bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Pterodactyls to Piccadilly Circus
Authors: Deluermoz Quentin , Singaravélou Pierre
Published: May 2022

This chapter grasps the current state of counterfactual history by examining uchronia in its more explicitly literary sense. It explains how the what-if history and revisions of the past spontaneously bring to mind H. G. Wells's famous time machine and the epigraph quoted from William S. Burroughs's The Place of Dead Roads that indicates how widely accepted this type of fictional voyage has become. If uchronia is defined by its playful nature, it must also be noted that it is a literary form with its own set of techniques that cannot be ignored. The chapter talks about work of fiction that is based on the principle of the divergence of a historical event that can take various forms and operate in different registers. It emphasizes the importance of guarding against overly rigid definitions and boundaries between genres when approaching a literary world full of surprising contrasts.
Causal Inference and Counterfactual Reasoning
Authors: Deluermoz Quentin , Singaravélou Pierre
Published: May 2022

This chapter reviews the counterfactual approach that seems to be as linked to the imagination as it is to the dimension that is generally considered to be historically scientific. It covers the establishment of facts, the formulation of hypotheses, the use of a theoretical apparatus or mathematical tools, and the search for objective as well as causal relationships between phenomena. It also deals with the radical opposition between the use of the imagination and a so-called scientific approach centered on a strictly objective reality. The chapter talks about overcoming contradictions by showing how the conceptions of science, modes of relation, or divisions of the world were the products of history or were substantiated and inspired by primary imaginations, which testify to human creativity. It addresses the question of causality or causal argumentation in history.
The Console and the Chalkboard
Authors: Deluermoz Quentin , Singaravélou Pierre
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the playful and participatory dimension of counterfactual reasoning, which operates on two levels: First, when choosing the bifurcation point and then there is the question of the counterfactual account itself. Knowledge of the workings of counterfactual reasoning and its implications makes it possible to approach more calmly questions of exchange and emotional involvement. It points out how many would seem passionately engaged in their past and participative practices, like reenactments that have become forms of sociability. The chapter highlights the playful, pedagogical, and critical uses of the counterfactual, focusing on the side of the reader, the listener, and the historical enthusiast. It outlines areas of activity that have already made effective use of counterfactual narratives without bothering with more scientific questions.
Language and Salvation in the Empire
Authors: Parker Charles H.
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the East India Company's (VOC) language policy, the translation of religious texts by predikanten and native linguists, and the conflicts over culture and communication that ensued. It illustrates the marks the Dutch left in the linguistic fields of the early modern world that were vernacular footprints put down by ministers and native linguists. As a language of empire and missions, Dutch never really got off the ground in any VOC or West India Company (WIC) holdings, except at the Cape of Good Hope in the late eighteenth century. The chapter mentions the Afrikaans in Drakenstein, and Stellenbosch, who began to emerge as a distinct language from the pidgin Dutch spoken among a growing population of European settlers. The territories of the Dutch empire in the period of company rule were kept deliberately small, spatially diffuse, and sparsely populated with Dutch settlers.
A “Diabolical Traffic”
Authors: Richardson David
Published: May 2022

Britain’s leading position in transatlantic slave trafficking elevated the significance historically of its abolition, but why it assumed that position is usually unexplained. This and the two following chapters address that issue. It begins here with identifying how, within a mercantilist framework, demand for enslaved Africans evolved in conjunction with the economics and demography of sugar cultivation in the British West Indies for export to Europe. Labor demands to meet territorial expansion of cane cultivation were reinforced by the human cost to slaves of such work. The chapter proceeds to show, however, that efficiency in slave supply, partly linked to competition-led shifts in outfitting slave voyages from London to British provincial ports, also encouraged Caribbean planters to choose slave imports over reproduction strategies to satisfy their labor needs, with Liverpool merchants emerging as drivers of continuing expansion in British slaving in 1750–1807. That, in turn, prompts examination of some local factors to explain Liverpool’s rise while also inviting consideration in chapters 2 and 3 of key operational aspects of slaving voyages at home and abroad that contributed to that city’s remarkable performance as an international slave port.
Reaching “the Common People”
Authors: Richardson David
Published: May 2022

Evidence of content analysis shows that newspaper reporting of the slave trade grew substantially over the eighteenth century, widening and deepening the reading public’s knowledge of it and Africa decades before abolitionists looked to use the press to promote their campaign from the late 1780s. The chapter explores the press’s role as mirror and shaper of public opinion in tandem with other publications. It also focuses on the reporting of conditions on board slave ships, paying particular attention to shipboard insurrections, which seemingly increased after 1750, and the nature of the reporting of them, including contemporary and historical interpretations of their causes. The discussion is reinforced by a review of narratives of former slaves published in Britain after 1770 as part of a process in which the issue of British slaving became entangled with public debates over Britain’s alleged attempts to suppress colonial liberty in 1763–1776, informing electoral politics and encouraging the politicizing of the nation’s role in promoting slavery before the War of American Independence broke out.
“To Interest Men of Every Description in the Abolition of the Traffic”
Authors: Richardson David
Published: May 2022

The chapter explains how and why public concerns over Britain’s involvement in the slave trade transmuted into an historically unprecedented nationwide social movement in 1787–1792 capable of coercing Parliament to contemplate moves to regulate and abolish it. It looks at the aims and objectives of the London Society established in 1787 to seek abolition; the public constituency (or “the people”) it identified as critical to its success; the methods it and likeminded bodies in Britain adopted to mobilize and energize its opinion through national petitioning campaigns and other activities to pressurize Parliament; the breadth and depth of the appeal of anti–slave trade ideas across class, gender, and ethnic boundaries; and the personal experiences that motivated individuals and different social groups to support abolitionism. The analysis is informed by contemporary and academic definitions of “the people” and of social movements, and by suggestions of linkages among urbanization, identity, political representation, social change, and mass politics in Britain during the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
On the “Heroism of Principle”
Authors: Richardson David
Published: May 2022

The concluding chapter explores the relative importance of agency and ideology in shaping the history of the British slave trade. Comparing the processes of slave trading and abolitionism, it notes how the former was integral to mercantilist ideas of imperialism, while the latter reflected a revulsion against slavery linked to humanitarian principles and an underlying sense of national identity. Success in articulating such beliefs, however, rested heavily in both cases on the ingenuity, skills, and social capital of individuals and groups in marshaling resources and managing efficiently the complex, multipolar nature of both activities, while adjusting to wider changes in the national and international environment in which they operated. Contingency played a part, and there were inputs, too, from African merchants as well as victims of slavery, notably in the latter case in Haiti. Nevertheless, evidence of subsequent nineteenth-century British interventions against slavery underlines claims that the abolition act of 1807 was the product ultimately of an ideologically based, nationwide social movement through which ordinary people mobilized in order to change the world.
Generations of Reason
Authors: Richards Joan L.
Published: May 2022

Generations of Reason recounts the story of three Cambridge-educated Englishmen and the women with whom they chose to share their commitment to reason in all parts of their lives. In the first generation, Theophilus and Hannah Lindsey founded the Unitarian Church in 1774. In the second, William Frend, with the support of his wife Sarah, lived a complicated life as a radical political thinker and writer through the Napoleonic era. In the third, Augustus De Morgan pursued mathematics and logic while his wife Sophia explored the world of spiritualism in early Victorian England. These couples were members of a non-traditional family formed when a man married the daughter or niece of the mentor, who had taught him the ways of reason. This dynamic supported a commitment to reason that profoundly shaped the lives of three generations of men, women and children.
The reason this family embraced was an essentially human power with the potential to generate true insight into all aspects of the world. Recognizing the role reason played in their lives casts new light on key developments in English cultural and political history, from the religious conformism of the eighteenth century through the upheavals of the Napoleonic era into the industrial prosperity of the Victorian age. At the same time, it restores the rich world of the essentially meditative, rational sciences of theology, astronomy, mathematics, and logic to their proper place in the English intellectual landscape.
The Road to Unitarianism
Authors: Richards Joan L.
Published: May 2022

In 1785, William Frend became director of the Sunday School in Maddingly to his other positions. Every Sunday over the course of a year, he and various other volunteers devoted their efforts to teaching the poor children of the neighbourhood how to read. After a deeply rewarding but exhausting year teaching poor children how to read, Frend set off for a European tour. For four months he and two of his friends walked across France, through Germany and Switzerland and back to Paris. Frend’s experience of foreign travel combined with his experience working with the children of England’s poor deeply unsettled him. Over the course of the following year, he searched the bible for assurance that the Anglican Church truly represented the Christian religion, but by the end of the year he concluded that it did not. Frend’s issue was the same one that had led Lindsey to leave the church: the conviction that the Trinity not a part of the religion that Jesus preachedin the Bible. Therefore, in June 1787 he resigned his positions as the vicar of Longstanton and the director of the Sunday School in Maddingly, and threw himself into efforts to remove the subscription requirement from Cambridge University. After a year in which he directed a series of increasingly vitriolic pamphlets against the Anglican Church the master of Jesus College removed him from his position as mathematics tutor there. But college fellowships were for life, and so Frend continued to live in Jesus College, albeit without any official duties.
Exercising Reason
Authors: Richards Joan L.
Published: May 2022

At the Essex Street Chapel, Priestley had begun to extend the purview of literalist reason into the political world of William Pitt the younger. Frend agreed with them, both religiously and politically, but in Cambridge his strongest ally was the minister of the Stoneyard Baptist Chapel, Robert Robinson. He also spent several summer months studying Hebrew in the Jewish community that clustered around the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London. His interest in the meaning of words fit very well with the Jewish interest in texts.
Frend spent the summer of 1789 on the continent. After his return he joined Priestley, Lindsey and other Unitarians in an effort to retranslate the Bible so that it would be a more accurate source for Jesus’s religion. As the French Revolution unfolded, the English became more reactionary, and the Unitarian pursuit of literalist reason became ever more suspect. In 1791, Priestley was burned out of his house and laboratory by a reactionary mob.
Home on Gower Street
Authors: Richards Joan L.
Published: May 2022

Augustus and Sophia were married on August 3, 1837. That fall he returned to teaching young men to reason through mathematics at the newly revamped University College London (UCL). In his writing, he focused on probability theory. The De Morgans’ first child, Alice, was born in June 1838; their second, William Frend De Morgan in November, 1839. Sophia focused on the challenge of raising them to be reasoning beings. When William Frend died on February 12, 1841, she again considered the nature of life after death.
Beyond Matter
Authors: Richards Joan L.
Published: May 2022

De Morgan was becoming intrigued by the four-color problem, when Alice suddenly died, in 1853. Her parents were devastated. It took Augustus five years to return to logic, where he developed the logic of relations. It took Sophia ten years to produce From Matter to Spirit: The Results of Ten Years’ Experience in Spirit Manifestations in which she offered a reasoned interpretation of the spiritual investigations she pursued with single-minded intensity after her daughter’s death.
Beyond Reason
Authors: Richards Joan L.
Published: May 2022

In 1860, the De Morgans moved to a house farther from town, and began to develop their ideas in new directions. De Morgan stopped writing his column for the Companion to the Almaniac, and drew back from the RAS. He spent some time supporting the work of the Indian mathematician Yesudas Ramchandra, began writing a signed column for the Atheneum called “A Budget of Paradoxes,” and became the first president of the London Mathematical Society (LMS), which his son George was instrumental in founding. But in 1867 he became convinced that UCL had abandoned the secular principles on which it was founded, and he resigned his position as mathematics professor there. Four months later George De Morgan died; Christiana De Morgan died in 1870. The combination of these events overwhelmed Augustus, who died on March 18, 1871. Sophia defended his life of reason in a Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, published in 1882. She died in 1895.
Gendering platform research
Authors: Kampouri Eleni
Published: May 2022

The literature on platform labour has been growing during recent years, encompassing a wide range of themes and perspectives, including gender. Despite efforts to address gender issues in the study of platforms, however, there is still a gap in the relevant literature. This article is an attempt to address this gap by discussing some of the theoretical and methodological implications of gendering platform research. At the same time, it is an attempt to think of gender as a perspective that sheds light on the feminisation and racialisation of precarious labour more broadly and platform labour more specifically. The article explores current research strands on gender and platforms. First, it discusses how gender is and can be integrated into the collection of statistical data on platforms. Then it considers recent research on domestic and care work platforms, which constitutes an area of interest for many researchers. The concept of work-life balance in platforms is raised next and the role of reproductive and affective labour as part of platform labour. The article addresses the question of affect in platforms, especially the ways in which it can provide a valuable theoretical framework for research shedding light on the subjectivity of platform workers. Overall, the article analyses both the recent literature on the topic and possible future research directions on gender in platforms.
Introduction: Fathering, poverty, families and policy
Authors: Tarrant Anna
Published: May 2022

The Introductory chapter describes the ‘Men, Poverty and Lifetimes of Care’ study, situating it within the wider social and policy context of the UK. This chapter considers how fathers on a low-income or residing in some of the most deprived urban contexts in Britain are typically portrayed within a 'deficit model' in British media and political arenas, and how and why this has intensified in the austerity context. This is followed by a summary of the main substantive themes that are explored and advanced in the book; namely masculinities, the dynamics of low-income family life, and men’s longitudinal patterns of caregiving and family participation.
Low-income fatherhoods in historical and political context
Authors: Tarrant Anna
Published: May 2022

This chapter synthesises national and international interdisciplinary literatures to consider the extent to which men’s relationships and lived experiences in low-income families and contexts have been addressed in academic debates and discussion. This chapter elaborates on the analytic lenses that influence the visibilities of low-income fathers and considers the extent to which academic research and scholarship has obscured knowledge of men’s family lives and identities. Concepts of father absence and presence are interrogated in the context of discussions about fatherhood, which define the current state of debate. In so doing, evidence of the relational and social dimensions of men’s lives in low-income contexts are brought back into analytic visibility.
Public health, emergency settings and end of life care
Authors: Simmonds Bethany
Published: May 2022

This chapter links the global and national perspectives discussed in the previous chapters to individual empirical data in three case studies. The first case study is in the sphere of public or preventative health, which is examined through a discussion of ‘active ageing’ policy, which encourage older people to participate in physical activity. This case study exemplifies the ‘active ageing’ paradigm, discussing data collected before the onset of austerity policy in the UK. The second case study is located within the sphere of pre-emergency care and draws on data to elucidate the vulnerability of older people in this care setting. This illustrates both paramedics’ experiences of working as frontline health and social care workers in a challenging environment, and the experiences of older people, who often end up being left waiting on the floor for several hours after a fall. End of life care, is the final case study discussed, examining the problems caused by a lack of trained senior clinicians who can make end of life care decisions. The lack of dedicated time and an appropriate environment in which to have these sensitive discussions is also highlighted.
We’re known as ‘the girls’ around town: support, isolation and belonging for a lesbian couple living with dementia
Authors: Henderson Lynda , Smith Louisa
Published: May 2022

This chapter notes the narrative of a lesbian couple living with dementia. It notes the slippery slope of dangerous co-dependency in line with their growing isolation from families and friends, accelerating symptoms of dementia, and stress in becoming a care partner. The Internet and social media had been the mediums that brought the world and dementia community to the couple especially as they are incapacitated to travel. Moreover, the Facebook community had helped the couple reunite after one became lost due to dementia. The couple also became an advocate for dementia awareness in Kiama despite the growing difficulty with the condition. The chapter then highlights the need for a person with dementia to have a community that support, respect, and understand them.
Rem(a)inders of loss: a Lacanian approach to new urban ruins
Authors: Pohl Lucas
Published: May 2022

The focus of this chapter lies on the question of how crises are inscribed into new urban ruins and what effects this inscription has on their perception. This question will be answered through a psychoanalytic framework. The chapter develops an approach that understands psychoanalysis as a theory of crisis. Therefore, the general aim of psychoanalysis is to trace how crises persist in the social reality of the subject through loss. A crisis can only persist, if there are things the subject associates with the pre-crisis era. Such a thing is the ruin. The ruin simultaneously functions as a remainder and reminder of a world before the crisis. Empirically engaging with the Michigan Central Station in Detroit, one of the most prominent ruins of our time, the chapter traces the potential of psychoanalysis to further investigate the relationship between materiality and fantasy as well as the desire and enjoyment deriving from ruin gazing.
Comparing Health Systems
Authors: Greener Ian
Published: May 2022

This book compares the health systems of 11 countries to find out what the most successful, in terms of health outcomes, health equity and other measures, having in common. It considers patterns of social determinants, health funding and health expenditure, as well as the ‘first wave’ COVID-19 response of a wider sample 25 countries. Making use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it combines detailed studies of its eleven countries with robust, comparative analysis of them.
Introduction
Authors: Greener Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter introduces the book, its data, and its method. It considers its approach in relation to other comparative health systems work, presents the data which it will include, and outlines Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the approach which the following chapters incorporate
Social determinants
Authors: Greener Ian
Published: May 2022

This chapter presents an analysis of 11 countries compared in terms of their social determinants – inequality, smoking and drinking, education levels, and overall health expenditure levels. It also makes clear the use of the book’s method, Qualitative Comparative Analysis. It considers social determinants in terms of both health outcomes and health equity, finding that the highest performing countries (the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) have low-income inequality, higher levels of pre-secondary education, and higher levels of health expenditure in common.
New framework for demand
Authors: Wilding Jo
Published: May 2022

Without understanding demand, it is impossible to operationalise a market that protects availability and quality of services. Yet there is no clear framework for making sense of demand and supply in social welfare legal aid. The chapter argues that there are two stages of demand: potential-client demand and in-case demand and, drawing on Seddon, that at each stage this may be value demand or failure demand. The chapter presents a four-square matrix to explore the types of demand and the cost consequences, using costed asylum and trafficking cases to illustrate. The failure to build the market around demand has led to payment and auditing systems which are poorly aligned with the drivers and consequences of demand, creating obstacles to high-quality work. Demand-responsiveness produces a higher quality of work than incentive-responsiveness, and it is harder to reconcile quality with financial viability when there is little overlap between financial incentives and demand.
How to support care at home? Using film to surface the situated priorities of differently positioned ‘stakeholders’
Authors: Ceci Christine , Purkis Mary Ellen
Published: May 2022

The policy goal to support older people living with dementia at home for as long as possible challenges formal care systems to deliver responsive community supports for older people and their families. An issue that remains under-theorized are the tensions among the ‘interests’ of those involved in different ways in the problem of care at home: people living with dementia and their families, service providers and policy makers. To access and understand some of these different ways of thinking we made a film from our ethnographic data (ethnodrama), and then used this film as a starting point for discussion with these groups. This chapter describes the outcomes of this film and focus group intervention, highlighting that although families, providers and policy makers may be related through their common interests, they do not necessarily have the same interests in common.
Institutionalizing austerity accounting in Europe: the implementation of European Public Sector Accounting Standards as crisis response
Authors: Botzem Sebastian
Published: May 2022

Public accounts are the basis for state activities. The introduction of market-oriented public sector accounting standards in Europe marks a shift towards an increasing influence of capital markets. European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS) are currently being implemented and privilege the information needs of investors and capital providers. This provides a challenge to democratic accountability and is likely to intensify pressure for austerity politics. By now, market-oriented public sector accounting is established at almost all political levels and is likely to intensify strict budgetary control in Europe, effectively establishing an ‘austerity infrastructure’. The main actors engaged in bringing about this new regime are state bureaucrats and statisticians as well as accounting practitioners from large auditing firms.
Negotiated austerity? A comparative survey of social concertation in Canada, Denmark, Ireland and Spain
Authors: Evans Bryan , McBride Stephen , Watson James
Published: May 2022

This chapter charts the impact of austerity on social concertation, used as an umbrella term to encompass processes and institutions of social partnership/ social dialogue/social concertation/ and neo-corporatism. These arrangements varied considerably between states, and were variously interpreted as providing a real voice for labour or, alternatively, representing a means by which labour might be managed and controlled. Considered as a means of expressing labour influence on policy, social dialogue or partnership has not fared well in the period of austerity. In quite diverse contexts – Canada, Ireland, Spain and Denmark -- notwithstanding national differences, social concertation mechanisms have been by-passed, effectively abolished or, where they remain, reduced in scope and significance. Whatever its limitations in the past, this avenue for expressing labour’s voice on policy issues is even less effective than formerly.
Three Roads to the Welfare State
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

The development of social policy in Europe is explored in this accessible intellectual history and analysis of the welfare state. From the Industrial Revolution onwards, the book identifies three important concepts behind efforts to address social concerns in Europe: social democracy, Christian democracy and liberalism. With guides to the political and ideological protagonists and the beliefs and values that lie behind reforms, it traces the progress and legacies of each of the three traditions. For academics and students across social policy and the political economy, this is an illuminating new perspective on the welfare state through the last two centuries.
Reform liberalism and technocracy
Authors: Fanning Bryan
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the shift away from laissez faire liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain towards a reform liberalism which recognised the need for significant government intervention in social policy and economic regulation. In Britain and in several other industrialising countries, liberals became politically influential at a time when most of the population did not have the right to vote. Laissez faire was enabled by the resistance of nineteenth-century liberal politicians and thinkers like John Stuart Mill towards extending the vote to the industrial working and poor classes. The chapter explores Jeremy Bentham's doctrine of utilitarianism — the pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The greater good, as understood in utilitarian terms, was Bentham's conceptualisation of the public interest. The discussion then examines the technocratic social policy advocated by Edwin Chadwick and other Benthamite reformers.
Back to the future, again
Authors: Pierson Christopher
Published: May 2022

This chapter builds an alternative history of the idea of a ‘strategy of equality’ and welfare in the Labour Party between the 1920s and the 1980s. It argues that the history of Labour thinking has been systematically mis-remembered and/or mis-represented. No-one thought the welfare state could work as a ‘strategy for equality’ unless and until something was done to redistribute the ownership and control of wealth fundamentally. Thinkers reviewed include Tawney, Cole, Dalton, Durbin, Crosland and Meade.
‘We are here for you’: the care crisis and the (un)learning of good nursing
Authors: Jensen Carsten Juul , Nielsen Steen Baagøe , Rhodes Carl
Published: May 2022

This chapter evaluates health care and hospitals in the Danish context. It looks at the way neoliberalising stresses efficiency and consumer-oriented services in hospitals, and how this is experienced by newly qualified nurses based upon institutional ethnographic research. The chapter considers the struggle between philosophies of caring (ethics of care) and their everyday lives, discussing the guilt, shame, and emotional breakdowns of nurses. These young nurses have to unlearn the ideals of care taught in nursing schools to adapt to the harsh realities of working life in hospitals, and the chapter identifies a gender difference in their work practices, which may or may not be representative of gender differences generally within nursing. The chapter then examines the notions of a ‘care crisis’ in relation to a less serious situation, that of a ‘care squeeze’.
Professionalisation of social pedagogues under managerial control: caring for children in a time of care crisis
Authors: Nielsen Steen Baagøe
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores professionalisation in a context of Danish kindergartens encountering New Public Management (NPM) with its bureaucratic measurement and evidence-based ‘toolbox’ programmes. How do basic economic, social, and organisational structures limit and shape both the possibilities of professionalisation of Danish ‘social pedagogues’ and the care work in childcare services in ‘early years’? Considering the voices of seven newly graduated pedagogues that work in kindergartens, the chapter argues that they experience major difficulties maintaining their professional identity attained at university colleges. They feel overwhelmed and helpless as they encounter the double pressure from cuts (underfunding) and a reorientation of their daily work towards that which can be monitored and valued. This form of professionalisation becomes a double-edged sword that feeds into a Nordic care crisis by rationalising and reorganising public care.
Introduction: The pandemic within
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

This introductory chapter describes the political, economic and social problems that the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed. Rather than having created these issues, it discusses how the pandemic has revealed the rifts caused by long-standing weaknesses in the economic and political sphere. These include supressed wages, high inequality, low political trust, and of course a collective inability to effectively address the increasingly urgent problem of climate destruction. For decades, these rifts were papered over by hegemonic thinking and practice,. As suggested by the title of the book, The Pandemic Within, we are all implicated in the pandemic. This does not mean that everyone carries individual guilt for inducing the pandemic, but that it is the inevitable by-product of our way of life, of the web of practices that make up our social, economic, and political order. The concept of the Anthropocene, signifying the deep entanglement of the natural and the social, is a manifestation of this.
The return of good government
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

It has become an article of faith among citizens and officials alike that government is bloated, inefficient and bureaucratic, and business efficient and innovative. Government must therefore be limited, and business and the market given free reign. But how did this ideology come into being? This chapter presents a genealogy of the collective distrust of government. It is the result of two interlocking trends. First, the withdrawal of business from the postwar settlement starting at the end of the 1960s. Second, the emergence of the public choice movement. Public choice presented itself as an economics of government but was in effect an ideological movement to starve government of funding, curtail democracy through voter suppression, and stock the bench with right-wing judges. This movement was amply financed by dark money. Taken together these two trends resulted in the demise of a fairly effective form of public administration as the management of societal sectors. In many countries, public administration is currently in disarray and can best be regarded as a ramshackle structure of various administrative models and reforms. We present the historical example of the administration of Red Vienna as a model for a reinvigorated administrative practice and ethos.
Money as a public good
Authors: Wagenaar Hendrik , Prainsack Barbara
Published: May 2022

This chapter describes the stranglehold that the global financial sector has on our economic and civic life. Operating largely outside effective democratic control, it has developed into a self-referential world uncoupled from the real economy, rife with moral hazard, conflicts of interest and revolving door arrangements with government officials. This chapter shows how much of the intransparency of the financial sector is by design, to ward off outside intervention and democratic control. It describes the private production of money, the ideologies that support these arrangements (such as the odd moral universe of money and debt), and their implications for society, such as private, profit-driven control over credit allocation, the massive indebtedness of citizens and businesses, and damaging national austerity policies. Given the outsized role of the global financial sector, most of the reforms we argue for in this book will be impossible to pursue. To reform the dysfunctional financial sector, we argue for a number of measures, such as educating the public about money, the restoration of the public creation of money, the creation of a system of democratically controlled credit allocation, and the introduction of capital controls.
European Committee for the Prevention of Torture
Authors: Coyle Andrew
Published: May 2022

The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) carries out regular inspections of all places where people are detained in the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. This chapter begins with a description of the author’s experience at the receiving end of the CPT’s first report on the United Kingdom when he had to respond to its severe criticism of conditions in Brixton Prison. He subsequently became an expert member of the Committee and he describes his involvement during its first visits to Russia in 1998 and 1999, where he inspected prisons across several time zones in that geographically vast country, and in other countries including Turkey where he had a ‘theological discussion’ with Mehmet Ali Aja who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Higher education today
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter looks closely at the present higher education in UK, which by any measure is a mass system. It enrols 2.5 million students, one of only five systems with more than two million students in Europe (the others are France, Germany, Italy and Poland). The discussion looks at UK higher education, along with most other higher education systems, like an archaeological site composed of many layers. The values and practices characteristic of earlier layers are still active and alive (and even dominant), and often at war with the values and practices of more recent layers of change. The chapter tackles the legal differences between chartered universities and higher education corporations, and the power to award both taught and research degrees presently exercised by the Quality Assurance Agency, among other topics. It also describes the different ‘mission groups’ most often seen as representing a stratification or hierarchy of UK higher education institutions. Nonetheless, the chapter underscores that the most important differentiating element within UK higher education is not legal status or mission group membership but institutional size.
The UK in the 21st century
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter attempts to place the current condition of UK higher education and of global higher education in the wider context of contemporary society, economy, and culture. It focuses on three particular themes that cover social class; the clash between supposedly cosmopolitan and ‘populist’ cultures; and the impact of the mass production of graduates. Globalisation is a common theme across society, culture and the economy. It may also be that mass higher education is another common theme. Experience of higher education is a significant ingredient in many of the post-class ‘identities’; it is also a primary source and spreader of cosmopolitanism; and the mass production of a highly skilled graduate workforce is a key element in the 21st-century economy.
What is to be done?
Authors: Scott Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses a set of reforms that might go some way towards resolving the general crisis facing mass higher education. It tackles four main themes. First, is the further expansion and a decisive shift towards a universal system of tertiary education. Second, is fair access to reduce current inequity in terms of participation, progression through higher education, achievement levels, and graduate success. Third, is a better balance between 'steering' and regulation, within a broader framework of democratic accountability and the abandonment of surveillance metrics at the system level, combined with the root-and-branch reform of institutional governance and management. Last is the reassertion of the public character of the university and its crucial, and critical, role in maintaining an open society.
Introduction
Authors: Kiely Elizabeth , Swirak Katharina
Published: May 2022

This chapter introduces the key theme of the book, the criminalisation of social policy and elaborates on how it is understood by the authors. It identifies the target audience and the geographical scope of the book’s coverage. It explains that the book builds on the work of others by bringing the criminalisation of social policy up to date by focusing on the period extending from 2008. The structure of the book is also outlined in this chapter.
Policing Parenting, Family ‘Support’ and the Discipline and Punishment of Poor Families
Authors: Kiely Elizabeth , Swirak Katharina
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores the void between the social and economic realities of working class parenting and family life and the unrealities of what working class parents and families are expected to achieve. Forays into Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research and programmatic interventions (Family Nurse Partnership and Troubled Families Programmes) into working class families, show how the responsibilisation of parents, who are being identified as deficient, is increasingly constructed as the solution to addressing the ‘reproduction’ of crime and poverty in legislation, policy and practice.  As is argued in the chapter, poverty informed policies and unconditional, relational family support are approaches to working with families that are required more than ever.
The Candidates: Making the House (of Commons) Their Home?
Authors: Harmer Emily
Published: May 2022

This chapter analyses how women politicians have been represented in news coverage of elections from 1918-2017. A brief overview of existing research into the representation of women in political media is provided. The chapter then tracks four trends overtime: 1) The extent to which women are quoted; 2) The policy issues with which women are most associated; 3) The proportion of items which explicitly evaluate women politicians negatively and positively; 4) The extent to which coverage personalises them by mentioning their appearance or familial situation. The second part of the analysis interrogates the gendered nature of electoral coverage by presenting a qualitative analysis of three key areas: 1) How women are portrayed as representing other women; 2) The extent to which news coverage is sexist; 3) The extent to which the personalised coverage that was measured quantitatively is explicitly gendered or problematic.
Prefiguring Alternatives
Authors: Schwittay Anke
Published: May 2022

This chapter considers praxis as a central element of teaching. Against mainstream employability agendas, the chapter employs pedagogical examples focusing on decolonial movements and activism to ask how teaching changes students and students, in turn, change teaching. It shifts its attention to how students apply their learning inside and beyond the university to enact change. The chapter also looks at the activism campaigns that were created by students in the author's own activism module, as well as at climate change activism among Sussex students, as concrete instances of students using their learning to imagine alternatives and beginning to enact them in powerful and inspiring ways. Drawing on the author's own experiences of teaching a postgraduate module on activism, the chapter explores the possibilities of combining theory and practice to craft a critical-creative activist pedagogy.
Marketing and Nostalgia: Unpacking the Past and Future of Marketing and Consumer Research on Nostalgia
Authors: Veresiu Ela , Robinson Thomas Derek , Rosario Ana Babić
Published: May 2022

Nostalgia – generally conceptualized in marketing research as consumers’ longing for the past – plays an ever-greater role in shaping contemporary consumer behaviour and market offerings. This chapter brings together disparate conceptualizations of nostalgia in consumerism across five decades to provide a coherent, integrative overview. Specifically, it unpacks individual nostalgia among consumers, producers’ application of nostalgia in advertising and branding, as well as the role of collective nostalgia in broader consumer culture. Nostalgia is important in marketing because it has the potential to create strong and enduring bonds between different market offerings and a wide variety of consumer segments. For this reason, nostalgic consumption also exhibits a dark side as people can become obsessed with the past to such an extent that they fail to meaningfully engage with both the present and the future. The chapter concludes by offering future research directions, including the regulatory, disciplinary, and exclusionary potential of nostalgic consumption.
‘Wag the Dog’: Terrorism in the 1990s
Authors: Rees Morgan T.
Published: May 2022

This chapter tackles how terrorism continued to be viewed as a second-tier threat as more principled interpretations continued to be repressed in the 1990s. It examines the responses to the rising threat of terrorism across the Clinton administration, showing how it adopted cognitive types of responses to acts of terrorism from the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, to the 1998 Embassy bombings, and the bombing of USS Cole. During this time, the potential threat posed by al-Qaeda largely went unnoticed by the public. This lack of public attention limited the administration's scope and perceived need for action despite vocal principled appeals by the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think tank, calling for a more ‘forward-leaning’ foreign policy, particularly in relation to Iraq, a leading state sponsor of terror. The discussion covers how Clinton was accused of constructing a ‘Wag the Dog’ style scenario when he pursued Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the Embassy bombings. Some political adversaries characterized the effort as a distraction from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The chapter likewise gives a brief overview of the Bush administration's early perceptions of the threat posed by terrorism.
Introduction
Authors: Ganz Aurora
Published: May 2022

This chapter outlines the research area of this book by introducing the concept of energy securitization and the context in which it is analyzed. It explains the motives and the aims of this research and presents the epistemological and methodological approach underpinning this study. This introduction clarifies what it means to challenge how we understand energy security, what we study about it and why. In its final section, this chapter outlines the content of this book.
Futures of Democratic Finance
Authors: Davis Mark , Davis Bruce
Published: May 2022

Chapter five extends our argument by reflecting on the potential futures of crowdfunding and the democratization of finance. We explore the paradox of financial inclusion; the idea of investment as a social act surrounded by long-standing taboos; and, how mainstream finance today is far more interested in managing the existing wealth of the rich than in creating it for the poorer members of society. Since there are also those who read the innovations of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets through the lens of democratic finance, we show how this market is driven by a very different worldview to the one we see embodied in crowdfunding.
Consequences of Forced Municipal Mergers: Evidence from Norway
Authors: Baldersheim Harald , Rose Lawrence E.
Published: May 2022

In 1994, five municipalities in the Fredrikstad district of Norway were merged into one municipality. The merger was approved by the national parliament even though a majority of the elected representatives in four out of five municipalities were against the merger and a majority of voters in referenda held in all five municipalities were likewise opposed to the merger. Using data from surveys conducted both before and after the merger, this chapter investigates three sets of hypotheses regarding the effects of the merger for how residents’ experienced and viewed their local municipality. Results provide insight into the potential consequences of involuntary mergers in other settings.
Institutional Changes and Shifting Roles: Local Government Reform in Hungary, 2010–2014
Authors: Dobos Gábor
Published: May 2022

After the fall of the Communist regimes in 1989-1990, new local government systems were established in Central and Eastern Europe. Although the countries of the regions shared some similarities at the time of the democratic transition (historical background, radical decentralisation), they have followed different paths since then. This paper aims to map the vertical and horizontal power relations of the Hungarian local government system and the changes to them following the Orbán government’s local reforms (2010-2014). To illustrate the changes, it uses data from empirical research projects (POLLEADER I-II, Local Autonomy Index). The study argues that, following the reform, Hungary moved in a different direction than the other countries of the Central-East European group, with a significant shift occurring in the vertical relations, as the local governments lost influence in the political system. Regarding the horizontal relations, the mayoral position became even more important in the ‘strong mayor form’ institutional setting.