All Publications
Doing Politics
is now free to access at doingpolitics.space. I want to write about politics as something people do, to describe a politics grounded in human action and interaction – in the gathering and meeting, talking and writing of embodied and situated human beings…
The role of the councillor and the work of meeting
This paper picks up a theme from the recent literature on the councillor, that of time spent in meeting, and suggests that if we are to understand the role of the councillor we must understand the work the meeting does. The discussion is based in a series of...
Meeting, talk and text: policy and politics in practice
Our prevailing accounts of the policy process are challenged by studies of practice as well as by practitioners themselves. This paper sets out an alternative, grounded in politics and sociology and informed by recent work in related disciplines. Drawing on the...
Europe in translation: governance, integration and the project form
Policy makers and commentators refer readily to ‘the European project’, as though Europe itself were a project. But what would it mean to take this term seriously, to develop the account of European governance it seems to suggest? This chapter begins on the ground, in the everyday understanding of the project as an organizational form…
Teaching politics after the practice turn
The ‘practice turn’ and its associated ontology, epistemology and methodology are now well established in political research. In this article, we identify and explore a corollary pedagogy. After outlining the principal components of practice theory, we compare case-...
Working for Equality: policies, politics, people
Equality is a hugely important topic for most Scots and many of us want to see a more equal society. But what kind of equality do we want, and how, in practice, might we achieve it? This book brings together a group of experienced practitioners from across the country...
Care, policy, knowledge: translating between worlds
served as postscript to Vicky Singleton, Claire Waterton and Natalie Gill’s new Sociological Review Monograph on Care and Policy Practices…
Doing comparison: producing authority in an international organization
Comparison is crucial to the way that policy organizations know the world, and nowhere more so than in the work of international organizations, which inevitably find themselves comparing policies and practices in different national settings. But how should we...
Doing Local Politics in Scotland
What is it that local councillors do when they go about their work? How do officers understand their role and engage within and beyond the council? How do communities connect with local councils and interact with councillors and officers? A better understanding of...
The Work of Commissions in Scotland
This paper reports a project undertaken by the Academy of Government, in collaboration with Oxfam Scotland, on the work of commissions. Its purpose was to inform a report by Oxfam Scotland responding to the Scottish Government’s announcement, in the Fairer Scotland...
Knowing Governance. The epistemic construction of political order
Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and reproduce? How are new understandings of governance produced in practice, by scientists and policy makers and...
Knowledge, policy and coordinated action: mental health in Europe
As a knowledge-based international agency, WHO offers a useful opportunity to explore the nature of knowledge in policy making.
Knowledge and policy in research and practice
We sum up this volume by restating our initial ambition, which was to develop a framework for investigation rather than to formulate any specific theory.
Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted
This important collection presents a radical reconception of the place of knowledge in contemporary policymaking in Europe, based not on assumptions about evidence, expertise or experience but on the different forms that knowledge takes. Knowledge is embodied in...
Introduction: knowledge in policy – embodied, inscribed, enacted
The literature on the role of knowledge in policy making encompasses a striking diversity of views on just what knowledge is, what different types of knowledge there may be and how they are to be observed empirically.
Introduction: knowing governance
Knowing Governance sets out to understand governance through the making of knowledge about governance itself.
Introduction: governing Europe’s spaces: European Union re-imagined
What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? What unacknowledged assumptions do we hold? This Introduction argues that, for a long time, EU studies has been dominated by discussions in which ‘the EU’ is consistently treated as an object: supranational, intergovernmental, multi-level, monotopia.
Reciprocal instrumentalism: Scotland, WHO Europe, and mental health
This paper explores the relationship between the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe (WHO Europe) and Scotland in the context of mental health
Making knowledge for international policy: WHO Europe and mental health policy, 1970-2008
It is widely agreed that the effectiveness of the World Health Organization (WHO) as a policy body derives chiefly from its reputation as a source of authoritative knowledge. However, little has been done to show just how WHO mobilises knowledge for policy purposes.
For a (self-)critical comparison
This paper reflects on the design and organization of cross-national comparative research in social and public policy, based in our own experience of leading and taking part in projects of this kind.
Rhizomic regulation: mobilising knowledge for mental health in Europe
Regulation depends fundamentally upon the production and dissemination of knowledge. At a minimum, one might imagine a mechanical model of regulation which involves regulator A exerting control over the actions of actor B. But even here, knowledge is crucial, for B must know what kinds of actions A requires or considers appropriate if regulation is to occur.
Stakeholder consultation and social mobilization: framing Scottish mental health policy
Public and stakeholder consultation is increasingly important in the policy process, both in the UK and elsewhere. Social scientists have considered consultation primarily in terms of how it relates to decision-making – either as a means of involving a wider constituency of actors in the decision-making process, or as a means of legitimizing the decisions taken by policymakers.
Reverb policy making in wave form
A new paper in Environment and Planning A explores how we might think of policy as something that moves
The practice of policy making
Editorial introduction to the special issue of Evidence and Policy 7 (2) The Practice of Policy Making. Source: Evidence and Policy 7 (2) 125-133 link SaveSave
Documents, practices and policy
What are the practices of policy making? In this paper, we seek to identify and understand them by attending to one of the principal artifacts – the document – through which they are organised.
Introduction
We are concerned here with community psychiatry, a particular way of knowing and thinking about mental illness and of responding to it. Community psychiatry, for our purposes, refers to all the policies, services, agencies and staff deployed in treating people with mental health problems who are poor and for whom publicly-funded services are the default, if not the only, option.
‘Policy opportunities’
What is policy? How do we do or make policy? Where and who with? What is it for, anyway, and what difference does it make? Good questions, though you wouldn’t be asking them if you didn’t already know that answering them isn’t easy.
Implementing recovery: an analysis of the key technologies in Scotland
Background: Over the past ten years the promotion of recovery has become a stated aim of mental health policies within a number of English speaking countries, including Scotland. Implementation of a recovery approach involves a significant reorientation of mental health services and practices, which often poses significant challenges for reformers.
Analysing policy transfer: perspectives for operational research
Policy transfer occurs regularly. In essence, a strategy developed elsewhere is taken up and applied in another policy context. Yet what precisely is policy transfer and, more importantly, under what conditions does it occur? This paper describes policy transfer and addresses three main questions, exploring what perspectives of policy transfer might contribute to operational research (OR) efforts.
Les transformations du système de santé mentale: l’exemple de l’Ecosse
System transformation in mental health is of immediate concern across countries throughout Europe and beyond. In this paper we describe a paradigm shift in Scottish policy from the control of psychiatric disorder to mental health governance and explore the means by which it has been supported and sustained
Transformation of a mental health system – the case of Scotland
System transformation in mental health is of immediate concern across countries throughout Europe and beyond.
Knowledge in policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted
The literature on the role of knowledge in policy making encompasses a striking diversity of views on just what knowledge is, what different types of knowledge there may be and how they are to be observed empirically.
The Practice of Policy Making: special issue, Evidence and Policy
The papers in this special issue began life as contributions to an ESRC-funded seminar series Policy as Practice: Understanding theWork of Policy Makers. The series promoted and facilitated exchange and debate of ideas about the practice of policy making. Seeing...
Indicating Mental Health in Scotland
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL
Health
This paper reviews comparative research on health policy in OECD countries, outlining the origins and development of health policy in the modern state and pointing to the different ways that development has been understood by welfare state scholars.
Health care systems and the problem of classification
Classification is integral to comparison. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the nature, purpose and limits of classification in comparative health policy.
Recovering Mental Health in Scotland: ‘recovery’ from social movement to policy goal
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL link
Towards a Mentally Flourishing Scotland: consultation process as public action
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL link
Scotland, Mental Health and WHO
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL link
articulation, assemblage, alignment: the project in/of EU governance
The project, and by extension the programme, is a key instrument of European governance. The function of the project is to draw heterogeneous sets of actors together, to generate connections between them, to articulate them.
The Fabrication, Circulation and Use of Knowledge-based Regulatory Instruments in European Countries
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL link
Comparative Studies and the Politics of Modern Medical Care
This new collection explores recent patterns in health care regulation, financing, and delivery across countries. Wide-ranging essays cover both key countries (Canada, Germany, Holland, the United Kingdom and the United States) and key issues, including primary care, hospital care, long-term care, pharmaceutical policy, and private health insurance. Respective authors pay close attention throughout to the […]
WHO, Mental Health, Europe
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL link
What is translation?
What is ‘translation’, and how might it help us think differently about knowledge transfer and exchange? The purpose of this article is to set out, for policy makers and practitioners, the theoretical and conceptual resources that translation holds and seems to represent.
The United Kingdom: health policy learning in the NHS
Source: Marmor, T R, Freeman, R and Okma, K (eds) Comparative Studies and the Politics of Modern Medical Care, New Haven: Yale UP link SaveSave
Introduction
Source: Marmor, T R, Freeman, R and Okma, K (eds) Comparative Studies and the Politics of Modern Medical Care, New Haven: Yale UP link SaveSave SaveSave
Comparing health systems
This chapter reviews the modes and functions of cross-national comparison in health services research and policy. Source: Mullner, R (ed) Encyclopaedia of Health Services Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage link SaveSave
Pharmaceutical politics in OECD countries
Source: Marmor, T R, Freeman, R and Okma, K (eds) Comparative Studies and the Politics of Modern Medical Care, New Haven: Yale UP link SaveSave
A National Health Service, by comparison
The National Health Service (NHS) has always been compared to other things, to other organizations and systems both at home and abroad. This paper explores those comparisons, beginning with the origins of national public health care in Lloyd George’s study of German social insurance, and ending with Gordon Brown’s claims for the NHS as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’.
Global health and the problem of governance
Source: Harvard Health Policy Review 9 (1) 26-34 link SaveSave
Learning by meeting
It has become something of a truism that organisational and political environments are internationalised, and that policy making is informed at least in part by increased understanding of what takes place in parallel domains and jurisdictions.
Comparative perspectives and policy learning
Source: Morone, J A, Litman, T J and Robins, L S (eds) Health Politics and Policy, London: Cengage Delmar Learning link SaveSave
Western Europe, health systems of
Source: Heggenhougen, K and Quah, S (eds) International Encyclopaedia of Public Health, vol 6 San Diego: Academic Press/Elsevie link
Mental health policy making in Ethiopia
Source: The Scottish Government email link
Organizing mental health in Scotland
This paper reports the first phase of a research project on mental health policy in Scotland that investigates the way knowledge is mobilised in the policy process.
Scottish Mental Health Policy: context and analysis
Source: EC integrated project 028848-2 KNOWandPOL link
Epistemological bricolage: how practitioners make sense of learning
How do policy makers come to know what they know? How do they think of learning? And how does that inform what they do? In this qualitative, empirical study, public health officials variously display scientific, institutional, and more socially situated epistemological strategies or rationalities.
Social democracy, uncertainty and health in Scotland
Health policy is as modern as social democracy. This is not to suggest that social democracy is some sort of ’cause’ of health policy, but that their environments – political, economic, demographic, social and ideological – are shared. Underpinning all of these is a common, modern epistemology, which frames the causes and effects of social problems and the capacities of government in specific ways.
Saglik Politikalari Süricinde Ögrenme [Learning in health policy]
Source: Keyder, C, Üstündag, Agartan, T and Yoltar, C (eds) Avrupa'da ve Türkiye'de Saglik Politikalari. Reformlar, sorunlar, tartismalar, Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari link
The work the document does. Research, policy and equity in health
At the center of the politics of health equity, in many countries and circumstances, stands a signal report of research. This article is concerned with what might be described as the architecture of such documents, including how they are produced and organized and the relationships they demonstrate with others that parallel, precede, and succeed them.
Learning in public policy
Introduction – Convergence, Diffusion, and Learning – Public Policy as Collective Puzzling – Learning in Practice – The Elements of Learning – Learning by Comparison Source: Rein, M, Moran, M and Goodin, R E (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, Oxford: Oxford...
Comparative perspectives and policy learning in the world of health care
The main point of this article is to explore the methodological questions raised by weaknesses in international comparative work in the field of health policy. The core question is how competent learning from one nation to another can take place.
Making sense of health politics through cross-national comparison: Odin Anderson’s seminal essay
Source: Journal of Health Services Research and Policy 8 (3) 180-182 link SaveSave
Welfare, participation and dissent in public policy
Relationships between states and citizens are defined at least in part through respective obligations and entitlements to welfare. Harold Lasswell’s ‘Who gets what, when, how’ is as good a definition of welfare as of politics: welfare is both source and target of a high proportion of political conflict in advanced industrial societies.
The health care state in the information age
The computerization of the medical record has important implications for the governance of health care, and the importance of health care means that changes wrought there are indicative of changes in government as a whole.
Learning from devolution: UK policy since 1999
Source: British Journal of Health Care Management 8 (12) 462-466 link SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave
HIV and the blood supply in the United Kingdom: professionalization and pragmatism
Source: Bovens, M, t'Hart, P and Peters, B G (eds) Success and Failure in Governance. A comparative analysis of European states, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar link
New Knowledge in New Settings: social learning in the health sector
Source: European Science Foundation, Standing Committee for the Social Sciences. link
Reforming health care in Europe
Source: West European Politics 23 (2) 35-58 link
The politics of health in Europe
This was the first general comparative study of health policy and politics to focus on the major countries of Western Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. 1 Health politics; 2 The health care state in Europe, 1880-1980; 3 National health services: Italy,...
Reforming health care in Europe
Source: Ferrera, M and Rhodes, M (eds) Recasting European Welfare States, London: Frank Cass. SaveSave
Welfare and Culture in Europe. Towards a new paradigm in social policy
This innovative volume describes how an awareness of culture must be applied to the study and provision of welfare in Europe. It shows how the cultures underpinning social welfare systems are starting to be exposed and explored. The assumption that the values and...
Conclusion: a new culture of welfare
Source: Chamberlayne, P, Cooper, A, Freeman, R and Rustin, M (eds) Welfare and Culture in Europe. Towards a new paradigm in social policy, London: Jessica Kingsley link
Recursive politics: prevention, modernity and social systems
The aim of this paper is to connect the recent interest in prevention to recent developments in social theory. It begins by recovering some of prevention’s essential features from the realm of common sense, showing that what is taken to be the common sense of prevention is emblematic of modernity.
Introduction: welfare, culture and Europe
Source: Chamberlayne, P, Cooper, A, Freeman, R and Rustin, M (eds) Welfare and Culture in Europe. Towards a new paradigm in social policy, London: Jessica Kingsley link
Institutions, states and cultures: health policy and politics in Europe
Source: Clasen, J (ed) Comparative Social Policy. Concepts, theories and methods, Oxford: Blackwell link
Policy Responses to AIDS in Europe
Source: European Commission EUR 17789 - Research on bioethics - AIDS: Ethics, Justice and European Policy
Competition in context: the politics of health care reform in Europe
The purpose of this paper is to provide a basis for exploring the relationship between competition and quality in health care by delineating the different institutional economic and political contexts in which pro-competitive reform was conceived and carried out in different European countries
The German model: the state and the market in health care reform
Source: Ranade, W (ed) Markets and Health Care. A comparative analysis, Harlow: Longman link
Pathways through care: the experience of psychiatric patients
The aim of this project was to identify the pathway through psychiatric care beyond the point of first admission.
User perspectives on psychiatric services: a report of a qualitative survey
Source: Journal of the Association for Quality in Health Care 3 (2) 65-72
Discharged into the community: the experience of psychiatric patients
Source: Social Services Research 1995 (1) 27-35 link
Prevention as a problem of modernity: the example of HIV and AIDS
Source: Gabe, J (ed) Medicine, Health and Risk. Sociological Approaches, Sociology of Health and Illness Monograph Series, Oxford: Blackwell
Prevention and government: health policy making in the United Kingdom and Germany
The gap between rhetoric and reality in health policy making for disease prevention services is well recognized.
Prevention in health policy in the Federal Republic of Germany
The comparative study of what tend to be regarded as marginal questions of health policy, such as prevention, is developing slowly.
Social Policy in Germany
An introduction to, and detailed analysis of, social policy provision in Germany. A specially selected team of authors look at the historical development of social policy in Germany; the framework for policy making today; the main areas of social policy (social...
The German Social State: an introduction
Source: Clasen, J and Freeman, R (eds) Social Policy in Germany, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. SaveSave
Pathways through Psychiatric Care. Identification of pathways through care by examination of the experiences of psychiatric patients
Source: Tayside Health Board
Prevention in health policy in the United Kingdom and the NHS
Source: Mills, M (ed) Prevention, Health and British Politics, Aldershot: Avebury
Governing the voluntary sector response to AIDS: a comparative study of the UK and Germany
The impact of AIDS on Western polities serves as a useful indicator both of social values and of political and organisational relationships.
Governing the voluntary sector response to AIDS: a comparative study of the UK and Germany
Source: Kuhnle, S and Selle, P (eds) Government and Voluntary Organizations. A relational perspective, Aldershot: Avebury
The idea of prevention: a critical review
Source: Scott, S J, Williams, G H, Platt, S D and Thomas H A (eds) Private Risks and Public Dangers, Aldershot: Avebury
The politics of AIDS in Britain and Germany
Source: Aggleton, P, Davies, P and Hart, G (eds) AIDS: Rights, Risk and Reason, papers from the fifth conference on Social Aspects of AIDS, Brighton: Falmer