bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Lone parenthood
Authors: Treanor Morag C.
Published: September 2020

Chapter four explores the importance of, and relationship between, family formation, or ‘breakdown’ and lone parenthood in the context of childhood poverty. Few subjects excite the public and political imagination quite as much as the issue of lone parents. It is an area with strong connections to poverty, disadvantage, gendered inequalities, and the supposed breaching of normative values and expectations. I engage with myths and assumptions about lone parents and reveal the corrosive effect of demonising lone-parent family life on children’s lives and wellbeing. I show that relationships are dynamic, that lone parents are not a homogenous group, that a large proportion of children will spend time in a lone parent formation, and that how a government responds to lone parents in policy terms directly relates to how impoverished their children will be. This chapter also discusses how poverty and emotional mal-being are not inevitable consequences of separation and divorce. The role of separated fathers in lone parent families, particularly their financial contribution and involvement in their children’s lives, are explored.
In and out of work
Authors: Treanor Morag C.
Published: September 2020

Chapter six explores the complex relationship between child poverty and families being in and out of work. It looks at the role of employment in lifting families out of poverty and how low quality, low security employment poses a threat to children and families rather than a route out of poverty. The chapter examines poverty and employment from the perspective of the child, exploring the implications for children of parental employment, unemployment, worklessness, low pay, and insecure employment. With the increase across the developed world of labour market activation, and the dominant status and values attached to employment, this chapter draws on research from children and low income working parents to highlight the challenges faced by children and families situated at the insecure, fragile end of the labour market. There are many actions by governments that interplay with employment and unemployment: in particular, this chapter looks at in-work benefits, labour market activation and welfare conditionality.
Housework and socialization
Authors: Davis Shannon N. , Greenstein Theodore N.
Published: September 2020

Power dynamics in one’s family of origin shape internalized notions of normative family relationships. Therefore, the division of housework in one’s family of origin socializes children to hold specific attitudes and beliefs about how relationships should work. We examine this hypothesized empirical relationship in Chapter 9 of the book by using Latent Profile Analysis to identify profiles for the adult children of the NSFH couples used to construct the five housework classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload). We found three classes for adult female children (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, and Nontraditional) and three classes for adult male children (Traditional, Transitional, and Nontraditional). Children responded to their parental division of labor in gendered ways, providing evidence for not only the parental socialization of housework behaviors but also the challenges faced by women and men in the changing cultural climate of the United States around gender and family responsibilities.
Insights for helping families
Authors: Davis Shannon N. , Greenstein Theodore N.
Published: September 2020

This concluding chapter of the book summarizes our key findings, focusing on the evidence of housework as a proxy for understanding power dynamics in couples. We present suggestions for practitioners based upon the changing demographics of the United States along side our insights from the Latent Profile and Latent Trajectory Analyses described in the book. We conclude with suggestions for family scholars interested in trying to understand power dynamics in intimate relationships.
Shaping practice: prescribing assessment
Authors: White Sue , Gibson Matthew , Wastell David , Walsh Patricia
Published: September 2020

This chapter reviews the use of attachment theory in practice guidance and child welfare policy, focusing on social work in England. In refashioning the role of social workers, the increasing social acceptance of attachment theory, and its concomitant discourse, influenced and guided the UK government's attempt to define and restructure what social work practice was. The attachment story in use offered explanations for how children become harmed by insensitive, unresponsive, and inconsistent parenting. Such ideas fed into the government's agenda for social work practice: namely to assess (needs) and refer (to services) or remove (to prevent harm). Social workers were, therefore, directed to assess parents' capacity to meet the needs of their children from the perspective of attachment theory. Ultimately, attachment theory has become institutionalised into the profession.
Coda: love reawakened?
Authors: White Sue , Gibson Matthew , Wastell David , Walsh Patricia
Published: September 2020

This coda summarises the main arguments of this book. It calls for the ethical use of attachment theory. All theories are tools, and tools need to be used in the right way, addressing the thing they were designed to explain or improve. There are parts of attachment theory that were designed to understand love and relationships, and parts that were designed to change policy and practice to create a more humane system of public services. These aspects provide a good fit for child welfare practice and some of the ideas of attachment theory were developed within, and inspired by, child welfare practice. If attachment theory is to be used ethically in policy and practice, practitioners need to properly understand the theory, its origins and original intentions. The book has also outlined the need to place attachment theory into a wider context for practice. Professional ethics necessarily involve respecting familial relational networks, seeking to develop, strengthen, and deepen those relationships that provide connection and belonging. Without these central values, attachment theory can result in the opposite.
Pressing, repressing and accommodating: local modes of governing social assistance recipients in welfare to work programmes in the Netherlands
Authors: Arts Josien
Published: September 2020

This chapter shows the differences between local welfare-to-work programmes in the Netherlands in terms of the ways in which social assistance recipients are directed towards paid labour: through pressing, repressing and accommodating modes of governing. Based on 13-month ethnographic research in three Dutch social assistance offices, this chapter argues, first, that the observed local differences result from decentralisation of policy design and implementation as well as increased discretionary power for case managers. Second, that the different local practices can be understood as varieties of neoliberal paternalism legitimised through various forms of stigmatisation of social assistance recipients that leave little room for them to revolt against disfunctioning policy and wrongful treatment. Third, by means of using the republican theory of non-domination, this chapter argues that the observed local differences (between as well as within municipalities) and limited room for social assistance recipients to voice their concerns indicate that Dutch welfare-to-work policies work partly in arbitrary ways and are insufficiently democratically controlled.
Rereading frailty through a lens of precarity: an explication of politics and the human condition of vulnerability
Authors: Grenier Amanda
Published: September 2020

Over the last 15 years, frailty has emerged as one of the most powerful constructs in gerontology, geriatrics, and health care delivery. Yet the dominant portrayal and response to frailty tends to mask that frailty is experienced by older people and is historically situated. This chapter suggests that the lens of precarity can be used to focus on the risks and insecurities experienced by older people and convey complex understandings of need in late life. It outlines key lines of thinking with regards to frailty and sketches emerging work on precarity with regards to aging. It then points to two angles to reconsider ‘frailty’ in late life: the politics of frailty, and vulnerability as a means to resituate the response to ‘frail’ subjects. It follows this by outlining the contributions that can be made through an analysis of precarity and concludes with suggestions for theoretical and methodological development.
Older workers and ontological precarity: between precarious employment, precarious welfare and precarious households
Authors: Lain David , Airey Laura , Loretto Wendy , Vickerstaff Sarah
Published: September 2020

This chapter develops a theoretical model for understanding ‘ontological precarity’ among older workers. Ontological precarity is caused by individuals feeling ‘trapped’ between precariousness in different domains of their lives. Individuals worry about the long-term sustainability of their ‘precarious employment’. This anxiety is enhanced by financial pressures to work longer in the context of diminishing financial support from a ‘precarious welfare state’ and from ‘precarious households’. The chapter presents case studies of three older hospitality workers, in order to illustrate how these different forms of precarity interact. It concludes by discussing policy implications and provides suggestions for how the framework could be used in future research.
From precarious employment to precarious retirement: neoliberal health and long-term care in the United States
Authors: Polivka Larry , Luo Baozhen
Published: September 2020

Neoliberal political economies have emerged across the west over the last 40 years. This development has been driven by several forces including public policy regimes that prioritize privatization of public assets and services, deregulation of the economy, reduced taxes on high incomes and wealth and use of public revenues to bail out corporate entities that are “too big to fail”. This chapter draws on Streeck’s theory of the Consolidation State dominated by corporate priorities. It describes how neoliberal policy priorities, especially privatization, are being implemented in the health and long term care systems in the U.S, and how these are in turn creating the same levels of economic insecurity and precarity in the context of work and retirement over the last 20 plus years.
Institutional collaboration in the creation of digital linguistic resources: the case of the British Telecom correspondence corpus
Authors: Morton Ralph , Nesi Hilary
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the creation of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of letters taken from the public archives of British Telecom (BT) that were written by nearly 400 authors on a wide variety of topics between 1853 and 1982. It first discusses some experiences working on the New Connections project, funded by Jisc (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) and a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage, and The National Archives, focusing particularly on the methodological issues encountered. The corpus was created to address a gap in existing corpus resources, and so that researchers (primarily linguists) could access and, crucially, engage with the language of the letters. Since the completion of the BTCC there have been efforts to expand the corpus to include correspondence written to and from the Post Office, an institution with many historical links to BT. This chapter addresses issues surrounding institutional collaboration in both phases of this ongoing research.
The public and the relational: the collaborative practices of the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History
Authors: Graham Helen , Green Victoria , Headon Kassie , Ingham Nigel , Ledger Sue , Minnion Andy , Richards Row , Tilley Liz
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History. It points to a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics — public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity — and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. Rather than favouring one or the other, the chapter argues that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue needed to be developed. Both political traditions have a history of being very effectively expressed in the learning disability self-advocacy movement as speaking up and being heard, and of arguing for services to start with the individual by being more ‘person-centered’. As such, the chapter reveals that the task of this archive is to explore fruitful combinations and collaborations between the two political traditions.
Poverty
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: September 2020

Conventional representations of poverty treat it as a condition characterized by a lack of resources. In recent years, those representations have been challenged, as poverty has increasingly come to be understood as a complex, multi-dimensional set of issues. It is not a single, unified idea. A ‘relative’ concept of poverty interprets the problems of poverty as socially constructed, socially defined or associated with inequality; but the idea of relative poverty still treats poverty as state of being. ‘Structural’ concepts of poverty see poverty as the product of social relationships. A relational view of poverty begins from a different conceptual base. Much of the experience of poverty is relational: examples include problems of social exclusion, lack of security, gender relationships and lack of power. The constituent elements of poverty are relational: poverty is closely identified with specific statuses such as class, dependency and lack of entitlement. Command over resources is no less relational: the things that people can buy or use, such as access to land or finance, also depend on the position of other people. Poverty is constituted by such relationships. It is, in and of itself, a relational concept.
Poverty and social policy
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: September 2020

If poverty is a matter of resources, then the way to deal with poverty is to increase people’s resources, either directly – providing money, goods and services – or indirectly, for example by promoting employment so that people can earn more resources. From a relational perspective, anti-poverty policies have to advance people’s integration into social networks, for example relationships of work, family, education and ethnicity – and reduce vulnerability, through human development and systems of social protection.
Poverty in rich countries
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: September 2020

The persistence of poverty in rich countries is something of a puzzle for those who see poverty in terms of resources; from a relational perspective, it is unsurprising. Although public discussion is sometimes dominated by moral judgments about the poor, governments in developed countries have come to see responses to poverty and the protection of people's circumstances as basic elements in the role of a democratic government, and if governments do not ensure that basic living standards are protected, they have failed. Debates tend to centre in practice on money, markets and commodification.
Responses to poverty
Authors: Spicker Paul
Published: September 2020

The experience of developed countries tells us that markets are not enough; that targeting does not work; and that systems are always mixed. The experience of the developing world is that local ownership of policies, participation and empowerment, and social protection can make a huge difference to life styles, in a way that economic growth alone cannot.
Conclusion: politicising infrastructure or sustainable mobility?
Authors: Cox Peter , Koglin Till
Published: September 2020

This chapter concludes the volume and explains the issues that have been touched upon by the authors of the chapters of this book. It explains that it would be easy to assume the superiority of European cycle infrastructure provision and that generally, European cycle infrastructure has been presented as good or as much better than the infrastructure provided in countries like the United States of America, Canada or Australia. However, it is concluded that this volume has shown that also the bicycle infrastructure in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden or Austria also fails to fully recognise the bicyclists’ needs for active and daily mobility. Further, this opens a space for shared critique, rather than focusing on the search for a mythical universal best practice allows dialogue between perspectives. It also permits (and insists on) analysis of the backstage of infrastructure construction. The conclusions raises also questions like What processes and assumptions are behind the plans drawn up and the decisions made? Who are the people involved and what considerations drive them? How are these considerations justified? Furthermore, it is stated that this volume has begun a comparative assessment of existing and historic struggles.
The development and early operation of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs)
Authors: Coleman Anna , McDermott Imelda , Warwick-Giles Lynsey , Checkland Kath
Published: September 2020

Chapter 3 deals with the development and early operation of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) of GPs. Building upon the context set out in chapter 2, we examine the factors affecting early CCG development, highlighting the complexity of their governance structures, approaches taken to engaging with their members and the development of external relationships with a wide range of new bodies. We found an explicitly ‘bottom up’ approach to policy implementation, with CCGs given considerable lee-way in developing their structures and processes. As a result, the history of previous commissioning structures and arrangements played an important role in the development of each CCG, as did the approach taken by local leaders and by the PCT/ developing NHS England local team. Engagement with local bodies such as Health and Wellbeing Boards and Local Authorities were also significantly affected by local history and geography. We found that the approach taken by NHS England to CCG development, with early freedom to develop as they chose increasingly curtailed by more prescriptive guidance and a complex assurance regime, led to some frustrations for those involved.
The strategies described
Authors: Allen Mike , Benjaminsen Lars , O’Sullivan Eoin , Pleace Nicholas
Published: September 2020

Chapter 3 provides a detailed description of the strategies to end homelessness. The strategies of the three countries were published within a relatively short period of each other. The Finnish strategy was launched in February 2008, while the Irish national homeless strategy, was launched in August 2008 and the Danish strategy in October 2009. The chapter argues that the three strategies can each be seen to have distinct phases of announcement and implementation. In the case of the Finnish strategies, these build upon each other through a series of achievements and refined objectives, while in the Irish case, the strategies change considerably in format and scope, reflecting the broader economic and political crisis that engulfed the country, with the Danish strategy and succeeding programmes falling in between the other two cases.
The Making, Mapping and Mobilising in Merthyr project: young people, research and arts activisms in a post-industrial place
Authors: Renold Emma , Ivinson Gabrielle , Thomas Gareth , Elliott Eva
Published: September 2020

This chapter tells the story of a research-engagement project called Making, Mapping and Mobilising in Merthyr (otherwise known as the 4Ms project). The project explored young people's sense of place and well-being while growing up in Merthyr Tydfil (hereafter referred to as Merthyr), a small post-industrial ex-mining and steel-making town in the South Wales Valleys. Once a hub of industrial activity and innovation, Merthyr has experienced a deep social rupture in recent years owing to deindustrialisation and the closure of ironworks, coal mines, and manufacturing industries that had served as cultural links underpinning the rhythms and rituals of Valleys life. The 4Ms project took place predominantly in a housing estate based on a design reputed to have been inspired in the 1950s by romantic Italian hilltop villages. The estate expanded in the 1970s, and by the 2000s, had become dilapidated and a place with high levels of unemployment. In a context of tightening austerity, this housing estate and the people living there have been subject to stigmatising media accounts fuelled by television's ‘poverty porn’ industry and, at times, by local residents themselves. The ‘realities’ of poverty tend to be portrayed in popular media through no-hope narratives of despair.
Dynamic housing transformations: following the money
Authors: Robertson Douglas
Published: September 2020

This chapter seeks to update the long-standing narratives that still shape contemporary understandings of Glasgow’s housing. Once the city’s housing was a simple binary, either public or private, either a tenement slum or council block, each sited within spatially and socially demarcated neighbourhoods. Now greater diversity and more complexity exists. In explaining this change the chapter sets itself two challenges. Firstly, to critique and re-appraise the traditional housing narratives, in order to lay out a city-wide housing template. Secondly, to outline how that inherited template has subsequently been reshaped by the financial, political and social contexts brought about by the consequences of the global financial crisis and financialisation, the process which changed housing finance from facilitating credit for home purchase to one increasingly concerned with facilitating returns for global investment. While financialisation offers a useful lens to better explain and understand the new narrative, the inheritances of the 19th and 20th centuries still exert a resonance on Glasgow’s contemporary housing situation.
Public services, the UK economy and the Brexit debate
Authors: Malin Nigel
Published: September 2020

Social investment has become a social policy concept that can be seen as a way to find a new economic legitimacy to social programmes. This has been as means of increasing economic productivity; it plays a positive role in economic regulation and investment in human capital (training and education) and social programmes like universal access to childcare and early childhood education, viewed as good for the economy. Interrogating ‘cuts to services’ as socially and politically contentious places the notion of ‘de-professionalisation’ at the heart of assessing the impact of the commercial model within the NHS, social care, education and criminal justice domains of the public sector. How have these cuts helped to downsize professional service-inputs in the form of efficiencies, pay cuts, rationing, reducing training and staff development, all of which potentially affect overall economic productivity? Will Brexit impact on the role and status of professionals living in the UK?
De-professionalism as defined by services deemed unconventional, under-performing or ineffectual
Authors: Malin Nigel
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses reports that some hospitals and primary care services are ‘under-performing’ due to a lack of health and social care professionals, particularly in areas like critical care, long-term and chronic illness. Similarly, in schools there are continuing claims that core funding remains a serious issue, that they are struggling to get and keep enough teachers, and standards are threatened as a result. Austerity is an extension of the neo-liberal logic to characterise any form of public spending as ‘unproductive’.
The changing meanings of lifelong learning policies: consequences for young adults and their life courses
Authors: Neves Tiago , Alves Natália , Cossetta Anna , Domović Vlatka
Published: September 2020

Lifelong learning policies have multiple meanings. They change across time, space, theoretical perspectives, and the types of actors that seek to make sense of them. This poses challenges to developing a research framework able to capture the myriad of understandings of lifelong learning ‘policy’. Furthermore, it defies coordinated policy-making and assessing its effects. This chapter aims to gauge such diversity and discuss its consequences for European young adults and their life courses. The chapter then moves on to, and concludes with, a discussion of how the tensions in the ‘growth and inclusion’ agenda interconnect with the movement from standardisation towards de-standardisation in the lives of young adults. In other words, we seek not only to provide an answer to 1) how de-standardisation is taken into account in European lifelong learning policies, but also to 2) how such policies impact and transform the lives of young adults.
Conclusion
Authors: Kovacheva Siyka , Rambla Xavier , Amaral Marcelo Parreira do
Published: September 2020

The chapter takes stock of the insights produced in the different chapters of this collection and draws conclusions based on three theoretical perspectives that guided our analysis. Each of them highlights a few important points that are helpful to make sense of the evidence posited by the thematic chapters. Cultural Political Economy provides crucial insights on the intimate connections between complexity reduction and the institutional normalisation of life courses. Life Course Research sheds light on the equally relevant connections between young adults’ biographies and active learning. Finally, Governance theories account for the regional dimension of lifelong learning policies. Some lessons learned are discussed and a plea to listen to the voices of young adults is made.
The social construction of child abuse in Ireland: public discourse, policy challenges and practice failures
Authors: Shore Caroline , Powell Fred
Published: September 2020

Irish child abuse inquiries of the last few decades have been hugely significant in revealing the tragic circumstances under which some children lived and died. The main focus here is on what these inquiries reveal about errors and mistakes in child protection and the changing relations between a number of key institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, the state and the media, not on what they reveal about abuse. Through the ‘lens’ of the child abuse inquiry the chapter considers a number of issues, including: the exposure of historic child abuse of children in Irish society, the emergence of campaigning groups, the growing power of the media in exposing a culture of secrecy, and the development of childcare policy.
The chapter then explores the wider context (political, cultural, and historical) in which discourses of child protection are framed and conducted. The chapter addresses discrete meta-themes that enable the reader to contextualise the debate about child abuse and theorise it from a critical social perspective. This offers a uniquely original analysis of discourses of child protection, incorporating policy development and messages for the future.
The political-administrative and the professional approach to errors and mistakes in Swedish child protection
Authors: Kjellberg Inger , Höjer Staffan
Published: September 2020

The discourses and debates on errors and mistakes in child protection in Sweden hold many different sub-themes. Relatively recently, the Swedish state both recognised and apologised to persons maltreated in the Swedish child welfare system before 1980. At times, the discourse has been dominated by parents’ abuse or neglect resulting in child deaths. The role of social services in these cases has been depicted as faulty. Other areas of discourse focus on strengthening children’s rights in child protection, and impact on the day to day work of social services arising in part from the increase in unaccompanied children entering Sweden over recent years.
This chapter aims to describe and discuss past and current strategies to avoid and handle errors and mistakes in child protection in Sweden. The chapter describes legal errors, organizational errors and professional errors as well as strategies to handle them. It builds on research from the two authors and others. The strategies are presented in themes, including: a) the different measures within the quality assurance systems – such as mandatory reports of mistreatment to the regulatory authority; b) the strategies to avoid errors and mistakes including increased legislation, control and governmental inspections and more attention to children’s voices; c) strategies originating from professional groups aiming to avoid errors and mistakes.
Finally, the chapter discusses possible strategies designed to promote learning from errors and mistakes in social work education and for policy development.
Organising: influences of the state, organisations and wider social policies
Authors: Bell Linda
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on organisation. Organising social work falls into many different areas, and because social workers are employed in so many different kinds of organisation (statutory local authorities being only one kind) and different sectors (including health and education, as well as the social-care field), the chapter concentrates only on a few areas. It looks backwards and forwards across the 1990s to the present day, as well as on into the future, and also considers social work both internationally and in the UK. It considers some important areas of social work: the development of professional organisation(s), research conferences, and the further exploration of developments in social work/social care education. Finally, the chapter gives two specific English examples: the first links up social work/social care training, research, and related workshops and conferences in the 1990s; and the second explores how recent social work education has been organised via the UK government initiative of funded ‘teaching partnerships’.
Contextual Safeguarding: theorising the contexts of child protection and peer abuse
Authors: Firmin Carlene
Published: September 2020

This chapter presents the extra-familial dynamics of peer abuse against the familial parameters of child protection. Analysed through the constructivist structuralist concepts offered by Pierre Bourdieu, cumulative data from a multi-study programme into extra-familial abuse provides a roadmap towards identifying the components of a contextual account of, and response to, peer abuse. Through this process, it is possible to bridge the gap between the field of child protection and the social fields of peer groups. This can be done by theorising and testing a new approach to extra-familial child protection — Contextual Safeguarding. In so doing, the chapter explains a framework through which peer abuse can be both perceived, and responded to, as a child protection issue.
Some concluding thoughts
Authors: Pearce Jenny
Published: September 2020

This chapter returns the discussion to the relationship between theory and practice in child sexual exploitation (CSE) intervention. It also tracks the broader implications of such an approach in related fields. While the sexual exploitation of children is the focus of this book, the ideas within it can be used to explore a range of forms of exploitation and abuse of children. Furthermore, these perspectives and political and economic concerns are explored in the book with sexually exploited children in mind, they are transferable to other exploitative contexts facing a range of children and young people. In addition, the chapter discusses some further avenues for exploration and implementation, including options for the setting up or reform of a service for children and young people.
Policy learning and policy failure: definitions, dimensions and intersections1
Authors: Dunlop Claire A.
Published: September 2020

This chapter provides an overview of policy learning and policy failure, both of which are classic topics of policy studies. The links between the two literatures appear obvious, yet there are very few studies that address how one can learn from failure, learn to limit failure, and fail to learn. This book offers a rare attempt to bring these two literatures together. The chapter then begins by defining policy learning and failure before organising the main studies in these fields along the key dimensions of processes, products, and analytical levels. Learning and failure studies are beginning to offer analysis in and for the policy process that concentrates on the prescriptive techniques that can help on the ground. Intellectual endeavours on the design implications of learning and failure are still in their infancy, but two streams of activity are making headway. For learning, analysis of international organisations makes particularly strong offerings on how governments should learn. Different instruments and methods for cross-national learning include: benchmarking, peer review, checklists, facilitated coordination, and extrapolation. Meanwhile, the prescriptive turn in failure studies is less concerned with how not to fail and more focused on its inverse — how to succeed in policy making.
Between policy failure and policy success: bricolage, experimentalism and translation in policy transfer
Authors: Stone Diane
Published: September 2020

This chapter re-assesses some of the literature on policy transfer and policy diffusion, in light of ideas as to what constitutes failure, partial failure, or limited success. Rather than frame a policy transfer as a failure or success, scholars must recognise transfer (and so failure) as a messy process involving an array of meso-level actors. Two aspects are of particular note. First, the treatment of imperfect transfer as underscored by flawed lesson-drawing is useful as it takes one back to questions about the depth of learning. Second, the chapter highlights two aspects of learning that are often overlooked in mainstream accounts: ‘negative lesson-drawing’ and selective learning. Negative lesson-drawing is a quest to avoid policy failure where policy learning is not synonymous with policy adoption. Instead, policy lessons can help crystallise what ideas and policy paths decision-makers do not wish to follow.
Vignette 7 Catching up with Kafka
Authors: Taylor Steven
Published: September 2020

Prison is like a microcosm of technocratic totalitarianism where every action collapses under the weight of its own bureaucracy. This often requires a member of senior management to override the rules in order to get things done! If you don’t have a powerful backer, it’s not happening. Most actions, from asking for toilet paper to doing a prison magazine, become a Kafkaesque nightmare rivalling Franz Kafka’s novels such as ...
What the OU did for me
Authors: James Erwin
Published: September 2020

Anyone familiar with prisons in the UK will have heard of Erwin James. No one writes about imprisonment as he does. Now an accomplished author and journalist, he provides an account of the role education in his life; first its premature closure through neglectful teachers and abusive family circumstances, then a surprise reopening and rediscovery of latent talent in a prison setting. The Open University, books, wide reading, some supportive teachers and a long prison sentence provide Erwin with hope for another life, a life outside. This moving and beautifully written chapter is proof of its realisation.
Sexual practices in childhood
Authors: May-Chahal Corinne , Kelly Emma
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses how childhood sexuality has been researched in historical, clinical, and academic studies outside the rapid evidence assessment (REA). It finds that, first, recognition of childhood sexuality is evident in all three fields. Second, even when confronted by contradictory evidence, Sigmund Freud's theory retains currency within which understanding of childhood (sexual) development is reported; acceptance of the latency of childhood sexuality (or asexuality) perpetuates a context for framing childhood as asexual. Actions such as imitations of adult sex, watching pornography, and concern about early puberty stray into the realms of the abnormal as a consequence. The chapter then examines some of the sexual practices engaged in by children mediated by the online environment. It considers consensual youth-involved sexual imagery online and the difficult task of distinguishing between normative sexual exploration, ‘sexting’, and online child sexual victimisation (OCSV).
Introduction
Authors: Liu Helena
Published: September 2020

This chapter canvasses recent global events including white nationalist rallies in the United States, the protectionist vote for Brexit, and the mainstreaming of racist far-right political groups across Europe. It then turns to the landscape of leadership and organisations and discusses how the backlash that we have observed against diversity is institutionalised in business practice. The chapter lays the groundwork to interrogate the violences of leadership theorising and practice in more depth as well as provide ways forward through anti-racist feminist resistance.
Undoing Leadership
Authors: Liu Helena
Published: September 2020

Following from the collective wisdoms of anti-racist feminisms, this chapter discusses the ways leadership may be theorised and practised beyond the reinforcement of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal violence. In particular, it explores three ways to ‘do’ leadership theorising and practice differently: decolonising our minds; relating with others; and reimagining leadership. These are not discreet domains of activity, but interconnected processes of social transformation; so that in relating with others, we can collaboratively reimagine leadership, and by reimagining dominant constructions of leadership, it will more readily enable us to decolonise our minds.
Sustainability and Law: A Historical and Theoretical Overview
Authors: Pieraccini Margherita , Novitz Tonia
Published: September 2020

This preliminary chapter traces the development of the sustainability agenda at multiple decision-making scales, also incorporating recent and upcoming political changes. In doing so, it provides a critical discussion of the historical, non-linear development of sustainability, showing the malleability of the concept, its ethical underpinning and the influence of the political realm in shaping the legal and policy articulations of sustainability. The analysis is informed by critical theory and environmental law theory. More specifically, rejecting the modernist dichotomy between the Eco and the Anthropos, we move beyond a pillar approach to sustainability and consider the scope for dissensus, a more relational analysis and a transition towards the pluriverse.
Accounting for Climate Change: Rethinking the Chaotic Corporate Reporting Landscape and Its Purpose, with the UK’s Failure as a Case Study
Authors: Villiers Charlotte , Tsagas Georgina
Published: September 2020

The chapter considers whether company law and corporate governance-related initiatives provide effective mechanisms for holding corporations to account for their contribution to climate change. A key regulatory device targeted at corporations is disclosure, the goal of which, in this context, is to achieve greater transparency regarding the risks and opportunities connected to climate change. The chapter explores to what extent climate change-related reporting contributes to the efforts towards reducing global warming. It is argued that there are a number of significant problems with climate-related reporting in its current state, in so far as there are many different requirements, including standards, codes, guidelines, at industry or sector level as well as at national and international levels; all these combined create a chaotic reporting landscape. Moreover, there is no meaningful link between the disclosures required under company law and initiatives within the area of environmental protection; hence it becomes difficult to identify clearly what the key reporting information is and what the responses and possible legal consequences of any such disclosures should be. Consequently, corporations’ accountability for their contribution to climate change is open to question.
Social Sustainability, Labour and Trade: Forging Connections
Authors: Novitz Tonia
Published: September 2020

This chapter investigates the connections that may be forged between sustainability, labour standards and trade. It offers a history of ‘social sustainability’ considering the opportunities presented by the SDGs. The approaches taken by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the European Union (EU) are compared and contrasted, considering recent developments, such as the ILO centenary reports and instruments, alongside EU commitments to enforcement of selected ILO standards. The chapter concludes by considering how the trade and policy coherence objectives set out in SDG 17 can be achieved and how the common and divergent approaches of the ILO and EU may yet evolve. It is suggested that SDG 16 could guide the processes for dialogue that are necessary to forge connections and solutions.
Case Study 2: The Fisher Supreme Court Cases against the University of Texas at Austin
Authors: Carter J. Scott , Lippard Cameron D.
Published: September 2020

This chapter looks at the most recent case to challenge affirmative action in college admissions policies in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin (2013 and 2016). Like chapter 5, the purpose of this chapter is to understand precisely what supporters and opponents are saying about the controversial policy. That is, how are they framing the debate surrounding affirmative action. However, this chapter looks at how framing may have changed over a decade later. We again focus on amicus briefs submitted by social authorities to the U.S. Supreme Court who had interests in the outcome of the cases. While we were interested in variation in types of frames used in these two cases (Fisher I and II) relative to the Gratz and Grutter cases, we mainly focused on authors continued use of both color-blind and group threat frames to state their positions. While some nuanced changes were observed from Gratz/Grutter to Fisher, our findings revealed a great deal of consistency from case to case and that the briefs continued to rely on color-blind and threat frames to characterize the policy. Particularly among opponents’ briefs, threat frames suggested that whites, in general, were losing in a country consumed by liberal agendas of diversification and entitlements only afforded to unqualified and ill-prepared non-whites.
Welfare across the Lifespan
Authors: Fowler Timothy , Fowler Timothy
Published: September 2020

This chapter considers how welfare or advantage ought to be distributed within a single lifespan, rather than between lives. A possibility is that people can make up for a bad childhood via compensating factors in adulthood, and thus there is no need to prioritise the interests of children. Through a consideration of what are termed ‘the intrinsic goods of childhood’ I make the argument that there is a basic case for seeing the start of a person’s life as the most important life stage, because gains in childhood are by their nature longer lasting and likely to lead to further advantages later in life. This provides a powerful, though potentially outweighed, reason for thinking that justice requires devoting more attention and resources to children than is recognised by most accounts.
The Implications of Perfectionism
Authors: Fowler Timothy , Fowler Timothy
Published: September 2020

Here, I build on the conception of children’s interests outlined in chapter 3, I show how Nussbaum’s list of valuable goods can be productively extended once the requirement to be neutral about ethics is dropped. I offer a view of flourishing grounded in the importance of interpersonal relationships, of agency and an appreciation of the natural world. I then discuss a few more concrete examples of the kinds of beliefs that will be required by progressive upbringing. These are i) a personal commitment to gender equality) knowledge of controversial scientific and historical truths, iii) an openness to sexual choice and iv) a rejection of consumerism. Taken together, these discussions show why justice for children requires them to be raised in an environment conducive to socially liberal beliefs and values, a view that stands in deep tension with theories of liberalism that apply only to politics, and to the preferences of many parents. I turn to these concerns in the next section.
Paying for Childcare
Authors: Fowler Timothy
Published: September 2020

Here, I make the case that each member of society can be expected to do better if more resources are dedicated to child rearing. This is for two reasons; first, it benefits everyone during their life stage as children. Moving resources towards children, and changing norms to be more child friendly, can be expected to benefit everyone, because childhood is a particularly significant part of a person’s life. It matters instrumentally – having good childhood is predictive of a good adulthood – and intrinsically, because people have a strong attachment to their childhood years. Second, it makes the project of raising children more attractive and this option benefits both parents and those who do not become parents.
Climate Change, Conflicts and Migration
Authors: Thalheimer Lisa , Webersik Christian
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on climate conflicts from a political economy perspective. Using the example of droughts in Somalia, the chapter investigates the different drivers of conflict and fragility over time, as well as the relation of changing actors in conflict, environmental disruptions and mixed migration. The chapter shows that there is no empirical evidence to state that climate change per se will increase the number of conflicts and migration. Instead, pre-existing conflicts exacerbate environmental problems that weaken local and national governance arrangements, as well as society’s capacities to deal with climatic shocks, which then can increase migration. However, the authors argue that these relations have to be seen with caution, as conflict-induced and climate-related migration cannot be yet clearly disentangled empirically. Thus, the authors conclude the need for streamlined, flexible governance measures to address climate conflicts.
Feminism Enters the Debate
Authors: Amery Fran
Published: September 2020

This chapter considers the entry of feminist arguments about abortion into UK parliamentary debates in the 1970s. A contingent of MPs willing to advocate for legal abortion on feminist grounds had developed. However, the wording of the Abortion Act placed feminist actors in a difficult position; the gendered implications of the Act were troubling, but at the same time it was essential to defend it from attack by opponents of legal abortion. This resulted in some tricky compromises, in which feminist actors would defend a ‘right to choose’ without examining the failure of the Act to provide exactly that. Yet difficulties were present for anti-abortion actors, who risked being perceived as being ‘against’ helping vulnerable women. Anti-abortion speeches during this period were ambiguous and confused in how they discussed women.