As a publisher, we play a significant role in supporting the development of new research understanding and skills, and in reflecting on emerging agendas and dilemmas, including online data, evidence use, ethical practice, mixed methods, participatory approaches and cross-disciplinary learning.
Our titles on social research methods and research practices span disciplines and embrace new collaborations and ways of working as part of a focus on challenge-led research.
Highlights in this area include the Social Research Association Shorts, which provide academics and research users with short, high-quality and focused guides to specific topics, and the Longitudinal and Life Course Studies journal.
Social Research Methods and Research Practices
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This chapter follows planners working in a medium-sized planning consultancy. It details the commercial work at the heart of planning systems, including work for private sector clients to promote their developments as well as engagement with more strategic politics and consideration of land and development sites in a particular region. A detailed account of a planning inquiry shows the interactions between planners and other built-environment professionals as well as an asymmetry in resources between private and public sectors. The chapter shows the private sector developing extensive knowledge of regional land markets, local authorities and development cultures. It explores business development practices and networking among private-sector planners, highlighting the existence of communities of practice underpinned by ‘banter’ in which an ‘othering’ of public-sector planners was a prominent feature.
This paper presents the findings of longitudinal research conducted in Ethiopia exploring the effects of COVID-19 school closures on children’s holistic learning, including their socio-emotional and academic learning. It draws on data from over 2,000 pupils captured in 2019 and 2021 to compare primary school children’s dropout and learning before and after school closures. The study adapts self-reporting scales used in similar contexts to measure grade 4–6 pupils’ social skills and numeracy. Findings highlight the risk of widening inequality regarding educational access and outcomes, related to pupils’ gender, age, wealth and location. They also highlight a decline in social skills following school closures and identify a positive and significant relationship between pupils’ social skills and numeracy over time. In conclusion, we recommend a need for education systems to promote children’s holistic learning, which is even more vital in the aftermath of the pandemic.
This chapter explores working life in a large, multi-disciplinary consultancy. It shows how planning consultants work with public-sector clients and on increasingly large and complex projects with many players. The chapter reveals the importance attached to sustaining good working relationships with clients and shows planners reflecting on how their work serves the public interest despite the imperatives of capital. We also explore the high-performance culture in the company and its implications for work-life balance.
This chapter draws together conclusions from the four ethnographic case studies. It provides answers to key questions, including: How do planners work? With whom do they work? What do they know? And what do planners believe in? This reveals the significance of concepts such as ‘public interest’, but also the tensions that planners find in identifying and attaining them, particularly in a changing professional environment shaped by austerity politics and commercial imperatives. We reflect on the powers that planners have and how they work in different, often conflictual settings. Finally, the chapter reflects on the implications of our findings for wider debates in planning, both in England and elsewhere.
This chapter explores the work of planners in Southwell, a local authority that has outsourced its planning functions to a large private-sector company. It explores how outsourcing works in the field of planning, revealing a distinct public-private hybrid. It reveals how ‘organisational islands’ contribute to pragmatic decision-making, in contrast to wider ideals of sustainable development. The chapter also shows the long-term significance of workplace culture, looking closely at class, place and gender identity. We reveal how the working practices of planners show similarities with those in other fully public-sector planning departments under austerity politics.
Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with all its attendant moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses how places are made through stories of four diverse public and private sector working environments.
The book provides a unique insight for educators, students and researchers into the everyday lives of planners and those in associated built environment occupations. This exceptional account of the micro-politics of a knowledge-intensive profession also provides an excellent resource for sociologists of contemporary work. The authors use team ethnography to push the methodological frontiers of planning research and to advance organisational ethnography into new areas.
Employment re-entry opportunities decrease with age. For middle-aged welfare benefit recipients, employment obstacles connected to age exacerbate further disadvantages connected to welfare receipt. At the same time, there is considerable diversity in middle-aged welfare benefit recipients’ long-term employment trajectories, which has thus far received little attention. Policies aim to increase labour market participation at higher ages. To this end, it is important to understand specific difficulties and to be realistic when formulating goals for people with very diverse types of employment histories. Using large-scale register data, this paper’s focus is on a cohort aged 45–54 in August 2012 in Germany. Sequence analysis aids in identifying characteristics relevant to employment histories over the past 19 years, from January 1993 to July 2012. Subsequent employment outcomes over the time span September 2012 to December 2018 are investigated, differentiating between jobs of different quality, and effects of training programmes on these outcomes are analysed using entropy balancing methods. Findings are that middle-aged welfare recipients’ employment biographies are very diverse, ranging from very little employment experience, over long histories of intermittent employment, to long continuous employment histories. Employment history attributes significantly affect employment prospects. The analyses further show that it is not too late to invest in skills, independent of employment history type.
This book presents and interprets the stories of nine actors involved in the design, construction, management and habitation of third age housing in the UK. The primary motivation behind this book is to offer a creative practice research perspective to the field of gerontology – through anthropology by means of design – and, specifically, an architectural ‘insider’ view on the designed environments of retirement housing. One distinct intention of this work is to amplify the voice of architects among associated researchers, but also, through sharing aspects of the underlying multi-sited ethnography, give voice to some overlooked actors within the research field that are equally well-placed to contribute to design discussions of retirement-living products. Readers are invited to consider the question of how designers – professional or otherwise – can facilitate the wellbeing of older people in their homes, by optimising design details of these micro environments, in support of collective ambitions to age in place for as long as possible. Related to this, it is anticipated that readers might seek authentication of retirement housing – as products marketed as ‘specialist’ housing options – asking the question whether all housing should be age-friendly. The book is especially relevant to scholars in the fields of ageing and environmental gerontology, as well as architecture and the built environment. It will also appeal to industry professionals and practitioners from the housing sector more broadly. The visual vignettes and variety of writing approaches – from storytelling to reflective accounts – make this an accessible, transdisciplinary book. It may also be read by people preparing for later life.
Chapter 1 contextualises the actors storied within this volume, specifically baby boomer characters ‘Matthew’ and ‘Eileen’ storied within Chapter 3, and ‘Rose’ the ‘vulnerable friend’ storied within Chapter 4. Taking a popular perspective, these characters occupy a common phase of life – retirement – albeit separated by over two decades, with Matthew and Eileen being recent retirees, and Rose a generation ahead. They are also considered outwith the target market for the villa product presented within Chapter 5; Matthew and Eileen being ‘too young’ or ‘not ready’, and Rose being ‘too dependent’ or ‘too late’ for a retirement apartment. This chapter uses gerontological literature to locate these ‘known’ individuals within a theoretical population or spectrum of older persons. It explores key terms used to describe life course stages, such as ‘third age’ (Matthew/Eileen) and ‘fourth age’ (Rose), and associated degrees of independence and how these translate to housing needs. Thus this chapter offers readers a theoretical primer and backdrop for the cast of actors storied in this book.
Chapter 10 contains a research story that captures the position of the architecture student responding to the dual challenges of designing housing and accommodating an aged population. The story is located within the academic design studio of a fictional architecture school and presents a composite student character, August, while reflecting upon empathic design approaches to designing retirement housing on a ‘live’ development site. It explores how architecture students think about designing for older people and, crucially, how they might extend their awareness of housing needs and occupant aspirations in later life. This reflective practitioner account posits that the academic design studio can provide a space to explore research methodologies, involving short-term ‘cultural immersion’ or ‘empathic modelling’ and other ‘fast ethnography’ techniques, resulting in meaningful stakeholder engagement and potential to generate knowledge for and from design. In these terms the design studio can create a safe place to challenge ethnocentrism and the practice of self-design, as well as to question mainstream architectural behaviours and identities perpetuated by ‘starchitects’. The chapter also offers a behind-the-scenes view of architectural education that serves to support greater mutual understanding between designers of the built environment and researchers in environmental gerontology.
