Research Archive
Writing Politics
We need to talk about writing. Doing politics differently must mean writing politics differently, and 'writing politics' is a collective exploration of how that might work... Most of us work in policy, politics, sociology, law or IR, and we’re committed to teaching as...
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…
The role of the councillor and the work of meeting
This paper picks up a theme from the recent literature on the councillor, that of time spent in meeting, and suggests that if we are to understand the role of the councillor we must understand the work the meeting does. The discussion is based in a series of...
What do policy makers really do?
The question is important because making policy engages a great number of people one way or another, and what they do they might do well or badly. Our standard answers are rather hazy, not least because policy making entails such great numbers of people doing a great...
Meeting, talk and text: policy and politics in practice
Our prevailing accounts of the policy process are challenged by studies of practice as well as by practitioners themselves. This paper sets out an alternative, grounded in politics and sociology and informed by recent work in related disciplines. Drawing on the...
Doing Politics: research, teaching and practice
For a meeting of the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, 19 November 2018... The aim of this presentation is simply to set out a framework for studying 'doing politics', and to discuss ways of using it in teaching as well as other kinds of...
Policy and politics in practice: the work of meeting, talk and text
Public lecture, Institut für Politikwissenschaft, University of Vienna, 13 December 2018... What are policy and politics, in practice? When we do politics and make policy, what are we doing? In this lecture, I want to set out a framework for understanding...
Good Vibrations
Nice citations, at least, if not ex-citations. Like lots of us, I guess, most of what I've written appears again (if it appears at all) as a name and number, person and date inserted in someone else's argument, to be read as simple ciphers for the complex body of...
Europe in translation: governance, integration and the project form
Policy makers and commentators refer readily to ‘the European project’, as though Europe itself were a project. But what would it mean to take this term seriously, to develop the account of European governance it seems to suggest? This chapter begins on the ground, in the everyday understanding of the project as an organizational form…
Care, policy, knowledge: translating between worlds
served as postscript to Vicky Singleton, Claire Waterton and Natalie Gill’s new Sociological Review Monograph on Care and Policy Practices…
Doing comparison: producing authority in an international organization
Comparison is crucial to the way that policy organizations know the world, and nowhere more so than in the work of international organizations, which inevitably find themselves comparing policies and practices in different national settings. But how should we...
PhD honoris causa
Awarded the degree of PhD honoris causa by the University of Liège, 19 March 2016. It's a tremendous personal honour, but also recognition of a longstanding, exciting collaboration with members of the Centre de Recherches et Interventions Sociologiques (CRIS).
Knowing Governance
Knowing Governance. The epistemic construction of political order is edited by Jan-Peter Voß and Richard Freeman, and sets out to understand governance through the design and making of its models and instruments. What kinds of knowledge do they require and...
Doing Politics in Translation
was the title of the 14th Kåte Hamburger lecture given at the Centre for Global Cooperation in Duisburg in October... How does politics happen? When we do politics, what are we doing? In answering this question, I return to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, to her...
Doing Democracy
was a panel Darcy Leigh organized at this year's Policy & Politics conference, with additional papers by Oliver Escobar, Deborah Holman and Sophie Thunus... What is democracy made of? How is it done? It is an idea and a set of institutions, to be sure, but what...
‘Doing Politics’
was given as an inaugural lecture on 4 February 2015... How does politics happen? When we do politics, what are we doing? In this lecture, I want to show how we might understand politics as action, as a mode of doing. Drawing on the sociology of interaction, I develop...
A New Politics of Knowledge
announced Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy on the LSE's Impact blog... Kat Smith and Richard Freeman argue it’s time to start bringing together the diverse and innovative thinking around the complex relationships between science, knowledge and policy....
Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted
edited with Steve Sturdy, has now been published by Policy Press... This important collection presents a radical reconception of the place of knowledge in contemporary policymaking in Europe, based not on assumptions about evidence, expertise or experience but on the...
Europe’s spaces of action
What do we imagine when we imagine Europe and the European Union? What unacknowledged assumptions do we hold? In Governing Europe’s Spaces, we re-imagine Europe as a space of action. We elaborate our concept of space – physical, symbolic, peopled, bordered, multiple...
Critical Comparison
'For a (self-)critical comparison', written with Eric Mangez, appeared in Critical Policy Studies in summer 2013... This paper reflects on the design and organization of cross-national comparative research in social and public policy, based in our own experience of...
Representing Practice
is the title of a panel at the conference on Interpretive Policy Analysis in Vienna in July 2013... A sense of practice has always been central to critical and interpretive policy studies, both as a theoretical construct and as an object of inquiry. Much work has been...
nef’s Prevention Papers
cite Richard Freeman's early work in seeking to renew an agenda for prevention in social and public policy... Ian Gough's 'Understanding prevention policy', written for the new economics foundation, begins by noting the relative absence of any theory of prevention in...
‘Aaron, why only sometimes?’
pointed to the relevance of Wildavsky's work for practice-based approaches to policy studies... The paper, given to the Interpretive Policy Analysis conference in Tilburg in July 2012, began by citing a passage from Craftways: 'The imposition of order on recalcitrant...
Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted
Knowledge in Policy is contracted to appear in late 2013, edited by Richard Freeman and Steve Sturdy and published by Policy Press... Knowledge in Policy: embodied, inscribed, enacted introduces a new way of thinking about knowledge, not in terms of its content or...
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... Both evidence and policy - separately and together - derive meaning from an implied other, third term: that of practice. Evidence...
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... Classics of Community Psychiatry is the first volume to examine the course of the...
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... The EC-funded Integrated Project KNOWandPOL is concerned with the way different kinds of knowledge are mobilised in...
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... This paper was first published in 1999, and is derived...
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... See the 'publications' page elsewhere on this site...
Edinburgh-Bremen-Milan workshop
Doctoral students and research fellows working on health policy in Edinburgh, Bremen and Milan met in Bremen for a workshop on Friday and Saturday, 18-19 June 2010... Doctoral students and research fellows working on health policy in Edinburgh, Bremen and Milan met in...
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. This study aims to identify and understand the...
Hanse Fellowship, Bremen
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 <a...
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... Classification is integral to comparison. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the nature, purpose and...
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. So what...
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'... We know little of the way policy-makers work, of what they actually do when they make policy. Our starting point in this panel is therefore...
What is translation?
A new paper in Evidence and Policy discusses this key concept in knowledge transfer and exchange... 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...
KNOWandPOL reports
Reports on our study of WHO Europe's initiatives in mental health policy are now complete. A separate document on the role of international organizations in regulation compares WHO's work with OECD's PISA programme in education.Freeman, R Smith-Merry, J, and Sturdy, S...