The voluntary sector was central to the COVID-19 response: fulfilling basic needs, highlighting new and existing inequalities and coordinating action where the state had been slow to respond.This book curates rigorous academic, policy and practice-based research into the response and adaptation of the UK voluntary sector during the pandemic. Contributions explore the ways the sector responded to new challenges and the longer-term consequences for the sector’s workforce, volunteers ...

This collection offers a comprehensive review of the origins, scale and breadth of the privatisation and marketisation revolution across the criminal justice system.Leading academics and researchers assess the consequences of market-driven criminal justice in a wide range of contexts, from prison and probation to policing, migrant detention, rehabilitation and community programmes. Using economic, sociological and criminological perspectives, illuminated by accessible case studies,...

This important book is the first edited collection to provide an up to date and comprehensive overview of the third sector’s role in public service delivery. Exploring areas such as social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value, the authors provide a platform for academic and policy debates on the topic. Drawing on research carried out at the ESRC funded Third Sector Research Centre, the book charts the historical development of the state-third sector relationship, an...

ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.During the consolidation of the welfare state in the 1940s, and its reshaping in the 2010s, the boundaries between the state, voluntary action, the family and the market were called into question.This interdisciplinary book explores the impact of these ‘transformational moments’ on the role, position and contribution of voluntary action to social welfare. It considers how different narratives have been constructed, ...

A collection of stimulating essays exploring the wide-ranging debates surrounding the relationship between business and society in 21st century Ireland.Wide-ranging, diverse and thought-provoking contributions from leading business researchers, economists, sociologists and political scientists from Ireland and abroad probe five central themes: the making and unmaking of the Celtic Tiger; governance, regulation and justice; partnership and participation; the nature of Irish borders ...

Adult social care in Britain has been at the centre of much media and public attention in recent years. Revelations of horrific abuse in learning disability settings, the collapse of major private care home providers, abject failures of inspection and regulation, and uncertainty over how long-term care of older people should be funded have all given rise to serious public concern. In this short form book, part of the Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work series, Iain Ferguson and Mic...

How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand ...

The voluntary nonprofit sector is now involved in all aspects of people's lives. The management of such organizations has never been of more interest than it is now, and the sector as a whole is in a period of great change. Well-meaning amateurs are being replaced by highly committed and professional leaders, and one in every six employees in the service sector is now working in the voluntary sector. In this shifting climate, this enlightening book questions whether voluntary organizations...

Is the privatisation of state education defendable? Did the public sector ever provide a fair education for all learners?In Education plc, Stephen Ball provides a comprehensive, analytic and empirical account of the privatisation of education. He questions the kind of future we want for education and what role privatisation and the private sector may have in that future. Using policy sociology to describe and critically analyse changes in policy, policy technologies and po...

In principle the advanced, market-driven world in which we now live is fuelled by knowledge, information and transparency, but in practice the processes that produce this world systematically corrupt and denigrate knowledge: this is the powerful and provocative argument advanced by Colin Crouch in his latest exploration of societies on the road to post-democracy.Crouch shows that executives in profit-maximizing corporations have incentives to ignore or distort knowledge, especially...

Employment relations within the health sector have undergone radical reform over recent years. This book is an important new study that examines the responses of managers and workers to these different reforms, at both national and local level.Bringing together analyses of both employment relations and public sector management, the book focuses on understanding why certain initiatives have been adopted, how managers have responded to them and the consequences of the HR modernisatio...

This work explores how reshaping budget rules and how they are applied presents a preferred means of public sector budgeting, rather than simply implementing fewer rules. Through enhanced approaches to resource flexibility, government entities can ensure that public money is used appropriately while achieving the desired results.The authors identify public budgeting practices that inhibit responses to complex problems and examine how rule modification can lead to expanded budget fl...