Public administration

This book will improve understanding of how voluntary organisations are structured and evolve, and how they respond to opportunities and constraints. Drawing on case studies with eight UK organisations, it addresses the key dilemmas of voluntary action and explores how these are experienced and managed within particular organisations.

Moving up and getting on is the first accessible, yet comprehensive, text to critique the effectiveness of recent integration and social cohesion policies. It argues that there needs to be greater emphasis on the social aspects of integration and opportunities for meaningful social contact between migrants and longer-settled residents.

This study, by a qualitative sociologist, uses interpretive methods to examine the impact of auditing and inspection on professional work in schools, hospitals, local government and the police and provides a true sense of what is practically involved in the work of counting, measuring and managing quality.

Presenting the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world, this book offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.

Published to coincide with the first anniversary of the election, this book looks at the Coalition government in the context of conservative ideas and seeks to assess what, if anything, is new about it.

Setting a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, this book shows that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation.

In this comprehensive account, Janice Morphet analyses the role and use of outsourcing within the UK public sector since the mid-1970s and illustrates the impact it has had on ideology, policy narratives and public expectations in the present.

This book analyses experiences of partnerships in different policy fields, identifying theoretical and practical impediments to making partnership work and evaluating the implications for those involved. It also addresses other key forms of collaboration between voluntary, private and statutory sectors, service users and community groups.

How did partnerships come to emerge almost everywhere and at almost the same time? What is the inner logic of partnerships? And at what point does that logic begin to break down? This book improves our understanding of the shifting ground on which partnerships and agreements must be reached in today's hyper-complex society.

This is the first biography of Abel-Smith. It takes a historical perspective to analyse the development of health and social welfare systems since the 1950s, exposing the critical impact of long-running debates on poverty and state responsibility, especially in Britain.

This book focuses on how personalisation - the idea that public services should be tailored to the individual, with budgets devolved to the service user or frontline staff - evolved as a policy narrative and has mobilised wide-ranging political support.

This topical book offers an analysis of the current state of the planning system in England and an evidence-based review of over a decade of change. With a critique of ongoing UK planning reforms, the book argues that the planning system is often blamed for a range of issues that are in fact the fault of ineffective policymaking.