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
The analysis of the introduction of fiscal welfare in two non-liberal welfare states, France and Sweden, confirms many of the findings or intuitions found in the existing literature regarding the uses and effects of the tax benefit instrument, which validates the idea that there are specific properties attached to this instrument.
The introduction lays out the main themes addressed, the originality of the approach (using fiscal welfare as an analytical lens and tying together a discussion of the social division of welfare and the social division of labour that the use of fiscal welfare entails) and the main contributions of the book. It highlights that, besides developing an original framework based on an understudied policy instrument, the analysis covers both the politics of fiscal welfare and its consequences. In doing so, it engages with the literature on welfare reform and transformation, notably in the field of care provision. It also engages with the literature on labour market polarisation and dualisation. In highlighting the multiple forms of inequalities that are produced through the policies studied, careful attention is given to the gendered, class and ethnic dimensions of these inequalities.
Fiscal welfare (or social tax expenditures) is a policy instrument associated with Liberal welfare states that has been on the rise across many European welfare states.
This book sheds light on the use and effects of fiscal welfare in France and Sweden. Focusing on the introduction of a 50% tax deduction on domiciliary care and household services, it explores the politics behind this scheme, its effects on care provision as well as on labour market dualisation, highlighting how fiscal welfare contributes to structuring both a social division of welfare and a social division of labour.
This ground-breaking book opens a new field of research by exploring fiscal welfare, the political uses of this policy instrument, the patterns of inequalities it gives rise to and its policy feedback effects.
This chapter focuses on the politics of fiscal welfare. The 50 per cent tax reduction on domiciliary care and household services was introduced in 1991 in France and in 2007 in Sweden, though the first debates regarding the introduction of such a tax benefit in Sweden had begun in the early 1990s. The chapter analyses the different stages of adoption and reform of this policy over time, the motivations put forward and the framing of these motivations, the actors that have mobilised and the partisan politics behind this policy scheme. It also looks at the evolution in cost and visibility of this tax instrument and the political and public debates it has sparked. It highlights that a similar temporality has emerged across France and Sweden, in terms of the periods when the choice of instrument was considered and/or implemented and expanded and the type of accompanying discourse. The motivations put forward in both countries also share strong similarities, not least that the schemes were intended to respond to a multiplicity of objectives, of which job creation and addressing of eldercare needs have been the most important.
This chapter examines the impact of the tax benefit instrument on labour market transformation. In particular, it shows how this policy scheme has contributed to the specific patterns of polarisation of the occupational structure that have been observed in both France and Sweden, but also to the dualisation of the labour market, by fostering the development of atypical and precarious working conditions in this sector. Crucial to understanding this process of dualisation are: the rationale for choosing this policy instrument – which subsidises the demand (private households) rather than the supply (care and household workers); the political and normative discourse framing both this tax benefit scheme and the care and household services sector; and the link between this scheme and the activation turn in social and labour market policy. This chapter thus shows how this fiscal welfare scheme actively contributes to fostering a social division of labour, which also intersects with the social division of welfare, and to the sharpening of social inequalities along gender, class and ethnic lines.
This chapter looks at the role of fiscal welfare in the process of transformation and quiet privatisation of care provision, showing how the tax instrument has been justified and legitimised in France and Sweden in the name of promoting ‘free choice’, which modifies the norms for public action with a shift towards a more individual rather than a collective response to care needs. The tax benefit scheme has also accompanied an opening up of care provision to the market and the development of an increasingly powerful private sector with a vested interest in maintaining and expanding this tax scheme. The chapter also examines the distributive consequences of the introduction of this fiscal welfare benefit, showing how it contributes to the co-existence of different forms of access to care and inequalities in access to care, thus leading to a social division of welfare.
This book uses the lens of fiscal welfare to analyse the transformation and development of inequalities in welfare provision and in the social division of labour. In order to better understand the relevance of this lens and to highlight some of the specificities of the instrument, this chapter provides a state of the art of the (essentially Anglo-American) literature on fiscal welfare and social tax expenditures. The chapter also identifies the main research questions addressed in the book and presents an analytical framework, the originality of which is to tie together the analysis of intersecting sources of inequalities and forms of polarisation, showing not only how fiscal welfare has an impact on the social division of welfare – which has been the focus of the fiscal welfare literature – but also how it underpins a social division of labour.
This chapter questions the uses and policy feedback effects of the policy instrument. While the analysis in previous chapters points to some of the negative consequences of this tax benefit scheme, in terms of inequalities in access to care and household services and the effects on public care provision, or in terms of the development of a precarious labour market segment, the scheme could still be considered efficient from a public policy perspective if it achieves some of the aims officially pursued. However, policy evaluations by public agencies and other scholars cast doubt on this while pointing also to the high cost of these schemes for public finances and to the targeting inefficiencies. Such critiques are not entirely new, but have been raised by different public reports at various stages of the introduction and development of the tax benefit scheme in both France and Sweden. This raises the question of the choice to use this policy instrument and why these policy schemes have not only remained in place but have even been extended over the years. This, in turn, helps address the question of the specific properties of the tax benefit instrument and the specific feedback effects of this instrument.
Mental health has become a major challenge in late modern societies. This chapter describes the scale of the challenge in the work context. It provides a background of the recent history on how psychological malaise and emotional distress have emerged as a central concern in the labour market. It provides a starting point to understand why the mental vitality and strength of the workforce has a far more psychological- and mental-health-focused character in current professional and non-professional culture than in earlier societies. This chapter concludes that to understand the recently arrived wave of mental health problems and mental fitness concerns among working populations we need to rethink the fundamental assumptions and interrelationships concerning psyche, emotions, work, disability and health. We also need to move away from dominating individualistic mental health frameworks and carefully analyse the role mental health plays in the current labour market and culture.
This chapter focuses on the transformation of occupational health and the surge of mental health perspectives since the 1960s through three social arenas. First, this chapter analyses how the central paradigm of modern occupational health, work stress research, developed into a dominant perspective structuring wellbeing at work, and what kind of built-in assumptions it produced about psychological wellbeing and human characteristics. The second part of the chapter describes the emergence of psychosocial risks of work and mental health in media by analysing the largest newspaper in the Nordic countries and a widely circulated women’s magazine. It analyses how the problems of the psyche came to the fore in occupational health publicity when the problems of the middle class in working life grew and new challenges began to be identified. The third part summarizes key research findings derived from extensive interview data of occupational health professionals (especially doctors) with long-term work experience. These analyses show how changes in work conditions and occupational structure as well as the liberalization of reflexive psycho-emotional character fuelled the emergence of mental vulnerability in the medical practice.
