Textbooks
Policy Press publishes a range of textbooks and other learning resources across the social sciences to suit a variety of course and learning needs. These are designed with students in mind and include many accessible features – from case studies and chapter summaries, to revision questions and illustrative boxes and diagrams.
The majority of our textbooks are available as consumer eBooks as well as in print and we are happy to discuss bespoke options such as print and digital packages or creating unique collections to suit your course needs. Our content is available through the key institutional content providers VitalSource and Kortext in early 2015, allowing seamless integration with VLE platforms. If you would like to discuss how we could help with your course resources, please contact pp-sales@bristol.ac.uk.
For more information about our textbooks, please see Information for Lecturers.
A Contemporary History of Social Work
Learning from the Past
An important contribution to topical debates about social work education and the identity of the profession, drawing lessons from the recent history of social work to identify how and why it has lost its privilege and influence.
Changing Children's Services
Working and Learning Together
This book focuses on the drive towards increasingly integrated ways of working in children’s services across the UK. The new edition of this bestselling textbook critically examines the potential and reality of closer ‘working together’, asking whether such new ways of working will be able to respond more effectively to the needs of children.
Infrastructure Delivery Planning
An Effective Practice Approach
Janice Morphet sets out and analyses the key components of infrastructure delivery in Britain, both at national and neighbourhood level, situating this within international, European and domestic economic, territorial and social policy.
What is professional social work?
What is Professional Social Work? is a now classic analysis of social work as a discourse between three aspects of practice: social order, therapeutic and transformational perspectives. It enables social workers to analyse and value the role of social work in present-day multiprofessional social care.
The handbook of inequality and socioeconomic position
Concepts and measures
This Handbook is the definitive resource for anyone wishing to quickly look up and understand key concepts and measurements relating to socioeconomic position and inequalities.
Understanding equal opportunities and diversity
The social differentiations and intersections of inequality
This book challenges the official discourse that shapes the debates on Equal Opportunities and Diversity (EO&D) at national, regional and European level and will be a key text for students and researchers of EO&D in many fields.
Modernising social work
Critical considerations
New Labour's modernisation agenda has produced an avalanche of change that has posed formidable challenges for everyone involved in social work, whether as service users, practitioners or managers. "Modernising Social Work" provides a radical appraisal of the far-reaching changes in their theoretical, historical and policy contexts.
Ageing, health and care
The ageing of the population has enormous policy implications for health care. This important new textbook, written by a leader in the field, covers key questions such as the fitness of older people in the future, the widening inequalities in the health of older people and how health in old age reflects habits and behaviour in earlier life.
Organisational Behaviour for Social Work
Using real social work case examples, Organisational behaviour for social work unites the well-established study of behaviour in organizations with the special, and sometimes unusual, organizational settings of social work practice.
Understanding Community
Politics, Policy and Practice
This substantially revised edition of a highly topical text applies a critical approach to themes introduced in the first edition including economic development, heath and housing, and draws upon theory from Marx and Bourdieu to offer a clearer understanding of community in capitalist society.
Understanding the environment and social policy
Using an international and multi-disciplinary approach, this book provides a timely overview of the current issues in environmentalism and social policy. It explores many current debates, including: cities, housing and transport; citizenship and care; employment and green jobs; environmental governance and legislation; and globalisation.
Gender Equality in the Welfare State?
This timely and accessible textbook analyses the male breadwinner model in terms of care, work, time, income and power, providing a framework which asks about policies and practices for gender equality in each of these. This new approach contextualises national policies and debates within comparative theoretical analysis and data.