Drawing on interviews with welfare-reliant single mothers living in the South Wales Valleys, this original book charts their interactions with the labour market and welfare state. It challenges current understandings of welfare eligibility and dependency and provides valuable new policy insights for welfare reform.

The second edition of this best-selling book continues to provide an essential guide to best practice in adult safeguarding. It includes recent legislation, guidance and research-based developments and relates them to practice examples.

Based on the findings of the Innovate Project, this book asks how services can be re-envisioned and transformed through innovation. The authors offer insights into the core conditions necessary for socially just and practice-congruent social care innovation that responds to the distinctive, contemporary safeguarding concerns facing young people.

Drawing on modern history, politics, economics, psychology, sociology and neuroscience, John Bone argues that our current turmoil leaves us ill prepared to deal with two of the greatest challenges that are confronting humanity: the rise of AI and automation and how we deal with climate change.

How can we design, develop and adapt urban environments to better meet the needs of an increasingly diverse ageing population?  This book highlights the urgent need to address inequalities that shape the experience of ageing in urban environments, and demonstrates that despite obstacles, meaningful social change is achievable locally.

The first in-depth analysis of the EU’s state-building efforts in Afghanistan (2001–2022), this book argues that the EU’s actions were inadequate and deeply flawed, failing to account for the growing insecurity within Afghanistan and changes within US strategy.

Exploring the development of stock exchanges, markets and the links with states, in this book Roscoe offers a cautionary tale about the drive of financial markets towards expropriation, capture and exclusion and wonders what the future for finance might be, and how we might get there.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed weaknesses in UK housing, with housing inequality contributing to the unequal impact of the disease. Becky Tunstall assesses the position of housing in public policy and health, and the most immediate responses to the pandemic in one convenient resource for students, scholars and practitioners.

Leaders, researchers and practitioners from the UK “What Works Network” share their insights on the successes, failures, and future of the What Works Centres, which have proven successful and popular across a number of policy settings.

The sixth, fully updated edition of this bestselling guide links the theory and practice of community work in an insightful and relatable read for students and practitioners. The textbook features brand new sections on work in health, housing, with children, young people and those with disabilities and the changing role of IT.

In this timely book, Ed Atkins asks: are we getting decarbonisation right? And how could it be made better for people and communities? In doing so, this book proposes a different type of energy transition. One that prioritises and takes opportunities to do better – to provide better jobs, community ownership and improve people’s homes and lives.

This book examines how changes to social rules reshape how states explain their military actions, and changes to technology and society transform contemporary warfare. Analysing the role that war serves in global politics, it outlines the ways in which war affects the contemporary world, from international relations to our day-to-day lives.