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
This chapter evaluates the research results from an active social policy perspective. Since the development of social policies increasingly takes place in a context of EU policy making, this chapter explains this broader political context. It then applies the theme of reflexivity and expounds on it in the context of debates on the future of active social policies. Based on the results of INPART, it also determines several core issues of activation — heterogeneity and policy differentiation, objectives of activation, matching resources of work and people’s needs, the relation between participation and income and the recognition of non-labour-market inclusion strategies. It argues that two approaches to these issues can be distinguished — orthodox consensus of activation and reflexive activation. It reasons in favour of treating activation as a process that involves activation not only of policy clients but also of the institutions involved in designing, implementing and delivering social policies.
This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.
Active social policies in the EU makes an important contribution to the debates in this area by: reporting on original international comparative research; reflecting on and critically assessing current activating policies; evaluating the consequences of these policies, as well as challenging the premises they are based on; including the perspectives of service users in its analyses; offering recommendations for the future design of activating policies.
The book will be invaluable for students, lecturers and researchers of social and labour market policies and policy makers. It is essential reading for those interested in issues of inclusion, activation and the role of types of work in promoting inclusion.
This chapter examines the development of active social policies, and elaborates upon the concept of activation. It explores the shift from passive to active social policies in the EU in general, and at the EU policy making level in particular, as a paradigm shift in which the main objective of social policies is being transformed from protection to participation. It argues that activation is not a uniform concept and distinguishes four ideal activation approaches in order to elaborate the variety of views on, and practices of, activation. It examines how the development of active social policies can be interpreted in the context of attempts of welfare states to adapt to a changing social reality. It concludes by explaining why activation emerged, and explores activation expenditures and institutional developments taking place against the background of the process of making welfare states and social policies more activating.
This chapter discusses the main concepts applied in this book — inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation on the one hand, and the concept of work on the other. It differentiates integration in the macro-sociological sense, and integration understood as individuals’ inclusion into societal systems. It explains that it is in this second distinction that the problematic of inclusion/exclusion seems to be applied most effectively. It discusses the necessity of making explicit what one means by inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation when using the concepts. It argues that individuals can, willingly or unwillingly, be in situations of inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation with respect to a multidimensionality of domains, practices, institutions or systems.
This chapter is centred on the Capitalisation of Unemployment Benefits programme, which is the most important employment scheme in Spain. It explains that this programme allows the unemployed who are entitled to unemployment benefits to capitalise the total value of these benefits and invest it in a new or already-established social company. It details the specific characteristics of the scheme and how it differs from the mainstream of employment programmes in the EU countries. It also explores the experiences of participants in the scheme in terms of its contribution to inclusion and exclusion. It highlights that by capitalising unemployment benefits in a social economy, workers become co-owners of the company where they work, thus, promoting ‘entrepreneurial activation’. It explains that this scheme allows a limited role of the state and increases autonomy and responsibility at work, which elicits different reactions and is experienced in different ways by the participants.
This chapter examines the case studies presented in this book and begins by assessing active social policies in the EU in general, and in the six countries that were involved in the INPART research in particular. Next, it expounds the two types of activation programmes — subsidised employment programmes for unemployed people (secondary labour market), and education and training schemes. It then explains the types of work under investigation in the case studies. The results of the case studies are then presented, followed by analysing what these findings tell about the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of various types of work.
This chapter examines the research literature on the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of various forms of work. It provides a review on studies addressing the effects of active social policies in terms of inclusion and exclusion. It explores the participation in ‘standard’ work, part-time work and flexi-work, employment programmes and training, unpaid work and informal paid work. It evaluates the issues that should be the focus of research on the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of forms of work, as well as the social policies promoting them.
This chapter begins by identifying the main goal of the research project Inclusion through Participation (INPART) which was to explain the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of various types of work. It notes that this objective was formulated against the background of a growing concern in social policy debates and social policy practices with the issue of ‘activation’. It enumerates the six EU countries involved in the project INPART — Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK. It discusses that the countries involved in INPART reveal significant differences with respect to the ‘activation’ characteristics of their social policies. Thus, the role of the state in making social policies more active differs according to each country involved in the project. It explores the themes of integration/differentiation and inclusion/exclusion across policy debate and scientific discourse.
This chapter argues that the increasing emphasis on social scientific research in international comparisons, of which INPART is an example, is taking place against the background of a ‘reflexive turn’ in the social sciences. It provides a brief summary of the orthodox consensus and the reflexive turn. The chapter then discusses and examines the implications the reflexive turn has for social research. It clarifies how INPART dealt with these implications, for example, in terms of the contextuality of knowledge and in terms of the competence of actors. It underlines some of the challenges confronting internationally comparative research in the context of the reflexive turn in social sciences.
This chapter begins by differentiating five major systems — work, income/consumption, the social network, the cultural system and the political system. It then further explores its different subsystems by examining how far can one predict a person’s position within other subsystems from her/his position within one specific subsystem. Theories are tested by empirical data, upon which new hypotheses are being formulated. The empirical analyses is first of all based on the INPART data; other observations, however, when they can shed new light on the INPART observations or give them a broader perspective are also referred to. This chapter examines the patterns of inclusion and exclusion. It also elaborates on the issue and focus on the different strategies every person applies to attain her/his personal preferences for inclusion, exclusion and marginalisation.
