Sage Publications Public Policy (SAGE Library of the Public Sector)

Product Description The study of public policy has a long history. It is rooted in the study of politics and of public administration as having developed from the former into a discipline of its own. Theory and research of public policy also involves the application of the sociology of organizations to the public sector and the concerns of studies of separate substantive fields of policy, like social policy, education policy and environmental policy. This collection focuses on the scholarly analysis of public policy, drawing on the various originating threads. It includes work that is prescriptive in character inasmuch as it contributes to a deeper understanding of the policy process in the public sector. The collection is mindful of the way in which new ways of cutting up the subject have emerged. Particularly salient, here, have been, on the one hand, studies with a focus on how policy is made and, on the other, a concern with public management. Volume One: Public Policy in Perspective Volume Two: Towards Public Policy Volume Three: Public Policy in Action Volume Four: Public Policy in Progress About the Author Peter Hupe is Visiting Professor at the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is also Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, UK. While teaching Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he had academic affiliations in Leiden, Leuven, London, Oxford and Potsdam. The major part of his research regards the theoretical-empirical study of policy processes, particularly implementation and street-level bureaucracy. He discovered the relevance of the latter during an earlier career as a policymaker in the Dutch national civil service. Publishing regularly in journals like Public Administration, Public Policy and Administration and Public Management Review, in 2019 he composed the Research Handbook of Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Ground Floor of Government in Context. With Tony Evans he edited Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom (2020). Michael Hill is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of Newcastle, UK.  Before entering academic life at the University of Reading he was a street-level bureaucrat in a local social assistance office. He later worked on research at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol on the implementation of social policy. Since retiring from Newcastle he has held part-time visiting professorships in London University at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary College and also in the London School of Economics and the University of Brighton. His long-standing text The Public Policy Process reached its eighth edition in 2021 in a joint version with Frédéric Varone of the University of Geneva. In 2020 he published Exploring the World of Social Policy with Zoë Irving of the University of York.