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
Winner of the British Academy Peter Townsend Prize for 2013
How do men and women get by in times and places where opportunities for standard employment have drastically reduced? Are we witnessing the growth of a new class, the ‘Precariat’, where people exist without predictability or security in their lives? What effects do flexible and insecure forms of work have on material and psychological well-being?
This book is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty and the labour market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Work may be ‘the best route out of poverty’ sometimes but for many people getting a job can be just a turn in the cycle of recurrent poverty – and of long-term churning between low-skilled ‘poor work’ and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative, life-history research with a ‘hard-to-reach group’ of younger and older people, men and women, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many.
This chapter examines the consequences of long-term labour market insecurity and recurrent returns to unemployment. Informants rejected the label of ‘poverty’, distancing themselves from its negative connotations which, in their minds too, spoke of the stigma and shame of the ‘undeserving poor’. Unlike ‘them’, our interviewees professed their ability to ‘manage’ in tight circumstances. Some interviewees were experiencing ‘deep poverty’ – unable to heat their homes or clothe and feed themselves adequately. Debt was widespread and served to entrench poverty and the benefits system failed to provide ‘social security’. Antipathy to making benefit claims coupled with the complexity, difficulty and high transaction costs of repeated moves from work to welfare served as a strong disincentive to rely on benefits. Stigmatised by officials, misinformed and disempowered, the process of claiming often meant there was a gap between losing work income and receiving benefits, which given the regularity with which jobs ended and benefits eventually began, recurred again and again. Because people often preferred or felt it simpler not to register as unemployed, and because the short-term, irregularly unemployed were not well-served by welfare to work agencies, informants to the study might be described as ‘the missing workless’.
This chapter locates the research for the book methodologically and geographically. The chapter describes the particular place – Middlesbrough in North East England – where the research was conducted and the rapid and dramatic social and economic changes that have affected the place. In particular, the chapter charts the steep (and continuing) decline of relatively well paid, skilled, standard jobs in manufacturing industry partially off-set (in terms of total levels of employment) by a rapid increase of female participation in growing service and new manufacturing sectors of the economy. The chapter shows how these changes have simultaneously contributed to the lowering of wages and an increase in involuntary part-time and precarious work for men and women across employment sectors. In this context the local labour market is typically characterised by the prevalence of underemployment in non-standard, lower skilled, insecure and lower paid jobs. Unemployment is a commonly understood feature of deindustrialised labour markets, as is the potential for the degradation of employment. Less commonly understood is how unemployment and casualised, insecure poor work can combine together to create the low-pay, no-pay cycle which is the key focus of this book. The chapter also describes the research methodology which was employed in the study.
This chapter explores how motivations to work were put into practice, in searching for jobs. It shows how the local labour market available to informants was instituted through informal social networks and how local knowledge facilitated job search, availability and offer. The chapter shows that this world of association rested more on who informants knew, rather than what they knew. The chapter highlights how statutory, voluntary and private sector agencies were all used by informants in searching for jobs, with mixed outcomes and assessments. Some, in the voluntary sector particularly, were found to offer effective, welcome, practical help, perhaps because less driven by a targets culture and ideological assumptions about the unemployed. On the other hand, private employment agencies, in particular, seemed explicitly designed to feed the offer of low waged, precarious work, again shifting the risks and costs of employment to employees. Statutory sector agencies – Job Centre Plus – fared badly with plentiful evidence of negative attitudes by agency staff toward job seekers and the unemployed generally – attitudes readily reciprocated by the local unemployed The chapter shows how the informality of participants’ job-search methods fitted well with the casualised recruitment methods of employers at the bottom of the labour market and the nature of the work on offer.
This chapter shifts attention from ‘the demand side’ of employment – or at least interviewees’ experiences of the forms of work on offer – to ‘supply-side’ factors that sometimes inhibited engagement with employment, and which helped shape the low-pay, no-pay cycle. Ill-health and caring responsibilities are the two empirical foci here. The chapter unravels the connections between unemployment, poor work and ill-health and speculates that long-term churning between poor work and unemployment may itself add further detriments to health. The chapter shows how jobs often made demands of unsocial hours under unpredictable conditions. This made fulfilling caring responsibilities and accessing affordable and manageable childcare difficult. The chapter concludes, however, by arguing that in the long-term, lived experience of the low-pay, no-pay cycle it is not so easy to separate ‘demand’ from ‘supply-side’ factors. The pressures, constraints and demands of poor work did much to shape what, superficially, appear to be problems that reside in the situations of those looking for work (e.g. ill-health or difficulties with childcare).
Indicators of child well being grew exponentially in the last four decades in both industrialized and developing countries. While efforts continue to develop comparative indicators of child well-being across countries, far less attention is focused on generating organized and comparative data on policies affecting children in developing countries and related outcome measures. This paper summarizes the history and trends in measuring child well-being and policies and examines the availability of data to create a global database on child policies and policy outcomes. Numerous efforts are currently underway to develop composite indicators of child well-being at all geographic levels but these indicators are unlikely to be tied to existing and emerging child policies. A paradigm for categorizing child policies and outcome measures across countries is offered. The lack of comparative data on policies affecting children in developing countries and outcomes is seen as an obstacle to furthering the development of policies that promote child well-being.
This chapter presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method seeks to answer the question ‘who is poor’ by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The chapter illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey (1997–2007). We argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time.
This chapter discusses the extent and nature of child poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia at the end of the twentieth century. In doing so, it presents data on the number and distribution of children living in poverty and deprivation in the year 2000, with data disaggregated for urban and rural areas, and where relevant, by gender. While knowing the pattern of deprivation and poverty at a point in time is useful it is also important to know if conditions for children are improving or getting worse. Thus, the chapter shows what changes occurred in these regions, between 1995 and 2000. Policy implications are discussed.
Measurements of poverty in terms of the principles of access to, and exercise of, a specific number of rights in areas like nutrition, safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, education and information show that 32 million children in Latin America were living in extreme poverty in 2007, and that the overall number of persons in poverty stood at almost 81 million. The chapter presents data on child poverty in Latin America, but explicitly measures it with a rights approach. This means considering children to be poor when at least one of their rights is unmet, or when they suffer at least one basic deprivation. Nonetheless, in child poverty, multiple deprivations occur simultaneously, reinforcing each other andundermining children’s and adolescents’ development. The chapter reports findings from a study which measured child poverty using two traditional methodologies: (i) direct methods (unmet basic needs), which were adapted to measure several levels of deprivation among children, based on the proposal by the University of Bristol and the London School of Economics; and (ii) indirect methods, represented by the measurement of absolute poverty according to per capita household income. It also presents data sources, methodology and aggregation indexes (appendix).
This chapter examines the extent to which a human rights approach offers a framework to increase accountability for the policies that perpetuate child impoverishment. In doing so, it considers some of the practical limitations to this framework with specific reference to the issues of ‘justiciability’ and ‘progressive realisation’. Finally, it explores how social scientists may utilise human rights frameworks in poverty research, as well as the methodological issues that arise from this approach.
