Issues of 'difference' are on the agenda right across the social sciences, and are encountered daily by practitioners in policy fields.A central question is how the welfare state and its institutions respond to impairment, ethnicity and gender.This book provides an invaluable overview of key issues set in the context of housing.
Touching on concerns ranging from minority ethnic housing needs to the housing implications of domestic violence, this broad-ranging study shows how difference is regulated in housing.It deploys a distinctive theoretical perspective which is applicable to other aspects of the welfare state, and bridges the agency/structure divide.
Housing, social policy and difference:
brings disability, ethnicity and gender into the centre of an analysis of housing policies and practices;
offers a new approach to housing, informed by recent theoretical debates about agency, structure and diversity;
develops the ideas of 'difference within difference' and 'social regulation';
looks beyond the concerns of postmodernism to create an original account of difference and structure within the welfare state.
The book will be an important text for students and researchers in housing, social policy, planning, urban studies, sociology, disability studies, gender studies and ethnic relations. It will also interest practitioners committed to greater equalities of opportunities and a fairer society.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction; Difference within difference; Structural factors and social regulation; Social regulation in housing; Disability and housing; Ethnicity, 'race' and housing; Gender and housing Cathy Davis; The accommodation of difference.
About the Author :
Malcolm Harrison is Reader in Housing and Social Policy in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, England. Cathy Davis is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography at Leeds.
Review :
"... an exceptionally well written and thoughtful book, successfully pulling together for discussion a variety of exclusionary experiences." Housing Studies "... amply succeeds in its aim of showing the extent of 'difference' in housing ... The chapters on social regulation in housing, disability and race deal impressively, and in a most scholarly fashion, with a vast amount of material and constitute valuable and up-to-date reviews of these topics for housing and social policy students." Journal of Social Policy "... a well-constructed and challenging contriburion to housing studies, and one that should be widely read." Canadian Journal of Urban Research "What is achieved is a considered, theoretically aware and well informed approach for understanding the pratical implications of welfare systems and social diversity within the increasingly salient context of housing. Their distinct theoretical approcah to agency and institutional power illustrates will the comlexity of the interaction of 'difference' and the welfare state, with difinitive cases being identified and explicated in terms of housing and disability, ethnicity and gender. Overall this book is impressive in both its contribution to the theoretical debate and its analysis of the housing context in the UK and the issues facing policy makers and practitioners. The writing is simultaneously academic and accessible ."Canadian Journal of Urban Research "... impressive in both its contribution to the theoretical debate and its analysis of the developments in the housing context in the UK and the issues facing policy makers and practitioners." HSA Newsletter "The book amply succeds in its aim of showing the extent of 'difference' in housing. No one could fail to be impressed by the wealth of evidence that Harrison cites in this regard.... The chapters on social regulation in housing, disability and rece deal impressively, and in a most scholarly fashion, with a vast amount of meterial, and constitute valuable and up-to-date reviews of these topics for housing and social policy students."HSA Newsletter
