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This paper locates ‘new Labour's’ welfare reform agenda in the workfarist shift of recent social policy. In this context it explores the aim of new labour's' welfare reform programme to reconstitute the reserve army of labour so that it is able to fulfil its role in managing economic stability. The emphasis is upon ensuring that labour is as cheap as possible for capital to employ through various direct and indirect wage subsidies and requiring more benefit dependent groups to compete for paid employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is motivated by a very simple question – ‘what types of firms create the most jobs in the UK economy?’ One popular answer to this question has been High-Growth Firms (HGFs). These firms represent only a small minority – the ‘Vital 6%’ – of the UK business population yet, but have a disproportionate impact on job creation and innovation. We re-visit the discussion launched by the 2009 National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) reports, which identified the 6% figure and, using more recent data, confirm the headline conclusion for job creation: a small number of job-creating firms (mostly small firms) are responsible for a significant amount of net job creation in the United Kingdom. Adopting our alternative preferred analytical approach, which involves tracking the growth performance of cohorts of start-ups confirms this conclusion; however, we find an even smaller number of job-creating firms are responsible for a very significant proportion of job creation. We conclude by considering the question – ‘what are the implications for policy choices?’ [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to this issue is presented, which focuses on concerns for public accountability under a state in transition. The article evaluates manuscripts in the issue, which cover topics including limitations in the growth development of urban areas, middle management resistance to change and challenges to democratic legitimacy, scrutiny, and accountability in the national and local state of Great Britain.

This paper examines the origins of state educational systems in Europe in the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of mass education throughout the world in the twentieth century. We offer a theoretical interpretation of mass state-sponsored schooling that emphasizes the role of education in the nation-building efforts of states competing with one another within the European interstate system. We show that political, economic, and cultural developments in Europe led to a model of the legitimate national society that became highly institutionalized in the European (and later, world) cultural frame. This model made the construction of a mass educational system a major and indispensable component of every modern state's activity. We discuss the usefulness of this perspective for understanding recent cross-national studies of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that key elements of contemporary social policy can be fruitfully analysed through the lens of waste. Drawing on work identifying the importance of waste and waste disposal in the history of modernity and early liberal theory, this article develops two concepts of waste – waste as inertia and waste as excess – and uses these to shed light on aspects of recent social policy in the areas of unemployment, healthcare and higher education. In particular, it is argued that the theme of waste is able to capture the desire of recent governments to deploy social policy explicitly to economic ends – including economic growth and capital – and the consequences it sets in motion for citizens who fail to comply with stipulated obligations. It is also argued that the government of waste is a source of political legitimacy for the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study collaborative and noncollaborative projects that are supported by government grants. First, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze optimal decisions in these projects. Second, we test our hypotheses with a unique data set containing academic publications and research funds for all academics at the major university engineering departments in the United Kingdom. We find that the type of the project (measured by its level of appliedness) increases the type of both the university and firm partners. Also, the quality of the project (number and impact of the publications) increases with the quality of the researcher and firm, and with the affinity in the partners’ preferences. The collaboration with firms increases the quality of the project only when the firms’ characteristics make them valuable partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Delegation models make contrasting assumptions about how political disagreement affects discretion and empirical research reports contradictory findings. The authors aim to shed new light on this puzzle by distinguishing the mechanisms that drive the effect of political disagreement on discretion. Four conditions influence the strength of each mechanism: (a) policy salience, (b) actors involved, (c) their capacity, and (d) decision rule. They explore this theoretical framework on the case of economic restructuring in the United Kingdom and show that political disagreement reduces discretion. There is no significant interaction effect between salience and political disagreement on discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how counterterrorism policing strategies and practices ill tile United Kingdom have changed in tile face of recent terrorist attacks. It considers tile evident limitations of these developments and how a local, democratic style of neighborhood policing could be used to manufacture the community intelligence ‘feed’ that offers the best probability of preventing and deterring future forms of such violence. These substantive concerns are set against a theoretical backdrop attending to how policing can respond to risks where the contours of the threat are uncertain. Tile analysis is informed by interviews with U.K. police officers involved in intelligence and counterterrorism work conducted during the early part of 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]