Textbooks
Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.
Our content is fully searchable and can be accessed on and off-campus through Shibboleth, OpenAthens or an institutional authenticated IP. For any questions on digital textbook pricing and subscription information, please contact simon.bell@bristol.ac.uk.
We are happy to provide digital samples of any of our coursebooks by completing this form. To see the full collection of all our core textbooks, browse our main website.
Books: Textbooks
Over the past decade, the UK has experienced major policy and policy making change. This text examines this shifting political and policy landscape while also highlighting the features of UK politics that have endured.
Written by Paul Cairney and Sean Kippin, leading voices in UK public policy and politics, the book combines a focus on policy making theories and concepts with the exploration of key themes and events in UK politics including:
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developing social policy in a post-pandemic world;
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governing post-Brexit;
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the centrality of environmental policy.
The book equips students with a robust and up-to-date understanding of UK public policy and enables them to locate this within a broader theoretical framework.
With a contemporary overview of global social policy formation, the third edition of this leading textbook identifies key issues, debates and priorities for action in social policy across the Global South and North.
Accessible and lively, it incorporates seven new chapters covering theory, social justice, climate, migration, gender, young people and water, energy and food. The original chapters have also been fully updated to reflect major developments in the fast-changing world of global social policy. Key features include:
• overview and summary boxes to bookend each chapter;
• questions for discussion and follow-up activities;
• further reading and resources.
Exploring what it means to locate human welfare within a global framework of social policy analysis and action, this textbook offers a perfect guide for curious students.
Building substantially on the earlier, landmark text, What Works? (Policy Press, 2000), this book brings together key thinkers and researchers to provide a contemporary review of the aspirations and realities of evidence-informed policy and practice. The text is clearly structured and provides sector-by-sector analysis of evidence use in policy-making and service delivery. It considers some cross-cutting themes, including a section of international commentaries, and concludes by looking at lessons from the past and prospects for the future.
This book will be of interest to a wide range of social science researchers, students and practitioners as well as those interested in supporting more evidence-informed policy and practice.
This textbook is the first to examine how new trends such as “radical innovation”, “co-creation” and “potentialization” challenge fundamental values in the public sector.
The authors bridge traditional public management approaches that tend to exclude social and societal problems, with broader social theories apt to capture new dilemmas and challenges. The book shows how the effects of new forms of managerialism penetrate the state, local governments, welfare institutions as well as professional work and citizens’ rights. It facilitates a discussion about how basic values are put at stake with new reforms and managerial tools.
The book is ideal for postgraduate students in the area of public policy and public management with an interest in managing and leading public administration units and welfare institutions.
Social justice and social policy in Scotland offers a critical engagement with the state of social policy in one of the devolved nations of the UK, a decade after the introduction of devolution.
Promoting greater social justice has been held up as a key vision of successive Scottish administrations since devolution began. It is argued throughout this important book that the analysis of Scottish social policy must therefore be located in wider debates around social injustice as well as about how the devolution process affects the making, implementation and impact of social policy.
Social justice and social policy in Scotland focuses on a diverse range of topics and issues, including income inequalities, work and welfare, criminal justice, housing, education, health and poverty, each reflecting the themes of social inequality and social justice.
This book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, policy makers and practitioners as well as students of social policy and of society in Scotland and other devolved nations.
