POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Services & Welfare

The help we give to others can be more effective and more just if we cultivate greater levels of compassion. Jason Wood reviews the research and talks to experts from across the world to make the moving case for greater compassion in public life.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Bringing to light the most contemporary research, policy and practice, this book presents stark evidence from Irish experience to argue that we need to urgently reimagine the root causes of homelessness and provides a robust evidence base to reimagine how we respond to homelessness.

This revised edition uses extensive updated research and survey evidence to challenge the view of 'skivers versus strivers', showing how much our lives vary not just as we age, but from week-to-week and year-to-year.

Amid urgent debates around the function of welfare in the post-industrial 21st Century, and how we pay for it, David Byrne and Sally Ruane deploy the concepts and analytical tools of Marxist political economy to better understand recent developments, and the possibilities they present for social change.

Telling the stories of low-income families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic in the UK and offers key policy recommendations for change.

Based on the findings of the Innovate Project, this book asks how services can be re-envisioned and transformed through innovation. The authors offer insights into the core conditions necessary for socially just and practice-congruent social care innovation that responds to the distinctive, contemporary safeguarding concerns facing young people.

Drawing on the history of social care, international comparisons and lived experience, this vital book outlines a different vision of social care as an essential part of England’s economic and social infrastructure that enables people to live good lives.

The third edition of this long-established guide offers an invaluable, authoritative and concise introduction to community development. Fully updated to reflect changes in policy, practice, economics and culture it will equip readers with an understanding of the history and theory of community development, as well as practical guidance.

With the UK’s decision to leave the EU as one of the greatest challenges in the EU’s history, this book seeks to understand the role played by social policy in the referendum campaign and withdrawal negotiations, and considers what Brexit means for social policy development both in the UK and across the EU.

Contributors including Brian Eno, Demos Helsinki, California’s Y Combinator Research and prominent academics explore the impact Universal Basic Income could have on work, welfare and inequality in the 21st century.

In Broken Benefits, Sam Royston argues that social security isn’t working, and without a change in direction, it will be even less fair in the future.

He provides an introductory guide to social security, correcting misunderstandings and presents practical ideas of how benefits should be reformed.

This book sets out practical and theoretically robust approaches for understanding and tracking change that any organisation can use to evaluate their contribution to social change and become more efficient and effective.