Wow! eBook
Negotiating Cohesion, Inequality and Change: Uncomfortable Positions in Local Government
Author(s): Hannah Jones (Author)
- Publisher: Policy Press
- Publication Date: 9 Sept. 2013
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 9781447310037
- ISBN-13: 9781447310037
Book Description
How are multiculturalism, inequality and belonging understood in the day-to-day thinking and practices of local government? Examining original empirical data, this book explores how local government officers and politicians negotiate ‘difficult subjects’ linked with community cohesion policy: diversity, inequality, discrimination, extremism, migration, religion, class, power and change. The book argues that such work necessitates ‘uncomfortable positions’ when managing ethical, professional and political commitments. Based on first-hand experience of working in urban local government and extensive ethnographic, interview and documentary research, the book applies governmentality perspectives in a new way to consider how people working within government are subject to regimes of governmentality themselves, and demonstrates how power operates through emotions. Its exploration of how ‘sociological imaginations’ are applied beyond academia will be valuable to those arguing for the future of public services and building connections between the university and wider society, including scholars and students in sociology, social policy, social geography, urban studies and politics, and policy practitioners in local and central government.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Focusing on the how rather than the what, this incisive and challenging account explores community cohesion policy as practice, exploring how it is embedded in particular places and in the narratives and emotional biographies of its practitioners.” –Professor Claire Alexander, University of Manchester
“Hannah Jones sympathetically and persuasively brings the politics of local government to life far beyond the mechanics of service delivery, showing how politicians and bureaucrats make up places as they make policy.” –Allan Cochrane, The Open University
“This important book delivers fresh thinking on cohesion as a policy approach to complex, diverse communities. It elegantly extends our understandings of emotion and policy work and makes a significant contribution to public sociology debates.” –Dr Sarah Neal, University of Surrey
About the Author
Hannah Jones is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University, UK. She previously worked in local government in inner London, and has held positions as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Research Associate at the Centre on Migration Policy and Society, University of Oxford.
