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 of over 1400 titles.
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.
The reception of disability-related social rights (disabled adult benefit, disability compensation benefit) is marked by a paradox: although they are factors of autonomy, they are perceived negatively. This chapter explains this paradox by the link between rights consciousness and the administrative relationship. The effectiveness of benefits is diminished by the ways in which they are implemented and by users’ perceptions of this process. The experience – and expectation – of heavy supervision, conflicts over needs assessments and disability levels, interruptions in payments, and unmanageable delays create a lack of trust and predictability, as well as a perception of disrespect. Social rights then fail in their capacity to reduce uncertainty and to act on people’s perception of their social status by making them subjects of rights. Whether the eventual outcome is non-take-up, or distrustful or reluctant take-up, rights consciousness is therefore tenuous and unstable.
This concluding chapter sums up the main conclusions of the book that justify speaking of ‘fragile rights’: often imprecise from the moment they are legally enshrined, disability-related rights suffer from major shortcomings in terms of effectiveness in all the studied areas (education, employment, social policy, accessibility). Faced with these imperfectly realized rights, many individuals protest (at least in the interview situation) and take action, negotiate, tinker, adapt, to make their rights more concrete, and in the same movement, to assert themselves as subjects of rights. This everyday politics takes place at a distance from the collectives involved in the politicization of disability, whether they be associations or public officials, towards whom several people make a demand for descriptive representation.
The French version of this book was the winner of the 2022 Grand Prix de la Protection Sociale.
Over the years, many disability-related rights have been legally recognized, but how has this changed the everyday lives of people with disabilities?
Drawing on biographical interviews collected from individuals with either mobility or visual impairments in France, this book analyzes the reception of disability policies in the fields of education, employment, social rights and accessibility. It examines to what extent these policies contribute to the realization of the associated rights among disabled people. The book demonstrates that the rights associated with disability suffer from major implementation flaws, while shedding light on the very active role of disabled citizens in the realization of their rights.
In spite of some improvements, the built environment and public transportation are far from being fully accessible. Moreover, in 2014 the government has reneged on a legally enshrined right by postponing the accessibility mandate. This chapter analyses the reception of this partially implemented policy and the difficulties it creates for disabled people in their everyday lives. Through a policy feedback effect, the 2014 reform has produced discontent, fuelling a relative deprivation that, at this stage, is leading more to individual than collective actions. But public space is not only materially hostile to disabled people; it is also symbolically so, as one of the main places in which they experience stigmatization. Taking these various dimensions into account makes it possible to specify the social, and not only material, conditions of a real right to mobility.
This introductory chapter develops a theoretical framework combining policy analysis (with an approach in terms of policy reception) and the sociology of law (through the study of rights realization at the individual level) to address the main question raised by the book: to what extent and how does policy reception enable disability rights to become effective in people’s experience? It presents the French context of disability policy and rights, and the methods of the study, drawing on biographical interviews.
This chapter revisits the distinction between special and inclusive education by distinguishing type of schooling, accommodations available, and changes in teaching formats. This framework is then used to analyse the reception of the gradual shift towards a promotion of mainstream schooling in France. In terms of policy reception, the comparison between different generations reveals an objective effect of the promotion of mainstream schooling on educational trajectories (where one is schooled) and expectations (what one subjectively values). Yet the narratives also show the major obstacles to a full realization of the right to inclusion, and the very active role of students and families to overcome them.
In France as elsewhere, disabled people suffer from structural marginalization in the labour market. Employment-related disability rights crystallize the ambivalence of disability policies: between an assumed inability to work that entitles people to benefits and the promotion of workforce participation; and between sheltered employment, quotas, and anti-discrimination. Employment might therefore appear to be the area where disability rights are the most fragile. The chapter shows, on the contrary, how this coexistence of divergent orientations can be analysed as their strong point, potentially opening more opportunities for individuals. After a review of the history of disability policies in the field of employment, the chapter analyses how disabled people negotiate a marginal place in the labour market, in dynamics that combine structural inequalities and the reception of public policies. It then focuses on the effects and appropriations of the flagship measure in this domain, the quota scheme.
This chapter analyses the policy journey of Disability Hate Crime from agenda triggering to substantive agenda setting. The arrival of Section 146 on the statute books by the end of 2003 has been regarded as the birth of the Disability Hate Crime policy agenda. Section 146 was not enacted until 2005, however, and in the meantime, Disability Hate Crime came to be a way of conceiving of targeted victimization of disabled people that was in advance of the prevalent view of hate crime in 2003. Sharply awake to equality agendas after the Lawrence Inquiry, the criminal justice system was receptive to the new policy agenda. The arrival of the Disability Equality Duty applying to the public sector from 2004 shaped the ‘discovery’ of Disability Hate Crime by the criminal justice system. The Pilkington case opened a policy window of opportunity. In contrast to the agenda triggering phase where politicians determined the direction of travel, in Phase 2, policy officials take the lead and the policy agenda became set.
This chapter assesses the context of disabled people’s experience of disadvantage and discrimination, and the persistence of prejudice against this population today in a wide range of social and institutional contexts. The dual problematization of welfare versus rights by state institutions gives a framing to Disability Hate Crime which sets a high standard for considering ableist crime. This chapter explores the extent to which this prejudice is reflective of the ableism impacting the Disability Hate Crime agenda itself. It is argued that in failing to recognize disability prejudice and ableism and their impacts on Disability Hate Crime, there is a failure to recognize and name the issue appropriately and, as a consequence, to deal with Disability Hate Crime justly.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was very little debate about the need to address Disability Hate Crime in England and Wales. Significant problematization and activism occurred to socially construct disability hostility as a problem worthy of political–policy attention. The introduction of new legislation addressing disability hostility is explored, noting the range of contributions to the securing of Section 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and particularly the critical political interventions by ministers and other politicians behind it. A strategic coupling occurred between activism and the political arenas enabled by policy entrepreneurs, who identified a policy window of opportunity in the form of the development of the 2003 Act and successfully created a hate crime policy domain for Disability Hate Crime. In doing so, they homogenized Disability Hate Crime as simply another strand in the hate crime domain. Without significant problematization efforts by activists and critical interventions by some political actors, expansion of the hate crime policy domain to include disability hostility would not have occurred.
