Publications

If the race is already halfway run even before children begin school,then we clearly need to examine what happens in the earliest years (Esping-Anderson 2004).

The importance of the early years is well understood within the Welsh Government. Since 2003 work has been underway to develop effective interventions in this area, such as the Flying Start programme. However, the question of what works best and is most effective remains important. Events such as this that bring colleagues from the policy,…

Over recent decades there has been an international shift towards multi-level governance. Against this backdrop, many comparative welfare studies take government policy outputs as the starting point for their analysis. However, the associated pluralization of electoral systems in unitary states means that welfare choices are no longer exclusively informed by single state-wide ballots. Accordingly, this…

The important role which older people play in rural community development through their various activities has become a substantive area of interest across social science disciplines, including gerontology, sociology, psychology and human geography. Reflecting the demographic shift of an ageing countryside within many parts of the global north, the future of rural social policy initiatives…

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of a need for a general, non-language-specific assessment tool that could be used to evaluate general speech and language abilities in children, especially to assist in identifying atypical development in bilingual children who speak a language unfamiliar to the assessor. It has been suggested that a non-word…

Drawing on perspectives from the governmentality literature and the sociology of risk, this article explores the strategies, tools and mechanisms for managing risk in acute hospital trusts in the United Kingdom. The article uses qualitative material from an ethnographic study of four acute hospital trusts undertaken between 2008 and 2010 focusing on the provision of…

This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search for…

This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local) knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search for…

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.