John Hudson

Making Policy in Theory and Practice (edited by Hugh Bochel and Sue Duncan) has just been published by The Policy Press.

I have a chapter in it looking at the potential for policy to become a learning experience. Putting together the chapter was certainly a challenge; the idea for the book was to take nine core ‘competencies’ identified in a government review titled ‘Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century’ and turn each into a chapter for the book.

Unfortunately (for me), mine - capable of learning lessons - was the final of these core competencies and, on closer inspection, remarkably like the two that proceeded it - open to review and open to evaluation - as well as drawing much from the ‘outward looking’ competency. In fact, once these elements had been covered by my co-authors, there seemed to be remarkably little left to say, and certainly Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century had little more than a few lines to say about my allocated topic! In fact, for the most part, it seemed to relegate lesson learning to the improved dissemination of evaluation findings.

With a little prod from some colleagues from within government assigned to offer some thoughts to help shape the argument, the chapter ended up in the (some would say) murky realms of complexity theory, posing some rather difficult questions about what learning might mean in a (non-linear) policy context, particularly when evaluation is often so tightly linked to quantitatively measured performance targets.

The temptation that governments often give into when undertaking reviews of policy making processes (and one that some of the academic policy analysis literature gives into also) is to prescribe tighter and tighter control of the policy making ‘machine’ in order allow for the more efficient delivery of policy makers’ ideas. However, the ‘machine’ is an illusion and ‘control’ impossible. Learning that adopts such overly simplistic views of the policy process risks being too narrow… or so the chapter argues!

Along with York colleagues Stefan Kühner and Stuart Lowe, I have been working on a new introductory social policy text book called ‘The Short Guide to Social Policy‘ that (if all goes to plan) is due to be published by The Policy Press next year. Having just finished the draft manuscript we are keenly awaiting the referees’ comments at the moment!

The project is something of a risky venture for us as there are already a lot of excellent social policy texts on the market. However, we hope to make a distinct contribution in three key areas…

Firstly, as the name of the book implies(!) by providing a short introduction. Many of the texts available now are approaching encyclopedia length. While this is a largely sensible response to the growing scope of the subject of Social Policy, for those only studying, say, a single module in the subject or merely looking for an accessible text to get them up-and-running, a 700 page introduction isn’t always welcome. To cut the book down to size, we have gone ‘back to basics’ so to speak, focusing only on the five giants of welfare identified by Beveridge: health, housing, social security, employment and education.

Secondly, by adopting an international approach. The most popular Social Policy texts remain very much focused on the British case. Yet, our experience as teachers of Social Policy is that the student body is becoming much more diverse in the UK and so the British case is not always a logical starting point for our students. Intellectually, too, there is no compelling reason why the British case needs to form the basis of an introduction to the subject; indeed, a comparative perspective is hugely beneficial. We have, therefore, tried hard to divorce our discussion from any national case. Though our knowledge is still biased towards the countries we are most familiar with, we have included examples and evidence from more than 70 countries in the draft of the book.

Finally, by adopting a common set of conceptually rooted headings for each chapter. In most Social Policy introductions, each chapter is allowed to follow its own logic and/or the content is allowed to be driven by the author’s own concerns. We have adopted a common structure for each chapter that broadly draws on Esping-Andersen’s view that welfare regimes have (varying) social rights, (varying) mechanisms of delivery (state, market, family etc) and produce (varying) degrees of social stratification.

In short, the book is informed by our interests in the comparative political economy of welfare; indeed, while the main chapters, for the most part, offer a description of policy mechanisms and an exploration of empirical evidence, we round the book off with a guide to some of the big picture theories about the development (past and future) of welfare states.

A few weeks ago I was - out-of-the-blue - invited to speak at a conference in Skopje, Macedonia, on ‘Contemporary Challenges in Theory and Practice of Social Work and Social Policy’ organised as part of a celebration of 50 years of social work and social policy education in Macedonia. The conference took place a few days ago:

Skopje Conference Poster

It was my first trip to the region and a great opportunity to meet some new people. Amongst those from or working in the region there were: former York PhD student Eda Tahiraj; conference co-organiser Maja Gerovska Mitev (University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia); Adrian Dan (Research Institute for Quality of Life, Bucharest, Romania); Mojca Novak (Business and Management School in Novo mesto, Slovenia), Natalija Perišić (University of Belgrade, Serbia); Paul Stubbs (Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia); Vanja Branica (University of Zagreb, Croatia).

I presented a paper from the fuzzy set ideal type analysis of productive and protective welfare state types that I have been working on with Stefan Kühner; a book from the conference with a chapter by us will be appearing in early 2008. An earlier version of the work can be downloaded from the ASPC 2007 website.