In the loop:a realist approach to structure and agency in the practice of strategy

This paper introduces and illustrates a critical realist approach to the practice of strategy, combining Archer’s stratified ontology for structure, culture and agency with her work on reflexivity, to provide strategy-as-practice with an innovative theoretical lens. By maintaining the ontic differentiation between structure and agency this approach renders the conditions of action analytically separable from the action itself, thereby facilitating the examination of their interplay, one upon the other, at variance through time, in strategy formation and strategizing. It therefore offers the field a fruitful methodological means of exploring the increasingly complex empirical implications of some practice theoretical claims

The higher education impact agenda, scientific realism and policy change: the case of electoral integrity in Britain

Pressures have increasingly been put upon social scientists to prove their economic, cultural and social value through ‘impact agendas’ in higher education. There has been little conceptual and empirical discussion of the challenges involved in achieving impact and the dangers of evaluating it, however. This article argues that a critical realist approach to social science can help to identify some of these key challenges and the institutional incompatibilities between impact regimes and university research in free societies. These incompatibilities are brought out through an autobiographical ‘insider-account’ of trying to achieve impact in the field of electoral integrity in Britain. The article argues that there is a more complex relationship between research and the real world which means that the nature of knowledge might change as it becomes known by reflexive agents. Secondly, the researchers are joined into social relations with a variety of actors, including those who might be the object of study in their research. Researchers are often weakly positioned in these relations. Some forms of impact, such as achieving policy change, are therefore exceptionally difficult as they are dependent on other actors. Strategies for trying to achieve impact are drawn out such as collaborating with civil society groups and parliamentarians to lobby for policy change

Preparing for a new Wales A report on the structure and workings of the Welsh Assembly; Wales Labour Party Conference, 10th and 11th May 1996

English/Welsh text on inverted pagesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:q97/25620 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Electoral discourse and the party politicization of sport in multi-level systems: analysis of UK elections 1945–2011

Mandate and accountability theory state that governments should implement the policies that they promised voters. Accordingly, this study addresses a key lacuna by exploring the role of electoral politics in shaping public policy on sport. Attention centres on issue-salience and policy framing in party manifestos in post-war UK elections. In an era of multi-level governance, the analysis also explores the impact of devolution in the UK where, since 1998, sport policy is mandated in four electoral systems in place of earlier, single state-wide ballots. The findings reveal that there has been a sharp increase in issue-salience over recent decades – thereby confirming the party politicization of sport as part of the wider rise of ‘valence politics’. They also show how parties increasingly frame sport proposals to achieve non-sport aims such as promoting social welfare and boosting international standing. Notably, the data underline the territorialization of sport policy following the UK’s move to quasi-federalism – as policy framing is now contingent on ‘regional’ socio-historical factors and party politics, including nation – building by civic nationalist parties

Party Politicisation and the Formative Phase of Environmental Policy-Making in Multi-level Systems: Electoral Discourse in UK Meso-elections 1998–2011

Despite sustained public demand for parties to act, the environment has been subject to limited issue salience in UK state-wide elections. This article uses qualitative and quantitative methods to explore party politicisation of the environment in regional elections 1998–2011. Contrary to earlier suggestions, the present findings indicate that multi-level systems may facilitate increasing environmental issue salience at the meso level. In part this is a function of nationalist parties' prioritisation of the environment. Overall, electoral discourse is shown to have a key formative role in driving policy divergence owing to inter-polity and inter/intra-party contrasts in salience and framing. From a normative perspective this suggests that the pluralising effect of (quasi-)federalism has the potential to foster greater responsiveness in party programmes through enhanced choice for the environmental issue public. This is an outcome of the expansion of electoral politics following state decentralisation and associated party competition to advance distinctive proposals over rivals