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.
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.
Reverb: policy making in wave form
A new paper in Environment and Planning A explores how we might think of policy as something that moves...
Evidence, policy - and practice
Richard Freeman, Steven Griggs and Annette Boaz edited a recent special issue of Evidence and Policy on the practice of policy making...
Classics of Community Psychiatry
has just been published by Oxford. Introduced by Richard Freeman and Michael Rowe, it is an innovative collection of written material on mental health work outside the hospital...
KNOWandPOL reports
Empirical work on the KNOWandPOL project is now complete. Reports on aspects of mental health policy in Scotland and in Europe are free to download...
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...
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
Chrystal Macmillan Building
15a George Square
Edinburgh
EH8 9LD
+44 131 650 4680