Social Science and Public Policy
Richard Freeman
An extended fellowship at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study has made it possible to work with a comparative health policy group at the University of Bremen.
See the write-up on jobs.ac.uk...
Policy as Practice
What is it that policy makers do when they make policy? What kinds of activity does policy making entail? This seminar series hosted by the Universities of Birmingham and Edinburgh, with APSE (the Association for Public Service Excellence), was funded by ESRC.
Practising EU government
This Europa Institute seminar series sought to identify and consolidate a ‘political sociological' approach to EU studies.
Knowledge and Policy: mental health in Scotland and in Europe
KNOWandPOL is an EC-funded integrated project on the role of knowledge in policy making in European countries. Our case study is concerned with mental health policy in Scotland: for more, click on the header above.
Children and Society
Past and present editors of Children and Society have included Richard Freeman's 'Recursive politics: prevention, modernity and social systems' in a commemorative special issue to mark 25 years of the journal...
Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State: Health
Richard Freeman and Heinz Rothgang review comparative research on health policy in OECD countries in Oxford's new Handbook of the Welfare State...
Classifying health systems
Richard Freeman and Lorraine Frisina's 'Health care systems and the problem of classification' has now appeared in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis...
Policy as Practice at IPA 2010
Last year's Interpretive Policy Analysis conference (Grenoble, 23-25 June 2010) included two panels on 'Policy as Practice'...
What is translation?
A new paper in Evidence and Policy discusses this key concept in knowledge transfer and exchange...
How do policy makers – public officials, politicians, activists and others – know what problems they must address? How do they then know what must be done? And how do they know how to do it?
These questions are explored in a series of research projects, fellowships and seminar series detailed on these pages, and expressed in the publications listed separately.
Knowing and policy making
This work combines comparative public policy with the sociology of knowledge. Early cross-national and comparative research on health policy in European countries led to an interest in what policy makers learn from each other across jurisdictions. This has broadened and deepened into investigation of the different ways in which knowledge is mobilized in policy making, cast analytically as processes of translation.
Doing policy
We commonly distinguish knowing and doing, between decision and action and between policy and practice. But policy making itself is a practice, policy makers themselves practitioners. So what do they do, exactly? What does policy making consist of? What do policy makers do when they go to work? What does it take to make policy?
Dr Richard Freeman
School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh
21 George Square, Edinburgh
EH8 9LD
+44 131 650 4680