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
What prevents an individual claimant from accessing social rights in the UK? This chapter unpacks this question by focusing on the range of systemic barriers that they face – from the recognition of social rights violations to the attainment of effective remedies. It critiques the current, limited understanding of access to justice, highlighting the necessity of a broader view that encompasses factors that are often obscured, including the need for legal consciousness, emotional resilience and financial resources. Drawing on extensive empirical insights from practitioners, the chapter reveals the profound inadequacies in the current legal system, particularly regarding legal aid and representation for welfare claimants. In response to these issues, it argues for an approach that addresses procedural and substantive barriers to accessing social rights through timely and effective judicial and administrative remedies. It emphasizes the importance of embedding international human rights standards into domestic law to provide robust protections against social rights violations. Ultimately, it advocates for structural reforms and collective solutions to enhance access to justice and promote systemic change.
This chapter maps the conceptual terrain for understanding social justice in the United Kingdom (UK), focusing on the state’s international obligations concerning social rights (SR) such as housing, food, fuel and social security. It addresses the substantive violations of these rights and the systemic barriers that impede access to social justice. By situating its analysis within the legal frameworks of administrative law, human rights and social justice, the chapter also draws from various social science theoretical lenses, including hegemony, power narratives and deliberative democracy theory. Empirical insights from practitioners across the UK highlight the multifaceted nature of SR violations and the inadequacies of the current legal system. This chapter proposes a model for improving access to social justice by recognizing and overcoming procedural and substantive barriers. It emphasizes the need for a multi-pronged approach to legal processes that ensure effective remedies and uphold human rights standards. In doing so, it advocates for the simultaneous development of both individual and structural remedies to achieve social justice.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book proposes a conception of social justice according to international human rights law. Social rights include everyday rights such as housing, food, fuel and social security.
Drawing on extensive research with frontline practitioners, the book frames access to social justice as a journey that should end with the realisation of an effective remedy. It highlights discourses that marginalise and disempower rights holders and reclaims the narrative around social rights as legal rights.
This is a unique contribution to our understanding of access to social justice from a social rights perspective complete with key recommendations for policy and practice.
This chapter takes a deeper dive into the concerns and challenges that emerged from the UK-wide empirical case studies by identifying various dynamics that interconnect laws, policy and public services to create the daily realities of policy in action ‘on the ground’. Informed by a critical discourse lens, it highlights how barriers to social justice are socially and discursively produced, and, more importantly, how understanding these dynamics can inform practice and chart ways forward to create legitimacy for social rights (SR) in the UK. It reveals how competing discourses marginalize those who experience violations of SR, pushing them further towards the margins and further away from social justice. If access to justice for SR is to be realized in the UK, attending to both structural injustice as well as a keen understanding of social and discursive barriers is necessary. This chapter concludes with a set of recommendations which, if implemented by the relevant decision makers, could begin to address the accountability gaps that plague SR adjudication in the UK, facilitating a rights-based approach and reclaiming the narrative for social rights as legal rights.
This chapter presents an overview of the legal obligations for economic, social and cultural rights in international human rights law. It is designed for a non-expert audience to understand the obligation of progressive realization better as it appears in the ICESCR and to provide insight into the interwoven ‘subduties’ to which the obligation gives rise. It draws on the international human rights legal framework, which includes the treaties, accompanying guidance, scholarly input and international treaty monitoring. It then moves on to explore the legal framework in relation to the right to food, the right to housing and the right to social security as they appear in the ICESCR. In doing so, it also provides insight into the UK’s compliance with these rights and demonstrates possible actions to enable further protection. Finally, it explores the emerging right to fuel as a derivative right under international law.
This chapter sets out the data generated from the empirical research via four UK-wide case studies that provide insights into the everyday reality of the justice gap in practice, drawing on the experience of a broad range of practitioners. Specific SR legal case studies from three of the four UK jurisdictions explore SR violations related to housing, social security, food and fuel, including access to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for people with terminal illness. A more general approach was adopted to understanding access to justice for SR issues for Wales. Each of the case studies in this chapter provides glimpses of wider issues across the social welfare landscape, illustrating examples of processes and mechanisms that work together to constitute the jurisdictional frameworks for SR and the systemic gaps in the access to justice journey.
This chapter identifies the potentially disruptive nature of the digitalization of workplaces in terms of our understanding of the ‘self’ at work. Traditional divides around work and private life, mind and body, machine and human are increasingly being reshaped by the introduction of certain kinds of technology into the labour market. It then proceeds to outline how these changes might be conceptualized on the traditional labour law narrative and the issues which arise from the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace according to our inherited understanding of ‘personhood’; namely, the effect of AI on worker ‘rationality’ and ‘autonomy’. In this chapter, there is an investigation of the potential benefits and implications of changing our approach to ‘personhood’ in a theoretical sense. The final section explores how the alternative vision of personhood might be adopted, in practical terms, to increase the effectiveness of the regulation of AI in the workplace.
This chapter investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged our most basic assumptions about our ‘selves’ at work, and (hence) the relationship between labour law and social justice. On the one hand, the pandemic reemphasized worker corporeality and led to a greater incursion of health and safety concerns into the workplace. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic served to accentuate the individualist and rationalist conception of the person at the heart of the law of the workplace. The chapter investigates the obstacles that this individualist/rationalist conceptualization of the person has caused in regulating the workplace both during and post-COVID. This approach has led to the erosion of collective and negotiated solutions, the equation of employee and employer struggles, and the inability of the law to protect those workers most in need. It is argued in the chapter that the analysis of labour law in the pandemic points to the need for a greater engagement with the moral project of embedding relationality at the heart of labour law, in order that labour law can better respond to labour market ‘shocks’.
This chapter concludes on the possibility of generating a positive theory of social justice for labour law by changing the way in which ‘personhood’ is conceived. In the chapter it is argued that there are three main positive effects for labour law of adopting a more relational approach to personhood. This approach brings together the work of Marxist, feminist, and classical labour law scholars; it is an inclusive critical agenda. Second, addressing personhood at the heart of labour law is a way of reconciling some of labour law’s greatest contradictions and theoretical dilemmas. Third, the relationship between labour law and personhood is not just a theoretical issue; it is crucial to engage with personhood in order to move forward with a labour law agenda for social justice. The hope is that changing the way in which we view personhood as a matter of labour law will lead to law and policies which are more effective in improving the lives of workers. In particular, embedding relationality will make us more able to respond to labour market change.
This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between social justice and labour law. It outlines the engagement of labour law with critical theory, and introduces Marxist and feminist approaches to labour law. It discusses the traditional social justice narrative of labour law (the coincidence of ‘labour is not a commodity’ and ‘inequality of bargaining power’) and the difficulties and contradictions that arise. It is argued in this chapter that fundamental to the difficulties and contradictions in the social justice narrative in labour law is the way in which personhood is conceptualized. This assertion is supported by an investigation of Sinzheimer’s critique of labour law and the person. The final section of this chapter seeks to suggest an alternative conceptualization of the person based around ‘relationality’. This conceptualization builds on Sinzheimer’s approach but also incorporates feminist and Marxist approaches to (legal) personhood.
