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.
This chapter discusses of the nature of care and its ethical rationale. The interpenetration of drudgery with emotional and relational labour has consequences when care work becomes a component in the paid labour force of the welfare state. Much care remains invisible in the home, heavily gendered and poorly rewarded. The partnership between the family and the state in the provision of care for those too young or old, ill or disabled, is very unequal. The demand for care is rising fast as the population ages, families become smaller and longevity increases rates of chronic morbidity. Health and social care services are under serious strain; both have a workforce shortage and an overstrained workforce supplemented by migrants from poorer societies. The health service depends on the social care system. Solutions to the crisis in both are well understood after a series of official reports over the last two decades, but forever postponed as ‘unaffordable’ in the present economic regimen.
This chapter explores the implications of care for others becoming a secular rather than a religious value, although it is still common to regard ‘caring’ as characteristic of Christians. It describes the rise of social action in churches on behalf of the poor and marginalized, particularly since the 1980s, and the way the established church acted as protection for other faith and ethnic communities. It documents generational, political and economic changes that have given rise to ‘new identity tribes’, especially since Brexit, superseding traditional class and political divides. Attitudes to immigrants now mark the division between conservative (sometimes ‘xenophobic’) and liberal identities. It traces the role of religion and higher education in these changes.
This chapter examines the gendering of care in the debate about the causes and timing of secularization and the role of the ‘sexual revolution’ in it, noting that women did not achieve effective control of their fertility until the 1980s or 1990s, with an uneven and uncertain transition from the 1950s as sexual mores altered. The gendering of care has remained largely unaffected by the changes of the sexual revolution. The chapter examines the ‘discursive Christianity’ found in the popular culture of the 19th and early 20th century, in particular in the ‘evangelical narrative’. It traces this narrative back to a wider ‘feminization debate’ beginning in the 18th century and analyses its role in the emergence of mass literacy, in particular in the ‘prize’ books given to working-class children after the introduction of compulsory mass education. It stresses the ideals of social reform in these books that carried potentially radical social criticism.
This book examines the evolving value of caregiving in Britain, from the welfare state’s inception to the present day. It explores the shifts in discourse surrounding care, charting key social, demographic, economic, political and cultural changes which have led to the current ‘care crisis’.
The author examines five key themes: the tension within institutional Christianity between caring for the marginalized versus maintaining ‘respectability’; the secularization of the value of care and its interaction with emerging social divisions; the persistent expectation that women bear the caregiving burden; the economic and social undervaluation of emotional and practical care work; and the challenges facing the care and health sectors. The author suggests that recalibrating the tax system to shift the burden from incomes to profits may be necessary for the survival of welfare systems under these new conditions.
This chapter describes writers and artists who accept a Christian justification of menial labour compared with others who see it as hampering women’s creativity and deplore the idealization of women as ‘the angel in the house’. It examines the ‘drudgery’ involved in care alongside the emotional and relational component of care work, both as unpaid family care and paid employment. Care and drudgery are in practice hard to separate. It traces the low status of care as part of the unpaid and ‘unskilled’ ‘reproductive labour’ of women in the family and discusses the role of women’s domestic drudgery in the marital exchange in preindustrial lower-class families and how industrialization changed it to the disadvantage of women and children. Today it is challenging for couples both in paid employment to perform all the domestic labour of the household, however much men contribute to it, hence the perpetual relevance of the ‘servant problem’. Feminism has always been divided over the relation of freedom and care and the solutions that have been proposed. The chapter considers recent revisionist feminists who repudiate the ‘sexual revolution’ and advocate the priority of care over ‘freedom’.
The chapter situates the perspective of the author in her family and class background as the eldest child in a large working-class family in the cotton district of North West England and examines her experience of educational mobility as a ‘scholarship girl’ shortly after the Second World War. It describes the fabric of community belonging at the time, woven around a mix of ‘folk’ and institutional Christianity in working-class communities, and the attrition of this pattern by secularization. It explores the way that care for others, largely a duty of women, was passed on in the family and through religious socialization in church and school and raises the question of how this was secularized in postwar social and economic change.
This chapter examines the ‘prize’ books distributed to working-class children in more detail, particularly bestsellers by Hesba Stretton and Silas Hocking, including a discussion of their reception by erudite critics as well as their popular readership. These novels were often the only books in working-class homes in the industrial cities up to the time of the Second World War, and they were more influential in perpetuating the gendered nature of care than the gendered double standard of sexual morality. The chapter traces the persistence of similar social reform messages in the popular culture of today’s secular Britain, now shorn of any evangelical religious content. It argues that the role of religious institutions in patrolling the borders of respectability, their internecine war about sexuality and the scandal of clerical abuse have turned churches into the hypocritical villains of this popular culture. The final examples come from contemporary performance poetry.
Changes in the operation of capitalism since the 1980s have made it difficult for states to use redistributive tax regimens like those initiated in the Keynesian reconstruction after the Second World War to fund the ‘welfare state’. This chapter discusses the work of economists, financial technocrats and social scientists who have analysed and criticized this situation over the last decade, beginning with Thomas Piketty’s demonstration of rising inequalities, the economic innovations that are driving this pattern of rising inequality and the social and political changes it stimulates, including the rise of populism and the problems it entails for democratic politics. The final part of the chapter considers how far the technological advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including artificial intelligence, are likely address the problem and solve the care crises. The care and health sectors are likely to grow while ‘cognitive’ employment shrinks. Addressing the care crises remains a matter of political will.
This chapter discusses the implications for society of the impossible/utopian universalism of the Christian commandment to love our neighbour ‘as’ ourself. It examines the theoretical concept of secularization and argues that it is a contingent and historical process. The core of the chapter is four episodes of secularization in Britain that had an impact on the principle of care for others: the movement of radical theologians in the 1960s; the ending of common Christian socialization in schools; the success of secular humanists in lifting controls on private and public sexual morality; and the role of university social science departments in distributing a secular outlook. It asks what difference it makes when care for others becomes a secular rather than a religious value.
This chapter begins by discussing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic for adult social care in England. Secondly it places adult social care in England today in context and examines questions of definition and of delivery. Thirdly, it describes the methodological approach taken in the research which formed the basis of this volume. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure of the book.
