Social and Public Policy > Work and Labour Markets
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In this short article, we call for policy makers, activists and academics to take account of food aesthetics of economically and racially marginalised people – especially women – when understanding and intervening in food distribution. Although it may seem that aesthetics and poverty are mutually exclusive, and somewhat provocative to suggest that food aesthetics, when understood more expansively, aesthetics is an important aspect of domestic food work, as our findings from our research with British Bangladeshi women from Tower Hamlets on low incomes and responsible for social reproductive labour in their families and communities attest. We draw inspiration from feminist philosophy of food and taste, and everyday domestic aesthetics. Reflecting on our data, we combine these philosophies with Krishnendu Ray’s critique of food sociologists who imagine that people on low incomes lack a sense of beauty because their lives are dominated by their life of suffering. To conclude, we propose that food aesthetics should become part of the politics of food distribution and rights.
While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, they rarely consider what enables such reform. In this conceptual article, we suggest that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate how they operate when doing so is necessary to continue to serve key democratic functions. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. Three current challenges highlight the urgency of adapting and innovating liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. A democratic theory of political robustness emphasises the need to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to changes, just as it helps to frame the necessary adaptations and innovations in times such as the present.
Media coverage plays an important role in generating knowledge about and shaping understandings of homelessness. Although families make up about 35% of all those without housing in the United States, they remain relatively invisible in the media. We examine the amount of coverage and content of representations of homeless families in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in 2017 and 2022. Families receive little media coverage in comparison to single, homeless adults, especially men. When newspapers do address unhoused families, they mainly do so without reference to the race, gender, or sexuality of homeless families. As a result of limited and trivial coverage, it is difficult to find articles that provide extended discussion of family homelessness or explain the multi-layered structural factors that cause families to lose housing.
Background:
In theory and practice, it is understood that personal relationships play a role in the effectiveness of translational models that bridge research and policy. These models can be made more efficient by understanding factors impacting relationships between policy-making players and third-party knowledge brokers.
Aims and objectives:
This study investigates a range of personal and office-level characteristics in predicting initial meetings and sustained relationships between federal staffers and knowledge brokers.
Methods:
A public affairs database, Quorum, was used to pull data on staffers who were contacted between September 2021 and August 2022 during an optimisation phase of the Research-to-Policy Collaboration (RPC). Logistic regression models were used to understand the impact of the characteristics on outcomes such as attending initial meetings and attending meetings facilitated by the RPC.
Findings:
Mid-level staffers and democratic staffers were more likely to meet with RPC staff. Office tenure was predictive of lower odds of meeting with RPC staff. For significant associations, the sample was stratified by political party to determine if the results differed by party.
Discussion and conclusions:
Together, these results suggest there are both personal and office-level characteristics affecting the federal staffers’ engagement with knowledge brokers. This work further informs efforts to bridge the gap between science and policy by informing knowledge brokers which offices and staffers they may want to approach.
Background:
The COVID-19 policy context was characterised by high levels of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge and the need for immediate action. Therefore, governments in Europe tended to rely on expertise provided by advisory bodies to design their crisis response. Advisory bodies played a fundamental part in policy making during the crisis to optimise policy formulation.
Aims and objectives:
During the COVID-19 crisis, the literature on policy advice grew considerably. To grasp the main research outcomes, we conduct a scoping review that interrogates the COVID-19 policy advice literature to answer the question ‘How did policy advisory bodies operate in Europe during the COVID-19 crisis?’ Our review builds on a strong theoretical and conceptual basis informed by the literature on policy advisory systems, while offering a new perspective by focusing on advice and policy making during crisis times specifically. We present a review of newly established knowledge and identify what merits further study.
Methods:
The scoping review follows a strict protocol informed by Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to capture the literature published between 2020 and 2023. We searched two databases, Scopus and Web of Science. The grey literature was excluded.
Findings:
In total, 59 academic outputs inform this review. Overrepresented in our review were qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. Our review shows that the academic community has focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.
Discussion:
Avenues for further research include the independence and influence of advisory bodies, and the fate of bodies set up during the crisis.
This chapter is the first of two that examine the agency and voice of workers. The chapter puts forward two dimensions to facilitate a mapping of worker agency and voice. These dimensions are: the form of agency – ranging from (informal) meanings, norms or beliefs via informal practice to formal practices; and the ends to which the agency is applied – whether it is agency that is mainly resistive to the employer or agency that is supportive of employer aims. This chapter focuses on worker agency in the creation of meaning before examining workers’ informal practices. In so doing, the chapter analyses meaningful work, organizational citizenship, discretionary effort, organizational commitment, flow, communities of coping and informal resistance, in terms of limiting effort and defending autonomy.
This chapter is the second of two that examine the agency and voice of workers. The chapter’s mapping follows two dimensions: the form of agency – ranging from (informal) meanings, norms or beliefs via informal practice to formal practices; and the ends to which the agency is applied – whether that agency is mainly resistive to the employer or is supportive of employer aims. This chapter focuses on formal voice structures and mechanisms. It begins with an analysis of employer-initiated voice mechanisms. It then focuses on the following worker-initiated voice structures and mechanisms: social media campaigns, worker collectivities, civil society organizations, labour unions, statutory workplace democracy, worker cooperatives and labour voice in global supply chains.
This chapter introduces the book as an analytical celebration of the sociology of contemporary work. The chapter defines what is meant by ‘the sociology of contemporary work’. It then goes on to outline the key threads in the book: the focus on service work, knowledge work and platform (gig) work; the sociological imagination at work; the importance of debate; and the importance of clear communication.
This chapter focuses on inequalities of opportunity: systematic differences in the likelihood that different groups of people (for instance people born to working-class or upper-class parents) are able to occupy employment positions that give beneficial outcomes, such as high income. The chapter examines, in turn, four types of inequality of opportunity: overall social (im)mobility, barriers related to gender, barriers related to ethnicity, and global inequality between countries as a context for international migration. The chapter weaves in examples from service work, knowledge work and platform work.
