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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This chapter explains the aims of the book and the focus on listening to the voices of paid care workers in four countries – Canada, Finland, South Africa and the UK. It describes the particular care workers we worked with in each country and briefly discusses the organisation of paid care work in each country. It outlines the qualitative methods of research that we used and our interest in finding out about care workers’ experiences and feelings during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter then discusses the four key concepts that run through the subsequent empirical chapters: intersectionality; caring in time-space; vulnerability; and agency. The chapter ends by outlining the focus of the chapters.
The book’s final chapter reflects on its original contributions to scholarship in arguing that policing, and in turn police diversity, cannot be understood without considering the significant impacts of street police culture on policing institutions, police decision-making and police officer experiences. The chapter considers the ways the book has argued that all police officers are impacted by the street police culture norms which set the formal and informal standards, behaviours, priorities, metrics for evaluation and agendas of police institutions. While it asserts that all police officers are forced to contend with street police culture on the job, this volume argues that for the particular experiences of officers from traditionally marginalized backgrounds – including racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ+ and those with different levels of higher education – experiences of street police culture can pose particular challenges and create additional burdens and obstacles in the role. This chapter reflects on the richness of comparing the UK and US jurisdictions which, while operating in distinct historical, legal, political, economic and cultural contexts, reflect remarkable similarities in analysing police diversity through the lens of street police culture. The chapter considers the significant challenges to changing street police culture.
The chapter illustrates that while the book has not offered police diversity as a singular solution to the problems plaguing UK and US policing, it has argued that it is just one of a plethora of tools required to help shift policing from its straight, White, male, working-class traditions, norms and culture, to a more heterogeneous, more varied, more broadly thinking and more creative set of institutions. The chapter reflects on the ways the book asserts that rules-based solutions, including lawsuits, consent decrees and compulsory affirmative action programmes, are also important to changing the character of policing institutions, reducing the influence of police culture, and improving the experiences of all officers, including those from traditionally marginalized backgrounds.
Digitalizing the public justice system might appear to be a challenge that cannot be undertaken in a flash. In this chapter, we show how courts ensured, for example, the fair handling and assessment of evidence, how they organized trials in virtual courtrooms, and how they protected the democratic freedoms and rights of defendants, witnesses, and how crime victims were safeguarded when legal proceedings took place remotely. The COVID-19 pandemic shows that radical changes in one of the central societal institutions can in fact be made quickly, though without the possibility to foresee what these changes may entail.
This book offers a unique perspective on Sweden’s COVID-19 response in its publicly funded welfare sector, which was initially highly criticised but later recognised as exemplary on the global stage in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Using diaries, stories and interviews from 73 workers across 30 professions, it reveals the everyday experiences of those maintaining welfare services, both on the front lines and behind the scenes. Covering 2020 to 2022, it spans major cities and smaller municipalities across Gothenburg, Uppsala and Stockholm and introduces 'pandemicracy,' a concept exploring pandemic-era governance and organisation of the public sector.
This insightful analysis sparks a wider discussion on adapting to unforeseen challenges in public welfare.
Chapter 8 explores one of the book’s key assertions – that UK and US officers from traditionally marginalized backgrounds may, under particular circumstances, engage in active bureaucratic representation, meaning in their roles as officers, representing and championing the interests of their communities of origin or other oppressed groups. While this argument has largely been explored with bureaucrats outside of policing, there is a growing body of evidence supporting the notion that ethnic minority, female and LGBTQ+ officers, among others, may explicitly or implicitly engage in policing in ways different from their straight White male counterparts. This chapter argues that under certain conditions, active bureaucratic representation in policing can occur, depending on the ways under-represented officers view themselves, view the role and experience the job, and the types of support they receive from colleagues, supervisors, their institutions and communities they serve. This can be highly beneficial to policing in a multitude of ways, particularly because it can mitigate the negative effects of street police culture on policed communities. To support this argument, this chapter also considers the growing body of evidence showing statistically significant differences in policing outcomes for officers from traditionally under-represented groups reflected in some studies. Finally, this chapter also examines intergroup contact theory, arguing that increased intergroup contact between officers from traditionally marginalized backgrounds and straight White male officers can help the latter mitigate a host of negative effects of street police culture.
On 5 May 2023, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus declared the COVID-19 pandemic over. According to the WHO, the virus continues to kill and mutate, but it no longer poses a threat to public health. During the more than three-year pandemic, the virus infected 765 million people and killed 6.9 million. Europe was the continent most affected, with almost 3 million deaths due to, or as a result of, the infection. In Sweden, life had already transitioned to a post-pandemic state in the late spring of 2022. The period since then that has passed since then has offered numerous evaluations, reflections and reviews of how the pandemic was handled in different areas and what consequences it had. At the same time, media coverage, and thus public interest in the pandemic, has waned. The outbreak of war in Ukraine in the spring of 2022 and the subsequent economic developments, with increased inflation, galloping energy prices and rising interest rates, have quickly taken over the media agenda. In light of these dramatic developments, thus, the chapter put the pandemic in a broader perspective where it has come to be regarded as a crisis that is both linked to and parallel with other existing and anticipated crises.
Care work is gendered. In addition to it being feminised, intersections of class, gender, race, nationality and documented status shape women’s experiences of care work. Care work is also, across a range of contexts, undertaken by migrant women who lack social support or protection and end up in low-paying, exploitative jobs. Transnational migrant workers find themselves in a particularly precarious position, having been hardest hit by COVID-19. This chapter illuminates the intersections between migrant labour and care work through the narratives of domestic workers. It reports on a photovoice project with migrant domestic workers in Cape Town, South Africa, looking at their experiences of performing care work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings suggest that migrant domestic workers’ everyday experiences are shaped by the intersections of race and class, exacerbating their vulnerability.
The idea for this book was originally formulated in March 2020, when, surprised by the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, we realized there was a unique opportunity to document the impact of the pandemic on people working in various parts of public welfare. The chapter introduces the focus of our field studies on workers who were acting in the shadow of the pandemic – that is, in areas of welfare that are not usually associated with professions and occupations fighting COVID-19 ‘on the front line’. As social scientists who had studied the Swedish public welfare sector for many years, we saw an opportunity to follow challenges and changes in work tasks and working conditions for teachers and healthcare professionals, as well as librarians, day-care staff, government investigators, municipal administrators and many other public sector workers.
This chapter focuses on the ways hegemonically masculine and heteronormative street police culture shapes the lived experiences of UK and US officers from LGBTQ+ communities. It considers the ways hegemonically masculine and heteronormative street police culture is normalized, reinforced and supported in police institutions, posing specific challenges for LGBTQ+ officers. Significantly, this chapter explores the ways pressures to adhere to these street police culture norms create similarities but also differences in the experiences of LGBTQ+ officers. It considers the ways hegemonically masculine and heteronormative street police culture creates some explicit and implicit similarities, but also many differences for LGBTQ+ officers’ lived experiences of policing compared to those of their straight colleagues in both jurisdictions. The chapter applies the lens of street police culture to the limited evidence about the experiences of LGBTQ+ officers in UK and US policing, and triangulates this with comments from diverse police leaders interviewed for this volume, to shed light on the experiences and provide further depth of understanding of the experiences and challenges of LGBTQ+ officers in both jurisdictions.
During the pandemic, maintaining the activities that fall under the responsibility of libraries proved to be more than just a matter of finding alternative and/or ‘contagion-proof’ ways of lending books, organizing author presentations and ensuring access to essential information and knowledge. The news reports and librarians’ own stories presented in this chapter remind us that the library’s mission is much broader and that it is the foundation of many of the democratic processes on which our society is based.
