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As we face a profound environmental crisis, we often think that it can be overcome by smart systems and green innovations, but this is risky since increasingly complex technological solutions rely on less abundant materials. A best-seller in France, this English language edition introduces readers to an alternative perspective on our technological future. The book skilfully goes against the grain to argue that 'high' technology will not solve global problems and envisages a different approach to manage our resources and build a more resilient and sustainable society.

Through a focus on control (self-organisation) and communication (alternative social media platforms), Anarchist Cybernetics explores the structures and functions of radically participatory and democratic organisation. Discussing some of the structures that organisations can build that allow their members to directly control how the organisation behaves, the book takes inspiration from an often-misunderstood concept: cybernetics. Building of the work of cybernetician Stafford Beer and providing a radical reading of his Viable System Model, Anarchist Cybernetics makes a unique and timely contribution both to academic debates around anarchist organisation and radical politics more generally and to broader public debates about how organisations can be democratised to allow for more participation by their members. With continuing discussions around the world about popular sovereignty and ‘taking back control’, the book outlines a clear set of proposals for how organisations can function effectively in radically democratic ways. While other contributions to these discussions often priorities one side of the communication-organisation relationship over the other, Anarchist Cybernetics addresses both and show how they are interrelated and that effective organisation demands a consideration of both.

The book provides fresh perspectives on the link between welfare policy and employment relations. A central argument of the book is that austerity in the work first policies (including Universal Credit) play a key role in attacking both social and employment rights. The book analyses the role and strategies of trade unions and civil society organisations in contesting the reform agenda demonstrating the importance of union organisation and bargaining for welfare policies. The geographies of austerity play a central role in the politics of welfare, with the ‘left behind’ regions, bearing the brunt of public expenditure cuts. In the case studies of Greater Manchester, as England’s flagship Devolution initiative, and the Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise Campaign the book explores the role of trade unions and civil society organising against welfare reform and precarious work. The final two chapters are devoted to exploring alternatives including lessons which can be drawn from Denmark’s, more redistributive welfare and industrial relations system and the importance of challenging the austerity narrative. The author calls for a greater role for economic and welfare democracy involving strengthening employment rights through coordinated collective bargaining and investing in public services and local government as a basis of building a democratic and accountable labour market.

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, the author of this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state's legitimization of austerity and women's everyday experiences, the book reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed. By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, the book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity. Delivering a timely account of the misconceptions of policies, discourses and representations around austerity in the UK, the book illustrates the complex ways through which austerity is experienced by women in their everyday lives.

Beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. This unique book carves a much-needed critical and interdisciplinary path to examine and understand the racial dynamics in the craft beer industry and the popular consumption of beer. The book's guiding theoretical perspectives are race and the founding of the United States; racial ideology and the boundaries of Americanity; the production of (beer as) culture; and cultural diversity and brewing. It begins with an overview of the whiteness of craft beer. Looking at the history of beer and its origin stories in the 'new world' shows that beer in the United States has always been bound up with race, racism, and the construction of white institutions and identities. Given the very quick and meteoric rise of the craft beer industry, as well as the myopic scholarly focus on economic and historical trends in the industry, the book states that there is an urgent need to take stock of the intersectional inequalities that such realities gloss over.

The relationship between the family and civil society has always been complex, with the family often regarded as separate from, or even oppositional to, civil society. Taking a fresh empirical approach, this book reveals how such separation underestimates the important role the family plays in civil society. Considering the impact of family events, dinner table debates, intergenerational transmission of virtues and the role of the mother, this enlightening book draws on survey data from 1000 young people, a sample of their parents and grandparents, and extended family interviews, to uncover how civil engagement, activism and political participation are inherited and fostered within the home.

This edited collection explores the temporal dimensions of civil society through examining how different lifecourse stages and events trigger or hinder engagement with civil society. There is increasing concern about declining levels of participation, and fears that young people today are far less civically engaged than older generations. Some believe that an already-weakened civil society looks set to enter a phase of terminal decline. However, these gloomy predictions do not consider the possibility not only that the nature of civic engagement may be changing, but that participation may wax and wane over the lifecourse. Drawing on a range of empirical data, including cross-sectional analyses, longitudinal data and interviews, this book investigates not changing levels of engagement, and the shifting priorities of citizens as they manage the contingencies of career, family and old age. Largely chronological in organisation, this book explores civic participation over the lifecourse – from school to later life. The book includes chapters on young people’s civil and political participation and the role of universities in promoting civic engagement. It also examines the challenges of parenthood and grandparenthood – as well as the opportunities for volunteering in later life. Finally, the examines how older people balance the competing claims of charities and family when thinking about their legacy.

In the current context of neo-liberal policies, market deregulation and global flows, cities around the world have been faced with the increasingly complex challenges of fragmentation and marginalisation, while ideals of close-knit communities, belonging, and citizenship have become ever harder to sustain. To understand processes of marginalisation and resilience from a multiplicity of viewpoints, there has been a growing demand for inclusive ways of knowledge production, taking into account approaches advocated by the civil society sector and knowledges carried by communities which have been encapsulated in the term ‘epistemologies of the South’. This volume seeks to respond to this need by arguing that collaborations between scholars, activists, stakeholders and communities together with artists can be used as a springboard to strengthen resilience in vulnerable urban areas by taking into account different viewpoints expressed through creative practice. It proposes to employ ‘Co-Creation’, reconceptualised as an alternative way to produce knowledge by bringing together academics, activists and artists and involving them in generating shared understandings of neighbourhoods and wider injustices in the city, through commonly-created artistic outputs. The authors use a multi-disciplinary framework to explore the relevance and suitability of Co-Creation as a broadly applicable methodology to challenge marginalisation in various contexts, primarily in Western Europe and Latin America. This comparative approach provides opportunities to test Co-Creation in various contexts and to address different forms of marginalisation including ethnic, racial, social, postcolonial and generational inequalities, and to discuss these experiences in the light of international debates on cohesive cities and active citizenship.

At a time when criminal justice systems appear to be in a permanent state of crisis, in this collection leading scholars from criminology and theology have come together to challenge criminal justice orthodoxy by questioning the dominance of retributive punishment. The book is a timely and unique contribution that considers alternatives which draw on Christian ideas of hope, mercy and restoration, rather than the norms of punishment, pain and retribution. Contributions focus on punishment, although wider criminal justice concerns in policing and probation, as well as mental health and surveillance are also considered. Promoting cross-disciplinary learning, the book is of interest to academics and students of criminology, public theology, socio-legal studies, legal philosophy and religious studies, as well as practitioners and policy makers. If the ideas discussed in this book are taken seriously they offer a fundamental challenge to the contemporary view of criminal justice.

Discrimination, unjust economic policies and violent regimes continue in the 21st century. This book exposes politicians' cruel motives and the resulting outcomes. The book begins with an overview of the role of cruelty in politics, in the design and implementation of state policies and in non-state responses. Cruel acts and policies are worldwide, though the United Nations has set prohibitions on cruelty which represent global standards. If truths about worldwide cruelties become evident, the elimination of such practices should become a key consideration in any future crafting of policies and in the advocacy of values which influence political cultures. Advocacy of humanitarian alternatives to cruelty would depend on the spirit of universal human rights, challenges to oppressive uses of power, and the promotion of policies to address social and economic inequalities. Understanding cruelty can be made easier by theory about patterns which persist irrespective of differences between countries and cultures. Through empirical analysis, human stories and poetic commentary, the book identifies non-destructive exercise of power, courageous public action and compelling humanitarian alternatives as the key to achieving a future in which dignity and equality flourish.

As the biodiversity crisis deepens, this book sets out radical environmental thinking and action to respond to the threat of mass species extinction. The book conceptualises large-scale injustice endangering non-humans, and signposts new approaches to the conservation of a shared planet. Developing principles of distributive ecological justice, the book builds towards a bold vision of just conservation that can inform the work of policy makers and activists. The book begins with an overview of ecological justice, sometimes referred to as ecojustice. It refers to interspecies justice, which describes the author's relational and global understanding of the justice relationship between humans and nonhumans. The book seeks to present an account of global non-ranking biocentric distributive ecological/interspecies justice to wild nonhuman beings. It concludes that the human takeover of the Earth's ecological space — its resources, ecosystem benefits, and actual spaces — that ultimately leads to species extinctions constitutes an injustice, which should be discussed and responded to as a matter of justice. The book is a timely investigation into ethics in the natural world during the Anthropocene, and a call for biocentric ecological justice before it is too late.

The Foundational Economy encompasses those goods and services, together with the economic and social relationships that underpin them, that provide the everyday infrastructure of civilized life. Policies that promote commodification, privatization and financialisation have incorporated many of these goods and services within market logics, with profound and damaging impacts on the daily lives of citizens. This edited collection extends theoretical and empirical work on the Foundational Economy to explore its relevance to the civil sphere and to civil repair. Our aim is to advance foundational thinking in three key areas. First, we set out detailed evidence on the impact of growth based and financialised solutions on local democracy, citizenship and civil society and explore alternative approaches to citizenship and social justice that are rooted in the Foundational Economy. Second, we provide, for the first time, important comparative perspectives on the development of foundational thinking. And third we document detailed and critical case studies in core areas of economic and social life. Addressing a range of substantive areas of concern, individual chapters use case studies at different national and regional levels to illustrate the arguments being developed. This unique collection demonstrates that there is clear evidence that The Foundational Economy is already influencing policy making at devolved nation and city region scales and is having international reach. In contrast to exclusively ‘bottom-up’ approaches however, we maintain that a Foundational Economy approach requires us to address the key institutions of our societies and the role of public action in those institutions.

This book conveys the ideas behind procedural justice theory as they apply to policing. It sets out important but complex ideas in jargon-free language to non-specialist readers with an interest in policing – including serving police officers and police recruits as they embark on a degree-level entry programme into the police service. The book’s main message is that public trust in the police builds police legitimacy, and people comply with the law and cooperate with the police when they see the police as legitimate. It argues that public trust in the police serves as the bedrock of police legitimacy. Procedural justice theory provides an account of the reasons why people obey the law that stresses the importance of fair and respectful treatment of the public, and an alignment between policing practice and people’s moral standards. It provides a narrative about crime control that questions the tough ‘no-nonsense’ solutions that politicians often reach for when crime problems emerge. The book’s main policy recommendations are that policing strategies and tactics should always be assessed against criteria of legitimacy, and that the quality of treatment in police contacts with the public is one of the keys to good policing.

This book analyses the impact of the idea of civilization on the global political order. The inquiry explains Norbert Elias’s pioneering examination of the rise of European civilized self-images. It extends the perspective by discussing the interdependencies between state formation which was central to Elias’s explanation and two inter-related phenomena – European colonial expansion and the evolution of the first universal society of states. Special emphasis is placed on European convictions that other societies would become civilized as a result of colonial civilizing offensives and the mimetic behaviour of non-European regimes. The nineteenth century standard of civilization which embodied that belief was an important junction between state formation, colonial expansion and international society. The book concludes with reflections on the cultural

This book provides a unique study on the lower ranks of the Afghan police force due to the lack of empirical evidence of what attributes to the causes, practices and consequences of corruption in this institution. The book is divided into a number of sections. It commences with an understanding of how corruption, and narrowly police corruption, impact on the police force, state legitimacy and the strategies in place to mitigate such problems as part of broader security and post-conflict reconstruction initiatives. The theoretical framework comprises political, economic and cultural drivers of police corruption by drawing on semi-structured interviews with elites and a survey and structured interview conducted with street-level police officers. The findings infer that weak oversight and low pay are causes of police corruption which intensify bribery and roadside extortion. The lack of professionalism, partly due to short and unclear training, and patronage are deemed as meanings of police corruption. In terms of motivation, there is no sense of pride in Afghan policing to fulfil a clear mandate. Moreover, non-meritocratic recruitment is prevalent which exacerbates local influences, loyalties and job buying in either high-drug cultivating or urban areas. To curb patronage, police officers are rotated to distant provinces but economic hardship is further increased when catering for large families with fewer breadwinners. The book concludes that the problems with police corruption and failure to combat it results in low public confidence and state illegitimacy which can support violent opposition groups to create further instability in war-torn societies.

Governments increasingly blame citizens for their own failed policies. Individuals can only be held responsible for the choices they reasonably make from the opportunities they have available to them. Government is the major agent in society that creates those opportunities for citizens. We know a good deal about how regulations and institutions affect social outcomes in various policy areas. This book examines five policy areas across the USA, UK and Australia: gun ownership, food manufacture, housing, gambling and recreational drugs. It demonstrates how different regulations affect gun crime, and how modern food manufacturers design their products to tap into basic human biological desires, creating the obesity crisis. Government policy over the last fifty years has produced a severe housing crisis. Gambling is an area where government has relaxed regulation to the benefit of many, but the detriment of the few, and needs to grapple with problems it has created, while recreational drugs is an area where government has remained paternalistic, performing the nanny role it refuses in other areas, despite the obvious failures of its regulatory stance. The book shows how government blames its citizens for the problems which arise from the government’s own policies. It’s the government’s responsibility, stupid.

As many social inequalities widen, this is a crucial survey of local authorities' evolving role in health, social care, and wellbeing. The book reviews structural changes in provision and procurement, and explores social determinants of health including intergenerational needs and housing. The book begins with an overview of the relationship between health and housing, regional disparities and responses across England, Wales, and Scotland in the provision of health and social care, and local authority commissioning. It considers how the Municipal Corporations Act (1835) led to the establishment of elected town councils. In the mid- to late 20th century, municipalisation gave way to centralised government, which subverted the autonomy of local authorities. Currently, social care is provided and funded by local authorities and private funders. The main objective of social care is to help people to live well and happily, and live as long as they can. This person-centred approach is in contrast to the systems that have been developed to support the health care needs of people. In 2020, poverty still remains a key driver of poor health and wellbeing. With detailed assessments of regional disparities and case studies of effective strategies and interventions from local authorities, the book addresses complex issues (Wicked Issues), considers where responsibility for wellbeing lies and points the way to future policy-making. The Centre for Partnering (CfP), a network of universities working with the private and third sectors, is a key outcome of this innovative review.

Legal professionals are thought to have higher levels of mental health issues and lower levels of wellbeing than the general population. Drawing on qualitative data from new research with legal practitioners, this in-depth study of mental health and wellbeing in the UK and Republic of Ireland’s legal sector is a timely contribution to the urgent international debate on these issues. The authors present a comprehensive discussion of the cultural, structural and other causes of legal professionals’ compromised wellbeing. They explore the everyday demands and difficulties of the legal working environment and consider the impacts on individuals, the legal profession and wider society. Making comparisons with systems overseas, this is an invaluable resource that provides evidence-based suggestions for swift and effective organisational and policy-related interventions in the legal sector.

This book is an innovative and systematic overview of policy analysis in Colombia and an instructive view of how it might help studies elsewhere. It casts new light on Colombia in a systematic overview of policy analysis for an international audience. Examining the historical development and current status of policy analysis as a field of study and in practice, the book considers public policy analysis in government and the judiciary, and across domains including health, education and the military. Chapters delve into Colombia's notable success in economic regeneration, the management of cultural diversity and the resolution of long-term internal armed conflict. Not just an important summation of policy analysis in Colombia, the book also provides insights and lessons applicable elsewhere.

Poverty and place matter to children’s education. This book reports on and elaborates findings of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy from the four UK jurisdictions of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and considers the implications for educational policy and practice. The book explores the different educational landscapes of poverty across the UK and highlights the importance of policy and place for educational opportunities and outcomes of young people living in poverty. The book presents research evidence from the four jurisdictions on the effects of poverty and policy on the education of young people and explores ways that schools and teachers in different parts of the UK try to mitigate the effects of poverty on young people.