Social Policy

This timely book is the most comprehensive account yet of recent commissioning practice in the English NHS and its impact on health services and the healthcare system.

Brings together interdisciplinary and international case studies to provide a distinctive analysis of how politics in the UK and the lives of British citizens have evolved in the first decades of the twenty-first century, focusing on the interconnectedness of austerity politics, the Brexit vote and the rise of populist politics.

Can affirmative action in US college admissions survive mounting threats? This judicious review, part of the Sociology of Diversity series, considers the question using up-to-date sociological, policy and legal perspectives to explain both sides of the fierce debate over affirmative action in the context of prominent Supreme Court cases.

This book examines poverty in the context of the economy, society and the political community, considering how states can respond to issues of inequality, exclusion and powerlessness. Drawing on examples in both rich and poor countries, this is an accessible contribution to the debate about the nature of poverty and responses to it.

Drawing on a two-year multi-platform initiative, this book by award-winning journalist and author Mary O’Hara, asks how we can overturn the portrayal of poverty once and for all. Crucially, she turns to the real experts to try to find answers – the people who live it.

Re-examining C.Wright Mills’s legacy as a jumping off point, this original introduction to sociology illuminates global concepts, themes and practices that are fundamental to the discipline and rethinks and re-imagines what a critically committed, politically engaged and publicly relevant sociology should look like in the 21st century.

Placing children’s experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of its examination of contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood, this book examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations and forges a radical new pathway for the future.

Providing an in-depth exploration of the experiences of Ireland, Denmark and Finland in their various initiatives designed to end homelessness, this book presents an authoritative comparative account of policies and strategies that have worked, along with an exposition of those that have not.

Using a unique archive spanning the lifetime of twenty council estates in the UK, this book examines what we can learn from council housing’s failings and successes for building sustainable communities in the future.

From scarcer resources to greater stresses, this book charts how policies and cuts have compromised workers’ ability to undertake their professional roles. Combining research and practice experience, it assesses the extent of de-professionalisation in recent years, and how workers have responded.

This book reconsiders traditional policy-analytic concepts, and re-develops and extends new ones, in a melded approach defined as systemic institutionalism. This links policy with governance and the state and suggests how real-world issues might be substantively addressed.

With welfare to work programmes under intense scrutiny, this book ranges widely across Europe to review existing policies and explore future ones. It shows how many schemes do not adequately address social rights and lived experiences, and consider alternatives based on theories of non-domination.