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Bringing together the voices of leading experts in the field, this edition offers an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year. The book considers a range of current issues and critical debates in UK and international social policy. It contains vital research, including discussions on the changing landscape of welfare in the UK and Europe more widely since the 2008/09 crisis, the continuing impact of austerity on social policy areas such as the NHS, social care and disability, the financialisation of pensions and corporatisation of welfare as well as topical contributions on the ‘Air Jamaica generation’ and the Alt-Right from a social policy perspective. Published in association with the SPA, this comprehensive analysis of the current state of social policy will be of interest to students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.
The relational processes and practices that create and sustain grassroots associations have received limited attention from researchers. This article addresses this gap, exploring collective leadership of grassroots associations through a ‘leadership-as-practice’ lens (; ). It adopts the concept of ‘bundles’ of leadership practice () to analyse data from a single ethnographic case study. Adopting this conceptual lens, we identify a set of ‘bundles’ of related practices – organising, engaging and accounting – that constitute the enduring reality of the grassroots association’s collective leadership.
This paper sets out to assess the state of the academic, and policy and practice, debate around leadership in the UK voluntary sector context. There has been a lack of sustained academic interest in the notion of leadership in the UK, and equally a lack of dialogue between academia, policy and practice. As a result, it is often far from clear whether there is any agreement about what leadership consists of, and the difference that ‘improved’ leadership might make. The paper considers what is meant by leadership in the voluntary sector, and considers three dominant approaches that have been used to frame leadership in debates within the sector. The three themes we identify in existing literature are person-centred approaches, process approaches, and debates that are concerned with issues of representativeness. In particular, it draws attention to the over-reliance on individual or person-centred accounts of leadership in the sector. The paper posits instead the promise of accounts that draw attention to collective notions of leadership, and the implications of a more widespread adoption of such frames for leadership development practice and research.
UK employment services are increasingly delivered by public, private and third sector organisations in quasi-markets that can be viewed as fields with actors (providers) competing for resources and position. The commissioning of the Work Programme produced an ‘episode of contention’ as fewer resources, shifting policy priorities and new contractual arrangements restructured relationships within the field. Drawing on empirical research the paper demonstrates how providers with different resources have navigated this period, employing strategies to manage challenger and incumbent roles and maintain their position in the field. The findings contribute to both field theory and our theoretical understanding of employment services.
The third sector has a long history of delivering employment services alongside statutory and private sector providers, but the landscape of provision has changed with the introduction of prime-led supply chain contracting and payment by results. This chapter draws on data from a qualitative study of the Work Programme and findings from an evaluation of Work Choice, the two main programmes operating in the field to explore how third sector providers have responded to these changes. It highlights the varied strategies TSOs have employed to navigate reputational and financial risk, and to then re-orientate services to secure a position in the evolving field. The chapter underlines the diversity of providers within the field and challenges a normative approach to understanding third sector experiences in these forms of public service delivery.
This chapter outlines the context of civil society in Wales during COVID-19. It begins by outlining the situation of civil society at the onset of the pandemic, and noting the challenges faced up to the beginning of the first lockdown, including longer-term challenges such as austerity, volunteering gaps and limitations and more immediate difficulties such as the impact of floods in early 2020 on some organisations.
Co-production is not a new concept but it is one with renewed prominence and reach in contemporary policy discourse. It refers to joint working between people or groups who have traditionally been separated into categories of user and producer. The article focuses on the coproduction of public services, offering theory-based and knowledge-based routes to evidencing co-production. It cites a range of ‘good enough’ methodologies which community organisations and small-scale service providers experimenting with co-production can use to assess the potential contribution, including appreciative inquiry, peer-to-peer learning and data sharing. These approaches have the potential to foster innovation and scale-out experimentation.
Only relatively recently, place leadership has become an important debate in the leadership studies and public administration literatures. From a place leadership perspective, there is clearly a potential role for third sector organisations and the voluntary engagement that citizens can play for places through different activities, such as for example social innovation, public services provision, volunteering, civic engagement, advocacy, enhancement of the quality of life, strengthening of social bonds and social cohesion. However, the topic of civil society and third sector organisations is still neglected in research and public policy debates on place-based leadership. Our special issue aims at filling this gap.
