested in public encounters, viewing these as arenas of moral scrutiny. The chapter identifies respondents’ experiences in regard to situations in which they have to represent themselves and their families and investigates the cognitive and social processes and activities they engage in to counter negative depictions of themselves and their family members. The chapter is especially interested in understanding to what extent such encounters are associated with embarrassment and/or shame and whether this affects people’s sense of empowerment, identity, well-being and resource use. The chapter also looks at if and how people engage in ‘othering’, distancing themselves from others through negative processes.
This chapter examines both the local lives and engagements of respondents and the ‘localness’ of their lives. It first looks at people’s sense of the locality in which they live. One of the questions running through the chapter is the extent to which people are socially isolated and/or locally engaged. Hence the chapter examines respondents’ friendship networks and also their involvement with neighbours. People’s use of a range of local services is also considered as is how they see their own involvement in the local community. Finally, the chapter examines respondents’ evaluations of how they and their family compare to others in terms of aspects of standard of living.
This chapter investigates the meaning and significance of family relationships among adults and especially the chains of relationships outside the immediate or nuclear family. These are examined mainly through the prism of whether and how people’s familial relationships involve the giving or receiving of resources and support including (money, other forms of material support, emotional support and knowledge/information). Among the topics investigated are the nature of the support received (if any) and the relational context within which it takes place. The chapter is especially interested in investigating the understandings that people have of receiving and giving help and assistance from and to relatives and the particular norms that govern exchanges among family members. The negotiations around exchanges, for example, ambivalences, the norms around giving back and reciprocity are also considered.
This final chapter connects the findings of the research with broader debates, research and theory in respect of work, unemployment, labour markets and welfare. Particular attention is focussed towards the myth of the high skills economy, the growth of underemployment and poor work and the idea that we have witnessed the rise of a new class at the bottom of society – ‘the Precariat’ - characterised by its general insecurity and precarious work opportunities. The final part of the chapter gives a critique of current political and policy approaches that bear on questions of work, welfare and poverty, highlighting their potential to seriously worsen the conditions and prospects of the sort of people whose testimonies provide the backbone of this book. It argues for – and describes - policies that would tackle the insecurity and poverty of low-pay, no-pay Britain, particularly strategies ‘to make bad jobs better’.
This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each. This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each. This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each. This chapter introduces the book. It begins by repeating the mantra-like statements favoured by British politicians that ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, counter-posing these with brief statements from research participants about the realities of ‘in-work poverty’. The first part of the chapter summarises the thrust of the books descriptions and its overall arguments. This is followed by a description of the layout of the book, chapter by chapter, with discussion of the main findings and arguments contained in each.
This chapter (and the two which follow) offer a description and analysis of the low-pay, no-pay cycle from the point of view of those caught up in it. Firstly, the chapter examines and describes the long-term pattern of churning between low paid jobs, ineffectual training and employability programmes and unemployment that was found in earlier research studies undertaken by the research team with interviewees in their teens and twenties. The chapter goes on to show how this pattern of working was also found in the same interviewees, via this current study, when they were in their thirties. Exactly the same pattern of the low-pay, no-pay cycle was found amongst the older people, in their 40s and 50s. Thus the chapter concludes that so-called entry level jobs do not act as stepping stones to more secure and better employment and that these experiences are not limited to the youth stage but continue over the life course, becoming for economically marginalised groups a permanent feature of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain.
This chapter reports on the interviewees undertaken with employers and practitioners who worked for ‘welfare to work’ agencies in Middlesbrough. The findings have a particular focus on what employers and agencies reported to be the key barriers to the unemployed getting jobs. Most commonly explanations rested on the personal attributes and attitudes of the unemployed rather than the availability of suitable work. This focus on supposed ‘supply-side’ deficits in the unemployed available workforce reflects the dominant approach to tackling worklessness in national policies. A very significant finding highlighted in this chapter is that formal qualifications and skills were notably missing from the list of personal attributes required and considered of little importance in practice by employers and agencies, working at the lower end of the labour market. The chapter illustrates how workers themselves have little power in this labour market – sent by agencies, hired or not by employers, only to return to welfare to work agencies as jobs finish or do not start. The chapter concludes by comparing, briefly, the ‘barriers to jobs’ as perceived by welfare to work agencies and as experienced by those caught up in the low-pay, no-pay cycle.
The chapter focuses on people’s recurrent experiences of getting, doing, losing and leaving jobs. It shows how much of the work now available is typically low-skilled, low paid and insecure yet usually demand uncommonly high levels of personal commitment. These jobs were found to be typically physically and mentally demanding yet poorly valued in terms of remuneration and status. For a few interviewees better quality employment meant they escaped the poverty and churning of the low-pay, no-pay cycle. It is employment opportunities – the demand side of the labour market - which are most significant in shaping the low-pay, no-pay cycle and patterns of recurrent poverty. Intriguingly, although able to - sometimes graphically - describe the pain and unpleasantness of poor work, interviewees would simultaneously proclaim how they ‘loved’ working. This conundrum is explained by reference to the intrinsic social, psychological, moral and class cultural value of work to interviewees. The chapter also scrutinises how and why workers left jobs, which was often related to the pressures of work on personal health or because of wider crises in people’s lives. Predominantly, the inherent insecurity of jobs, with employers who were as quick to fire as they were to hire, meant that jobs were lost.
This chapter sets out the general theoretical and empirical terrain of the book, drawing attention to continuities and discontinuities both in the provision of welfare as an attempt to tackle or at least contain poverty and in the shape and nature of employment in the UK. It defines some of the key terms we use in this book. The chapter highlights the recent turn in research to understanding the dynamics of poverty and it also explains the broader research programme in which the study was located. The chapter also contends with some important, contemporary myths about the demand for and supply of labour. The chapter highlights the broad landscape of changing employment and welfare conditions. The chapters which follow, in the middle of the book, paint a finer portrait of the consequences and reality of these changes as they are lived by people in low-pay, no-pay Britain.
