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Whilst there is a growing body of literature on formal voluntary organisations, relatively little research has been undertaken into the roles and functioning of small, informal, below the radar community groups and actions. ‘Community groups in context: Local activities and actions’ brings together a decade of research with informal community groups and small scale civil society organisations. It explores the wealth and diversity of their forms and activities, their fragility, strategies for survival and their position in relation to a range of public policy objectives. In particular the book examines under-researched aspects of small scale community action: from voluntary arts through to Gypsy, Traveller and Roma groups through to how people learn through to how activists learn, the emotional investment in community action and the voice of below the radar groups in local and national policy contexts.

This book provides a longitudinal perspective on change and continuity in voluntary action in recent decades in the UK. Drawing on more than 30 years of different quantitative and qualitative data, its longitudinal, mixed-methods approach offers insights into recent and contemporary British voluntary action. The book deploys a range of quantitative data sources on individual behaviour, both cross-sectional and longitudinal, to analyse aggregate trends in individual engagement in both formal and informal volunteering, in the level and frequency of engagement, the types of activities that volunteers carry out, their responses to questions concerning their motivation and the rewards they obtain from volunteering. These analyses are complemented, and given much greater depth, by the use of qualitative data from individuals who volunteer for the Mass Observation Project, through which they provide free-form written testimony about their daily lives. Tracking a subset of these individuals over time provides unique and novel insights into behaviour, motivation, and lifetime engagement. This source is also highly informative of individuals’ understandings of, and particularly their attitudes towards, voluntary action, and the balance between public and private responsibility for the provision of public services. The findings lead us to caution against any simplistic suggestions that levels of voluntary action can be increased significantly without policies that work with the grain of individuals’ everyday lives.

McDonald's, Blockbuster Video, Jiffy Lube, and Subway: franchising has become an ever-present feature of the American landscape. One-third of the U.S. gross domestic product flows through franchises, and one out of every sixteen workers is employed by one. But how did franchising come to play such a dominant role in the American economy? What are the day-to-day experiences of franchisees and franchisers in the workplace? What challenges and pitfalls await them as they stake their claim to prosperity? These are just a few of the questions explored in this book, a documentary-like look into the frustrations and uncertainties that entrepreneurs face in their pursuit of the American dream. The author worked for three years in the front-line operations of franchise units for three companies, met with CEOs and executives, and attended countless trade shows, seminars, and expositions. All this firsthand experience gave him unprecedented access to the hopes and aspirations of franchisees. His book closely traces different franchisees and follows them as their dreams of wealth and independence buckle beneath the weight of frustrating logistics and contractual technicalities. Through extensive interviews and research, the author not only discovers what makes franchisees succeed or fail, he uncovers the difficulties in running a business according to someone else's system and values. Bearing witness to a market flooded with fierce competitors and dependent on the inscrutable whims of consumers, he uncovers the numerous challenges that franchisees face in making their businesses succeed.

Contemporary democracies need to develop a better governance of problems, as all too often policy is a sophisticated answer to the wrong problem. This book offers a new approach to public-policy making as problem processing, bringing together aspects of puzzling, powering, and participation, relating them to cultural theory, to issues about networks, to models of democracy, and to modes of citizen participation. It is part of a growing body of work in policy analysis literature.

Drawing on empirical research with the UK’s two largest charitable food organisations, this book explores the prolific rise of food charity over the last 15 years and its implications for overcoming food insecurity. As the welfare state withdraws, leaving food banks to protect the most vulnerable, the author questions the sustainability of this system and asks where responsibility lies – in practice and in theory – for ensuring everyone can realise their human right to food. The book argues that effective, policy-driven solutions require a clear rights-based framework, which enables a range of actors including the state, charities and the food industry to work together towards, and be held accountable for, the progressive realisation of the right to food for all in the UK.

This book brings together a collection of new and innovative work by researchers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK - settings where issues of voluntarism and participation have become increasingly important for the development and delivery of social welfare policy. Prefaced by one of the foremost geographers in this field, the book contains empirical and theoretical work from both new and well-established geographers. The chapters explore the interactions between voluntarism and a range of issues including governance, health, community action, faith, ethnicity, counselling, advocacy and professionalisation.

Why do people keep fighting for social causes in the face of consistent failure? Why do they risk their physical, emotional, and financial safety on behalf of strangers? How do these groups survive high turnover and emotional burnout? To explore these questions, the authors of this book undertook three years of ethnographic fieldwork with two groups: anti-death penalty activists STOP and the Catholic Workers, who strive to alleviate poverty. In both communities, members must contend with problems that range from the broad to the intimately personal. Adverse political conditions, internal conflict, and fluctuations in financial resources create a backdrop of daily frustration—but watching an addict relapse or an inmate's execution are much more devastating setbacks. This book finds that overcoming these obstacles, recovering from failure, and maintaining the integrity of the group require a constant process of emotional fine-tuning, and it demonstrates how activists do this through thoughtful analysis and a lucid rendering of their deeply affecting stories.

In a time of unprecedented turbulence, how can public sector organisations increase their ability to find innovative solutions to society's problems? This book shows how government agencies can use co-creation to overcome barriers and deliver more value, at lower cost, to citizens and business. The book is prescriptive. It shapes around the framework of an innovation ecosystem, encompassing the four Cs of consciousness, capacity, co-creation and courage. Through global case studies and practical examples, the book addresses the key triggers of public sector innovation. It shares new tools for citizen involvement through design thinking and ethnographic research, and pinpoints the leadership roles needed to drive innovation at all levels of government.

Does the coalition government represent a new politics in Britain, or is the new government just the same old Tories hiding behind an opportunist pact with the Liberal Democrats? Does Cameron differ from past Conservatives like Margaret Thatcher, and if so, how? This book looks at the coalition government in the context of conservative ideas and seeks to assess what, if anything, is new about it.

Everyone is talking about partnerships: environmental partnerships, social partnerships, public–private partnerships, partnerships between NGOs in Europe and the third world. How did partnerships come to emerge almost everywhere and at almost the same time? What is their inner logic? And at what point does that logic begin to break down? In a highly complex society, the conditions on which agreements are built are constantly changing, demanding, first and foremost, that parties agree to reach an agreement. Partnering is an answer to the growing differentiation and dynamism of the societies in which we live. While this answer holds great potential, it is, however, also very fragile. It is the aim of this book to improve our understanding of the shifting ground on which agreements must be reached in today’s hyper-complex society.

Personalisation – the idea that public services should be tailored to the individual, with budgets devolved to the service user or frontline staff – is increasingly seen as the future of the welfare state. This book focuses on how it evolved as a policy narrative and has mobilised such wide-ranging political support.

State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This book brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa’s police forces. The contributors consider historical trajectories and particular configurations of police power within wider political systems, then examine the ‘inside view’ of police forces as state institutions – the challenges, preoccupations, professional ethics and self-perceptions of police officers – and finally look at how African police officers go about their work in terms of everyday practices and engagements with the public.The studies span the continent, from South Africa to Sierra Leone, and illustrate similarities and differences in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone states, post-socialist, post-military and post-conflict contexts, and amid both centralizsation and devolution of policing powers, democratic transitions and new illiberal regimes, all the while keeping a strong ethnographic focus on police officers and their work.

This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of recent shifts in the ideas and paradigms that underpin social policy. Since the 1980s the renaissance of civil society has introduced new ideas about the nature of power, citizenship, and human rights, which radically challenge the dominance of the state, the power of professionals, and the welfare system itself. The book traces the historical roots of these apparent changes and movements, demonstrates in detail their often paradoxical results, and speculates about the whole future of social policy.

This book is an English version of a successful text on public policy analysis originally written for policy practitioners in Switzerland and France. It presents a model for the analysis of public policy and includes examples of its application in everyday political-administrative situations. This English version introduces supplementary illustrations and examples from the United Kingdom. Structured and written accessibly for readers who may not have an academic background in the social sciences, this book applies key ideas from sociology, political science, administrative science, and law to develop an analytical framework that can be used to carry out empirical studies on different public policies.

Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail industries, has evolved from an arena dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. And as in other areas of retail, this transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process. This has been especially pronounced in bookselling, this book argues, because more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives that debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to questions of profit? This book looks at a century of book retailing, demonstrating that the independent/chain dynamic is not entirely new. It began one hundred years ago when department stores began selling books, continued through the 1960s with the emergence of national chain stores, and exploded with the formation of “superstores” in the 1990s. The advent of the Internet has further spurred tremendous changes in how booksellers approach their business. All of these changes have met resistance from book professionals and readers who believe that the book business should somehow be “above” market forces and instead embrace more noble priorities. The book uses interviews with bookstore customers and members of the book industry to explain why books evoke such distinct and heated reactions. It reveals why customers have such fierce loyalty to certain bookstores and why they identify so strongly with different types of books. In the process, this book also teases out the meanings of retailing and consumption in American culture at large.

This book focuses on the dynamics of change as new strategies — active citizenship, public participation, partnership working, and consumerism — encounter existing institutions. It explores different sites and practices of governing, from the remaking of Europe to the increasing focus on ‘community’ and ‘personhood’ in governing social life. The authors critically engage with existing theory across political science, social policy, sociology, and public administration and management to explore how ‘the social’ is constituted through governance practices. This includes the ways in which the spaces and territories of governing are remade and the peoples constituted; how the public domain is re-imagined and new forms of state–citizen relationships fostered; how the remaking of governance shapes our understanding of politics, and changes the ways in which citizens engage with political power and the selves they bring to that engagement.

This book rethinks the public, public communication, and public action in a globalising and mediated world. It develops theoretical perspectives for investigating the formation of publics, focusing on four overlapping processes: claiming publics; personalising publics; mediating publics; and becoming public. Using case studies, the book offers a set of methodological resources on which other researchers can draw, and foregrounds the need to interrogate the boundaries between theory, research, and politics.