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
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If we are to achieve the reorientation in policy and research that is needed, we have to begin by challenging implicit and dominant beliefs in the nature of science and knowledge. This chapter starts by demonstrating the constructed nature of science from which our beliefs about what counts as knowledge are derived. Structuring knowledge in terms of dualisms has forced social science into artificial and unworkable divisions, often inappropriately framed around quantitative versus qualitative methods. We find recognition of this failure of ontology throughout social theory, and yet, hitherto, there has been no adequate alternative that could both rescue a place for the real and incorporate the role of construction. In working with a complex realist ontology, we argue, we can take account of standpoint, agency and the very real ethical role of the social scientist in producing knowledge for policy.
This chapter takes it as given that the global socio-ecological system is facing a polycrisis. Impending catastrophic global warming is a crucial driver of that crisis. The Earth is now beyond six of nine crucial planetary boundaries. The chapter describes the inadequacy of social action in facing up to the implications of this. It identifies a failure of governance at all levels – global, national and subnational. This is a consequence of the electoral cycle-driven perspective of political parties, in marked contrast to the long-term outlook of major corporations and international bodies like the McKinsey Institute and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Continuing economic growth and high levels of personal consumption, where identities have become constructed around consumption rather than work, are not compatible with confronting climate crisis. The chapter contrasts resilience understood as bouncing back to a previous system state and transformation in creating the best possible future system state.
This chapter critiques the growing trend of ‘restricted complexity’ approaches in empirical research that claim to be complexity informed but lack the capacity to facilitate social transformation. It argues that such methods are insufficient for grappling with the interwoven polycrisis confronting global socio-ecological systems. Instead, the chapter advocates for ‘complexity-congruent’ research designs that embrace ‘complexity signature traits’ that focus on time/trajectories, case-based analysis, multi-level scaling, participatory elements, recognition of human agency and an understanding of complex causality and equifinality. The chapter outlines a three-pronged methodological approach that (1) uses complexity-congruent designs, (2) identifies time–space leverage points for intervention and (3) constructs scenarios of ‘boundary objects’ at these leverage points. Emphasising the role of narratives, interpretation and a hermeneutic sensibility, the chapter proposes treating computational models as ‘justified stories’ that complement qualitative approaches within an overarching action research framework. In turn, the chapter ultimately rejects positivist and reductionist modes and calls for a shift towards a participatory, case-based, scenario-driven praxis that recognises the constitutive power of research in shaping socio-ecological trajectories. Finally, the chapter calls for a complexity-informed pedagogy that equips researchers with the tools and mindset necessary for transformative social action in the face of polycrisis.
In this chapter, we present alternative scenarios for the future development of socio-ecological systems at the global, national and city region levels of socio-ecological reality and governance. For the global level, there will be one scenario pair of alternatives. For the national level, we will prepare alternative good–bad scenarios for the UK as a representative high-/high-middle-income state. We will present scenarios for Nigeria as an important low-middle-income country because there are both very acute problems from climate change and signs of real effort to address them. For the city region level, we will present good and bad scenarios for the North East of England. The key drivers for the scenarios are global warming and crises in food supply, global supply chains, urban systems, political legitimacy and fiscal systems. We offer optimism of the will for good scenarios coupled with pessimism of the intellect for bad ones.
The purpose of this chapter is to develop and ground the framing of crisis as a state in systems which cannot endure for long and has to result either in a restoration of previous system state or transformation of system state. Crisis must lead to change. This has to be set in relation to the general understanding of how and why complex systems change. It is important to distinguish between changes which alter the system’s parameters without changing its overall character and those which do change that character. The second type of change results in transformation of kind while the first does not. We explore how transformational change in complex systems happens. Transformational cause in complex systems is always complex, multiple and emergent. It involves many things which come together to engender change. A crucial emphasis in the chapter is on the role of human agency in engendering change.
This chapter seeks to apply the complexity frame to understand the interwoven crises in health systems and the issues this raises for research and governance. The impact of beliefs about what is real and how it can be measured and governed, discussed in Part I of the book, become clear. The chapter examines crises in health in terms of conceptual, organisational and research levels. Counterposing health as individually or socially determined identifies very different implications for action as illustrated by the changing definitions applied by the World Health Organization. Conventional research understanding through reduction is compared with the potential offered by more holistic approaches, and the meaning of this for governance is discussed. The failure to recognise health as a complex system is compounded by underpinning neoliberal policies that have brought health systems to crisis. Such action can be compared with public provision to point to drivers that result in very different system trajectories.
Fiscal crisis is a period in the trajectory of state finances when the relationship between states and social structures is under extreme stress and deficits have the potential to destabilise the social order. It describes the contradiction between collecting enough tax to fund welfare, including education and health, and the willingness of taxpayers, especially elites, to pay. This chapter shows how the wealthy in high-income countries have waged a war on tax systems, reduced their own taxes and transferred tax to regressive consumption taxes and taxes on labour incomes while benefitting from tax expenditures. It examines the relationships among taxation, public expenditure and public debt and shows how debt holders have come to exercise enormous power over public expenditure and seek to restrict the power of democracy to deal with all forms of inequality and the costs of confronting impending climate catastrophe.
In today’s world, there are interwoven crises affecting us at every level. This book explores the impact of these crises on applied social research. It shows how using a complexity framework in research is key to tackling global challenges effectively.
By featuring illustrative examples from the UK, China, Brazil, South Africa and the US, the authors demonstrate how an action research programme based around the use of existing social research methods embedded in processes of co-production and participation can drive real-time social change.
In doing so, the book highlights the transformative role of action-oriented research in addressing today's complex global challenges.
This chapter demonstrates how global inequality has shifted from being primarily an issue of inequality among countries to being one of inequality within countries. It shows how inequality has increased, with the most affluent drawing away not only from the poor but also from the crucial middle-income households. As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has noted, middle-income households, the majority in all high and most high middle income countries, achieved considerable ontological security, which is crucial to maintaining political legitimacy and social order. However, younger generations are unable to access this security in terms of day-to-day life, owning housing and establishing secure pensions. The chapter focuses on how inequality of power is the cause of these changes in post-democracies and begins to explore how that inequality might be confronted through new political forms which engage civil society in real decision making. Confronting impending climate catastrophe makes such developments essential.
This book seeks to put the complexity frame of reference to work in confronting the interwoven crises confronting us in the socio-ecological systems within which we live on this planet in the 21st century. We argue that post-disciplinary science as both a basis of understanding and research practice can work in the interwoven systems of governance and civil society to achieve the best possible available future in the possibility space of futures within which future generations will have to live. This means that we are saying something about the nature of knowing, and importantly, that we can also act in the world to co-create desired futures despite the many complex interwoven crises we currently face. Here we explain what is meant by the complexity frame of reference and the nature of the Capitalocene as the character of the global system. The contents of the book are also outlined here.
