The Rise of the Resilient Local Authority?

The term resilience is increasingly being utilised within the study of public policy to depict how individuals, communities and organisations can adapt, cope, and ‘bounce back’ when faced with external shocks such as climate change, economic recession and cuts in public expenditure. In focussing on the local dimensions of the resilience debate, this article argues that the term can provide useful insights into how the challenges facing local authorities in the UK can be reformulated and reinterpreted. The article also distinguishes between resilience as ‘recovery’ and resilience as ‘transformation’, with the latter's focus on ‘bouncing forward’ from external shocks seen as offering a more radical framework within which the opportunities for local innovation and creativity can be assessed and explained. While also acknowledging some of the weaknesses of the resilience debate, the dangers of conceptual ‘stretching’, and the extent of local vulnerabilities, the article highlights a range of examples where local authorities – and crucially, local communities – have enhanced their adaptive capacity, within existing powers and responsibilities. From this viewpoint, some of the barriers to the development of resilient local government are not insurmountable, and can be overcome by ‘digging deep’ to draw upon existing resources and capabilities, promoting a strategic approach to risk, exhibiting greater ambition and imagination, and creating space for local communities to develop their own resilience

Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: explaining the 'inverse intervention law'

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding. Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary division between bias and risk (or need). Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services

The politics of ageing: health consumers, markets and hegemonic challenge

In recent years ageing has travelled from the placid backwaters of politics into the mainstream of economic, social and cultural debate. What are the forces that have politicised ageing, creating a sustained opposition to the supply side hegemony of pharmaceuticals, medicine and state which has historically constructed, propagated and legitimised the understanding of ageing as decline in social worth? In addressing this question, the paper develops Gramsci's theory of hegemony to include the potentially disruptive demand side power of consumers and markets. It shows how in the case of ageing individuals acting in concert through the mechanisms of the market, and not institutionalised modes of opposition, may become the agents of hegemonic challenge through a combination of lifecourse choice and electoral leverage. In response, the hegemony is adapting through the promotion of professionally defined interpretations of ‘active ageing’ designed to retain hegemonic control. With the forces of hegemony and counter‐hegemony nicely balanced and fresh issues such as intergenerational justice constantly emerging, the political tensions of ageing are set to continue

Public libraries and non-users: A comparison between Manchester and Rome

This paper presents the findings of a study conducted with library managers from two major metropolitan areas, Greater Manchester in England and Rome in Italy. The study aims to compare practices, activities and policies adopted in the two cities to attract non-users, with particular attention to the approach that librarians take to resolving the non-user issue. This research also revealed differences in the way public libraries are used in the two areas. In Manchester, libraries are predominantly task orientated, offering access points for community services, whereas in Rome the focus is more on entertainment, leisure, and social events. The non-user profiles differ between cities, with non-users being mostly older teenagers and young adults in Manchester and mostly younger teenagers and pensioners in Rome. Reading groups, a key service for encouraging reading and familiarising with library facilities, are well established in England, with 90% of the libraries in Manchester accommodating one or more groups, compared to only 50% of the libraries in Rome offering usually a single group. In addition, Manchester libraries often have a range of specialised reading groups to suit a large variety of reading tastes. Libraries in both cities are aware of the need for proactive marketing and management of their web presence but should look at other countries’ strategies to expand their range of activities and programmes to attract more public

Big data analysis of public library operations and services by using the Chernoff face method

This article is © Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (please insert the web address here). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conduct a big data analysis of public library operations and services of two cities in two countries by using the Chernoff face method. Design/methodology/approach – The study is designed to evaluate library services by analysing the Chernoff face. Big data on public libraries in London and Seoul were collected respectively from CIPFA and the Korean government’s website for drawing a Chernoff face. The association of variables and human facial features was decided by survey. Although limited in its capacity to handle a large number of variables (eight were analysed in this study) the Chernoff face method does readily allow for the comparison of a large number of instances of analysis. 58 Chernoff faces were drawn from the formatted data by using the R programming language. Findings – The study reveals that most of the local governments in London perform better than those of Seoul. This consequence is due to the fact that local governments in London operate more libraries, invest more budgets, allocate more staff and hold more collections than local governments in Seoul. This administration resulted in more use of libraries in London than Seoul. The study validates the benefit of using the Chernoff face method for big data analysis of library services. Practical implications – Chernoff face method for big data analysis offers a new evaluation technique for library services and provides insights that may not be as readily apparent and discernible using more traditional analytical methods. Originality/value – This study is the first to use the Chernoff face method for big data analysis of library services in library and information research

Local Government Performance, Cost-Effectiveness, and Use of the Web: An Empirical Analysis

This article empirically assesses the relationship between government use of the web, service performance, and cost‐effectiveness. It tests and challenges the assumption, prevalent in government thinking and in the Digital Era Governance (DEG) quasi‐paradigm, that the delivery of web‐based public services is associated with better outcomes. English local government is used as a test case, for which (uniquely) good‐quality full‐population time‐series data for council performance, cost, and web quality are available. A new panel data set is constructed covering 2002–2008, allowing the actual relationship between web performance and council cost and quality to be estimated using dynamic regression models which control for both general changes over time and the time‐invariant differences between councils. Consistent growth is shown in the scope and quality of local government web provision. Despite this, and governmental enthusiasm for bringing services online, no association is found between web development and performance, or cost‐effectiveness. The article concludes that governments’ enthusiasm for citizen‐facing digital government is not supported by this empirical data, and that a skeptical view is warranted of DEG's advocacy of digitalization as a core focus for service improvement