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School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new paradigm of early childhood allows for the construction of the child as active agents able to comment on their own lives. Historically children have been constructed using divergent discourses as either beings or becomings. More recently they have been seen as complementary and a further temporal state of having been allows for a richer description of the child. In play and role-play, the three temporal states can be observed and appear to inform the children’s understanding of complex world structures. This paper reports the research that was conducted in two Early Childhood Education and Care settings in England. The research was concerned with young children’s experiences of play and role-play in their early childhood setting. Observations and conferences demonstrate the ways in which the temporal states are established in their play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out the theoretical and methodological approach of a study of the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interest in relation to the Trust schools initiative in England. Drawing on the discourse theoretical approach of Laclau and Mouffe the paper argues that the politics of consensus associated with New Labour reconfigures the field of politics, closing down legitimate democratic space. Building on this approach and that of policy sociology the paper outlines how the researchers seeks to address the following questions – if the space for legitimate democratic debate is so severely constrained then how does a social democratic government deal with the kind of opposition that Labour faced in relation to Trust schools? How do governments persuade dissident citizens to support unpopular policies? How are citizens mobilised to support such policies? This also raises questions about how, in such a restricted political space, do those questioning or resisting such policies, engage in the politics of persuasion and the mobilisation of interests? The reconfiguration of the field of politics and what this means for the constitution of legitimate democratic debate is the object of study of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theoretical construct of social capital remains contested in terms of conceptualisation and measurement. The present paper follows the convention of distinguishing between trust, bonding, bridging and linking social capital, to conceptualise how religious communities promote and develop social capital within a specifically religious cohort. Developing this construct of religious social capital further, this paper proposes a measure for use specifically among religious communities to assess individual-level social capital. The Williams Religious Social Capital Index (WRSCI) provides a unidimensional construct of religious social capital taking into consideration the four elements highlighted. A sample of 720 members of six cathedral congregations in England and Wales completed a battery of items concerning social capital. Factor analysis procedures produced a 12-item index of religious social capital. Reliability analyses demonstrated that this index achieved satisfactory levels of internal reliability consistency. Construct validity was supported by the clear association between frequency of attendance and levels of assessed religious social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate social mobility processes affecting the lives of 15 young adults in Loughborough (aged 20-30) who experienced poverty and disadvantage as children. Using biographical narrations, the interactions between the labour market, welfare, educational institutions and familial relationships will form the framework for assessing the applicability of poverty 'transmission' theories and mechanisms. The paper's concluding comments highlight the complexity and vulnerability of young people's lives, reveal the structural and individual constraints on social mobility and address the role that institutions play in constructing the past and current life experiences of those young adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A. H. Halsey has been a professorial fellow (now emeritus) at Nuffield College in Oxford University since his appointment in 1962 as Director of Oxford’s Department of Social and Administrative Studies. This paper explores his contribution to education throughout his career, as an academic and as a national and international policy advisor, and the interface between these two. Halsey worked in what he termed the ‘political arithmetic’ tradition throughout his career, with the dual tasks of documenting the state of society, and addressing social and political issues through ‘experimental social administration’, that is the field testing of social innovation and social policy in advance of national implementation. The paper focuses on Halsey’s ‘activist’ role in policy development in the UK and internationally, through his work on educational reform at the OECD and as research advisor to Crosland at the DES with the introduction of comprehensive schooling in the UK and in particular the Educational Priority Areas (EPA) programme, and traces through the impact of his work. His major contribution as one of the leading sociologists of education in the second half of the 20 th century is also discussed, but the wider impact of this aspect of his work requires a much more extensive assessment than is possible in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is the standard qualification undertaken by pupils in England and Wales at the end of year 11 (age 15–16). GCSEs continue to play an important and central role in young people's educational and employment pathways. Within the sociology of youth, there has been recent interest in documenting the lives and educational experiences of ‘ordinary’ young people. In this paper, we analyse school GCSE attainment at the subject area level. This is an innovative approach and our motivation is to explore substantively interesting patterns of attainment that might be concealed in analyses of overall attainment or attainment within individual subjects. We analyse data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales using a latent variable approach. The modelling process uncovered four distinctive latent educational groups. One latent group is characterised by high levels of overall attainment, whereas another latent group is characterised by poor GCSE performance. There are two latent groups with moderate or ‘middle’ levels of GCSE attainment. These two latent groups have similar levels of agglomerate attainment, but one group performs better in science and the other performs better in arts GCSEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on Julia Brannen’s contribution to the development of theory and methods for intergenerational research. The discussion is contextualised within a contemporary ‘turn to time’ within sociology, involving tensions and synergies between sociological and historical imagination. These questions are informed by a juxtaposition of Brannen’s four-generation study of family change and social historian Angela Davis’s exploration women and the family in England between 1945 and 2000. These two studies give rise to complementary findings, yet have distinctive orientations towards the status and treatment of sources, the role of geography in research design and limits of generalisation [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New medicines represent exciting possibilities to individual patients for improved futures through reduced morbidity, as well as the potential for disappointment where promised outcomes are not forthcoming. For healthcare systems these technologies can enable enhanced effectiveness as well as spiralling costs, depending on value-for-money offered. Amidst uncertainty over efficacy and pricing, institutions such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence have been set up to regulate the cost-effectiveness of new products. The increased transparency of this new regulation, combined with inescapable uncertainties, leads to the heightened politicisation of decision-making and an insidious subjectivity beneath a veneer of rational-bureaucracy. This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of hope within such contexts. Conceptualised here as ideological, affective and prone to lapsing into trust, hope is considered to shape the lifeworld-background of regulatory decisions and mask uncertainty around effectiveness. These processes challenge regulator legitimacy and effectiveness within polycentric regimes, through the distortion of communication and the manipulation of blame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws parallels between the market trend in the English NHS and Polanyi's (1957) The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press: Boston (originally published in 1944 in the United States as The Great Transformation, Rinehart: and Co: New York, and in 1945 in England as Origins of our time, Gollancz: London) account of how the rise of markets provokes a self-protective counter-reaction that tries to re-embed economic relations in social relations. We report findings from a qualitative study of NHS contracting, which examines the recent move to harder-edged contracts with greater use of financial penalties and incentives. In practice, use of these techniques tended to be confined to nationally-mandated sections of the contract rather than emerging from local bilateral agreements, and when things went wrong the parties relied more on cooperative behaviour than on the provisions of the contract to find solutions. Making the current contracting system work depended more on existing relational networks than on the incentive structures created by recent 'marketisation' initiatives, but the inability of the market to evolve as expected has encouraged policy makers to publish plans for further radical reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the incremental approach to the marketisation of the English National Health Service (NHS) since the introduction of an 'internal market' in 1990 until the 2010 White Paper, 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS', and the subsequent Health and Social Care Bill published in January 2011. The introduction of a competitive market for a universal, tax-financed health system requires fundamental changes in regulation in order that market bureaucracy can be substituted for direct management. The components of reform are insufficiently captured by the framework of hierarchies and networks in new public management theories of decentralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a qualitative study of UK mental health practitioners' experiences of working with the contested condition, dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD). Our interviews focused on the issues of treatability, risk assessment and decision-making in multi-disciplinary teams. We discuss the approach of values-based medicine (VBM) as a useful framework for interpreting the data: respondents cited both explicit values (based on occupational training) and implicit values (based on personal beliefs and subjective perceptions). There was evidence of conflicting values -- within individuals, between occupational groups, and between individuals in occupational groups -- which led to widespread uncertainty and caution about whether and how those with 'dangerous' personality disorders could be treated. These disputes were resolved by a 'slide to pragmatism', whereby practitioners, reluctantly acknowledging their own empowerment in the process, sought to make whichever choice was least risky for their own professional reputation, and most pragmatic, given the resources available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the significant characteristics of many poor neighbourhoods is that the schools which serve them are characterised by poor performance in terms of attainment and other measures. This feature is seen as critical in the reinforcement of disadvantage, its transmission between generations, and as a barrier to social integration. Government policies in the UK have increasingly targeted improved school standards and performance, while other policies on urban regeneration and housing may interact with this issue. This paper examines the particular role of homeownership tenure alongside the other factors (notably poverty) which affect school attainment. After reviewing existing literature it presents new analyses of attainment based on linked pupil, school and small area-level datasets for selected areas in both England and Scotland. This provides some evidence to support the contention that homeownership has an additional effect on school attainment, beyond that explained by poverty and other associated variables, although there is some uncertainty about how separable these effects are at school or neighbourhood levels. It also points out the significant role of changing tenure mix in housing regeneration in transforming the overall profile of neighbourhoods and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the policy of promoting 'mixed communities' in the UK context. It describes the various policy instruments available for the pursuance of this goal and sets out the assumed benefits and underlying mechanisms intended to deliver beneficial outcomes, especially for disadvantaged areas. It goes on to analyse the effects of housing tenures and of housing tenure mix upon the incidence of serious problems and of the desire for local service improvements within neighbourhoods in England, using the Survey of English Housing. The findings indicate that the level of social renting is a more important influence upon neighbourhood conditions than the degree of tenure mixing. Furthermore, the findings provide more support for tenure dispersal policies than for tenure dilution strategies such as promoting a modest degree of owner occupation on social housing estates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the treatment of ontology offered by critical realism. It addresses much of the material elaborated upon in two editions of this journal. Three main groups of criticisms are made here of the critical realist treatment of open systems. It is argued that critical realism, particularly in the project in economics emanating from Cambridge, UK, tends to define systems in terms of events. This definition is shown to be problematic. The exemplar of a closed system provided by critical realism of the solar system is shown to be flawed in that it is not closed according to the closure conditions identified by critical realism. Second, the negativity of the definitions adopted is problematic for heterodox traditions attempting to build positive programmes. Furthermore, the dualism of the definitions is also inconsistent with Dow's approach, which has ramifications for the coherence of post Keynesianism. Third, the definitions tend to polarize open and closed systems and ignore the degrees of openness evident in reality. The polarization of systems leads to polarized methodology and unsustainable arguments to reject so-called “closed-systems methods.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a review of gentrification and global city research to develop an appreciation of the nature of gentrification taking place in central areas of Leeds in the UK. The literature review establishes an uneven and dominant set of social, economic and cultural relations between the city-region of London and the South East with other regions in the UK. It is proposed that these sets of relations will impact upon socio-spatial developments in regional cities in the UK and will provide the dynamics leading contemporary gentrification in regional financial centres. Using Leeds as a case study, quantitative and qualitative data are presented to develop an appreciation of the internal and external dynamics driving contemporary 'developer-led' gentrification in Leeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kari Polanyi Levitt has commented that her father's writing was met with a 'deafening silence' in England, a silence which she suggests is 'yet to be explained'. Given The Great Transformation was purposefully, situated in England Polanyi Levitt's point is an interesting one, and one which still deserves attention. But the last two decades have witnessed an intensification of interest in Karl Polanyi's methodological approach and theoretical insights, from England as well as elsewhere, and representing a range of disciplines. This raises a string of associated questions: interest from who? Why now? And how? Further we could ask: Does this new interest have the potential to redress the Polanyi Levitt charge without falling prey to an opposite one of misusing or abusing the Polanyi legacy? This paper contributes to the much larger agenda of examining in a serious way the usefulness and applicability of Polanyi's key ideas and methods, particularly as they apply to the burgeoning interest in markets and exchange within New Economic Sociology (NES). A sub-set of this agenda is to explore whether Polanyian insights provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of competitive processes and innovation than is currently available within Economics, Sociology or indeed Economic Sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]