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
In conducting research into innovation, researchers find themselves positioned in complicated roles and challenging spaces. This chapter draws on three complementary conceptual frameworks – learning partnerships, para-ethnography and the analytic third – to explain how the project’s research relationships developed and their distinctive characteristics. The authors note how the traditional understanding of the ethnographer as distanced and uninvolved may not be possible in applied organisational settings, particularly when feeding in information and insights might enable innovators to better deal with the challenges of complex system change. The chapter highlights the importance of attention being paid to the role of emotions in innovation processes and how carefully managed relationships that acknowledge emotions can enhance the potential to realise effective innovation outcomes.
This chapter outlines some of the features, dynamics and constraints that characterise the social work and social care context in the UK, particularly within the field of extra-familial risks and harms. This discussion draws on a categorisation of ‘foundational contextual domains’ of innovation within which individual components may operate as barriers or enablers, depending on the degree to which they have been taken into account in planning and operationalisation. Individual innovation journeys may be particularly affected by one, several or all components within these foundational contextual domains. The chapter is structured with reference to our six-stage modelling of the innovation journey, which elaborates phases of: (1) mobilising; (2) developing; (3) designing; (4) integrating; (5) growing; and (6) wider system change. Within each stage, we consider ethical and practical principles for planning and implementing social care innovation. These should help an innovation to mobilise, flourish and sustain through its different stages, particularly in new systems and interventions at the interface between children’s social care, the multidisciplinary safeguarding field, third sector organisations and the transitional boundary to adult services with respect to young people in later adolescence.
What counts as innovation in the social care field remains open for debate. Classic conceptualisations from the social innovation field commonly involve disruption of systems, practices or paradigms. One point of discussion that persisted throughout the Innovate Project was whether developments that seek to improve local practices, without disruption of local systems, still qualify as innovation. To consider this issue, this chapter draws on data from two sites that were introducing Trauma-informed Practice into statutory children’s social care settings with young people affected by extra-familial risks and harms. Their efforts reflected not only features of whole-system/service innovation (that is, disrupting and changing significant features of existing work) but also more incremental approaches to service improvement (improving, rather than substantially changing, how existing work was delivered). This chapter considers the extent to which this capacity to integrate improvement and innovation paradigms might have been possible because of the particular features of Trauma-informed Practice, which has the potential to be used as a means of improvement only, particularly if its fundamentally disruptive or radical potential is overlooked. The chapter ends by reflecting on what system conditions might be necessary to achieve that potential.
This final chapter of the book steps back from the detailed scrutiny of different aspects of the fieldwork to consider overarching insights from across the Innovate Project, with reference to: (1) innovation theory and practice in social care; (2) the particular intricacies of developing/introducing new systems and interventions to address extra-familial risks and harms; and (3) critical perspectives on conceptions of childhood, risk, vulnerability and public funding mechanisms. The authors consider the distinctive nature of innovating in the field of adolescent safeguarding, particularly how system capabilities and innovation processes operate at the interface of children’s and adult social care, the multi-agency safeguarding and criminal justice systems, and the voluntary and charitable sector. The chapter identifies the insights that support and align with existing literature and those that offer new insights and ways forward. Implications for innovation practice in other countries with a similar conception of social work, social care and child welfare are considered.
People are often described as ‘defensive’, but what does it mean for an organisation to act in a defensive way? Why does it happen, and what effect does it have? This chapter explores what it means for organisations working in the field of extra-familial risks and harms to enact collective defences. Drawing on data from observations of practice across the case-study sites, a composite vignette is constructed of a muti-agency team meeting. Taking a psychosocial perspective, the language, practice and behaviour of professionals in this composite ‘meeting’ is analysed through the lens of organisational defences against anxiety. Looking beneath the surface, the authors argue that defensive practice is caused by a complex force field created by anxieties about the high-risk nature of young people’s harm and the lack of a coherent regulatory framework. The chapter argues that practice and research in this field need to be characterised by emotionally containing reflective spaces, which will reduce defences and enable opportunities for caring and relationship-based approaches to young people’s safety.
EPDF and EPUB available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Based on the findings of the Innovate Project, a four year pan-UK study to identify the processes of innovation in care this book asks: how can services be re-envisioned and transformed through innovation? The authors provide an overview of the project findings and offer insights into the core conditions necessary for socially just and practice-congruent social care innovation.
Essential reading for anyone engaged in social care practice and innovation, as well as those undertaking continuing professional development, this book will aid the reader in developing a conceptual understanding of their experiences and support them in designing more informed responses to the challenges they face.
This chapter considers some of the dynamics and processes that may emerge during the early phases of innovation in social care and related settings, particularly when services are seeking to improve responses to young people affected by extra-familial risks and harms. As an emergent approach aimed at creating more developmentally attuned safeguarding responses for young people in transition to adulthood, Transitional Safeguarding proposes the need for ‘whole-systems’ change. The discussion draws particularly on the Innovate Project’s ethnographic research with two sites that were considering how the principles of Transitional Safeguarding might affect their service configurations. Ideas drawn from complexity theory and the ecocycles model of systems development are used to explore the iterative and recursive character of change processes during the early stages of innovation, including: (1) an initial stage where ideas emerge and resources are mobilised; (2) a phase where work focuses on the ‘maturation’ of ideas and productive struggles; (3) periods where momentum is lost, sometimes permanently; and (4) a potential time where there is renewal and re-engagement with ideas, leading to further iterations.
The book begins with a critique of how and why innovation is increasingly the framework of choice in the UK for finding new and better ways of responding to difficult social problems that have been difficult to address via conventional practice models and systems. We note that there is neither a shared definition of what constitutes innovation in the UK social care sector nor a comprehensive understanding of what might be expected within innovation projects at different stages in their journeys. This chapter sets out how the authors have sought to address these gaps in understanding through a novel ethnographic study (the Innovate Project) of how six statutory safeguarding services and third sector organisations introduced new approaches to addressing extra-familial risks and harms affecting young people. The study methodology is introduced, and the three frameworks upon which innovations were built (Contextual Safeguarding, Transitional Safeguarding and Trauma-informed Practice) are described. Finally, an outline is provided of what the ensuing chapters will cover.
What happens when system leaders believe, or want, innovation to work but are presented with evidence that it might not be possible? And what pressure to perform are researchers and practitioners under in order to demonstrate that innovations can and do work? This chapter explores the context of innovations and the conditions that compel researchers and professionals to perform success. Using the concept of the primary task, this chapter examines the work of researchers and professionals involved in the innovation process and how they navigate the complex ruling relations that govern their actions. The chapter considers the often hidden work of professionals to hold innovations alive, often at a personal cost. Instead of examining and evaluating the success of innovations in sites, the authors ask, ‘What if these innovations cannot work?’. In raising this question, the chapter invites readers to explore five provocations on the limits of innovating for children and young people affected by extra-familial risks and harms in the current context of social care.
