David Byrne

Durham University | DU · School of Applied Social Sciences

The essential character of social science is that is founded around an interaction between theoretical framings and empirical investigation. Class is one of the most salient framing concepts of the discipline, always central even if somewhat pushed into the background in an era when identities not founded in economic relations seemed to take priori...

This chapter addresses the ways in which class is researched in contemporary social science. It addresses the issues which arise in researching class in relation to two aspects: class as position and class as identity. The quantitative and qualitative work modes which have been employed in class oriented work are reviewed and critically assessed. T...

This chapter begins with a synthesis of Mills’ specification of the sociological imagination as concerned with the intersection of biography and history, with the dynamic turn in social policy studies based on the availability of longitudinal data sets. It notes the importance of consideration of the whole of the life course and the significance of...

This chapter begins with a review of the shift in the underlying logic of post-industrial capital accumulation from the primary circuit, direct production of commodities, to the secondary circuit where value is realized through the change in already existing assets, particularly real property. In consequence the policy agendas and practices of loca...

This chapter reviews the current dominant trends in the sociological theorizing of class through the frame of a complex realist take on the ways in which class emerges at the levels of the social order and individual lives. It reasserts the centrality of relations in the mode of production and develops a critique of contemporary theorizing and in p...

This chapter combines a review of approaches to the relationship between class and culture with an examination of a range of ‘documentary fictions’ and empirical studies which have examined that relationship. It begins with an endorsement of the views of Maxwell in his realist take on culture and proceeds through a discussion of Bourdieu and Willia...

In this chapter the scale of deindustrialization in the UK since 1970 is identified alongside important changes in the gender composition of the labour force. Over this period the relationship of the state to workers has been transformed through the introduction of means tested supplements to low wages and imposition of conditionality on the receip...

This short chapter presents a discussion of the political implications of the arguments and evidence about class which have formed the basis of the rest of the book. A distinction is drawn between the liberal focus on inequality alone and a socialist focus on the mechanisms generating an unequal class structure. The need for a politics of class whi...

The transition to twenty-first century post-industrial capitalism from the ‘welfare’ industrial capitalism of the twentieth century, has affected the ways in which class is lived in terms of relational inequality and the factors that structure identity. Class After Industry takes a complex realist approach to the dynamics of individual lives, place...

Tax and Spending in Post-Industrial Societies - written with Sally Ruane

What does the future hold for the welfare state in the post-industrial 21st century? Political and economic forces are threatening the taxation regimes of highly globalised, capitalist societies, prompting an urgent debate around the function of the welfare state and how we pay for it. In a challenge to current policy and thinking, David Byrne and...

Complexity theory has been considered to have the potential to bridge the natural and the social sciences. This workshop will specifically examine how complexity can be applied to cities. How can we theoretically approach and empirically analyse cities as complex socio-ecological systems? Key experts in this research field will present and discuss...

Health inequality outcomes in local systems reflect the design of services, interactions between agents and contextual attributes. This chapter outlines an approach to understanding health inequalities by adopting a whole systems approach that firstly focuses on different types of policy and practice, ways of working and types of interventions adop...

The chapter begins by summarising evidence about New Labour’s record on heath inequalities and considers the implications of this given the shift from relatively high levels of public expenditure on services to a programme of austerity that framed much of the Coalition government’s agenda and policies that followed. This programme of austerity was...

This chapter draws on case study research using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to develop understandings about what combinations of practice, policy and context work in addressing policy problems like health inequalities. Using set-theoretic and case-based methods such as QCA fits with assumptions about complex causal interdependencies. The...

The chapter begins by considering what we mean by ‘health’ and by ‘inequalities’. When taken together health inequalities are often considered to be wicked problems – issues that are complex in terms of causal pathways, difficult to define and with no immediate solutions. They can pose challenges to traditional approaches to policy making and progr...

This chapter provides a historical overview of policy and implementation in the period from the first statutory intervention in health in 1848 to the introduction of a universal health service in 1948 and more recent initiatives to address health inequalities under the Labour government of 1997 to 2010. It is argued that it is possible to see inves...

Health inequalities can be about when people die, about differential presence of particular pathologies and about limitations placed on the life they lead when they are living it. This chapter discusses the operationalisation (what are we measuring?), casing (for what are we measuring it?) and causality of health inequalities. The relationship betw...

New public health governance arrangements under the coalition government have wide reaching implications for the delivery of health inequality interventions. Through the framework of understanding health inequalities as a 'wicked problem' the book develops an applied approach to researching, understanding and addressing these by drawing on complexi...

Not many things are as important to the quality of life as healthy and overall life expectancy. So why nearly 70 years after the creation of the NHS do we have wide variations in health outcomes that are related to peoples’ different and unequal positions in society? We might expect a universal free at the point of delivery health service to narrow...

Reviews the current nature and application of the complexity frame of reference across the social sciences

There is now a developed and extensive literature on the implications of the ‘complexity frame of reference’ (Castellani & Hafferty, 2009) for education in general and pedagogy in particular. This includes a wide range of interesting contributions which consider how complexity can inform, inter alia, research on educational systems (Cochran-Smith e...

Introduction Taxation is always on the political agenda but, in a context of a government programme of deficit reduction principally through cuts to the welfare state rather than tax rises, it is notable that ‘fair taxation’ has become a major political issue. It has been taken up not only by political activists and trade unions but also by the Hou...

In Chapter Four, on UK taxation, David Byrne and Sally Ruane switch the focus towards paying for welfare. They argue that it is increasingly important, against the backdrop of economic crisis, rising inequality and austerity, to focus on how we pay for welfare services, and what impact that has on citizens. They map out the different forms of taxat...

Shows how the idea of social mobility chimes in with the neoliberal agenda: if individuals can be seen to be able to move between social classes, inequality becomes less of a problem. Or, in commonsense terms, as long as there are ladders available the cleverest will always be able to climb them. Criticises notion of the ladder, e.g. David Cameron...

For the past two decades, ‘complexity’ has informed a range of work across the social sciences. There are diverse schools of complexity thinking, and authors have used these ideas in a multiplicity of ways, from health inequalities to the organization of large scale firms. Some understand complexity as emergence from the rule-based interactions of...

The social world is complex and emergent. Inquiry, directed towards establishing universal empirical regularities (i.e. nomothetic inquiry), cannot establish causality in such a world. We can never assign a causal effect to any intervention without assessing the whole context of that intervention. However, we can develop generalizable knowledge if...

The objectives of this article are primarily methodological. It demonstrates how the use of 'combined truth tables' derived by deploying the tools of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) enables us to explore the multiple trajectories of cases through time. This approach is presented as an alternative to the use of log-linear methods which develo...

This piece responds to the Benchmarking Review of UK Sociology’s assertion that the discipline has a deficit in quantitative methods and that the solution involves a recognition that: ‘… statistical methods form the core of social science.’ It argues that whilst a quantitative programme is essential and we can agree that there are problems in relat...

This study explores why progress with tackling health inequalities has varied among a group of local authority areas in England that were set targets to narrow important health outcomes compared to national averages. It focuses on premature deaths from cancers and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and whether the local authority gap for these outcomes n...

In complex contemporary societies social science has become increasingly interwoven into the whole fabric of governance. At the same time there is an increasing recognition that attempts to understand the social world which seek to mimic the linear approaches of the conventional 'hard sciences' are mostly useless given the complex systems character...

This chapter deals with the development of knowledge which is to be applied in order both to understand what works and to show what has worked — with the improvement of practice and policy and with claims for competence in the development of solutions to the problems of contemporary life — the policy domain, and in the implementation and execution...

This chapter addresses ‘the methodological foundations of applied social science’. It begins with a critique of existing meta-theoretical positions through a consideration of the implications of understanding social research practice as necessarily post-positivist, focusing in particular on the implications of realism for applied social research. I...

This chapter discusses the process of evaluating — with the role of social science in the establishment of outcomes and effectiveness in the achievement of those outcomes. It reviews the role of evaluation in relation to policies in all areas. It deals with the actual politics of evaluation, that is to say the way in which political pressures intru...

This chapter addresses the process of modelling — the creation of versions of reality by whatever means — physical, mathematical, as computer simulations — in order to work out what might happen in the future if various actions and/or contextual developments are applied to reality in the same way as they are applied to the model. It identifies the...

This chapter examines the ‘legitimating’ process: that is to say the selective use of social science in justifying policy and practice. It focuses on the policies of evidence. It examines the political factors in the construction, publication and use of evidence generated by applied social science. It shows how political factors always enter into t...

This chapter examines the process of ‘consulting’. It notes that consultation has become an essential component of the repertoire of political administration in post-democracy society. It examines the role of social science in consultation with reference to: the delivery of existing evidence to those who are being consulted; the use of quantitative...

We aim to answer the question: How can we develop an evidence base that will assist tailoring health interventions to individual patients? Using social theory and interview data from people living with chronic illness, we developed a new approach to analysis. Individuals were considered as emergent complex systems, adjusting and adapting within the...

This paper draws on Desrosie `res, Hayles and Tukey in arguing for an exploratory approach to the use of numerical taxonomy and related approaches in quantitative social research. It asserts that rather than trying to develop algorithm (either in the form of equation sets or game rules) based representations which abstract 'variables' as analogies...

Informed by a critical realist position, the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis could be enriched when focusing on differences amongst complex systems as source of causality, instead of focusing on objects that seem to have similar properties. When the seemingly similar objects are looked at from a participatory position (e.g. action resear...

Complexity research has been characterized by plurality in research methodologies (see e.g. Eve et al., 1997; Mittleton-Kelly, 2003). In this chapter we discuss methodologies and guidelines suitable for researching complexity in public administration. As relatively little has been specifically written on methodologies for researching complexity in...

This paper examines the development of SPSS from 1968 to 2008, and the manner in which it has been used in teaching and research in British Sociology. We do this in order to reveal some of the changes that have taken place in statistical reasoning as an inscription device in the discipline over this period. We conclude that to characterise these ch...

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The authors argue that narratives—the plural being very important—are crucial for the representation of complex urban spaces. They do this by drawing on first-hand empirical examples from a previous examination of people’s understanding of ‘postindustrial transformation’ from the past through the present to the future, and earlier work on children’...

Statistical measures have assumed a set of new roles in contemporary post-industrial, and in some important respects post-democratic (Crouch 2000), societies. Since the development of effective statistical data production in the nineteenth century, quantitative measures have played a central, and indeed in many ways constitutive, role in governance...

How can we make complexity work as part of a programme of engaged social science? This article attempts to answer that question by arguing that one way to do this is through a reconstruction of a central tool of a distinctively social science - the comparative method - understood as a procedure for elucidating the complex and multiple systems of ca...

This second edition reviews the present status of discussion about the concept of social exclusion and issues of social exclusion in post-industrial capitalism

John Clarke, Changing Welfare, Changing States, Sage, London, 2004, viii + 179 pp., £18.99 pbk, ISBN 0-7619-4203-3 - - Volume 34 Issue 1 - DAVID BYRNE