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.
Books: Research
The CTOC contends that the effectiveness of services and interventions is determined not by the efficiency of internal processes, but by how effectively public service systems can engage with the innate complexity of outcomes. In this chapter we transpose the challenges posed by complexity into design parameters for public service reform. We draw from Teece et al’s (1997) theory of dynamic capabilities to articulate three core capabilities we consider necessary in tackling complex outcomes: stewardship, coordination, and adaptation. We argue that investment in and management of these three capabilities in consort could inform an alternative logic of outcome-focussed service reform.
Writing more than two decades ago, Smyth and Dow (1998, p 291) wrote that ‘outcomes appear to have become part of a naturalised and largely uncontested discourse’, which has ‘rendered others irrelevant’. Recently however, public management scholarship has begun to engage seriously with the measurement and management of social outcomes as a theoretical and conceptual matter. A viable and compelling alternative conception to the RTOC has since developed within public health, social epidemiology, and health geography scholarship, positioning outcomes not as products of service production chains but as the emergent properties of complex systems. We expand on this model in a public administration context to construct an alternative model, the CTOC.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
How can public services and social interventions create and sustain good outcomes for the populations they serve?
Building on research in public health, social epidemiology and the social determinants of health, this book presents complexity theory as an alternative basis for an outcome-oriented public management praxis. It takes a critical approach towards New Public Management and provides new conceptual inroads for reappraising public management in theory and practice. It advances two practical approaches: Human Learning Systems (a model for public service reform) and Learning Partnerships (a model for research and academic engagement in complex settings).
With up-to-date and extensive discussions on public service reform, this book provides practical and action-oriented guidance for a radical change of course in management and governance.
This chapter draws together the book’s contributions and sets out a working model for building complexity-capable public services. It revisits Alex and Amy’s story from the introduction to illustrate how this service reform trajectory can feel challenging and uncertain in practice, but also deeply necessary. We end the book by setting out a broad research agenda to prompt critical engagement with this new service reform trajectory. We describe five key questions we consider the most significant: the accountability question, the assurance question, the unintended consequences question, the pragmatism question, and the research question.
This chapter explores a novel approach to implementing a complexity-informed management practice in public and non-profit organisations, HLS (Lowe and Plimmer 2019; Lowe et al 2020a; 2020b; 2021; Human Learning Systems Collaborative 2021). We describe the principles of HLS and its genesis into a substantial service reform coalition involving more than 300 organisational members, drawing on evidence from a rich cohort of case studies.
We highlight a strengths-based perspective implicit in HLS, which illustrates how reformers have harnessed agency, assets, and capabilities to purposefully embed more human, learning-oriented, and systemic practices in service contexts. The relational work involved in this is central to this examination and offers a lens through which we can understand the struggles, strategies, and investments involved in service reform practice in organisations and systems.
This chapter introduces the book’s subject by focussing on one service interaction in a UK local authority. This story is used to illustrate the book’s central point: opportunities to improve lives and outcomes are routinely missed by the way we have chosen to design and administer public services. The chapter then describes the intent and structure of the text.
Our analysis of complexity poses a new organising question for scholars, managers, and practitioners: how can public service systems be supported to build the requisite capabilities to manage the complexity demanded of them? In this chapter, we approach this question from a research perspective, and discuss how a ‘learning partnership’ methodological approach between researchers and practitioners can support the development and elaboration of a complexity-informed practice. We draw on two substantive learning partnerships with UK charitable foundations – the Lankelly Chase Foundation since 2017 and the Tudor Trust since 2018 – to discuss how this research approach can help public service organisations to build their dynamic capabilities.
This chapter charts the evolution of the ‘outcomes’ imperative in public service reform, tracing its conceptual and rhetorical roots as public management practice diverged from traditional public administration, took hold during the NPM reforms of the late 20th century, and evolved into more elaborate models of outcome-based management such as impact investment, outcomes funds, and social impact bonds in the recent ‘governance’ era.
We show how this evolution embodies an RTOC which combines the technical rationalism of management control systems theory (Kaplan and Norton 2015; Smith and Bititci 2017), with the behavioural rationalism of Public Choice Theory (Buchanan and Tulloch 1962) and Agency Theory (Jensen and Meckling 1976). We take note of a range of empirical evidence which suggests that models deriving from this theoretical perspective deliver something approaching the opposite: worse outcomes at greater cost.
Chapter 7 draws attention to the modest pursuits and pleasures that sustain a liveable life in hardship but don’t necessarily conform to popular ideas of ‘good resilience’. It argues that research on lived experiences of welfare tends to be reactive in orientation, so that welfare users are more often positioned as adept responders than pursuers in accounts of getting by. The chapter builds on the work of Les Back and Eve Tuck to foreground examples of hope amid the strain of life on welfare without falling into overly rosy accounts of resilience or reinforcing the expectation that people face difficult situations with plucky resolve. While the understated examples of everyday care and accomplishment the chapter foregrounds may seem inconsequential, they are perhaps all the more relevant given the limited resources at the disposal of people struggling to get by.
The Conclusion reiterates the value of bringing together Anglo-settler, Indigenous and minority ethnic stories of life on welfare and the strengths and limits of ethnography in this endeavour. It foregrounds participants’ insights about the need for more understanding in Australia’s welfare system, particularly in the form of centring welfare users’ knowledge of the system. However, it also draws together lessons from the preceding chapters on practitioner ambivalence about welfare users’ knowledge and the limits of a system based on repeated disclosure, even when geared towards support. Finally, it returns to Ghassan Hage’s concept of the social gift to argue for a magnamanous rather than maligning spirit of welfare provision. In the face of mounting evidence that mean welfare exacerbates and entrenches the poverty and vulnerability it claims to tackle, the book ends by advocating a welfare system that creates possibilities rather than problems for the people who rely on it.
