Publications

The constitutional reform programme pursued by the Labour Government following the 1997 General Election fundamentally recast territorial politics and administration within the United Kingdom (UK). The introduction of devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the regional agenda pursued in England and the creation of an elected mayor in London challenged the already somewhat…

Wales is often regarded as being a uniform country, but, as has been highlighted in the previous chapter, it is very diverse with distinct geographical differences in population and other socio-economic and cultural characteristics. This chapter reveals and discusses some of these differences through official statistics presented at a variety of spatial scales with the…

Few places could better illustrate the complexities of locality making than the Heads of the Valleys. The area selected as the south Wales WISERD locality is today highly recognisable as a locality of both political and popular construction. It is enshrined in much Welsh government policy and recognised as a particular bounded space by many…

The territorialisation of rural places has long been a focus of inquiry by geographers. On the one hand, rural places are culturally perceived as deeply embedded in their territories, if understood etymologically as a connection to the land or terroir. The traditional industries of rural areas have been based on exploiting the land and its…

The book provides the first systematic assessment of trends in inequality in job quality in Britain over recent decades. It assesses the pattern of change drawing on the nationally representative Skills and Employment Surveys (SES) carried out at regular intervals from 1986 to 2012. These surveys collect data from workers themselves, thereby providing a unique…

The unadjusted public–private sector pay differential has attracted considerable political interest over many years. It has been used to justify changes to pay-setting arrangements and the imposition of pay restraint on the public sector. However, previous analyses have shown that a large part of the premium can be explained by differences in individual and employment…

Will Hutton’s keynote at the 2015 WISERD Annual Conference.

WISERD, in partnership with the Research Institute for Applied Social Science (RIASS) and the Academy of Social Science, have today launched a new booklet showcasing the vast array of social science research taking place in Wales; titled ‘Making the Case for the Social Sciences 10 – Wales’. It includes a new study by Welsh researchers which…

Karl Wilding’s keynote at the 2015 WISERD Annual Conference.

The 6th Annual WISERD Conference took place at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium from Tuesday 30th June – Thursday 2nd July. It was attended by almost 200 delegates, which included practitioners, policy makers and social scientists, who came together to discuss and debate a range of topical themes such as health; social care; wellbeing; education; culture &…