Politics and International Relations - Research

There is widespread commitment across public service agencies in the UK and elsewhere to ensuring that the best available evidence is used to improve public services. The challenge is not only making research evidence accessible and available but also getting it used. This book provides a timely contribution to enhancing evidence use.

This study, by a qualitative sociologist, uses interpretive methods to examine the impact of auditing and inspection on professional work in schools, hospitals, local government and the police and provides a true sense of what is practically involved in the work of counting, measuring and managing quality.

New Labour have set themselves up to specifically address women's issues and attract women voters, but how successful have they been? This book offers an analysis of New Labour's politics and policies from a gendered perspective.

Women's increased role in the labour market has combined with concerns about the damaging effects of long working hours to push time-related issues up the policy agenda in many Western nations. This wide-ranging and accessible book assesses policy alternatives in the light of feminist theory and factual evidence.

This book identifies key topics in the policy arena, subjecting them to sustained theoretical and practical appraisal. It shows the advantage of applying a cross-disciplinary lens to the study of 'policy', presenting critical and reflective engagements with theory and practice at all levels of political organisation within a range of contexts.

How did partnerships come to emerge almost everywhere and at almost the same time? What is the inner logic of partnerships? And at what point does that logic begin to break down? This book improves our understanding of the shifting ground on which partnerships and agreements must be reached in today's hyper-complex society.

This book examines the meanings of gender that underpin policies in the Scandinavian welfare states, historically and today, and raises the question whether the hallmark of the Scandinavian welfare model is a special combination of gender equality and gender differentiation.

This important book explores the meaning of social justice and examines how it translates into the everyday concerns of public and social policy.

This original and stimulating book examines contemporary issues in social work, particularly exploring the politicisation of the profession from the 1970s onwards.

This book examines how new dimensions of diversity and difference, so often debated in the national context, are emerging at the neighbourhood level.

This book, the third in Martin Powell's New Labour trilogy, analyses the legacy of Tony Blair's government for social policy, focusing on the extent to which it has changed the UK welfare state.

This timely book explores how changing territorial politics are impacting on social citizenship rights across the UK.