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.
The relationship between social policy and social change can be dynamic and can bring about significant transformation. However, this relationship is not linear and is affected by political climate, by context, by those who are either involved or excluded and by the extent of media attention. On the one hand there can be blocks, revisions and retractions, but, on the other, there can be breakthroughs and significant movement. There are many ways in which social policy can contribute to participatory social policy and social change and in this chapter we look how social entrepreneurship linked to forms of social and micro enterprise can operate as a major change element, particularly when opportunities, such as those contained in the Care Act 2014, are utilised by those whom the policy most affects.
When links are made between social policy and social change, a pivotal area relates to the extent of involvement of those who utilise services. Involvement can take many different forms and operate at many different levels. It can be deep and meaningful or superficial and meaningless (Fawcett et al, 2010). Recently, co-production is a term that has been coined to clarify what involvement can and arguably should incorporate. The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE, 2015) maintain that co-production should be regarded as a number of principles rather than as a singular entity. They point to the importance of power imbalances being addressed and to attention being paid to reciprocity and to acknowledging and working with diversity. Accordingly, there is a strong emphasis on assets, rather than on deficits and on negotiation, mutuality and exchange.
This chapter draws on participative action research (PAR) undertaken by academics at Liverpool Hope University and members of SUGAH (‘Service User Group At Hope’, a mental health service user and self-advocacy group). The project was funded by the European Union (EU) as part of its Horizon 2020 agenda and the group are part of the Rebuilding an Inclusive, Value based Europe of Solidarity and Trust through Social Investments (RE-InVEST) programme, which is looking at the impact of austerity on marginalised communities. The research has been framed in terms of the coproduction of knowledge, the active participation of academics and service users as equal partners in research and knowledge production, with engaged action as one of the outcomes.
The overall aim of RE-InVEST is to influence political and academic debates on the nature and impact of austerity and, in particular, to invigorate reinvestment in welfare, social policy and the economy. Strategically, the project puts the ‘voices of vulnerable groups and civil society organisations’ at the centre of the programme (RE-InVEST, 2017a). It aims to establish research designed to meet the needs of the people it serves; and, through active participation, the coproduction of new knowledge to develop political demands for change.
The project has been funded for four years (2015–19). The first element of the research, conducted between September 2015 and October 2016, was tasked with addressing the ‘social impacts of the present crisis’ and this element of the overall project is discussed here.
The RE-InVEST programme is committed to the involvement of ‘vulnerable groups’ in the research process (RE-InVEST, 2017a).
Pat’s Petition is a group that campaigns about the ‘perfect storm’ of UK political and social policy changes impacting on disabled people and carers, concentrating particularly on so-called ‘welfare reform’ (Machin et al, 2014). It is a pioneer in a development that has international implications. Formed in 2011, it was set up originally to launch an e-petition on what was then a new UK government website to enable online petitions. Any petition raising 100,000 signatories would be debated in parliament. Although it was one of the most successful early campaigns, Pat’s Petition did not reach the required number of signatories, but was awarded a debate in Parliament by the Labour Party. The group continue to campaign, occupying a unique position in taking a neutral political line and being inclusive of both disabled people and carers, consistently championing their cause and focusing on a ‘safety net’ of support.
Part of the impetus behind starting the e-petition came from the realisation that many disabled people and carers could not take part in demonstrations and marches or even get out easily to meet in groups. The internet opened up connections and made it possible to find people with comparable interests for peer support and community. This has been life changing for many disabled people and carers including Pat herself, who is blind, and previously could not communicate beyond a limited circle of friends. However, as she describes the difficulties of file formats, including on official websites, and the slow speed of hearing emails in comparison to other’s speed reading, it is clear that difficulties of access for disabled people have not been completely overcome by electronic communication.
Groupwork is a powerful means of creating social change. Groups of people with shared experience and common concerns can undertake collective action and, as they become more than a collection of individuals and harness the range of skills, knowledge and experiences of their members, can become extremely powerful entities (Doel and Kelly 2014: 55). Organising collectively can enable people who are regarded as disempowered, vulnerable and socially excluded to organise effectively and they can achieve empowerment through coming together in groups (Beresford and Fleming, 2015: 3).
Groups and groupwork can be defined in many different ways, so providing a definition can be problematic. The groups discussed here all form part of what could be called self-directed groups or mutual aid groups in some way. In these groups the focus is external. Group members come together seeking change in their world. Any personal growth of members is a secondary – not primary – benefit; it is the change in the external world that is sought (Mullender et al, 2013: 8).
This chapter considers the power of groupwork in creating policy change. It looks at examples where groupwork was consciously chosen as the means of organisation. It is not always possible to prove a direct causal connection between the work of groups and policy impact; however, the groups described here can be credited to a large degree for achieving the changes they sought. The examples are not the result of rigorous research, but ones young people I know or colleagues have been part of. I have had conversations with people involved; the quotes are from those conversations.
I am currently undertaking research for my PhD into women’s experiences of pornography. I have researched pornography twice before: once for a short undergraduate project and once for my Master’s dissertation. Each time the research has been conducted with women living in the UK and so primarily is located within the British context; however, not all who participated were British nationals. Additionally, pornography does not necessarily have national boundaries and I have drawn upon international (though primarily Western) research and examples. This research may therefore have some international relevance, though I recognise the limitations to this given that the position of pornography within societies varies greatly globally. Pornography is a subject I have always had a political and feminist interest in, and now also an epistemological and methodological one. My interactions with it have largely been academic and pornography is not something I use or am personally interested in. It is, however, something I would consider myself to have a lived experience of, and it is this experience that has been formative in shaping my political opinions on it. As I have learned more about pornography, had new life experiences, and learned about other women’s experiences, the ways in which I have sought to research pornography, and subsequently understand it as a phenomena, have changed.
In this chapter, I am going to outline why I think a feminist epistemological approach and participatory methodology to researching pornography could have innovative implications for how we seek to formulate policy and law on pornography. Put simply, I will explore why taking a feminist approach to how we develop knowledge on pornography could change how we seek to regulate it within our society.
The UK House of Commons passed the Gender Recognition Bill by a majority of 355 votes to 46 at 7.11pm on Tuesday 25 May 2004. Having already been debated by the House of Lords, the new and virtually unamended legislation completed the remaining formalities quickly and received Royal Assent on 1 July 2004 (Burns, 2014: Foreword) The following spring, in April 2005, the new Act of Parliament came into full effect and several thousand British transsexual women and men began applying for legal recognition of their acquired gender.
Women became recognised as women, men as men – for all purposes in UK law. Successful applicants received replacement birth certificates to protect their privacy, and it became an offence for officials learning about a transsexual person’s gender reassignment history to disclose that to a third party without consent (except in specifically defined instances). It also became possible for transsexual women to marry men (or enter a Civil Partnership with another woman) and vice versa for transsexual men. The new law provided a resolution to a nightmare that transsexual people had contended with for 34 years. While not the first law to be changed by their activism, the new Act was the prize that trans campaigners had fought to obtain for more than a dozen. And yet the most remarkable thing was that the whole legislative process had taken place with so little discourse in the conventional media-hosted sense. The reasons for that will become plain in this account.
But first some background … British transsexual people had experienced serious problems with the official view of their gender for 34 years.
From time to time a ‘scandal’ or wrongdoing is exposed – often through the dogged persistence of individuals – which has a substantial influence on public policy, especially in health and social care. The relationship is a complex one as Butler and Drakeford (2006) observed: ‘Scandal is constructed out of a very particular set of events and processes, inhabited by real people and built on unique experiences’ (p 5). In 2011 I made a decision that was to dominate my life for the next two years: I decided to speak up about the serious concerns I had about the leadership and approach of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the national regulator of health and social care services in England. This was a controversial, and unusual, step as I was a current member of the CQC’s board. Such was my concern that I felt the CQC was, or was at risk of, not meeting its statutory duties.
It is fair to say that I am not unaccustomed to raising difficult issues. I pursued successful legal action following years of neglectful care from mental health services. As a result of my experiences I have campaigned on mental health issues and worked with numerous organisations to provide or facilitate the voice of people receiving care services. I have brought three successful legal claims for disability discrimination, including as a litigant-in-person. These previous experiences were helpful when I was faced various behaviours when speaking up: I knew what worked and I was prepared for the emotional rollercoaster.
This chapter will focus on mental health service users and survivors with attention not only to health systems but to housing, welfare benefits and poverty. In terms of disability more generally I shall also have something to say about deaf people particularly as regards education policy. The main object of the chapter is to contest privileged knowledge in social policy and associated practices by exposing its nature and to counterpose this with ‘knowledge from below’. I will argue that this knowledge is collective at two levels: in the discourses produced by organisations of users of welfare services; and then in the development of this by new forms of theoretical and empirical knowledge taking shape in the academy and other spaces by service user researchers engaged in transforming how we think about the welfare state and social policy. It is important to state at the outset that these forms of knowledge are not uniform. This is partly because different groups of service users are positioned differently both by the welfare state and also in how they respond to it, a set of differences captured by the term ‘intersectionality’. However, epistemological responses themselves are not homogenous and there is increasing debate on just how the situation of users of the welfare state should be understood.
Looking back at the rise of the mental health survivor movement, Judi Chamberlin made explicit links with the feminist practice of consciousness raising (Chamberlin, 1990). Writing in an Indian context, Davar shows how the survivor movement grew out of the Indian feminist movement (Davar, 2013), which exposed the detrimental effects of patriarchy on women’s emotional health.
When considering the extent to which the evil of want has been tackled and overcome since Beveridge’s time, there are good reasons to focus on the experience of disabled people, whose needs were poorly recognised in the post-war period. Under the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, employment for disabled people was characterised by segregation, marginalisation and low pay, with employment support mainly focused on servicemen disabled in the two world wars. In addition, for those disabled people who were unable to work, the financial support available from the welfare state was inadequate, confusing to claim and stigmatising (Borsay, 2005). This chapter therefore seeks to explore the impact of employment and social security policies on the economic wellbeing of disabled people today, using the UK as a case study.
Society’s understanding of disability and attitudes to disabled people have changed significantly since the immediate post-war period. According to the social model of disability, developed by disabled people from the 1960s/1970s onwards (Campbell and Oliver, 1996), people with impairments are disabled by the physical, organisational, financial, and most importantly attitudinal barriers in a society organised by and for non-disabled people. These barriers need to be dismantled or overcome to enable disabled people to participate in paid work and enjoy a reasonable standard of living. In practice, this very often necessitates the provision of assistance to overcome the impact of impairment, such as social care support to enable a disabled person to get ready for work in the morning or disability benefits to fund mobility.
