bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Victorians, Islam and the Idea of Progress
Authors: Pugh Martin
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses Victorian progress, and considers a marked shift in British thinking during the nineteenth century. After the comparative tolerance of the eighteenth century, the Victorian era saw a distinct deterioration in British attitudes towards Islam, culminating in an almost fanatical view of Muslims by the later nineteenth century. While there is a variety of explanations for the long-term trend, the fundamental one lay in the impact of the process of industrialisation that had set in during the late eighteenth century and that had left Britain apparently the world's leading power by the 1850s. Many Victorians convinced themselves that their success was underpinned by something distinctive in the English national character or experience. Even when confronted with the evidence produced by mid-century investigations into widespread poverty, many Victorians retained their self-confidence, arguing that if industrial development continued for another generation it would inevitably generate employment and spread prosperity for all who were able and willing to work.
The Great War and the Re-drawing of the Ottoman Empire
Authors: Pugh Martin
Published: May 2020

This chapter details how, during the 14 years before the outbreak of the First World War, Britain comprehensively revised her diplomatic alignments, readjusted her military strategy, and rearranged her armed forces to meet the threat posed by the European powers. In the process, she signed an alliance with Japan and ententes with France and Russia, she concentrated her fleet in the North Sea and the Channel, and developed a plan to prevent Germany from imposing a quick defeat on France by mobilising a new British Expeditionary Force. However, there remained one flaw in all this: she had not really considered the Ottoman Empire or, indeed, the wider question of her relations with the Muslim societies in Turkey, Persia, Egypt, and especially India. This oversight was a by-product of her new strategy, which frankly made security in Europe the chief object and in effect downgraded the importance of the imperial world. As a result, Britain failed to take full account of changes in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa engendered by the Great War.
People, Territory, Plebiscite: The Main Features—Objections and Answers
Authors: Waters Timothy William
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses three main aspects of the new rule: people, territory, and plebiscite. It also considers some objections to the new rule and its effects—including the possibility that it would make things worse. The chapter then answers those objections and provides a theoretical justification for the basic intuition that democratic decision-making by local majorities is a positive good. An important theme will emerge: In many respects, the new rule is flawed—in the same ways the current rule is. And in other respects, this flawed new rule offers something more in keeping with people's better natures. The new rule is principally designed to be used before a crisis; it provides a pathway for peaceful change so that crisis need not come.
Broader Implications: Features and Effects of the New Rule
Authors: Waters Timothy William
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses features and effects not directly evident in the rule's formal elements, but that are aspects or likely consequences of its operation: its radically ahistorical quality; its effects on resource distribution, immigration, and violence; and its minimalism. The new rule proposes a radically democratic, ahistorical model for deciding the governance of people on territory. It privileges the preferences of the current population, giving little value to ancient claims; claims based on past facts would not defeat an otherwise valid plebiscite. It does this to resolve one of the core tensions that plagues thinking about self-determination. The new rule cuts through history's thicket of contradictory proofs and contesting principles by identifying a moment of decision: a vote. However, the more difficult problem concerns abuses that take place not in some distant past but today—expulsions, genocides, and abusive policies that alter demography now. The chapter then argues that although secession—like any change—might be destabilizing in the short term, the benefits could be significant.
Boomer-blaming
Authors: Bristow Jennie
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes some of the rhetoric and symbolism surrounding the Boomer-blaming phenomenon. The first is the attempt to highlight the apparently divergent fortunes of different age groups. The next strategy is to upset and offend the younger generation, primarily reflected through sensationalist headlines highlighting the supposed ‘greed’ of their elders. The final rhetoric stems from self-absorbed ‘Millennial angst’ griping about the unfairness of their circumstances. Taken together, the chapter argues, these methods of Boomer-blaming cast the difficulties of the present moment in generational terms. They pretend to be authentic expressions of young people's pain and wisdom, but in reality these sentiments are scripted by political and cultural elites.
Dramatising the crisis
Authors: Bristow Jennie
Published: May 2020

This chapter illustrates how the ‘Boomer’ of the cultural imagination is a cipher for long-running anxieties about the past, present, and future. In attempting to explain why the Boomers are such a problem today, Blamers go back as far as their limited historical imaginations will take them — to that moment known, simply, as ‘the Sixties’. Boomers have become fall guys for the Sixties, and everything that is seen to have gone wrong since. In addition, the concept of generation is mobilised here as a static, determining force, which needs to be corrected in favour of other generations. The over-inflation of this imagined generational agency denies any sense of individual agency amongst members of the Boomer generation, let alone those that followed. The Boomers are dehumanised as a demographic lump, propelled by their historical moment into screwing up the world for everybody else. The only solution, as some of the Blamers see it, is to wipe the slate clean and start again.
Local Ideas and Global Networks
Authors: Livesey James
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the aftermath of the collapse in authority of positivist models where scholars became highly sensitized to the implication of strategies of inquiry and interpretation with strategies of control. Even in areas of the social sciences that did not commit to discourse as a master category, the suspicion that the claim to a form of truth, or knowledge, entirely distinct from power, was in fact nothing more than a mystification that had explosive consequences. The history of science in its many forms has been transformed. In turn, the challenge to an easy universalism in the sciences has been foundational to the emergence of global intellectual history. The philosophical and methodological challenges of even the most mediated and subtle kinds of constructivism create dual fundamentalist temptations, toward a self-refuting reductivism or an overstated idealism. The “strong program,” associated with the Edinburgh University Science Studies Unit, pursued a wholehearted sociology of science and argued that the truth-value of particular scientific ideas was itself social in origin, thus collapsing the discovery/validation dichotomy.
Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution
Authors: Livesey James
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.
Conclusion
Authors: Livesey James
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses political fragmentation that is often identified as the feature that differentiated Europe from other regions of the globe, from the fall of Rome to the twenty-first century. Researchers have not fully thought through the nature and consequences of stable diversity. It focuses on the Darwinian mechanisms of interstate competition and have been less sensitive to the capacity of fragmented but stable societies to form dynamic learning communities. The most important feature of a fragmented Europe, from this perspective, was not the spur to innovation of interstate competition that forms the focus of the research on the fiscal military state or its variant, the development state. The incentives to cooperation incubated in local, provincial contexts where individuals and groups were in constant contact were, if anything, even more important in explaining successful adaptation to change. The provinces of Europe, in a best-case scenario, could create stable contexts for cooperation and innovation.
Improvisation as System
Authors: Kloeckl Kristian
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the nature of improvisation as a concept and practice, drawing on literature from the social sciences, humanities, performance studies, and the emerging field of critical improvisation. By providing an understanding of the nature of improvisation, some of its key characteristics, and its historical ties with the urban context, this chapter provides a basis for the work with improvisation for the design in a hybrid city context. The radical and experimental work from the 1960s has gained new significance today, and networked information technologies have reached levels of performance and pervasiveness that were unthinkable half a century ago. Past works have used improvisation predominantly as a concept and metaphor. This chapter suggests, instead, that we consider improvisation more thoroughly to inform a method for the design of interactions in hybrid city environments.
Experimentation with Uncertainty and the Unpredictable
Authors: Kloeckl Kristian
Published: May 2020

This chapter illustrates this improvisation-based design model through an analysis of a number of recent interactive urban projects that vary in scope and scale. The improvisation-based model offers a different view of these projects that allows for a new understanding of their nature. The projects display some of the characteristics of improvisational dynamics discussed so far. They represent instances along a trajectory toward an improvisational perspective on the design of urban interactions. Not all of these examples display all elements of the model equally, but all of the examples display some of these elements to some extent. Examining these projects by way of the four positions of the improvisation-based design model helps illustrate how parts of the model can be used in a design process.
Prologue
Authors: Fullagar Kate
Published: May 2020

The evening of 10 December 1776 was exceptionally cold. It had been a trying winter for Londoners in more ways than one. News from across the Atlantic was getting worse every day, and no one seemed to agree on the best path forward. Some thought the American colonists were justified in their break for independence. Others believed that hanging was now not punishment enough. The weather didn’t help. Yet, undeterred by it all, that night the members and students of the Royal Academy of the Arts scurried up the steps into Somerset House on The Strand for their annual prize-giving ceremony. Perhaps they were eager for some distraction from the splintering of their empire. Perhaps they wanted simply to find out who were the medal winners for that year and to listen to their president’s seventh formal address....
A Cherokee Envoy and the Portrait That Failed
Authors: Fullagar Kate
Published: May 2020

The focus of this chapter alternates throughout from Ostenaco and his travels to the centre of London, to Reynolds’s endeavour to paint his portrait, back to Ostenaco, back to Reynolds, and then finally ends with Ostenaco’s voyage home in October 1762. The chapter covers only six months, but this period turned out to be portentous for both Cherokee and British fortunes. The Cherokees looked set to enjoy some assured independence herein and the British teetered on the verge of wiping out all imperial rivalry. Amid the narrative flipping, we follow Ostenaco’s adventures through the seamier regions of London’s lowlife—including taverns, spas, and drunken escapades in pleasure gardens—to his diplomatic meeting with King George III. We witness Reynolds’s meeting with Ostenaco and his attempt to capture the Cherokee’s image on canvas according to his neoclassical philosophy of art. Reynolds afterwards reckoned the work a failure—an intriguingly rare moment of defeat for the painter—but it nonetheless distils much about attitudes to empire in Britain at the time.
A Pacific Celebrity and the Portrait That Worked
Authors: Fullagar Kate
Published: May 2020

Chapter 7 picks up Mai’s story after his arrival in Britain and marries it with Reynolds’s story through the momentous years of 1774 to 1776. First, we focus on Mai. The First Admiral, Lord Sandwich, arranges for him to meet George III within days, before being taken over by the Pacific enthusiast Joseph Banks. Among the many personalities he meets is Charles Burney, father of a fellow Pacific voyager and one of Reynolds’s greatest mates. It is likely at a Burney-hosted dinner that Reynolds first encounters Mai. Reynolds exhibits his portrait of Mai at the Royal Academy in April 1776. The difficulties Reynolds had encountered when painting Ostenaco are now clearly resolved. The chapter closes amid the escalating tension preceding the American declaration of independence. Reynolds, as ever, weathers the storm through art and affability. Mai determines to head home by any means necessary, having by now gathered as much as he can from the British for his own personal plan of launching political action back home.
Return of the Traveler
Authors: Fullagar Kate
Published: May 2020

The final chapter traces Mai’s voyage back from Britain to the Pacific. This voyage was arranged by the British government and led, again, by James Cook. Mai experiences various adventures during the voyage, including some altercations with different indigenous groups. In New Zealand, Mai secures two Maori boys to join him as servants. His arrival on Tahiti proves moving for Islanders and British alike. Here Mai reunites with a sister and an aunt, wrangles with a chief, and acquires a large canoe. Mai expects to be deposited back on Ra‘iatea, but Cook at the last minute decides against it, fearing Islander conflagration, and takes him to Huahine instead. Disappointed, Mai is at least gratified to have Cook’s men build him a house. In many ways, Mai’s plotline is the most tragic of the three characters: he begins as a refugee from his own society and never fulfils his dream of restitution. Even so, Mai offers at least one small twist to the old tale—European empire never steals the limelight in his story; instead, Mai turns the tables by employing European empire, almost entirely on his own terms, to seek his ultimate end.
Epilogue
Authors: Fullagar Kate
Published: May 2020

By the time Captain Bligh made his enquiries at Huahine in 1789 Mai had been dead at least eight years. Probably nine. He had not reached his thirtieth birthday. Against everyone’s expectations, however, Mai did not perish through war. Most posthumous accounts agree that he died a natural death about three years after he said goodbye to Cook. Following multiple trips to his native Ra‘iatea and a credible attempt at its liberation, he succumbed in the end to a fever, or “ague.”...
The Enlightenment Rejection of Magic
Authors: Hunter Michael
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the state of affairs in the mid-eighteenth century. It also explores the extent to which a medical approach to magic and related phenomena became fashionable among intellectuals as part of the Enlightenment. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of doctors like Sir Hans Sloane and Richard Mead and the nature of their diagnosis of those with magical beliefs. Consideration is also given to the hitherto neglected influence of such ideas on liberal churchmen in their discussions of miracles and related topics. All this provides a means of exploring how scepticism on such subjects fits into our understanding of the Enlightenment as a whole.
Prologue
Authors: Scott Jonathan
Published: May 2020

Fewer than three hundred years ago there occurred the most fundamental reordering of human existence since the beginning of agriculture. How was this possible, involving as it did the disappearance of an entire and heavily defended way of life? The Industrial Revolution is a major field for economic and social historians. But explaining it requires us to understand a complex of developments across the early modern period connecting the sub-fields of environmental, economic, social, political, intellectual and cultural history, and to examine the unfolding of world-changing processes and events, including the large-scale migration of peoples....
A Maritime Monarchy
Authors: Scott Jonathan
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers the possibility of building a maritime monarchy and how the Anglo-Dutch Revolution achieved this. Early modern Europe was governed by territorial monarchies and small, sometimes maritime, republics and/or cities. The former were culturally and socially aristocratic, and the latter mercantile. But in the later seventeenth century, a new European great power emerged that was a territorial monarchy within which a landed aristocracy, enriched by the economic changes of the period, beginning with those revolutionizing agricultural productivity, became fully participant in its new commercial economy. The way in which Britain's ruling class in both Houses of Parliament intertwined hereditary nobility and a mercantile, manufacturing, and financial oligarchy had no European parallel. The strict separation of the world of work from socially mandated aristocratic idleness which applied elsewhere had disappeared.
An Empire of Customers
Authors: Scott Jonathan
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains how the growth of the colonial export sector distinguished the mercantile activity of Britain from that of other European powers from the middle of the eighteenth century. It was in the mid-eighteenth century that the value of British exports entered an unprecedented period of expansion. One factor facilitating this was a relative abundance of raw materials and of energy. Thus one reason the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain had to do with access by British merchants and manufacturers to coal, iron, tin, flax, wood, and wool as well as sugar, tobacco, and eventually cotton. But the other and more decisive factor concerned the size and growth of the markets, especially imperial markets, for British exports. As the most dynamic such market North America is the focus of the chapter. But in relation to the development of the economy as a whole, this should not be prematurely abstracted from its broader relationship to the empire.
Younger Sons and Their Families
Authors: Muir Rory
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the complicated relations between siblings during the Regency era, given the privileged position of the eldest son in the family. It shows that not all gentlemen were rich; indeed, many had little money of their own and had to pursue a career. The eldest son would normally inherit the family estate, while the daughters and younger sons would receive no more than a start in life. Inequality of various kinds was universal and taken for granted, challenged only by the most radical and impractical of political philosophers and French republicans in the most extreme phase of their disastrous revolution. Younger sons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries usually accepted their inferior position and meagre inheritance without complaint.
The Law
Authors: Muir Rory
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a look at the barristers. Becoming a barrister was always something of a gamble: only a minority achieved even a modicum of professional success, and many quit the profession in disgust while relatively young men. The position worsened in the years after the Napoleonic Wars when the size of the Bar expanded far more quickly than the demand for barristers — partly because the end of the war made alternative careers in the army and navy much less appealing. Nonetheless for an ambitious young man, particularly of an earlier generation, the Bar was not necessarily a bad choice: it required great effort and considerable ability, luck and patience, while the rewards were far from certain. But it was relatively open to talent, and the rewards of success were great, not just in material terms, but in prestige and fame, and it could open a door into a career in politics as well as in the law.
The Law
Authors: Muir Rory
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks to the other branch of the legal profession: the attorneys and solicitors. Attorneys and solicitors dealt directly with the client and cover a vast range of legal matters, including wills, property transfers, and other affairs that usually do not need to be tested in court. Attorneys were much more numerous than barristers in Regency England. The social standing of attorneys relative to the gentry, the clergy, and other genteel professions was also open to doubt. They certainly lacked the prestige of barristers. Indeed, attorneys seemed little better than school-teachers or the better sort of shopkeeper: respectable enough in their way, but not a career for the younger sons of the gentry. However, as the chapter shows, attorneys were also considered a rather gentlemanly profession, and many gentlemen indeed prospered by becoming one.
The Navy
Authors: Muir Rory
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a look at the navy. For many boys growing up in England in the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy was immensely glamorous, the object of intense fascination. There was almost universal agreement that the navy was Britain's own particular strength, and that unlike the army, the navy defended the country and promoted trade without threatening traditional English liberties. Even in peacetime there were naval exploits to capture the imagination. A career at sea, especially in the navy, appeared exciting, romantic, and desirable; and there were numerous cases of young boys either running away to sea or demanding that their parents allow them to join the navy. Many parents favoured the navy as a career for their younger sons on more pragmatic grounds. It was traditional, patriotic, and thoroughly respectable.
The Navy
Authors: Muir Rory
Published: May 2020

This chapter continues the discussion on careers in the navy, particularly in terms of career progression. On the whole the navy was not a particularly rewarding career for most officers. Life at sea, especially for a midshipman, was harsh, uncomfortable, and dangerous, while there was only a slim chance of making a fortune or even of becoming sufficiently prosperous to be able to marry and support a family in the style of a gentleman unless they had some private means of their own. Yet some men found it extremely satisfying, relishing their time at sea while also enjoying enforced periods of leisure at home with their families. This was largely a matter of taste and temperament rather than patronage or connections: there were plenty of men of all ages and ranks for whom the sight of a proud man-of-war setting sail lifted their hearts and made them thank fate — or their parents — for preserving them from a life of tedium and dullness behind a lawyer's desk or in a counting house. Patriotism, the pursuit of glory and, at least during the war, the sense of performing an essential service, provided intangible rewards, while a naval officer had a respected place in British society which long continued to regard the navy as central to its identity.
Having the Spirit of Christ
Authors: Bazzana Giovanni B.
Published: May 2020

The earliest Christian writings are filled with stories of spirit possession and exorcism, which were crucial for the activity of the historical Jesus and for the practice of his earliest followers. Possession, besides being a harmful event that should be exorcized, can also have a positive role in many cultures. Often it helps individuals and groups to reflect on and reshape their identity, to plan their moral actions, and to remember in a most vivid way their past. This book illustrates some of the major ways in which a critical aspect of spirit possession can emerge in texts of the early Christ movement. It begins with a reading of some well-known texts in the light of a more sophisticated notion of spirit possession, which emphasizes the cultural and religious productivity inscribed in it as well as the significance of its performative nature. The book continues by looking at the fundamental role played by spirit possession in the religious experience of Paul and of his Christ groups, and the social and ethical functions of the religious experience of possession in the Pauline groups. In conclusion, when reviewing insights drawn from anthropological literature, the book attempts to treat the “spirits” involved in cases of possession seriously and not merely as mythical and metaphorical representations.
If One Does Not Have the Spirit of Christ, One Does Not Belong to Him
Authors: Bazzana Giovanni B.
Published: May 2020

This chapter attends to the social and ethical functions of the religious experience of possession in the Pauline groups. Recent ethnographic literature has illustrated how spirit possession can have a truly “productive” role in shaping social structures, ways of knowing, moral agency, and even the formation of individual subjectivities. This chapter shows that these same traits are recognizable in the Pauline Christ groups. Specific attention are given to the forms in which possession enables a poiesis of the past. The sense of temporality underlying such an experience is remarkably different from the archival and academic study of history typical of western modernity. Through his very embodiment of the πνεῦμα‎ of Christ, Paul (and arguably the other members of his groups) could make the person of Christ present in a way that affectively and effectively informed not only their remembrance of and interaction with the past but also their moral agency and even their subjectification as Christ believers.
Conclusions
Authors: Bazzana Giovanni B.
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter illustrates some of the major ways in which a critical aspect of spirit possession can emerge in texts of the early Christ movement. It does so with the help of appropriate insights drawn from anthropological literature. A starting point here is the effort to treat the “spirits” involved in cases of possession seriously and not merely as mythical and metaphorical representations, as several earlier studies have done. Such a move naturally raises a host of complex questions concerning notions of ontology and agency. After all, the latter's allocation to nonhuman entities does collide with the established modern paradigm of the autonomous human individual as the only rightful possessor of agency.
Gender Mainstreaming and Gender Equality in Europe
Authors: Lomazzi Vera , Crespi Isabella
Published: May 2020

The book provides a systematic scientific overview of gender mainstreaming in Europe. It recalls the main steps of the origins and the development of the European gender mainstreaming (GM) strategy. The book also connects this framework with the current situation of gender equality and explores the strength and weak points of the strategy. To do so, it provides a critical evaluation of the instruments used to measure gender equality and explores how societal aspects, such as the opportunity structure defined by work-family balance policies and practices, affect the individual values of gender equality supporting the development of gender egalitarian cultures.
Further, it develops an outline of the current and future challenges of the gender mainstreaming strategy, that run in parallel with the general European Union’s challenges, such as the integration process, economic crisis, migration and refugees crisis, and the rise of right-wing Euroscepticism. In addition, the old but always current problem of conceptualizing gender equality in different ways leading to jeopardized results. The book offers a critical review of the GM strategy in Europe and analyses whether and how gender equality in Europe is improving, with a specific interest in the cultural differences between the European countries where this common strategy is implemented.
Gender mainstreaming in Europe: legislation and cultural changes
Authors: Lomazzi Vera , Crespi Isabella
Published: May 2020

The exploration of the development of the gender mainstreaming strategy and its effect on, European legislation concerning gender equality, from its beginnings to today is the aim of this chapter.The focus is on the role of the European Union in promoting substantive equality for men and women improving legislation in the European Union context and favouring a cultural change in the gender equality perspective.
Gender mainstreaming is analysed as the main legislative and cultural shift done for promoting gender equality in all European policies. Gender mainstreaming legislation requires the adoption of a gender perspective by all the central actors in the policy process and, even considering its limits and blunders, and is still the most crucial transnational strategy currently in existence that promotes gender equality in all domains of social life.
The legislation enquiries raised at the beginning of the gender mainstreaming implementation process in the EU around 1996 focused on the potential role of the EU in bridging the gap between formal and substantive equality, until nowadays and most recent guidelines, are the issues of the discussion in the chapter.
European gender cultures
Authors: Lomazzi Vera , Crespi Isabella
Published: May 2020

Wondering whethergender mainstreaming really supports the shift to a more gender-egalitarian Europe,this chapter explores the intertwined relation between individual gender role attitudes, gender regimes,and gender cultures in Europe. It investigates how structural aspects, which determine the opportunities available for men and women to achieve their goals, as well as cultural features, which establish socially constructed, predominant family models and legitimised gender roles, contribute to explaining individuals’ beliefs in gender equality.
The chapter reports empirical evidence of the positive effect of work-family balance policies, which enshrines the gender mainstreaming principles, on the promotion of gender egalitarian beliefs.
Thesepolicies and workplace practices allow working parents to combine their professional and personal responsibilities, directly affecting their opportunity structures. Because of such realistic opportunities, people tend to express more egalitarian views. At the same time, the implementation of work-family balance policies transmits a certain idea of a lifestyle model and family pattern, legitimising them through structural elements that contribute to changing current gender regimes.
Forecasting road traffic and its significance for transport policy
Authors: Goodwin Phil
Published: May 2020

Traffic forecasting developed initially to decide how much road capacity to provide, but early methods tended to underestimate the growth. The methods were changed but then from the late 1980s systematically overestimated traffic growth, distorting the appraisal of benefits, and transforming the policy implications: it became evident that no feasible road capacity expansion would be enough to cope with the forecast traffic, and it would be necessary to manage demand instead. Since 2015 the official forecasts have sensibly avoided specifying a ‘most probable’ future, replacing it with a variety of different possibilities from almost no growth to exceedingly high. This creates a framework for a much more useful type of policy appraisal, though practical road proposals mostly still confidently assert high traffic growth at levels which have not been seen for over 25 years.
Health, wellbeing and quality of life
Authors: Curl Angela , Clark Julie
Published: May 2020

Transport is fundamental to health, wellbeing and quality of life. By providing accessibility and mobility, it contributes positively to population health in numerous ways. At the same time, many significant health challenges can also be attributed to particular ways of travelling, with the dominance of the private car a particular issue. Transport has the potential to address health inequalities, yet despite a recent upsurge of interest in the benefits of active travel, health is seldom a primary consideration in transport policy. Proposing an agenda for change that puts health and wellbeing at the heart of transport policy, we investigate how transport and health policy can intertwine to realise the benefits of transport while mitigating its negative impacts, and argue that the underlying purpose of transport policy must be to improve the health and wellbeing of citizens.
Introduction
Authors: Whitworth Adam
Published: May 2020

Social policy and human geography are intimately intertwined yet frequently disconnected fields. Whilst social policies are always conceived, implemented and experienced in and through geography, the role of place in social policy scholarship and practice is frequently overlooked. Bringing together experts from both fields, this collection illuminates the myriad of ways that human geography offers rich insights conceptually, empirically and methodologically into the neglected spatialities of policy scholarship, practice and experience.
By building the necessary bridges towards a spatial social policy, this book enables the enhanced design, performance and understanding of social policies once properly rooted in their multiple spatialities.
Financialisation, Social Impact Bonds and the making of new market spaces in social policy
Authors: Wiggan Jay
Published: May 2020

Social Impact Investing (SII) is a mechanism by which governments seek to access and mobilise the resources of private for-profit and philanthropic capital to finance a range of social policies. SII is used increasingly but remains relatively under-examined conceptually, empirically and particularly geographically. This chapter explores the ways in which SII represents a distinctive process of extensive financialisation that creates new financialised market space within social welfare programmes. In doing so, the chapter examines how SII forges new financial chains of value that transform geographically rooted ‘problem’ populations and welfare delivery into investable products linked to distant mobile national and global financial market actors. Through this spatially transformative financial shift, it is argued that the SII starting point of finance capital for welfare provision instead results in appropriating additional public resources for finance capital
Situating social policy analysis: possibilities from quantitative and qualitative GIS
Authors: Orford Scott , Webb Brian
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the potential use of GIS in social policy analysis. It describes the advantages of GIS as an approach to social policy enquiry and provides a number of extant examples from a variety of policy fields. Although it is typically thought of as a quantitative method, the chapter also emphasises more recent qualitative uses of GIS. The chapter addresses some of the barriers to the use of GIS in social policy and how these can be overcome. The chapter concludes with an overview of how recent innovations in GIS and the availability of social data can have a positive impact on the use of GIS in the field of social policy.
The historical trajectory of social innovation in the European Union
Authors: Verschraegen Gert , Oosterlynck Stijn , Sabato Sebastiano , Novy Andreas
Published: May 2020

This chapter outlines the history of practices and discourses of social innovation in the EU, thus demonstrating how EU institutions have shaped the meaning and content of social innovation over time. It discusses the historical roots of social innovation in Europe and analyses how it evolved from a grassroots model of social action in the 1970s into a crucial dimension in official EU policy making during the Barroso Commission (2004-2014). Taking a chronological approach, the chapter situates social innovation developments within the broader policy framework of the EU’s overarching strategies: the re-launched Lisbon Strategy (2006-2010) and the Europe 2020 initiative (2010-ongoing) and assesses how the notion of social innovation has been used to creatively combine apparently contradictory policy goals within the Europe 2020 Strategy, such as poverty reduction on the one hand, competitiveness on the other.
Social and employment policies in Europe from a multilevel perspective
Authors: Zimmermann Katharina
Published: May 2020

Chapter 2 discusses the characteristics of and the relationship between European and local social and employment policies. It starts with an overview on EU cohesion policy and characterises the ESF as a specific governance tool which nowadays combines financial, programmatic and procedural aspects in a unique manner. In a second step, the chapter discusses the crucial role of the local level in current activation policies. Chapter 2 argues that the local level deserves specific attention and should not be subsumed under national welfare systems. Furthermore, the streamlined EU cohesion policy and particularly the ESF establish a stronger direct link between the European and the local level and confront local actors with new opportunities and challenges.
A broader perspective on local policies and the European Social Fund
Authors: Zimmermann Katharina
Published: May 2020

Chapter 8 departs from the empirical findings presented in chapter 6 and 7 and develops an empirically-grounded typology of local responses to the European Social Fund in the field of social and employment policies. The three major empirical patterns of how local policy fields deal with the ESF and under which conditions they do so, are discussed in turn. The first type refers to the so-called ‘refuseniks’; cases where local social and employment actors experienced the ESF more as a burden than as a welcome financial gift. In the second type, it was observable that actors with clear and pre-defined own ideas used the ESF-funding to finance these ideas. Such ‘cream skimmer’ cases did not experience significant change of their local policy fields through the ESF. In the third type (the ‘transformers’), this was clearly different: here, local social and employment policies were strongly shaped by the ESF. Chapter 8 discusses to what extent these types can be (contingently) generalised to other cases in Europe and beyond, and what the implications of the findings are for theoretical debates in the field of Europeanisation.
The Generation Game: ending the phoney information war between young and old
Authors: Ginn Jay , Duncan-Jordan Neil
Published: May 2020

A recurring theme in right wing thinking is that older people are a burden on the young, absorbing an unfair share of national resources, including spending on state pensions, benefits, NHS and social care. This perspective is presented as a zero-sum game, in which generations must compete for scarce resources, their interests being in conflict. In contrast, others say that pensioners have by no means escaped the impact of austerity policies and that life expectancy has flatlined. In this chapter, we examine these views and the statistical evidence used to support them. We conclude that it is essential to distinguish both inter-cohort differences in the lifecourse, as well as intra-cohort inequalities of income, wealth and life chances that are associated with gender, class and ethnicity; that all generations need a secure income in retirement and sufficient health and social care; that older people’s past and current contributions to society are substantial but often invisible; and that intergenerational solidarity through families and social institutions promotes the welfare of all ages.
Lyme disease politics and evidence‑based policy making in the UK
Authors: Bloor Kate
Published: May 2020

There are few ‘accepted’ approaches to dealing with tick- borne infections (including Lyme disease) that have not been challenged. This case study looks at my role in UK Lyme patient’s activism and policy change (for example, related to the NICE clinical guidelines process) focussing on one specific policy issue. It shows how critical analysis of scientific, clinical and other real- world evidence drew on and reflected the ethos of the Radstats network. It is a story showing how I worked with others with statistical skills - using science and evidence to challenge policy successfully. It explains how communities can take action, while using or creating scientific knowledge - to improve policy and people’s health. It shows how networks of communities can engage through social change (based on an understanding of policy and science) to make it more socially relevant and responsive, as well as more scientifically robust.
The quantitative crisis in UK sociology
Authors: Williams Malcolm , Sloan Luke , Brookfield Charlotte
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the ‘crisis’ in UK quantitative methods, primarily that as exemplified by sociology, and the response to it over the last two decades, from research identifying the problem in the early 2000s, to the current Q-Step initiative, which aims for a ‘step change’ in quantitative methods teaching. This we describe as a ‘revolution’ and the purpose of this chapter is to assess the likely success of this ‘revolution’. We provide an overview of the projects which aimed to describe, explain and address the crisis. We then briefly sketch out a methodological history of UK sociology, from which we conclude that UK sociology has been predominantly qualitative and humanistic for much of its existence and this, we argue, is a barrier to the success of the current initiatives. Although Q-Step will have increased the number of UK trained quantitative social scientists, who in turn may shape the culture of their departments, grafting number onto existing structures and a prevailing culture of humanism may only have a superficial, or even ephemeral effect.
Turning solutions into ‘structural’ problems: unemployment insurance, Denmark, 1992–93
Authors: Hansen Magnus Paulsen
Published: May 2020

Chapter 5 analyses the reform process ending with ‘The active labour market policy act’ (1992-93) of the Danish unemployment insurance system. The chapter explains how a number of instruments that were initially qualified to keep the existing normative principles alive became requalified and reshaped to activation. The reform introduced an individual contract in combination with it with a number of different instruments: leave schemes to ease access to the labour market, job training for the unemployed and job offers that the unemployed, after a period of time, would have to accept in order to continue to receive compensation.
Infinite testing: tests and critique in and below the public
Authors: Hansen Magnus Paulsen
Published: May 2020

In chapter 9 the key dynamics driving the active turn are teased out. The composite and tension-filled repertoire installs a multicausal and behavioural problematisation of unemployment where there is constant room for improvement and adjustments. At the level of public debate, this manifests in a permanent testing of policy instruments’ behavioural effect. At the level of the every-day governing of the unemployed, the tensions between the different cities of the active turn are mitigated in categorisations and various and continuous tests that evaluate the behaviour of the unemployed. The tests, such as profiling, screening, interviews and contracts, thus continuously ask what kind of subject the unemployed person is (i.e., what city do you live in?), how worthy are you and what instruments will make you more worthy, that is bring you closer to working. The chapter then points to the implications for the way in which the voice of the unemployed is qualified. The book ends with a discussion of to what extend the ideas of universal basic income and social economy/enterprises, that have received growing attention in international policy debates, contain credible alternatives to the moral economy of activation.
Strategies of resistance in the neoliberal university
Authors: Hamilton Mary
Published: May 2020

Major changes are taking place in the UK university sector as HE is transformed into a high value commodity on the international market. These changes impact strongly on the day-to-day experience, relationships and identities of academic staff.
This chapter reports on an interview study of academics’ writing practices in three UK Universities and three disciplines. Despite ample and vivid evidence of stress, acceleration of work, loss of autonomy and deteriorating working conditions we found little trace in our data of organized, collective resistance. However, there were many examples of tactical and symbolic workarounds and of staff holding on to core disciplinary values and vocational commitments. The chapter suggests that the framework of "everyday resistance" as proposed and documented in many contexts by Scott and others helps us to understand these reactions and how they reflect high levels of discomfort and wider frustration with the directions in which universities are moving.
The marginalisation of popular education: 50 years of Danish adult education policy
Authors: Larson Anne , Cort Pia
Published: May 2020

Drawing on Biesta’s distinction between three functions of education: qualification, socialisation and subjectification, the chapter traces adult education policy in Denmark from the 1960s to the 2010s. Based on analysis of policy papers, we show how adult education policy during the past 50 years has developed from a combined focus on all three functions of education to a dominant focus on qualification from a human capital perspective, subordinating socialisation and subjectification to the idea of integration into the labour market and being employable. By shedding light on changes in adult education policies, we aim to question today’s language of economic necessity and technocratic inevitability in relation to adult education policy and to evoke a discussion about what adult education should be good for. The historical reading of Danish adult education policy, thus, serves as a resistant act by showing that adult education can be and has been thought otherwise.