Social policy, care & welfare
My first university job was as a Lecturer in Public and Social Policy at Bradford. In practice,this meant, among other things, teaching and writing on social policy. This policy focus has roamed across many areas, including social services and social work, family, professions, gender equality, violence, and ageing. Throughout much of the teaching, I actually saw, perhaps oddly, part of my task as helping students not to see social policy as a separate field, but as part and parcel of society, politics and policy. ‘Social policy’ was not, in my mind, a separate field of activity or study. Meanwhile in the mid-1980s I completed my PhD on social planning, social theory and patriarchy, bringing together the earlier engagement in urban planning with politics, social policy, sociology, social theory, and gender studies. The wider interest in politics and policy has continued, in work on, for example, the ongoing restructuring of the state, anti-violence policy, political masculinities, the gendered nature of public politics more generally, and the ever more pressing questions of crisis and crises of many kinds, locally and globally. And then throughout all of this, the very everyday questions and demands of care and welfare remain for many, perhaps for all in some sense, and most clearly for the vulnerable. These are down-to-earth matters, as with the practicalities of developing good policies and practices for and with older people in relation ageing, gender, inequalities, health, care, and increasingly digitalisation.
Selected Works
- ‘Planning under difficulties: The move to decrementalism’, with Ida Roberts, in Katherine Jones (ed.) The Yearbook of Social Policy in Britain 1975, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1976, pp. 3-18. View PDF
- ‘Decrementalism: The practice of cuts and the theory of planning’, in Patsy Healey, Glen McDougall and Michael J. Thomas (eds.) Planning Theory in the 80s, Pergamon, Oxford, 1982, pp. 161-179. View PDF
- ‘Notes on patriarchy, professionalisation and the semi-professions’, Sociology, Vol. 16(2), May 1982, pp. 184-202. Read here
- ‘Men, fatherhood and the state: national and transnational perspectives’, in Barbara Hobson (ed.), Making Men into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 245-272, 293-294. Read here
- ‘Gendered policy and policy on gender: The case of “domestic violence”’, with Linda McKie, Policy and Politics: An International Journal, Vol. 36(1), 2008, pp. 75-91. Read here
- ‘Gendered and social hierarchies in problem representation and policy processes: ‘Domestic violence’ in Finland and Scotland’, with Linda McKie, Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 16(2), 2010, pp. 136-158. Read here
- ‘Care and work matter: A social sustainability approach’, with Charlotta Niemistö and Carolyn Kehn, in Christa Binswanger and Andrea Zimmermann (eds.) Transitioning to Gender Equality (SDG5), Transitioning to Sustainability Series: Volume 5, MDPI, Basel, 2021, pp. 179-195. Read here
- ‘Work, care and gendered (in)equalities’, with Charlotta Niemistö, in Marie Sandberg and Janne Tienari (eds.) Transformative Action for Sustainable Outcomes: Responsible Organising, Routledge, London, 2022, pp. 105-110. Read here
- ‘The place and potential of crisis/crises in critical studies on men and masculinities’, Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought, Vol. 12(3-4), 2022, pp. 563-585. Read here
- ‘Evaluating the concept of political masculinity/ies: A simple idea or a case of too many ideas?’ European Journal of Politics and Gender, Vol. 7(3), 2024, pp. 326-344. Read here
- What’s the Problem with Older People?: A Policy Analysis of Selected Finnish Reports and Documents on Ageing, Care and Digitalisation, with Hanna Sjögren, Charlotta Niemistö and Margaux Viallon, Hanken School of Economics Working Paper, No. 567, Helsinki, 2023. 43 pp. Read here
Social policy, care & welfare
My first university job was as a Lecturer in Public and Social Policy at Bradford. In practice,this meant, among other things, teaching and writing on social policy. This policy focus has roamed across many areas, including social services and social work, family, professions, gender equality, violence, and ageing. Throughout much of the teaching, I actually saw, perhaps oddly, part of my task as helping students not to see social policy as a separate field, but as part and parcel of society, politics and policy. ‘Social policy’ was not, in my mind, a separate field of activity or study. Meanwhile in the mid-1980s I completed my PhD on social planning, social theory and patriarchy, bringing together the earlier engagement in urban planning with politics, social policy, sociology, social theory, and gender studies. The wider interest in politics and policy has continued, in work on, for example, the ongoing restructuring of the state, anti-violence policy, political masculinities, the gendered nature of public politics more generally, and the ever more pressing questions of crisis and crises of many kinds, locally and globally. And then throughout all of this, the very everyday questions and demands of care and welfare remain for many, perhaps for all in some sense, and most clearly for the vulnerable. These are down-to-earth matters, as with the practicalities of developing good policies and practices for and with older people in relation ageing, gender, inequalities, health, care, and increasingly digitalisation.
Selected Works