All Publications

Doing Politics

is now free to access at doingpolitics.space. I want to write about politics as something people do, to describe a politics grounded in human action and interaction – in the gathering and meeting, talking and writing of embodied and situated human beings…

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Rhizomic regulation: mobilising knowledge for mental health in Europe

Regulation depends fundamentally upon the production and dissemination of knowledge. At a minimum, one might imagine a mechanical model of regulation which involves regulator A exerting control over the actions of actor B. But even here, knowledge is crucial, for B must know what kinds of actions A requires or considers appropriate if regulation is to occur.

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Stakeholder consultation and social mobilization: framing Scottish mental health policy

Public and stakeholder consultation is increasingly important in the policy process, both in the UK and elsewhere. Social scientists have considered consultation primarily in terms of how it relates to decision-making – either as a means of involving a wider constituency of actors in the decision-making process, or as a means of legitimizing the decisions taken by policymakers.

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Introduction

We are concerned here with community psychiatry, a particular way of knowing and thinking about mental illness and of responding to it. Community psychiatry, for our purposes, refers to all the policies, services, agencies and staff deployed in treating people with mental health problems who are poor and for whom publicly-funded services are the default, if not the only, option.

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‘Policy opportunities’

What is policy? How do we do or make policy? Where and who with? What is it for, anyway, and what difference does it make? Good questions, though you wouldn’t be asking them if you didn’t already know that answering them isn’t easy.

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Analysing policy transfer: perspectives for operational research

Policy transfer occurs regularly. In essence, a strategy developed elsewhere is taken up and applied in another policy context. Yet what precisely is policy transfer and, more importantly, under what conditions does it occur? This paper describes policy transfer and addresses three main questions, exploring what perspectives of policy transfer might contribute to operational research (OR) efforts.

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Health

This paper reviews comparative research on health policy in OECD countries, outlining the origins and development of health policy in the modern state and pointing to the different ways that development has been understood by welfare state scholars.

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Comparative Studies and the Politics of Modern Medical Care

This new collection explores recent patterns in health care regulation, financing, and delivery across countries. Wide-ranging essays cover both key countries (Canada, Germany, Holland, the United Kingdom and the United States) and key issues, including primary care, hospital care, long-term care, pharmaceutical policy, and private health insurance. Respective authors pay close attention throughout to the […]

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What is translation?

What is ‘translation’, and how might it help us think differently about knowledge transfer and exchange? The purpose of this article is to set out, for policy makers and practitioners, the theoretical and conceptual resources that translation holds and seems to represent.

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Comparing health systems

This chapter reviews the modes and functions of cross-national comparison in health services research and policy. Source: Mullner, R (ed) Encyclopaedia of Health Services Research, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage link SaveSave

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A National Health Service, by comparison

The National Health Service (NHS) has always been compared to other things, to other organizations and systems both at home and abroad. This paper explores those comparisons, beginning with the origins of national public health care in Lloyd George’s study of German social insurance, and ending with Gordon Brown’s claims for the NHS as ‘the best insurance policy in the world’.

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Learning by meeting

It has become something of a truism that organisational and political environments are internationalised, and that policy making is informed at least in part by increased understanding of what takes place in parallel domains and jurisdictions.

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Social democracy, uncertainty and health in Scotland

Health policy is as modern as social democracy. This is not to suggest that social democracy is some sort of ’cause’ of health policy, but that their environments – political, economic, demographic, social and ideological – are shared. Underpinning all of these is a common, modern epistemology, which frames the causes and effects of social problems and the capacities of government in specific ways.

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The work the document does. Research, policy and equity in health

At the center of the politics of health equity, in many countries and circumstances, stands a signal report of research. This article is concerned with what might be described as the architecture of such documents, including how they are produced and organized and the relationships they demonstrate with others that parallel, precede, and succeed them.

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Learning in public policy

Introduction – Convergence, Diffusion, and Learning – Public Policy as Collective Puzzling – Learning in Practice – The Elements of Learning – Learning by Comparison Source: Rein, M, Moran, M and Goodin, R E (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, Oxford: Oxford...

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Welfare, participation and dissent in public policy

Relationships between states and citizens are defined at least in part through respective obligations and entitlements to welfare. Harold Lasswell’s ‘Who gets what, when, how’ is as good a definition of welfare as of politics: welfare is both source and target of a high proportion of political conflict in advanced industrial societies.

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The politics of health in Europe

This was the first general comparative study of health policy and politics to focus on the major countries of Western Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK. 1 Health politics; 2 The health care state in Europe, 1880-1980; 3 National health services: Italy,...

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Social Policy in Germany

An introduction to, and detailed analysis of, social policy provision in Germany. A specially selected team of authors look at the historical development of social policy in Germany; the framework for policy making today; the main areas of social policy (social...

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