Government as a Brain: How Can Governments Better Understand, Think, Create, and Remember, and Avoid the Traps of Collective Stupidity Both in Emergencies and Normal Times

Governments are evolving new ways to think, combining observation, memory, analysis, models, and creativity. This article describes how they think, how the COVID crisis has accelerated innovation in new ways of thinking, the use of metaphors to understand these processes, the role of democracy and civil society, and the new skills needed

Investigating the New Landscapes of Welfare: Housing Policy, Politics and the Emerging Research Agenda

As debates about housing form an increasingly important arena of political controversy, much has been written about the new fissures that have appeared as governments not only struggle to reduce public expenditure deficits but also attempt to address problems such as affordability and homelessness. It is widely anticipated that new conflicts will be played out in the private rental market as access to homeownership becomes unrealistic and the supply of social housing diminishes. However, what other tensions might surface; that hitherto have not been subject to the critical gaze of housing research? In this paper, we provide some thoughts on the nascent policy issues as well as the ideological schisms that are likely to develop in coming years, offering suggestions as to how the focus of housing policy research might be reoriented towards a “politics” framework to capture and better understand the conflicts that are likely to arise

Does co-creation impact public service delivery?:The importance of state and governance traditions

Co-creation in public service delivery requires partnerships between citizens and civil servants. The authors argue that whether or not these partnerships will be successful depends on state and governance traditions (for example a tradition of authority sharing or consultation). These traditions determine the extent to which co-creation can become institutionalized in a country’s governance framework

Transformers: How local areas innovate to address changing social needs

Innovation in public services is going to prove crucial to the UK’s ability to meet the social challenges of the 21st century. However, at the moment, the UK does a poor job of developing innovations in the public sector. We are particularly weak in using innovations in one service to improve public services in others in the same locality or nearby. Historically, nearly all innovation policy has been tailored to the needs of for-profit manufacturing sectors. However, there is an increasing thirst for understanding how finance, policy and institutions can support Social Innovation. This report draws on extensive research, including literature reviews and case studies from around the world, and from interviews. The Young Foundation collaborated with NESTA to produce this report. It looks at successes as well as failures. It aims to clarify which conditions best support and sustain local social innovation and it provides guidance to future practitioners and policymakers

Sport, physical activity and the establishment of Health and Wellbeing Boards in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire

This paper will examine the emergence of Health and Wellbeing Boards in Nottinghamshire and the City of Nottingham and explore the implications for sport and physical activity. At the time of writing the transfer of responsibilities for Public Health and the establishment of Health and Wellbeing Boards in both the City of Nottingham and within Nottinghamshire County Council are considered to be relatively advanced by the Strategic Health Authorities, the respective local authorities and by the boards of the two Primary Care Trusts. "Shadow"� Health and Well being Board have been established in both authorities and they have been meeting regularly for s everal months. Public health and commissioning staff have also been successfully relocated and new strategies and priorities are starting to emerge. Nottingham and Nottinghamshire have traditionally acknowledged the role of sport and physical activity to the wider determinants of public health and given a relatively high priority to the contribution that sport and physical activity can make to the ir preventative health and early intervention agendas. This paper will look at the transition to Health and Wellbeing boards to assess how the role of sport and physical activity may be changing and to identify opportunities for its contribution to policy and practise in the future. It will examine both the theory and practise behind the emerging governance arr angements, the strategic objectives and priorities, and the developing evidential base for future policy and delivery within the two areas

Film support and the challenge of ‘sustainability’: on wing design, wax and feathers, and bolts from the blue

In recognition of the importance of film in generating both economic and cultural value, the UK Labour government set up a new agency – the United Kingdom Film Council (UKFC) – in 2000 with a remit to build a sustainable film industry. But, reflecting a plethora of differing expectations in relation to the purposes behind public support for film, the UKFC's agenda shifted and broadened over the organisation's lifetime (2000–11). Apparently unconvinced by the UKFC's achievements, the Coalition government which came to power in May 2010 announced the Council's abolition and reassigned its responsibilities as part of a general cost-cutting strategy. Based on original empirical research, this article examines how the UKFC's sense of strategic direction was determined, how and why the balance of objectives it pursued changed over time and what these shifts tell us about the nature of film policy and the challenges facing bodies that are charged with enacting it in the twenty-first century

Governing software: networks, databases and algorithmic power in the digital governance of public education

This article examines the emergence of ‘digital governance’ in public education in England. Drawing on and combining concepts from software studies, policy and political studies, it identifies some specific approaches to digital governance facilitated by network-based communications and database-driven information processing software that are being discursively promoted in education by cross-sectoral intermediary organizations. Such intermediaries, including National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, Demos, the Innovation Unit, the Education Foundation and the Nominet Trust, are increasingly seeking to participate in new digitally mediated forms of educational governance. Through their promotion of network-based pedagogies and database-driven analytics software, these organizations are seeking to delegate educational decision-making to socio-algorithmic forms of power that have the capacity to predict, govern and activate learners' capacities and subjectivities

Uninterested youth? Young people's attitudes towards party politics in Britain

Following the outcome of the 2001 and 2005 General Elections, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters on both occasions, much attention has focused upon the state of British democracy and how to enthuse the electorate, especially young people. While the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier, it may be failing to tackle the real problem - that youth appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of over 700 young people in order to shed light on what lies at the heart of young people's apparent disengagement from formal politics in Britain - political apathy or a sense of political alienation. The findings reveal that they support the democratic process, but are sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led, and are turned off by politicians and the political parties. However, there is no uniform youth orientation to politics, and the data indicate that views differ according to social class, educational history, and also gender. However both ethnicity and region of the country in which young people live seem to have little influence in structuring political attitudes and behaviour

Soft Openings: The psycho-technological expertise of third sector curriculum reform

Since the late 1990s the "third sector" has become active in generating new curriculum programmes in England. Based on tracing third sector participation in public education during the New Labour years, the article explores a documentary archive of third sector curriculum texts and argues that the programmes, strategies and techniques of the third sector have sought to pursue a new form of governmentality. The type of governmentality pursued by the third sector takes form as a "soft" style of curriculum reform derived from assembling together cybernetic and psychological forms of expertise, interactionist and constructivist pedagogies, and an emerging "psycho-technology" of subjectivity. The third sector fabricates reform proposals for a curriculum of the future in which governance is done by cross-sectoral networking, epistemological categories are blurred, and student subjectivities are made up to be malleable, soft-skilled and psychologically self-shaping. The article examines how third sector texts have assembled this new psycho-technological expertise of curriculum reform through both cybernetic and psychological styles of thinking

Managing health care in the digital world:A comparative analysis

Recently, most reforms affecting healthcare systems have focused on improving the quality of care and containing costs. This has led many scholars to advocate the adoption of Health Information systems, especially electronic medical records, by highlighting their potential benefits. This study is based on a comparative analysis using a multiple method approach to examine the implementation of the same electronic medical record system at two different hospitals. Its findings offer insights into the processes of the adoption of innovation and its implementation in a healthcare context. The need to innovate, the decision to innovate, the implementation process and consequently, the results produced are quite distinctive at each study site. This comparative case study reveals that what appears to be the same can be quite different: this can be due to several conditions at the organization, the organization’s characteristics, and the process of implementation adopted. We need to understand these elements in order to be able to plan and manage such programs in the future