bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘No such thing as society’? Neoliberalism and the social
Authors: Clarke John
Published: January 2022

This chapter contends that neoliberalism, in many variants, involved a sustained attack on ideas, institutions and formations of the ‘social’. It argues that the view of neoliberalism as ‘anti-social’ risks reifying a particular conception of the social and misses critical ways in which neoliberalism not merely contests but has sought to reconstruct older conceptions and institutions of the social. The chapter then takes a view of the social that treats it as a shifting and contested field, composed of imaginings, representations and their institutionalizations rather than a fixed formation more or less associated with the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare states. It provides a vital foundation for thinking about the shifting relationships between neoliberalism and the social. While some commentators are now suggesting that we are moving beyond neoliberalism, or that global social policy is being reframed as ideas and discourse evolve, the chapter cautions us to be wary. It helps us to navigate the complex terrain, going beyond simple binaries, dichotomies and periodization. The important point here is to recognize the shape-shifting processes of neoliberalization on the one hand, but also alternative ways of thinking and organizing the social on the other.
Introduction
Authors: Juhila Kirsi , Dall Tanja , Hall Christopher , Koprowska Juliet
Published: January 2022

The introduction outlines the background, aims and content of the book.
From a collaborative and integrated welfare policy to frontline practices
Authors: Juhila Kirsi , Raitakari Suvi , Caswell Dorte , Dall Tanja , Wilińska Monika
Published: January 2022

The chapter discusses collaborative and integrated welfare as a current policy trend and defines the core elements of interprofessional collaboration and service user participation. Interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are conceptualised as relational and interactional activities taking place in boundary spaces and requiring and constituting relational expertise. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the potentials and challenges of interprofessional collaboration and service user participation. Multi-agency meetings and teamwork are introduced as frontline arenas and boundary spaces to ‘do’ collaboration based on shared aims and common knowledge.
Examining talk and interaction in meetings of professionals and service users
Authors: Hall Christopher , Dall Tanja
Published: January 2022

The chapter reviews the literature on meetings and examines analytical concepts which are developed in later chapters of the book. Meetings are approached as social and interactional occasions which invoke and formulate organisational work. The chapter outlines literature which approaches meetings as rituals and ceremonies, in particular degradation and integration ceremonies. Key concepts are examined which consider talk and interaction in meetings, such as the structure of meetings, the role of the chair, turn-taking, topic progression and decision making.
Negotiating epistemic rights to knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories in mental health meetings
Authors: Juhila Kirsi , Morriss Lisa , Raitakari Suvi
Published: January 2022

The chapter examines mental health meetings undertaken as part of the Care Programme Approach context in England. It applies the concepts of epistemic status and rights in analysing the ownership of knowledge concerning service users’ recent histories. The analysis demonstrates how both service users and professionals who are close to service users’ everyday lives display access and ownership to that knowledge. The key finding is that meetings contain both collaborative practices that strengthen service user participation (integration ceremony) and practices that produce epistemic injustice for service users (degradation ceremony).
Relational agency and epistemic justice in initial child protection conferences
Authors: Koprowska Juliet
Published: January 2022

The chapter examines Initial Child Protection Conferences in two local authorities in England, focusing principally on the role of the chair. It applies the concepts of institutional talk, relational agency, and epistemic rights and (in)justice. It demonstrates that differences in the chair’s interactional approach is influenced more by institutional norms than personal style. Its key finding is that relational agency and epistemic justice work together to advance service user participation.
Conclusion
Authors: Juhila Kirsi , Dall Tanja , Hall Christopher , Koprowska Juliet
Published: January 2022

This book has examined how policy trends that promote interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are implemented (or not) through frontline practices in multi-agency meetings. The challenges faced by service users are seen as complex and interconnected, demanding many kinds of expertise for them to be understood, assessed and resolved. As a result, collaboration and participation together have become the prevailing approach in health and social care policy in Western welfare states. Bringing together diverse viewpoints of professionals and service users is also thought to create boundary spaces that, at their best, produce joined-up thinking and constructive debate, resulting in novel ideas. ...
Islands of hope in a sea of despair: civil society in an age of austerity
Authors: Davoudi Simin , Steer Mel , Shucksmith Mark , Todd Liz
Published: January 2022

This chapter critically engages with a number of critical questions which arise from the interplay of hope and despair in the context of neoliberal austerity and civil society responses to it. It aims to address questions such as: should we celebrate the growing contributions from voluntary sector as the best of times for a flourishing civil society; or should we reproach the decline of public services as the worst of times for a diminishing welfare state? Should we embrace civil society initiatives as a mark of resistance to neoliberal policies; or should we repel them for mopping up the consequences of such policies? Do civil society responses to austerity offer genuine or false hope? Would the flames of their actions burn strongly enough to withstand the harsh winds of neoliberal austerity and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic?
The public sector and civil society: introduction
Authors: Steer Mel , Davoudi Simin , Todd Liz , Shucksmith Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter include signposting and a summary of the chapters in this section of the book.
Are we ‘all in this together’? Reflecting on the continuities between austerity and the COVID-19 crisis
Authors: Hastings Annette
Published: January 2022

This chapter reflects on some of the early evidence to emerge of the uneven social and economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and draws out the continuities between these impacts and those of the UK’s 2010–20 decade of austerity. Focusing on three groups - young people, women and frontline public sector workers - the chapter argues that austerity may have amplified the effects of the pandemic on these groups. The chapter also considers how the crisis provoked by the pandemic may have temporarily renewed our understanding of the integral role that both public services and third sector organisations play in supporting societal wellbeing. However, it cautions against viewing temporary re-recognition as a sign of a broader retraction of neoliberal austerity politics.
So what is a university in any case? A grass-roots perspective on the university and urban social justice
Authors: Benneworth Paul
Published: January 2022

This chapter critically discusses a university’s potential to fulfil a wider role that benefits the local community, region and society as part of the civic university mission in the UK. It discusses the university modernisation agenda, the marketisation, management and neoliberalisation of the sector that in myriad ways contradicts the civic university mission. It highlights the risk of ‘civic-washing’ where the warm words of civic university strategies and mission statements do not materialise into genuine, sustained actions, civic engagement or ethical management practices and organisational culture. The chapter concludes with more hopeful, modest examples of the foundations of the civic university in action through engaged research and knowledge exchange that offer hope and inspiration towards the fulfilment of the civic university mission.
Disabling bodies
Authors: Leahy Ann
Published: January 2022

In this Chapter, the empirical study that informs the book is introduced. The Chapter addresses how participants experienced onset of disability, or greater disablement, in their bodies. It shows that this could involve suffering, loss, uncertainty about daily life and the future and forced abandonment of activities and roles. This could be linked to a sense of finitude and could involve fundamental re-thinking about one’s self, or a sense of biographical disruption. This was often so even when disablement (and greater disablement) occurred gradually and at a stage in life when the participants considered impairment as ‘natural’ or ‘on-time’. But participants did not define themselves by their bodies or wish to be defined by them. They concentrated on what they could still do and sought ways to perceive a continuous sense of self as well as meaning and value in their lives. Participants did this in interaction with dominant discourses of ageing, and, indeed, of able-bodiedness, which shape subjective interpretations.
Introduction
Authors: Neagu Mariela
Published: January 2022

The introduction introduces the author and her interest in undertaking the writing of this book. Starting with the dedication, the book is casting a question that is going to be addressed throughout: what matters for children in state care? It briefly describes her professional journey from influencing the reforms of what the so-called orphanages in Romania to her recent research on this topic at Oxford University. The introduction also provides the structure of the book.
Introduction
Authors: Darko Natalie
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces the text, outlines the central aim and provides a background and rationale that explains why this publication is needed.
It is argued that more inclusive practice is required to improve the inclusion and under-representation of BME groups in health services and research. It is also suggested that we need to shift away from the use of the term ‘hard to reach’ and associated misconceptions because it contributes to exclusionary practices and has implications for escalating inequalities in health and healthcare access for BME groups. A brief outline of the chapters of the book are provided.
Case study: “We are not hard to reach, you are just not reaching us!” Understanding intersectionality and the prevention and management of Type 2 diabetes among British African-Caribbean women
Authors: Darko Natalie
Published: January 2022

This case study chapter presents the lived experiences of (n=30) British African- Caribbean women (18-75 years) who engaged with a culturally- tailored and community-based diabetes risk awareness and prevention programme. The program is appraised via focus-groups with these women. By listening to the voices of these women, it is shown that health services have largely treated these women as hard to reach. However, these women do not categorise themselves as hard to reach but rather argue health services “are not reaching” them, by assuming that health practices are equally applicable and effective for all women. It is argued that the design and delivery of previous services fail to recognise how intersections of these women’s identities impact on their health and access to services. Recommendations are given on how to improve health interventions involving British African-Caribbean.
Three habits of successful policy entrepreneurs1
Authors: Cairney Paul
Published: January 2022

This chapter turns lessons from individual studies and systematic and qualitative reviews of the literature into a coherent multiple streams approach (MSA) narrative. It applies the MSA narrative to the politics of evidence-based policymaking in order to show how to make the MSA story as memorable, widely understood, and correctly applied as possible. It also describes policy entrepreneurs as the heroes of the MSA story. The chapter mentions policymakers that ignore most policy problems and outlines strategies that effective policy entrepreneurs combine to adapt limitations in their complex and unpredictable environment. It also details how the MSA story begins as an antidote to rational policymaking during a policy cycle.
Drawing practical lessons from punctuated equilibrium theory
Authors: Koski Chris , Workman Samuel
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines information-processing, which is seen as the driver of policy change in theories of agenda setting and particularly in punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). It represents a guide for scholars wishing to bridge the divide between PET theory and the practice of institutional design. It also illustrates the engine of information-processing in policy systems called subgovernments. The chapter defines subgovernments as collections of policy actors in government and around government that develop and make policy within substantively specific issues. It outlines ways of thinking about matching future policy research with solutions to underlying problems that are impediments to policymaking.
Why advocacy coalitions matter and practical insights about them
Authors: Weible Christopher M , Ingold Karin
Published: January 2022

This chapter highlights advocacy coalitions, which refer to a type of alliance that involves people aligned around a shared policy goal. It describes people associated with the same advocacy coalition and similar ideologies and worldviews who wish to change a given policy in the same direction. It also examines the coalition that forms an informal network of allies who operate against an opposing coalition that consists of other people who advocate for different policy directions. The chapter offers an argument that builds from the various ways of thinking about political relations in the form of advocacy coalitions. It elaborates how people can effectively deal with coalitions without becoming so particularised that the arguments lack any generalisations.
Adaptability of the German Vocational Model to Mediterranean Countries
Authors: Tosun Jale , Weiß Julia , Meyer-Hamme Alexa , Katzlinger Marcel
Published: January 2022

This chapter, authored by Jale Tosun, Julia Weiss, Alexa Meyer-Hamme and Marcel Katzlinger undertakes the important task of evaluating – from the German perspective – if the German dual model can be successfully transported to Spain and Italy where youth unemployment has traditionally been, and continues to be acute. Focusing on the involvement of German multinational companies and their subsidiaries abroad, the chapter assesses the efforts Italy and Spain have expended in implementing the German dual vocational education and training model and the extent to which ground realities have had to be taken into account to make the model work locally. In so doing, the chapter treats us to a historical recounting of the educational and labor market systems, their (non)coordination in the two countries, and their current efforts on reform. It is argued that organizational networks can help facilitate the role of German companies as successful transfer agents for dual vocational education and training. The chapter concludes on the optimistic note that if such networks can be created, German companies can inspire other companies to join in their effort, negotiate with vocational schools curricula and learning conditions that fit their needs, and eventually produce policy demand for apprenticeship programs.
Introduction
Authors: Carrigan Mark , Fatsis Lambros
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides a background on the sociology about public life and the technologies that make it possible. It discusses how to rethink and write about public sociology as an endeavour that could be practised as a relationship between intellectuals, publics, and platforms of communication. It also explores how social media could stimulate public life, attempting to explain how such platforms are designed or what the terms 'public', 'sociology' and 'public sociology' mean. The chapter mentions how the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the conceptions and practice of what public life is, how it has been or can be understood sociologically, and what role social media platforms play in enabling or compromising the ability to occupy, create, and identify oneself as a public. It combines ideas of public life, technological innovations, and sociological scholarship.
The History of Platforms
Authors: Carrigan Mark , Fatsis Lambros
Published: January 2022

This chapter draws inspiration from a direct, embodied and experiential approach to being public. It identifies ways of using digital platforms as ‘tools for conviviality’ that can be used to manufacture real, human connection, and build community rather than trap people into a digital grid where only mere connectivity and superficial networks are possible. It also investigates how to humanize and publicize social media without falling into their clutches as complicated online systems that keep people busy as addicted users of a digital treadmill that exhausts public or civic energy. The chapter looks back through the history of the media in order to understand how new media technologies have always been embedded within a broader apparatus of technical developments. It cites a materialist phenomenology that conceives of a sequence of media systems, underwritten by technological advances with an array of interdependent effects.
Assembling Public Sociology
Authors: Carrigan Mark , Fatsis Lambros
Published: January 2022

This chapter attempts to summarize public sociology as a theoretical debate and a routine practice online and offline. It emphasizes the desire to use both sociology and social media platforms to stimulate civic engagement and public participation. It also discusses several propositions, such as the opposition on the professionalization of public sociology through its institutionalization as a sociological subgenre. The chapter talks about the approach to social media platforms as digital commons that enable participation inside and outside, and the recruitment of the figure of 'the public intellectual' that recasts social media as a less elitist and more sociable figure that speaks as much as they listen. It articulates a vision for thinking and doing things differently in ways that empower, instead of powering social media systems or academic institutions whose interests can and often do diverge from people.
Decisions and Narratives: Factfinding and Case Construction
Authors: Hillier Tim , Dingwall Gavin
Published: January 2022

Chapter 6 explores trial narrative and considers the extent to which narrative is used to make sense of the world. Prosecutors are charged with determining whether there is a realistic chance that the evidence will lead to the suspect’s conviction. The evidence has to provide a compelling story because people make sense of the world and of events through narrative. Police and prosecutors are therefore engaged in a process of case construction whilst the advocate’s skill is in presenting the evidence in a way which is coherent and compelling. The centrality of story-telling challenges notions of the trial as a rational and scientific process and the implications of this to the search for truth will be analysed.
Conclusion
Authors: Chakma Bhumitra
Published: January 2022

Conclusion sums up the key points of this study and presents its major findings. It also seeks to illustrate the general implications of this work for regionalism studies. In a final sub- section, the conclusion illustrates the debate about the future of SAARC.
The Negation of Innocence: Terrorism and the State of Exception
Authors: Polizzi David
Published: January 2022

The state of exception has been traditionally evoked to describe the suspension of existing law by a given state; however, in the age of the terrorism machine, this distinction is no longer the exclusive domain of state actors.  Though configured slightly differently, these “exceptions” have also been employed by non-state actors and the zones of indifference which these strategies construct have been equally detrimental to those targeted.  The resulting consequence of this process of exception, regardless its specific manifestation is the negation of innocence.
The Bad Guys Are Everywhere; the Good Guys Are Somewhere
Authors: Deukmedjian John E.
Published: January 2022

Since modern-day English public policing in the nineteenth century, crime prevention and deterrence were seen as compatible to the liberal and democratic values of society: pre-emption through surreptitious surveillance was derided by those wistful of potential tyrannical rule.  Following World War II, English-speaking intelligence agencies had a simple mandate: to pre-empt another Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, the growth and integration of national security with public police intelligence followed, in an ever increasingly securitized society, particularly following 9/11.  The totality of intervention capabilities from an integrated international intelligence community fused with intelligence-led policing and big-data technology companies has created total information awareness, whereby everyone is assumed to pose risks. This chapter will glimpse into the endarkened world of national security and pre-crime.  From what is currently apparent, it is concluded that security assemblages, rather than fending-off potential attacks (or even major crimes), fundamentally aim for greater global population control.
Supermax Prison Isolation in Pre-Crime Society
Authors: Kupers Terry A.
Published: January 2022

Risk assessments appear in all aspects of criminal justice proceedings.  The individual at high risk is surveilled, using new technologies such as face recognition or digital scanning of mail, so that he or she can be arrested or cited with a rule violation report preemptively, or immediately upon committing an outlawed action. The high risk prisoner is sent to supermax isolation or merely denied parole for an extended time. A long stint in solitary and a longer prison tenure damage people, and then their chances of success at “going straight” in the community are reduced, as reflected in a higher recidivism rate and greater mortality. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Drone Justice: Kill, Surveil, Govern
Authors: Schippers Birgit
Published: January 2022

This chapter presents drones as a central element in the contemporary techno-political assemblage of global violence, which proceeds via killing, surveillance and the formation and government of conduct. Drawing on recent work in posthumanism as well as selected poststructuralist concepts, the chapter demonstrates how drones scramble and rescript the boundaries between the domestic and the international; between the private and the public; between territoriality and extra-territoriality; and between lawfulness and the extrajudicial. The chapter argues that drones materialise and visualise justice as a spectacle: they project global ‘power without vulnerability’ that extends into the future by seeking to foreclose a justice-to-come, whilst their deployment generates structures of unequal risk distribution and the networked construction of digital subjects as killable. The chapter also discusses the role of drone strikes in a biopolitical regime that proceeds via pattern-of-life analyses, and it concludes by attending to drone usage during the current coronavirus pandemic.
Philosophy, Identity and the ‘Ship of Theseus’
Authors: Szifris Kirstine
Published: January 2022

Introducing the concept of philosophy, this chapter provides a starting point for the reader to understand some of the core themes of the book. In particular, it focuses on identity introducing the dichotomy of survival versus growth. The chapter also places the work in context provide a brief introduction to prisons, the prison environment, and the role of education.
Kant, Bentham and the Question of Identity
Authors: Szifris Kirstine
Published: January 2022

Recognising that the work places the ‘person in context’, this chapter moves the lens of focus to individuals. Using in-depth descriptions of two philosophical discussions in the two prisons, the chapter provides a more in-depth account of engaging people in prison in philosophical conversation. This provides a foundation to discussion desistance literature and its focus on narrative identity and identity change. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the possibility of growth in the prison environment and the importance of being human.
Towards a Framework for Understanding Philosophy in Prison
Authors: Szifris Kirstine
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides a summary of the findings of the research. Drawing together all the previous threads it reminds the reader of the relevance of the ‘front’ in prisons – survival versus growth. It goes on to discuss a framework for growth outlining six key themes (forming relationships, developing trust, becoming more open-minded, wellbeing, a space for self-expression, opportunity for self-reflection) before discussing how philosophy helped develop a space to grow. The chapter concludes by returning to the conversations with the participants, outlining a few small ‘moments of growth’ Szifris recorded during her time in the prisons.
Infectious Domination, Contagious Revolutions
Authors: Bloom Peter , Jones Owain Smolović , Woodcock Jamie
Published: January 2022

This chapter has introduced into this analysis the concepts of viral innovations” and “disruptive contagions”. Building on the insights which have preceded it, it eschews conventional conceptions of the social as “stable” and the political as “dynamic”. Fundamentally, it takes seriously the fact that power is always necessarily mobile and therefore any and all social orderings will be in a constant state of flux and reconstitution. Moreover, it understands hegemony as a viral discursive that is marked primarily by its contextual adaptability as opposed to ideological uniformity or “actually existing homogeneity”. To be clear, these postulations are a far cry from asserting the total randomness of the social or its complete variability. By contrast, it is to show how a relatively coherent set of logics can be flexibly customised and “infect” otherwise contrasting “host contexts”. Its strength, hence, is found its infectious qualities not necessarily or even primarily its orthodoxy. Practically, this mobility of power and virality of hegemony translated into dominant cultures of constant innovation rooted in the social production of “cultural environments” which must be creatively and continuously improved upon by its populace (and if necessary outside actors). These innovative “cultural environments” extend from physical spaces, digital networks, to internal subjectivities.
Guerrilla Democracy
Authors: Bloom Peter , Jones Owain Smolović , Woodcock Jamie
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduced the notion of guerrilla democracy. Theoretically, it is the culmination of the fundamental analysis of the mobility of power and virality of hegemony. These insights build on the last chapter, which focused on the infectious character of hegemonic networks and the possible contagions of counter-hegemonic networks. Specifically, guerrilla democracy is the ability to contagiously reimagine and reconnect the social. It is rooted in a guerrilla ethos of subversion for the purpose of disruptive creation – the effort to undermine and supplant an existent and seemingly more powerful status quo through alternative modes of existence that have the potential to become a viral political pandemic. Its strength lies in its capacity to harness the same dynamism and context – specific adaptability as found in hegemonic epidemics. Further, this guerrilla ethos is joined to a radically democratic politics. More precisely, it is concerned fundamentally with questions of “who counts” and importantly, “how they are counted”. It is an often revolutionary demand to overcome the “deprivation of voice”, here expanded to mean which individuals and group’s views are being marginalised and which potential social connections are being rendered invisible.
Introduction
Authors: Armstrong Lynzi , Abel Gillian
Published: January 2022

Sex work laws are highly contentious globally and while sex worker led organisations have been calling for decriminalisation for decades, legislative frameworks continue be punitive, with various forms of criminalisation in place. The decriminalisation of sex work in New Zealand was a unique change in this international policy landscape, which set New Zealand apart from other countries and shone a spotlight on it in prostitution policy debates. This introductory chapter provides essential context to this edited collection on the New Zealand model, discussing New Zealand’s policy framework in the broader international policy environment. This chapter introduces the New Zealand model and the legislation underpinning it, also outlining what is currently known about its impacts, before providing an overview of the book and the impetus for it.
Sharing Care
Authors: Brooks Rachel , Hodkinson Paul
Published: January 2022

Amidst a context in which the burden of early-years care continues to fall heavily on women, Sharing Care examines the experiences of the minority of fathers who take on an equal or greater share of caregiving for babies and young children. Drawing on detailed qualitative research in the UK, the book outlines the nature of equal and primary carer fathers’ experiences, paying particular attention to what prompted them to take on their unusual roles, how they and their families adjusted over time and the nature of the challenges they encountered. The authors argue that, for many such fathers, taking on an equal or primary care role represented a significant and unexpected shift in their horizons and the beginning of a journey towards experiencing themselves as largely interchangeable with their partners in their role as parents. Yet the book also explores how cultural and practical context around them generated challenges to the development of fathers’ caregiving, leaving certain responsibilities still centred on mothers. The book’s conclusions highlight the potential for fatherhoods and masculinities to be transformed by the experience of taking on of everyday care responsibilities, but also how such journeys can be constrained by enduring assumptions of default maternal responsibility that remain embedded in understandings, interactions and policy.
Extended Fatherly Involvement: Development and Understandings
Authors: Brooks Rachel , Hodkinson Paul
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides a critical examination of the extant literature on fathers’ involvement in the care of their children. The first part focuses on the now quite extensive body of work on fatherly involvement in general, exploring the extent to which approaches and understandings have changed over recent years. The second part shifts the focus to the minority of fathers whose practices go beyond what might be expected of a secondary caregiver or supporter, considering the growing literature on stay-at-home dads, fathers who take extended periods of parental leave (some of it caring alone), and those who share care more-or-less equally with their partners.
Developing Fatherly Roles and Identities: Towards Parental Equivalence?
Authors: Brooks Rachel , Hodkinson Paul
Published: January 2022

The focus for this chapter is on the detail of the roles and responsibilities equal and primary carer fathers were discharging and the ways they had come to understand themselves as parents. The authors show how many fathers in the Sharing Care study had come to regard themselves as largely interchangeable with their partners in their caregiving and how most were successfully discharging a striking range of care responsibilities that went significantly beyond dominant notions of masculinity or fatherhood. However, certain key aspects of parenting, including emotional comfort, care coordination and networking with other parents, had sometimes remained centred on mothers, and the authors outline domestic and external factors that had apparently placed limits on the extent to which the fathers’ parenting had become fully gender-neutral.
Introduction: Developing Qualitative Research into Happiness and Wellbeing
Authors: Cieslik Mark
Published: January 2022

This introduction charts the emergence of happiness research and the growing interest amongst social scientists into the nature of wellbeing. It sets out different definitions of wellbeing, detailing the potential of qualitive and biographical research for happiness studies to capture the collaborative social processes that underpin wellbeing. It discusses some of the challenges facing happiness researchers such as those around structure-agency, macro-micro processes, the politically and culturally contested nature of happiness and the significance of biographical and life course events. The chapter concludes by summarising some of the distinctive challenges faced by contributors to this volume and their efforts they made to overcome these in their own projects.
Considering the Body in Happiness Research
Authors: Gibbons Richard
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues for a broader focus on the body in happiness research through the use of qualitative methods. It draws upon biographic approaches to consider how wellbeing intersects with the body as individuals gradually take stock of their wellbeing through mindful, embodied, and temporal registers of experience, influenced by class, gender and age. The chapter offers insight that scholars might find useful when considering the body and embodiment in their own work. It also offers a cautionary tale to remind happiness researchers of the need for personal vigilance throughout the research process, as deepening insight about wellbeing coexists within the current parameters of one’s own life, and can therefore further sensitize/problematize one’s own wellbeing.
“Earning Money as the Wheels Turn Around”: Cycle-rickshaw Drivers and Wageless Work in Dhaka
Authors: Prins Annemiek
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the working lives of cycle-rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It highlights the significance of unwaged rickshaw labour in enabling rural-urban migrants to navigate ecological and financial emergencies. The chapter argues that while hardly a safe or secure mode of work, the rickshaw industry nonetheless constitutes a relatively stable site of return when other labour projects fail. The importance of the rickshaw industry as a safety net for some drivers is increasingly undermined by the implementation of government licensing and mobility restrictions in Dhaka city. In analysing these restrictions, the chapter contests the idea that informal work is always already inherently precarious. Instead, it highlights how politics and policy interventions impact work-lives and make informal work precarious.
“I Voted Bolsonaro for President”: Street Vending and the Crisis of Labour Representation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Authors: Nogueira Mara
Published: January 2022

Around the world, political parties founded on trade unionism are struggling to mobilise voters while far-right populism is on the rise. In Brazil, the 2018 election that brought Bolsonaro to power was a resounding defeat for Brazil’s traditional left-wing Worker’s Party (PT). This chapter interrogates the relationship between Bolsonaro’s victory and the crisis of wage labour and labour politics in Brazil. It does so by analysing political discourses of street vendors during the 2018 election in the city of Belo Horizonte. I argue that the decline of the PT must be understood in relation to the historical exclusion of non-waged workers and their interests from the trade union movement. Moreover, I show that this decline was accentuated at the local level by the connection between the PT and local revitalisation policies that constrained street vendors’ access to urban space. By doing so, the chapter reveals the multiscalar dimension of the ‘labour crisis’ which manifests itself at the intersections of local and national politics.
Why Do We Hate Politicians?
Authors: Weinberg James
Published: January 2022

The scale and ambition of this book require considerable preface in terms of empirical, methodological and conceptual clarity. Therefore, this opening chapter is used to (a) highlight the premium that has been placed on politicians’ personalities by popular as well as academic press (thus clarifying the broader fillip for this book, the three ‘problems’ highlighted above, as well as its public appeal), (b) introduce basic human values as the measure of personality chosen for this study from within a broader literature on personality and politics, (c) clarify the data and empirics underpinning the content of subsequent chapters, and (d) outline the contribution of each chapter in the rest of this book.
Environmental Anarchy?
Authors: Beeson Mark
Published: January 2022

Some of the most influential ideas about national and even global security reflect untenable, anachronistic strategic views that are simply no longer appropriate for contemporary international circumstances. At a time when climate change poses an existential threat to the continuation of life itself, there is an urgent need to rethink security priorities while we still can. This book provides an explanation of the failures and dangers of the conventional strategic wisdom, by examining the theoretical and practical basis of current security policies, especially in the United States and China. The book considers the possible importance of economic and psychological factors that are generally ignored in the ‘grand strategies’ of the most powerful states. The case for a new approach that takes issues like environmental and human security much more seriously is developed, although the author is not confident such measures will be adopted, especially in the limited time available to make a real difference.
(Not So?) Grand Strategy
Authors: Beeson Mark
Published: January 2022

Great powers pursue ‘grand strategies’. This chapter explains what they are, why they might be inappropriate at this point in history, and how they fail to take the natural environment seriously. Competition not cooperation is the predictable result when bot the US and China feel they have a unique historical role to fulfil.
Conclusion
Authors: Beeson Mark
Published: January 2022

This chapter offers some ideas for possible policies that might address the actual problems we collectively face now, rather than those that may have confronted other less ‘global’ civilisations. If security is to be sustainable and actually make people feel secure, it will need to be placed on a very different footing and the strategic calculus that informs elite level policy making will have to be radically rethought.
Local Government: Compulsory Competition and Best Value
Authors: Morphet Janice
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses how the liberalisation of local authority services started once negotiations began to extend the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) to local government in 1988. It highlights the policy approaches adopted by successive governments that were framed in an immediate ideological construct of New Public Management (NPM). It also examines how the NPM diverted the public sector away from the underlying international agreements that the UK had entered into. The chapter details the implementation of performance management to prepare for public sector market liberalisation for local authorities across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It explains how liberalisation in the UK was used to reshape local authorities and was aligned with the new policy on the extension of subsidiarity.
Outsourcing Central Government Services
Authors: Morphet Janice
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the requirements on central government to liberalise services as part of the implementation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which provided an opportunity to distance the civil service from the more difficult and public-facing elements of its roles. It explains how privatising the delivery of services enabled the introduction of performance management and cost-cutting. It also recounts how governments had no particular interest in asylum or immigration policy as most of the post-war immigration to the UK had been from Commonwealth countries to meet employment shortfalls in UK public services. The chapter then details how the central government implemented public service liberalisation through the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) and anticipated GATS by prioritising nationalised industries and local government. It clarifies how the use of agencification and privatisation allowed the reformulation of pay bands leading to cost reductions in the front-line delivery services.
Theorizing about Identity, Change in Capabilities and Dyadic Relations: An Approach Based on Analytic Eclecticism and Systemism
Authors: Gartner Scott Sigmund , Huang Chin-Hao , Li Yitan , James Patrick
Published: January 2022

This chapter theorizes about identity, change in capabilities and dyadic relations. It shows that the frame of reference for this work combines analytic eclecticism and systemism. Analytic eclecticism guides assembly of causal mechanisms into an integrated whole, while systemism — a means towards visual representation of hypotheses — provides the method. The chapter argues that the Taiwanese identity, the rise of China, cross-Strait relations, and the role of the United States are connected to each other and depicted within a figure created under the rules put forward by systemism. It then proceeds to review paradigmatic thinking and concludes that it is insufficient to provide a basis for theorizing in the complex and fast-paced context of the rise of China, shifting Taiwanese identity, cross-Strait relations and US influence. It discusses the means towards building and depicting theory: analytic eclecticism and systemism, and it assembles the causal mechanisms gleaned from the diverse academic literature into a visual representation.
Factors Influencing Identifying Only as Taiwanese: A Layered Empirical Approach (Survey II)
Authors: Gartner Scott Sigmund , Huang Chin-Hao , Li Yitan , James Patrick
Published: January 2022

This chapter carries out a layered empirical approach from survey results obtained in 2017 to describe how people in Taiwan increasingly view their identity as separate and different from that of the Chinese people living on the Mainland. It investigates individual characteristics and contextual conditions that influence identity in Taiwan in addition to the critical factors of democracy and the United States. The chapter also looks at how beliefs about cross-Strait relations influence an individual's ideational formation as exclusively Taiwanese. By doing so, the chapter unfolds a greater analytical clarity and insights into how and why a ‘Taiwanese only’ identity has evolved on the island. The chapter then jumps to describe the Taiwan National Security Survey Data and the variables developed to address these questions. It elaborates on Proportional Reduction of Error (PRE) to explore critical questions about factors influencing Taiwanese identity. The chapter shifts its focus on Taiwanese–Mainland relational issues, such as the 1992 Consensus, then determines how the model used to explain ideational issues operates with political issues such as the performance assessment of President Tsai Ing-wen.
Comparing Participation Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis
Authors: Ryan Matt
Published: January 2022

This chapter briefly introduces the key concepts of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) focusing on key terms and assumption including necessity, sufficiency, combinatorial and asymmetric causation, operations on sets and fuzzy sets, truth tables, and measures of fit. It then discusses how QCA can be applied to PB and how cases were selected for a worldwide comparison.
Conclusion: Democratic Innovations after the Beginning
Authors: Ryan Matt
Published: January 2022

This chapter summarises the contributions of the book and develops future agendas for research on participatory budgeting and comparative methods in the field. It provides sober but positive advice for advocates of participation in politics based on the evidence and learning of a worldwide comparison of participatory budgeting.
Reactive Policing of Gangs: Cops as “Warriors”
Authors: Deuchar Ross , Crichlow Vaughn J. , Fallik Seth W.
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, we build on the previous discussion by exploring the “warrior” mindset in policing. This mindset is reflected in the highly controversial militaristic strategies that have characterized contemporary policing in many of America’s disadvantaged crime-prone communities. Residents in these locations are often the recipients of disorder enforcement, stop-question-and-frisk (SQF), and zero tolerance crackdowns. The conceptualization of warrior policing underlines the concern that officers who see themselves principally as warriors ignore the inherent consequences of forcible approaches in these communities. Here we define the contrasting roles of police as guardians and warriors, followed by a critique of warrior policing and the impact of aggressive, and often reactive, enforcement strategies. We also explore the history of militarism and aggressive enforcement in the US, along with further insights from interviews with our sample of police officers and from our participant observation during deployments.
Epilogue
Authors: Deuchar Ross , Crichlow Vaughn J. , Fallik Seth W.
Published: January 2022

The Epilogue draws the reader’s attention to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, setting this within the long-standing context of racial disparities in police violence against Black people and documenting the unprecedented public response. We highlight the way in which the incident impacted public perceptions of police legitimacy like never before, and that the challenge of reversing the legitimacy crisis in American policing has now become one that will most likely to continue to faze law enforcement leaders for generations to come.
Belaboured Europe
Authors: Moses Jonathon W.
Published: January 2022

This introduction takes a critical look at Europe’s current approach to labour market integration. Despite the removal of many barriers to entry, the European labour market does not work as designed: it remains remarkably segregated, and few of the economic gains from integration have found their way back to the workers who produced them. European workers suffer from shrinking labour shares of income, high levels of unemployment and income inequality, and remarkably little wage convergence across member states. These outcomes suggest we need to rethink Europe’s approach to labour market integration.
Money and People on the Move
Authors: Moses Jonathon W.
Published: January 2022

Given the degree of local labour market variation, as seen in Chapter 5, and the absence of other available adjustment tools (whether at the national or the EU level, as seen in Chapters 6 and 7), member states have remarkably little capacity to influence their local labour markets. As a result, much of the burden of economic adjustment has been pushed down to lower levels of the economy. In particular, European policymakers hope that an integrated market can clear itself, without local political interference, and that mobile workers and capital can fill the void created by the absence of other instruments for economic management. This chapter shows that this is not the case: in response to the Great Recession, capital markets tended to exacerbate, rather than assist, in the necessary economic adjustment. This left European workers terribly exposed, and most of the burden of adjustment landed on them, in the form of increased unemployment, falling wages and growing pressure to workaway.