Networks have become a prominent template for public service governance. Often seen as an alternative to hierarchies and contracts, networks cross institutionalized organizational or sectoral boundaries to promote collaboration and the sharing of resources when addressing complex problems. Nowhere is this more the case than in the field of health services modernization and improvement. Comprising unique empirical contributions, drawn primarily from the experience of the UK National Health Service (NHS), this edited collection develops a ‘decentred’ analysis of health and care networks. Contributors look beyond particular structures or patterns of governance and focus instead on the interpretation of the meaningful practices of policy actors as they encounter and enact policy instruments and structures. The approach offers a distinct form of analysis that deepens and enriches more traditional public policy accounts of network governance. It recognizes the influence of local history, highlights the influence of dominant economic, technical and corporate narratives, and acknowledges the continued influence of biomedical knowledge and professional expertise. Offering practical insight for current and future service leaders about the challenges of implementing, managing and working within networks, this book draws out key messages for practitioners and researchers alike.

Drawing on the expertise of some of the most innovative minds in the field of leisure studies from across Canada, Decentring Work questions how and why we have come to value paid employment as the marker of social success and individual self-worth and, more provocatively, investigates the role that leisure might play in its stead. Using a mix of approaches from in-depth empirical studies to more conceptually driven discussions, the chapters in Decentring Work weave together effectively into a treatise on notions of work, leisure, power, and social change.

Decentring Urban Governance seeks to rethink governance not as a particular state formation, but as the diverse policies emerging associated with the impact of modernist social science on policy making, considering the diverse meanings that inspire governing practices across time, space, and policy sectors in urban context. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book goes beyond neoliberalism, and is interested in other webs of meaning through which actors encounter, interpret, and evaluate social science, which have received less analytical attention. All these different webs of meaning – elite narratives, social science, and local traditions – influence patterns of action. The book creates an analytical space by which to consider situated agency and localised resistance to the discourses and policies of political elites, including the myriad ways in which local actors have resisted practices of governance on the ground. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of urban governance, governance and more broadly to the social sciences, housing, social policy, law and welfare studies.

This book explores the meaning of leisure in the context of key social formations of our time. Chris Rojek brings together the insights of feminsim, Marxism, Weber, Elias, Simmel, Nietzsche and Baudrillard to produce a survey - and rethinking - of leisure theory. At the same time he presents a radical critique of the traditional 'centring' of leisure, on 'escape', 'freedom' and 'choice'. Revealing how leisure practices have responded to living in a risk society, he shows that 'free' time becomes something very different when simulation and nostalgia lie at the heart of everyday life.

Contemporary security governance often relies on markets and networks to link public agencies to non-governmental actors. This book explores the rise, nature, and future of these new forms of security governance across various domestic, transnational, and international settings. The chapters reveal similarities and differences in the way security governance operates in various policy settings. The contributors argue that the similarities generally arise because policy elites, at various levels of governance, have come to believe that security depends on building resilience and communities through various joined-up arrangements, networks, and partnerships. Differences nonetheless persist because civil servants, street level bureaucrats, voluntary sector actors, and citizens all draw on diverse traditions to interpret, and at times resist, the joined-up security being promoted by these policy elites. This book therefore decentres security governance, showing how all kinds of local traditions influence the way it works in different settings. It pays particular attention to the meanings, cultures, and ideologies by which policy actors encounter, interpret, and evaluate security dilemmas. This book was originally published as a special issue in Global Crime.

Decentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices.

Eighteen innovative essays explore not only how the European Renaissance helped form Canada, but also how more significantly the experience of Canada touched the Renaissance and those who first came to the shores of North America.