Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare-state politics, policy, and management. This volume offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.An international group of scholars contribute organizational studies that shed new light on old debates about policies of workf...

Used across the public health field, this is the leading text in the area, focusing on the context, participants and processes of making health policy.

Making policy is what governments do, but there are some fascinating and hotly debated issues associated with how government decisions get made in the interests of the people. The concept and practice of evidence-based policy-making insists that properly developed public policy draws on the best available evidence. This book considers how governments in Canada have historically interacted with research and what directions these interactions may take in the future. The goal of government maki...

Media matters. From encouraging charitable donations and delivering public health messages to promoting democratic participation and state accountability, the media can play a crucial role in development. Yet the influence of the media is not always welcome. It can also be used as a mechanism of surveillance and control or to disseminate hate speech and propaganda.How then should we respond to the growing importance of the media - including journalism, radio, television, community ...

The growth of what some academics refer to as 'the policy analysis movement' represents an effort to reform certain aspects of government behaviour. The policy analysis movement is the result of efforts made by actors inside and outside formal political decision-making processes to improve policy outcomes by applying systematic evaluative rationality to the development and implementation of policy options. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the many ways in which the policy ana...

Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. Howeve...

Despite predictions that 'new public management' would establish itself as the new paradigm of Public Administration and Management, recent academic research has highlighted concerns about the intra-organizational focus and limitations of this approach. This book represents a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art of public management, examining and framing the debate in this important area.The New Public Governance? sets out to explore this emergent field of resea...

Community is an elusive yet frequently invoked concept. Terms like community health, community living, community schools, community policing, community development, and community renewal have become part of the contemporary lexicon.What has led organizations, and particularly Western governments, to take such an interest in community, and why this interest now? What has caused the increasing acceptance of community as the primary vehicle through which a wide variety of government p...

The importance of polling public opinion is widely recognized today. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that in mass societies, polls have also become an important medium for communicating ideas and beliefs, especially since many people have become less involved in community organizations and interest groups that formerly connected them to events and issues. Polling and Public Opinion examines the impact that polls have on the thoughts and behaviour of the public.Peter M. Butl...

Disciplining the Poor explains the transformation of poverty governance over the past forty years—why it happened, how it works today, and how it affects people. In the process, it clarifies the central role of race in this transformation and develops a more precise account of how race shapes poverty governance in the post–civil rights era. Connecting welfare reform to other policy developments, the authors analyze diverse forms of data to explicate the racialized origins, operati...

Indigenous North Americans continue to be overrepresented among those who are poor, unemployed, and with low levels of education. This has long been an issue of concern for Indigenous people and their allies and is now drawing the attention of government, business leaders, and others who know that this fast-growing population is a critical source of future labour. Shauna MacKinnon’s Decolonizing Employment: Aboriginal Inclusion in Canada’s Labour Market is a case study with lesson...

Scholars and governments recognize the importance of policy development and implementation for population health, but there is a lack of systematic theoretical and conceptual development in the health field to address the issue. Health Promotion and the Policy Process is the first book to take an in-depth look at the theoretical advances in the political sciences, including discussing the significance of political economy and sociology, which so far have made little progress in he...