This open access book is an exploration of city responses to migrants with a precarious status in Europe. It provides new evidence and analysis from research on three cities in Austria, Germany and the UK: Vienna, Frankfurt and Cardiff. The book explores strategies and services of municipal authorities towards precarious migrants and their cooperation with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in service provision. It focuses on healthcare, education, housing and access to advice; and part...

In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking. But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians and the general public? Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods e...

The shifting nature of employment practice towards the use of more precarious work forms has caused a crisis in classical labour law and engendered a new wave of regulation. This timely book deftly uses this crisis as an opportunity to explore the notion of precariousness or vulnerability in employment relationships.Arguing that the idea of vulnerability has been under-theorised in the labour law literature, Lisa Rodgers illustrates how this extends to the design of regulation for ...

Governing Compact Cities investigates how governments and other critical actors organise to enable compact urban growth, combining higher urban densities, mixed use and urban design quality with more walkable and public transport-oriented urban development. Philipp Rode draws on empirical evidence from London and Berlin to examine how urban policymakers, professionals and stakeholders have worked across disciplinary silos, geographic scales and different time horizons since the ea...

This open access textbook provides an introduction to theories, concepts and methodological approaches concerning various facets of migration and migration-related diversities. It starts with an introduction to migration studies and continues with an introductory reading of migration drivers, migration infrastructures, migration flows, and several transversal topics such as gender and migration. It also covers politics, policies and governance as well as specific research methods.A...

The Social Democratic party family is a central part of political life in the West. This book focuses on this party family as well as a unique political force in the industrialised world. It provides a critical comparative survey of when, where, how and why Social Democracy developed within established capitalist democracies.The book explains the electoral fortunes of Social Democratic parties, the influence of the party system dynamics and co-operation between parties in governmen...

This open access book describes how the numerous arrivals of asylum seekers since 2015 shaped reception and integration processes in Europe. It addresses the structuration of asylum and reception systems, and spaces and places of reception on European, national, regional and local level. It also analyses perceptions and discourses on asylum and refugees, their evolvement and the consequences for policy development. Furthermore, it examines practices and policy developments in the field of ...

A detailed new examination of the initiatives governments are exploring to reform the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy in order to provide more opportunities for political participation and inclusion.Combining theory and empirical case studies, this is a systematic evaluation of the most visible and explicit efforts to engineer political participation via institutional reforms. Part I discusses the phenomenon of participatory engineering from a conceptual standpoint...

This open access book presents a topical, comprehensive and differentiated analysis of Germany’s public administration and reforms. It provides an overview on key elements of German public administration at the federal, Länder and local levels of government as well as on current reform activities of the public sector. It examines the key institutional features of German public administration; the changing relationships between public administration, society and the private sector; the admi...

***Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2025***‘Reveals the causes and consequences behind the explosion of migrant care work. A remarkable contribution from one of the leading social scientists of gender, care and migration in Europe’ Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Princeton University‘A tour-de-force distillation of radical social thought on domestic labour grounded in critiques of global capitalism’ Heidi Gottfried, co...

Irregular migration systems are giving way to an undocumented population in Europe that is estimated at some millions. The migrants managed to live and work for years without a certified identity yet within ‘foggy’ social structures. What strategies and mechanisms allow them to avoid detection, generate an income and access necessary services? What alternatives are pursued - at whatever human cost - to substitute for political membership and legal protection? How does irregular status impa...

Population ageing and the globalisation of international migration are challenging the research agendas of social scientists around the world, and posing numerous challenges for policy makers and practitioners whose goal is to formulate and design high-quality and user-friendly policies and services. Both of these phenomena have brought, for example, attention to the fact that more and more people around the world are ageing in countries other than those where they were born. The fact that...