Publications

For over sixty years significant research activity has addressed the extent to which the effects of social class over the life-course have determined or contributed to an individual’s economic and social fate in old age. This has led to the elaboration and discussion of a whole host of conceptual and measurement issues among a growing…

Work is an important feature of the modern Welsh economy. A lot is known about pay, but less is known about other features of work such as what skills do jobs require, how relevant are qualifications for work, and how does training and learning compare with other parts of Britain. This report provides some answers.

Attitudinal data on the experience of work and the intrinsic quality of work in Wales are relatively rare. This report offers unique insights into the stresses and strains of work, the attitudes of workers towards employment and who they work for, and the fear of job loss.

This paper argues that New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ project – and the chaos that ensued – can only be understood by grasping the longstanding, complex and intimate relationship between education and the middle class. Drawing on empirical data from ongoing investigations into the allegiances of the middle class, the paper shows how New Labour’s desire…

But what, after all, is ‘the regional’? A region can be as largeas the European peninsula. Within the political enterprisethat is the European Union, however, regions subdivide acontinent already sliced up into nation-states – and eventhen what counts as a region is far from certain. Accordingto the latest Map of European Regions, a region might…

This article examines the electoral discourse associated with state decentralisation. It offers an original perspective that complements existing studies by detailing the discourse-based dimension of policy agenda-setting associated with Scottish and Welsh devolution in UK state-wide parties’ general election manifestos 1945–2010. Innovative aspects include a combined quantitative (issue-salience) and qualitative (policy framing) methodological technique transferable…

This chapter describes the Wales Health Impact Assessment Support Unit (WHIASU) and the evolution of HIA in the context of Wales as a devolved nation with its particular approach to public health. The character of WHIASU can only properly be understood in terms of its history and the wider social, policy, and political context of…

This paper attempts to analyse current developments in education through exploring shifts in the politics of education over time. Rather than looking at education policy in terms of political provenance (left or right) or ideological underpinnings (the state or the market, the public or the private), the paper compares education policies in terms of the…

During the mid-to-late 1980s, ‘locality’ was the spatial metaphor to describe and explain the shifting world of regional studies. The paper argues that the resulting ‘localities debate’ threw this baby out with the bathwater and rather than invent new concepts to capture socio-spatial relations in the twenty-first century, the paper urges a ‘return to locality’…

This paper explores the spatial practices of public engagement through the consideration of an audio walk project that took place in Ebbw Vale in the summer of 2010. In the current political climate public engagement is often seen as a universal good, a way of demonstrating the productive dialogues that exist between ‘experts’ and their…