Publications

Previous research has drawn attention to the importance of measuring accessibility to public transit services for transport planning and decision-making purposes and to the use of GIS to produce accessibility maps. Existing measures have been criticised for their lack of sophistication and reliance on simple operations such as Euclidean buffering. This article introduces an accessibility…

In this paper we examine the contested character of local civil society in rural North West Wales. Recent years have seen an increasing research and policy interest in the nature of civil society activity at the local level. In contributing to this, we argue that greater attention be paid to how relationships between civil society…

The constitutional reform programme pursued by the Labour Government following the 1997 General Election fundamentally recast territorial politics and administration in the United Kingdom. The introduction of devolved institutions across the UK challenged the already somewhat over-stated and loosely defined myth of the ‘unitary state paradigm’ and reinvigorated debates regarding the extent to which the…

The UK has traditionally been viewed as a classic example of a unitary state in which central institutions dominate decision making. The recent Labour Government sought to counter this convention through devolution to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London and administrative decentralization to the English regions. This article examines New Labours efforts to promote sub-national…

The differentiation of rural development in eastern coastal China has been exaggerated by the rapid rural restructuring under globalization, since economic reforms and an open-door policy were initiated in 1978. The problems associated with rural restructuring in China may in part be addressed by drawing on experiences and achievements from other countries, including Britain, which…

This article deals with issues relating to trade union density and the fact that while over the past 30 years, union densities have followed a declining path in all regions, this retreat was not uniform across space. Analysis of the Labour Force Survey reveals that Wales exhibits among the highest levels of union density in…

British Politics 6(3) pp 379-396 On the basis of extensive new empirical evidence, this article offers an assessment of how post-devolution Wales has determined the strategies employed in attempts to engage with, and influence, EU policy-making processes. The primary focus of the article is on domestic political capacity construction, rather than specifically about the impact…

Education and skill are increasingly used by states around the world as a central organizing principle in the regulation of migration flows. Immigration theorists have often claimed that use of education and skill to determine “who should get in” to a country is non-discriminatory, innocent and legitimate. Using the example of Canadian immigration policy, this…

Paul Peterson’s (1981) City Limits was to become one of several landmark publications in the study of urban politics during the 1980s and 1990s. It pioneered the argument that, amid the unravelling of the 1960s Great Society welfare accord and associated War on Poverty1 and now confronting the deindustrialisation of their maturing economies and the…

This article considers Goffmans conceptualization of interaction order at the margins of society in encounters between urban welfare workers and their clients. Observations from these encounters demonstrate practices relating to the situated management of stigma and identity, and the accomplishment of role within these service encounters. A reading of Goffmans theoretical contribution lies in revealing…