Welfare state governance is about tackling social issues, empowering citizens, and adding societal value. It is also about improving public health and quality of life, alleviating inequality, and reducing social polarization. Bringing together researchers from around the world, this volume examines how politics, policies and services contribute to the strengthening of societal value. It assesses the societal impact of policies and professional actions, the ways in which social inequalities...

There are significant variations in how healthcare systems and health professionals are regulated globally. One feature that they increasingly have in common is an emphasis on the value of including members of the public in quality assurance processes. While many argue that this will help better serve the public interest, others question how far the changing regulatory reform agenda is still dominated by medical interests.Bringing together leading academics worldwide, this collecti...

The book examines ongoing dynamics within the organizational fields of health and higher education, with a focus on collective (public universities and hospitals) and individual (professionals) actors, structures, processes and institutional logics. The fact that universities and hospitals share a number of important characteristics, both being hybrid organizations, professional bureaucracies, and operating within highly institutionalised environments, they are also characterised by their ...

In Realities of Canadian Nursing, influential scholars throughout Canada give voice to the unheard concerns of nurses and go to great lengths to ensure the text offers readers more than an update on current and pressing professional, legal, ethical, political, social, economic, and environmental issues in nursing and healthcare. In chapter 1 of the text, authors Carol McDonald PhD, RN and Marjorie McIntyre RN, PhD offer a Framework for Analysis, which gives students and educators a shared ...

This comprehensive textbook explores the policy process from a multitude of perspectives, including rationalism, culturalism, institutionalism and from a political point of view. This allows students to discover key concepts from the policy science literature and gain a deeper understanding of how public policy is discussed academically and shaped empirically.Public Policy in Action gives a detailed breakdown of all stages of the policy process by discussing the emergence ...

A updated overview of Australia’s health care system, addressing its core features, concepts and issuesUnderstanding the Australian Health Care System, 2nd edition is an excellent university book for undergraduate and postgraduate students alike.Published four years after the original, this second edition has been fully revised to reflect major Australian health care reform. Its fully up-to-date content includes current governmental and le...

Making policy is what governments do, but there are some fascinating and hotly debated issues associated with how government decisions get made in the interests of the people. The concept and practice of evidence-based policy-making insists that properly developed public policy draws on the best available evidence. This book considers how governments in Canada have historically interacted with research and what directions these interactions may take in the future. The goal of government maki...

Praise for Creating Interdisciplinary Campus Cultures"Klein's analysis shows convincingly that from research in the sciences to new graduate-level programs and departments, to new designs for general education, interdisciplinarity is now prevalent throughout American colleges and universities. . . . Klein documents trends, traces historical patterns and precedents, and provides practical advice. Going directly to the heart of our institutional realities, she focuses attention on so...

Calls for closer connections among disciplines can be heard throughout the world of scholarly research, from major universities to the National Institutes of Health. In Defense of Disciplines presents a fresh and daring analysis of the argument surrounding interdisciplinarity. Challenging the belief that blurring the boundaries between traditional academic fields promotes more integrated research and effective teaching, Jerry Jacobs contends that the promise of interdisciplinarity...

Law and the Technologies of the Twenty-First Century provides a contextual account of the way in which law functions in a broader regulatory environment across different jurisdictions. It identifies and clearly structures the four key challenges that technology poses to regulatory efforts, distinguishing between technology as a regulatory target and tool, and guiding the reader through an emerging field that is subject to rapid change. By extensive use of examples and extracts from the tex...

B. Guy Peters presents a critique of conventional policy design methods, placing emphasis on the need to formulate interconnecting designs for issues that cross multiple policy areas. He advocates the use of analytic categories for understanding problems rather than functional categories, such as defence and health, to change the perspective of problems and modernise policy design.Whereas previous literature takes a top-down, technocratic approach, this new perspective emphasises t...

In recent years public management research in a variety of disciplines has paid increasing attention to the role of citizens and the third sector in the provision of public services. Several of these efforts have employed the concept of co-production to better understand and explain this trend. This book aims to go further by systematizing the growing body of academic papers and reports that focus on various aspects of co-production and its potential contribution to new public governance. ...