Jack Newman

• Research Associate at University of Bristol

This paper contributes to the development of a critical realist approach to discourse analysis by combining aspects of ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) and ‘the morphogenetic/morphostatic approach’ (M/M). Unlike poststructuralist discourse theory, CDA insists on the maintenance of two distinctions: (i) between discourse and other aspects of soci...

The Conservative Party's ‘levelling up agenda’ has been deployed both as a tool for public communication and as a broad motif for the government's policy programme, gaining a great deal of traction as a political message. Levelling up is a vision of a post-Brexit Britain in which there will be greater state investment, educational opportunity, regi...

National governments are increasingly focusing on ‘place’ in attempts to tackle economic challenges. This puts pressure on regions to deliver productivity improvements. Drawing from stakeholder interviews, document analysis and secondary data analysis, this paper considers the productivity policy levers available to regional leaders. Three UK regio...

The corporate governance literature has often been concerned with whether individuals with a high number of board directorships are too busy to serve in their role. In the UK, many MPs also hold positions on boards of directors. This raises the question of whether MPs with board memberships are too busy to serve their constituents, party and parlia...

At the time of writing, the UK government is attempting to tackle place-based inequality through its ‘levelling up’ agenda. To be effective, such interventions require local institutions with the capacity, powers, and budgets to develop and implement long-term strategies. Multi-level metagovernance, the ongoing reorganisation of local governance sy...

The aim of this article is to examine the recent progress made by Government to improve public health and address health inequality. Elected in July 2024, the Labour government has promised to deliver a transition from reactive to preventative health policy and tackle social and geographic disparities in public health. However, this government pled...

Here are the slides of my presentation to the UK Association for Public Administration Conference 2024 at the University of Birmingham. The paper is co-authored with Sarah Ayres, Geoff Bates, Anna Le Gouais, Rachael McClatchey and Nick Pearce

The UK is characterised by spatial inequality between and within regions, alongside an over-centralised asymmetric model of governance. In England especially, these features are stark, and throughout the last decade, politicians have responded by forging a distinctive programme of English devolution focused on city-regions. In this article, we anal...

The UK state has been through many periods of perceived crisis, but the instability of the last decade has shaken some of the foundational institutions of British politics. Our main argument is that the rise of political instability relates to the failure of British politics to respond to structural inequality in society and politics. This includes...

This article seeks to explain why spatial policy in England has been so ineffective in recent decades. It offers a novel framework – ‘Hyper-Active Incrementalism’ – to conceptualise the way that public policy in this area is prone to being short-term, under-evaluated, reactive, fragmented, incremental and top-down. It applies this framework to a hi...

International studies show that relative levels of regional (de)centralisation are associated with more or less balanced patterns of economic growth, well-being and resilience. Alongside supporting specific levels and types of devolution, prior studies emphasise the quality of local institutions as a key factor underlying balanced growth. This stud...

The Universal Credit reforms of the 2010s were a crucial turning point in the UK’s social security system. The reforms have been widely criticized in the literature for placing too much responsibility on welfare recipients, for using cultural explanations of poverty, and for prioritizing incentive-based solutions. This article argues that these com...

David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservatives took as its starting point the assumption that the party needed to modernise, requiring a move towards the political ‘centre ground’. This shift presented the party leadership with a series of challenges, including brand detoxification, party management, and policy renewal. Modernisation also implied...

This paper seeks to learn lessons about the role of the private sector in subnational governance by analysing the UK's Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). The paper outlines the public justifications for LEPs using documentary analysis, and then considers these against findings from interviews and network analysis, concluding that the justificati...

These are the slides from my paper to the 2021 Political Studies Association Conference. In order to investigate the government's 'levelling up agenda', this paper consults a range of sources, including parliamentary speeches, government publications, and campaign material. On this basis, it outlines a definition of 'levelling up' and argues that t...

These are the slides from my paper to the 23nd Annual Conference of the IACR (International Association for Critical Realism). I lay out a possible meta-theory for the analysis of discourse from a critical realist perspective. The paper takes key aspects of critical realism and simplifies them into an accessible framework that can be used alongside...

These are the slides for a paper given to the 'Money, Security and Social Policy' network during their November 2019 event: 'Current research on Universal Credit and the changing landscape of social security in the UK'. The slides relate to a journal paper on Ontological Policy Analysis and Universal Credit that is currently under review. The ev...

These are the slides from my paper to the 22nd Annual Conference of the IACR (International Association for Critical Realism). I argue that the morphogenetic approach (pioneered by Margaret Archer and Doug Porpora) can and should be integrated with critical discourse analysis (as outlined by Norman Fairclough and Lillian Chouliaraki). The paper was...

These are the slides from my paper to the Social Policy Association Annual Conference 2019. I argued that we need to consider the underlying ontological assumptions of policy documents, and I presented my own findings from an application of 'ontological policy analysis'. The subsequent paper is currently under review.

These are the slides from my presentation to the PSA Conservatism Specialist Group Workshop 2019. In the paper I begin to explore the question 'what are the ontological assumptions of conservatism?'. The paper is part of my long-term and slow-moving project to provides some answers to this question. I hope to publish a paper on this in the future.

These are the slides to my paper to the Political Studies Association Conference 2019. The presentation explores the ontological assumptions underpinning two key policy agendas of the David Cameron governments: (1) the Big Society, and (2) the social justice agenda. The full paper was written as a collaboration with Richard Hayton and is currently...

This article engages with two meta-theoretical approaches to social analysis, ‘morphogenetic theory’ and ‘constructivist institutionalism’, and specifically explores how the former fares under the critical scrutiny of the latter. The key proponent of constructivist institutionalism, Colin Hay, has offered two detailed critiques of morphogenesis tha...

Here are the slides and abstract from my paper to the Political Studies Association Conference 2017. The paper explores some meta-theoretical issues in the work of Margaret Archer. The paper was later published as... Jack Newman (2019) Morphogenetic theory and the constructivist institutionalist challenge. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavio...