This February, The Policy Press is publishing Understanding ‘race’ and ethnicity , a much-needed textbook combining historical and theoretical approaches to the issue of ‘race’ and ethnicity within welfare provision. In this blog post, co-editor Gary Craig questions whether it really is time to ‘move on’ from ‘race’ in the context of the recent outcome of the Stephen Lawrence trial:

“It’s time to move on from ‘race’. Or so argued John Denham, outgoing Home Office Minister in 2010. His thoughts were echoed by the incoming Prime Minister who argued that multiculturalism was dead – i.e. that there was no need to expect any adjustments from the white British population to the increasing diversity of the UK population (likely to include roughly a 16% minority population when the results of the 2011 census are published). And by the current Home Secretary, Theresa May, who believes that ‘equality is a dirty word’.

None of this will give comfort to those who battled long and hard for 18 years to see justice done in the Stephen Lawrence trial. Although the Lawrence family and those close to them argued that the outcome of the trial – with two men convicted of Stephen’s murder from a gang of six after two failed trials and years of botched investigations – could only be regarded as a cause of partial satisfaction, many public figures rushed to argue that this ‘proved’ that justice in the case of racism was working well.

There is another story. Despite the provisions of the Race Relations Amendment Act 2000, which incorporated many of the findings of the MacPherson Inquiry into Stephen’s death, many public agencies have still failed to implement effective race equality provisions, even to the point where they barely engage in the most basic ethnic monitoring. Private agencies of course are not covered by the legislation and can engage in the most horrendous abuse of minorities, as a series of reports on forced labour are beginning to show.

Since Stephen’s death there have been around 100 racialised murders including, it appears, the death of the Indian student in Salford earlier this month whilst the Lawrence trial was coming to an end. And for minorities living in rural areas, the position is deteriorating. Although the number of racist incidents has begun to decrease slowly in many urban-based police forces, this is not the case in many rural forces. In North Yorkshire, for example, the number of racist incidents has increased by 25% over the past three years. Because of the remote nature of the county and the scattered settlement pattern of the minority population, this is likely to be an understatement of the true picture. A few years ago, a study of students entering the medical school found that 25% of those of ethnic minority origin had either witnessed or experienced racist abuse or assault. And it remains the case that Black and Asian young people are disproportionately – sometimes by a factor of ten – more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than young white people.

Politicians and those close to them may feel it is time to ‘move on’ from ‘race’: but the experience of most minorities is that if we ‘move on’ from ‘race’, they will be left further behind in the struggle for equality.”

Gary Craig is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Understanding ‘race’ and ethnicity, also edited by Karl Atkin, Sangeeta Chattoo and Ronny Flynn and published by Policy Press in February. You can order your copy now. 

We’d love to know what you think - you can leave a comment using the button at the top of this blogpost.

As we approach the end of 2011, it is impossible to ignore the huge impact of a number of global and national events that have happened in the last year. Our Senior Commissioning Editor, Karen Bowler, give us her thoughts about the most significant global news of 2011 and how some of our titles have related to current events:

“To my mind the most significant global news of 2011 has been the shifts of power within the Middle East, from the Tunisian revolution that marked the start of the Arab Spring to the death of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and continued protest in Tahrir Square during Egypt’s first democratic vote. Social welfare and religion in the Middle East by Rana Jawad examines some of these complex social and political dynamics and how they have shaped social welfare in the Middle East. Based on an in-depth study in Lebanon and supplementary research in Iran, Egypt and Turkey, this book argues that religion is able to provide sophisticated solutions to the major social and economic problems of the Middle East, which have become more prominent on the global stage following this year’s events.

Closer to home financial crises across Europe are shaking the foundations of the European Union and the Eurozone. Recently published Towards a social investment welfare state? edited by Nathalie Morel, Bruno Palier and Joakim Palme examines the ability of the European social investment strategy to regenerate the welfare state and help address the challenges posed by the economic crisis and other global shifts, such as ageing and climate change.

In the UK, May saw the publication of the long-awaited Munro review of child protection. Following a number of high profile child protection failures the review was tasked with finding a way of cutting bureaucracy for social workers while also increasing accountability. In response to the recommendations of this review, Effective safeguarding for children and young people, edited by Maggie Blyth and Enver Solomon, publishing in February 2012, brings together academic and practice experts to review ways forward for safeguarding children.

2011 has been a difficult year for the police, starting with a row between the Police Federation and the Home Secretary about the harsh cuts required following last year’s Spending Review – a news story which has rumbled all year with its impact on frontline police services. The police have also been buffeted by accusations of ineffectual policing of the summer’s riots across England and the reopening of old wounds of poor forensic practice and institutional racism with the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. Read about what chief police officers think in Policing at the top , by Bryn Caless, which provides an overview of who chief police officers are and how they come to their post, and their frank opinions on the challenges facing policing today.

Finally, the Leveson Inquiry into the practice and ethics of the press media continues to cause a stir, just as we have published Democracy under attack. Long-time Guardian Society editor Malcolm Dean provides an insider perspective on how the media undermines democracy, with politics and policy increasingly shaped by the media not just reported by it. A topical and challenging read at a time when it is the media who are under attack.”

Competition: What policy could make a difference in 2012? 

The Policy Press is committed to publishing with a purpose. Our aim is to try to improve social conditions with publications that will make a positive difference to learning and research, policy and practice.

As we enter a new year, we would love to know, in a maximum of 200 words, your answer to the following question:

If you could implement one policy to make a difference to the lives of people in the UK in 2012, what would it be?

It does not necessarily have to be realistic! The entry judged to be the most inspired and/or make the most positive difference will win £20 of vouchers to spend online at www.nigelsecostore.com . Nigel’s Eco Store aims to make a difference by offering eco friendly yet fun and functional products.

Please send your answer to tpp-marketing@bristol.ac.uk by 3 January 2012. Please note we may publish your entry on our website, blog, or in future editions of our newsletter.

TPP: How did the book come about?

MB: Work on user involvement and user movements has been a feature of my research for most of my academic career. I felt instinctively drawn to the importance of understanding the experience of using services from the perspective of those on the receiving end and, when I started out on this work was surprised that (at that time) this was a rather radical idea. Now it’s no longer radical, I wondered if this meant that things have changed fundamentally?

TPP: Tell us about the conference you organized to explore these issues:

The conference was held in Brighton in April 2009 and the contributors to this volume spoke. It was designed to enable a dialogue between user activists, academic researchers and practitioners. It highlighted tensions and differences between those different groups who are all in some way interested in and committed to understanding and promoting user perspectives on services; what it means to live with illness, disability or mental health difficulties, and how collective action can contribute to transformation. It also demonstrated the diverse contexts in which dialogue is taking place and the new relationships that are being explored.

TPP: What kind of things did you learn from the conference?

One thing that was particularly striking was the importance of research as a space in which new knowledge and new understandings are being generated. Perhaps this is ultimately less threatening and easier to accommodate than fundamental changes to services?

TPP: Phil, what is your particular interest in this topic?:

PC: The essential focus of user involvement for me has always been about ‘voice,’ about enabling meaningful engagement to occur and about involvement leading to action. I guess this is not ‘rocket science,’ and this focus may well be seen as a simplistic one. However, across all three sections of the book (user movements, user involvement in services and user involvement in research), what ‘voice’ means and what, it any, action this leads to, are examined and critiqued in a variety of settings.

The range of contributors, from the established and well known, to those newer to involvement and writing about it, offer perspectives on specific initiatives and on key concepts and ideas. Settings where involvement is described and analysed include mental health, disability, cancer care, local government, acute health services, social care and a range of research settings such as young people (e.g. young mothers and young people with hearing loss), older people and women’s alcohol use.

TPP: What kinds of conclusions do you reach through the book?

PC: Taken together, the contributions offer complex insights into user involvement. Much critique concerns the opportunities, challenges and tensions for those individuals and groups who become involved, and for groups and organizations where involvement is played out. The historical perspective offered by some contributors reminds us both how much has changed, and how similar are many of the issues faced by users seeking to shape services. Evidence highlights the need for inclusive and diverse ‘bottom up’ involvement. However, negotiating the service user/professional interface remains important if more effective and rewarding involvement opportunities are to be achieved.

TPP: Thanks very much Marian and Phil.

Critical perspectives on user involvement was published on 16 November 2011 and can be ordered here.

TPP: How did you come to be interested in this field of study:

HG: People in schools now have to think about themselves as a leader, talk about themselves and each other as leaders, and they have to be seen to do leadership in a very effective way. Twenty years ago this was called management, and forty years ago it was called administration. I first became interested in this issue when I began my masters in education management, and asked questions about the title, and also why much of what we learned in the sessions was more about business management than education. I was able to do some serious work on this through my doctoral studies where I studied the history of educational management through interviewing the people who had brought it as a field of study into the university.

TPP: What did you do next?:

HG: By the time I had graduated in 1999 the field was rebranding itself as leadership, and the New Labour government was making leadership a central feature of its reform strategy. It seemed to me that this needed investigation and I successfully applied for ESRC funds to undertake a mapping of the field, and use my doctoral methodology and conceptualisation to examine the knowledge workers involved in enabling the government do invest in leadership. Over 100 interviews were completed with researchers, politicians, civil servants and practitioners, and in addition policy texts and research outputs were examined.

TPP: Tell us about the book and why you wrote it:

HG: Leadership and the Reform of Education is about the way that successive governments – in this instance the New Labour governments from 1997 to 2010 – have tried to change what goes on in the classroom through changing the way that headteachers and other educational professionals go about their jobs and think about what it means to be a teacher.

What the book does is to report on the work I undertook, and what I set out to do is to include all who are involved. So much that is written about leadership is based on very narrow conceptualisations of what ‘leader’, ‘leading’ and ‘leadership’ is about, and the references are limited to a small group of writers who work in a particular way. Importantly, this type of approach is being sold to other countries, and knowledge workers from abroad are brought in to help this narrow form of leadership to be presented as international. However, when a full search is undertaken of the literatures, and when discussions take place with professionals there is other knowledge and ways of knowing within the library and in classrooms both in the UK and in the international field. So the book not only examines the dominance of a particular approach to leadership used by New Labour to bring about reforms, and why it was able to do that through working with a particular type of researcher, but also recognition is given to critical and socially critical research that is not only part of the field but also is accessed by professionals. I examine the working lives of professionals, and open up the research not accessed by New Labour to scrutiny.

Of course, as soon as I had completed the draft of the book there was a change of government, and so I end the book with not only a review of the New Labour period in office but also how the Coalition is conducting itself. Clearly this is my next project, but what is obvious is how ideas and people not only travel with their knowledge and ideas, but also travel over political boundaries and serve different governments.

TPP: Helen Gunter, thank you very much. Helen’s book Leadership and the reform of education is published by The Policy Press on 16 November and can be ordered here.

TPP: How did you come to be interested in your area of work?

NE: I first got interested in working with very young children when I was at university in California. I was at the time, and still am particularly interested in language development. I also was attracted to early years practice because small children are so honest about boredom. The onus is squarely on the adult to be interesting and engaging. The children have choice.

TPP: Describe a typical day (if there is such a thing!).

NE: A typical day when I was doing the work described in the book was lots of meetings, lots of running from one government building in Whitehall to the next, waiting for ministerial meetings to start and arranging visits to local Sure Start programmes. Reading and writing was done on the train to and from work, or at weekends.

TPP: What was your main goal in writing this book?

NE: My main goal was to try to explain the complexity of policy making. I wanted to surface the underlying assumptions that ministers had about Sure Start, how both implicit and explicit assumptions shaped the policy and the interweaving of evidence, gut feelings and politics around the policy process. I also wanted to get down what I think were the key lessons we learned.

TPP: What do you think of current government’s use of resources to make a positive change for young children?

NE: The current government has taken some really important steps to build on the accomplishments of the last in terms of services for young children, and in budgetary terms, early years has not suffered as much as many other areas. My main concern is the removal of the ring fence. So as other areas of expenditure are squeezed, at local level, early years money will be used on other things.

TPP: What do you think is the most pressing issue moving forward in creating and maintaining youth-directed programs in lieu of events such as the August riots and the growing public concern over the futures of our young children?

NE: My major concern is not about service delivery, but about unemployment, affecting young as well as older working-aged adults. There will be increases in child poverty as unemployment rises and new benefits systems take hold.

TPP: What do you feel is the biggest hurdle to overcome when implementing programmes and policies directed at helping families and young children?

NE: My main conclusions from the book were that we made two serious mistakes, which really remain the hurdles for programme implementation. We did not sufficiently recognise the difficulty of the task of running the programme, and hence failed to provide the ongoing development, support, and performance framework that would have ensured higher quality earlier on. Secondly, we did not understand how long it would take for programmes to become established in local communities. In part, our efforts to get as much set up as possible in a short time, meant we neglected the needs of the new work force needed for implementation.

Many thanks Naomi. If you’d like to know more about ‘Providing a Sure Start‘, the book can be ordered here at 20% discount.

I was amused by the reaction of Dale Salwak’s contact who thought that if the book had merit it would somehow get noticed on its own! Would that that were true! Some of Salwak’s ideas may not work for all books – not many bookshop owners would thank authors for trying to meet with them to discuss their book as so much buying is done centrally now. And not all books are suitable for coverage in the local newspaper. But I think he makes some good points (or has been well-advised by his publisher!):  he acknowledges that advertising does not always sell books, but a succession of small actions can help a lot in “spreading the word”. This is something we also believe at The Policy Press.

We treat all our books as individual titles and tailor our marketing activities for the best results. In addition we have always seen marketing of our books as a partnership between the authors and ourselves. This is because the author often has the best specialist knowledge of networks and associations in his or her subject area and as publishers we have built up a great deal of knowledge about the best routes to market, timings of marketing campaigns and the different markets we operate in.

That is why we ask our authors to complete a marketing questionnaire which forms the basis of the marketing plan for that book, which we then implement in liaison with the author. We appreciate our authors who are willing to help publicise their books and happy to support them with publicity materials as required. For example, if the author is willing to post notifications to specialist networks of which he/she is a member, we are happy to encourage that and in turn can concentrate on wider, more generic contacts.

We know that this does not come easily to everyone and are happy to take the lead where required. My hope is that we can work with our authors to achieve the best coverage and sales as appropriate for their book.

Kathryn King, Marketing Manager, The Policy Press

TPP: What did you hope to discover through your work in Making modern mothers?
Where there any surprises?

RT & MJK: One thing that motivated us from the start was to get a sense of how social change is actually lived in families – how mothers and daughters manage changing expectations and values. We know something about this from our own families but doing a study like this gave us the opportunity to explore these questions on a much broader canvas. We also wanted to update the feminist account of motherhood, feeling that the picture of motherhood in the social sciences was forged by the baby boomer generation. We felt that some important things had changed and wanted to know what motherhood looked like through a different generational location. Empirical research always produces surprises – the world is always more complex and rich than we expect. The diversity of mothering that we discovered was surprising, partly because it is so seldom shown. Simply representing this is important, revealing the poverty of the popular ‘figures’ that we tend to rely on and think with.

TPP: Which came first in your research: childhood or motherhood?

RT & MJH: For both of us research on childhood and youth came first. But when you study youth you also study young people’s understandings and imaginings of adulthood which always involves the markers of ‘settling down’ and parenthood. We have also both researched young people’s sexuality and the cultural controversies that surround teenage pregnancy and parenthood. Extending our analysis of the life course from youth to maternity and back to childhood made perfect sense.

TPP: Have you felt through this research that the traditional heteronormative, late 20s/early 30s married parental system has fallen by the wayside? Many of the women you focus on in the book certainly do not fall into this ideal. What do you make of the changes? Do you see any patterns? Are they simply the adaptations of a world of more options and opportunity?

RT & MJK: We deliberately sought to represent diversity in our study – however there are still patterns in the timing of motherhood. The middle age group of women aged between 25 and 36 reflects the majority experience of women becoming mothers for the first time, and establishes a cultural norm that means that those having babies earlier and later are seen to be young and old mothers respectively. In many ways the timing of motherhood is more culturally loaded than other aspects of difference such as marital status and sexuality which would have been much more important in a previous generation. So yes, in a way the normative model of married, heterosexual, stay at home motherhood is increasingly anachronistic – and ‘timely’ motherhood that synchronises career, relationship and economic independence is the cultural ideal.

TPP: Has the process of researching and becoming involved in the lives of these women changed your perspective on motherhood?

RT & MJK: Inevitably. There is not such thing as a neutral position with motherhood. We are all daughters and sons, and we all have a position in relation to mothering, whether that is as someone for whom mothering is no longer a possibility, through the experience of reflecting back on it, being in the thick of it and seeing it on the horizon. The research team paid attention to their own personal investments as part of the research, and this enriched the research process, the data and our interpretations.

TPP: Which of the stories in the book or aspects of a story affected you most? Why?

RT & MJK: That is hard to answer. In one way it was the case study families that had greatest impact on me – simply because we met so many family members and witnessed change over time.  When we wrote about these families we sometimes felt that we had become part of the family ourselves. But some of the most powerful connections may have been those that were relatively transient – like the young mother who we met in a special residential unit and who we lost contact with after she lost her much wanted baby.

TPP: Many thanks for your time and the insights into your work. Making modern mothers is now available with a 20% discount. You can order your copy here.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), known in policing as “the twenty/twenty hindsight brigade”, is investigating allegations against the former Commissioner, so it’s probably premature to come to any conclusions about the ethics of the relationship between police leaders and senior editorial staff at The News of the World, as it also may be about the wider question of newspapers paying police officers for information. Now Assistant Commissioner John Yates has also resigned (18th July), citing similar reasons to Sir Paul’s for his departure, after a week of heavy pressure and publicity. Two former chief officers at the Met, Andy Hayman and Peter Clarke, are also in the frame for the IPCC to look at.

This all seems to lend substance to media claims that policing is in crisis and that the police are led by inept, malign or naïve people. But there are some things we would do well to bear in mind: first, the Met is not the police. It likes to think it is sometimes, because it has some national roles, but policing is more than what happens in London. The second point is that policing goes on, whoever is at the top. Someone will step in and mind the shop, while the police go about their daily, routine, necessary and unglamorous tasks. The third point to make is that none of the allegations against any of the police leaders is yet proved and the cloud of speculation may be as evanescent as mist before sunrise.

The final point is this: when I did my research a year or so ago on chief police officers, what came across most strongly to me was that people at the top of policing cared very much about the image of the police and about how the public perceived them. It really matters to them that they are trusted and that people can rely on their fairness and neutrality. This relationship is not something that any good cop would willingly put at risk and we would be daft to join the current feeding frenzy engendered by the media and politicians – neither of which trades comes anywhere near policing in the public’s sense of moral worth.

Bryn Caless is the author of the forthcoming Policing at the top (September) which can be ordered at 20% discount here: http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781447300151

These neighbourhoods have long been poor, working class areas; their large estates were a product of earlier slum clearance and rebuilding before and after the Second World War. The proportion of newcomers, usually migrants from abroad, in all the areas has grown rapidly since the 1980s, following the loss of traditional local jobs and better housing options elsewhere for local families with more choice. This has compounded the pressures on already disadvantaged areas.

Parents with little choice about where they live have a stronger than average concern about their neighbourhoods. They try to control and shape their immediate surroundings but they rely not just on who their neighbours are and what family members they live near, but on wider structures and services that they cannot shape on their own. All the areas have many local facilities and services, added incrementally over years of effort to improve social conditions and reduce neighbourhood problems, but the overall condition of all the areas is poor. We talked to 200 families over ten years from 1998 to 2008, collecting their views on community problems and on how the areas changed during that time.

This book relies on the words of families themselves to answer three important questions:

What are the main challenges facing families in poor areas?

Have government efforts helped or hindered progress over the past decade?

Since 1998, many public and private initiatives have targeted area conditions and low income families, but it is rare to hear what families give their views on what works and doesn’t work, explain what helps and what hinders their children’s progress, what gaps there are and what new approaches may help. Parents have both positive and negative experiences of neighbourhood services and programmes in the most difficult areas; we point to the conspicuous gaps still waiting to be closed. Therefore, behind our questions about bringing up children in low income areas lie much bigger worries:

What future do families face in disadvantaged areas?

How far is the wider society responsible for that future?

Family futures by Anne Power, Helen Willmot and Rosemary Davidson, publishing this month, shows how responsibility can be shared.

Peter Townsend (1928-2009) was one of the 20^th century’s great champions of social justice. In an earlier book (The Peter Townsend reader edited by Alan Walker et al. 2010) his work was celebrated, but there is now a need to look to the future and apply his analyses to debates going forward in order to achieve a more socially just society. Using Peter Townsend’s academic legacy of nearly 600 publications, it addresses the current unacceptable levels of poverty, such as seen in the recent BBC documentary “Poor Kids” and the need to shape new arguments and policies to combat them.

In Fighting poverty, inequality and injustice, the contributors draw on the work of Peter Townsend to make a compelling case against the pessimistic analysis of neoliberal policy makers and commentators, including many in the Coalition government, that the welfare state must be cut back and that better alternatives are the market and self-interest.  While this policy direction neglects the poor and vulnerable, the alternative one proposed would lead to a less fractured, more socially just society.  The key elements of this manifesto for social justice are:

• - An adequate income, sufficient to allow people to live decently and with dignity, in work, out of work, in childhood and in old age.
• - A concerted attack on damaging social divisions in society – based for example on class, race, gender, and location – which result in exclusion, ill-health and premature death.
• - A universal child benefit and a universal basic pension paid at a level that enables full participation in society.
• - A new welfare state, at the heart of British life, aimed at nurturing the self-realisation of everyone, providing support when needed across the life course, and actively preventing poverty, inequality, ill-health and exclusion.
• - An international welfare state in which rich nations redistribute large portions of their income to the poorest.

The manifesto  does not simply state the case for social justice and list demands for policy action; it demonstrates the affordability of these basic demands.  First of all, by rebutting the claim of the present government that Britain is broke.  It shows that the debt threat has been blown out of proportion and that the size of the public sector is not out of step with other major European countries with more successful economic records.  It also illustrates alternative sources of revenue to public spending cuts, such as closing tax loopholes and taxing vacant housing.

Secondly, it is argued that social justice in Britain depends on a fair tax system.  At present the top 0.1% of taxpayers benefit by more than £50,000 each from tax reliefs. Their pre-tax incomes are 31 times the average and their tax reliefs 86 times the average.

The manifesto for social justice is realistic and realisable if policy makers reject inequality and choose to promote opportunities for every person in this country to live, at least, a decent and fulfilled life.

Alan Walker, co-editor of Fighting Poverty, Inequality and Injustice: a manifesto inspired by Peter Townsend, published by The Policy Press on 15 June 2011.