Matthew Donoghue

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Social Policy and Intervention

This paper provides a critical assessment of the term ‘resilience’ – and its highly agent-centric conceptualisation – when applied to how individuals and households respond to hardship. We provide an argument for social conditions to be embedded into the framework of resilience analysis. Drawing on two different perspectives in social theory, namel...

Since the inception of Community Cohesion policy in 2001 and the ongoing welfare reform of the New Labour era, creating a cohesive, responsible and mutualist society has become an important goal for UK governments – something that is still partially true for the Coalition government thanks to their Big Society project. However, although New Labour...

This article engages with popular narratives of community and cohesion, explored through a series of focus groups in Bradford and Birmingham. This article argues that the participants interviewed used discourses propagated by government to make sense of these narratives in their neighbourhoods and communities. The use of these discourses constructs...

Brexit is about more than the UK exiting the EU. For the Conservative Party, it is about reacting to the challenge from the radical right, both in terms of the electoral threat from UKIP and a long-term internal struggle between moderate Conservatives and the more radical Eurosceptic faction within the party. We ask to what extent Brexit could also...

This article aims to contribute to the theoretical development of the social resilience approach. Recognising the interface between resilience and poverty studies, it proposes a distinct role for resilience research from a critical perspective to understand the dynamics of hardship in exceptional times, such as times of socio-economic crises, rathe...

This review of social cohesion policy was commissioned by the British Academy in 2018 as part of the Cohesive Societies programme. Its aim is to provide an overview of current policy on social cohesion at different levels of government in the UK: national, regional (England, Scotland, and Wales) and English local government.

In recent years, resilience has been invoked as both a pre-emptive and responsive strategy to tackling socio-material insecurity. This article outlines a number of discursive and administrative features that distinguish the rise of resilience from longer-term shifts towards ‘active citizenship’ in British social policy. Within this context, we draw...

Resilience, Agency and Coping with Hardship: Evidence from Europe during the Great Recession — CORRIGENDUM - HULYA DAGDEVIREN, MATTHEW DONOGHUE

Austerity localism powerfully explains dynamics of (dis)empowerment at the local level, especially regarding the autonomy and accountability of local authorities and third sector organisations (TSOs) in the UK. Yet these dynamics at institutional level have also a clear impact on individuals, especially the socio-economically vulnerable. This is es...

This paper aims to contribute to the growing literature on resilience by focusing on coping with hardship during the Great Recession, drawing upon primary data gathered through household and key informant interviews in nine European countries. As the resilience approach highlights agency, the paper examines the nature of household responses to hard...

The work of Antonio Gramsci is important to the theoretical underpinnings of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). However, many scholars’ engagement with Gramsci’s work within CDA remains surprisingly thin. This article seeks to highlight the detriment to CDA of having only a surface engagement with Gramsci. It critically assesses how Gramscian conce...

Resource pack, providing an overview of the concept of social cohesion as used or conceived in different academic disciplines/fields. N.B. - As it isn't clear from the list on the cover, the editor-in-chief for this resource book is Dr. Sadek Kessous

The 2008 crisis led to a rise in unemployment and greater insecurity in the labour market. Since then, the austerity policies involving cuts in public spending and welfare reforms created further vulnerability for many households. This was accompanied by an unfounded discourse of strivers vs skivers/scroungers (Allen et al., 2015: 908) despite the...

The global financial crisis impacted the UK welfare state deeply, particularly within the context of the Coalition and Conservative government’s austerity agenda. The crisis helped legitimise continuing sweeping reforms to welfare provision, reducing the role of the state and including ‘the social economy’ to a greater extent than before by emphasi...

This paper examines poverty and hardship in Europe after the 2008 crisis, using household interviews in nine European countries. A number of findings deserve highlighting. First, making a distinction between ‘the old poor’ (those who lived in poverty before as well as after the crisis) and ‘the new poor’ (thosewho fell into hardship after the crisi...

It is well documented that the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 plunged many European countries into financial difficulty, either through sovereign debt crises or crises of the financialised economy. However, what has been less discussed is how European households have dealt, and continue to deal seven years on, with the effects of this crisis on th...

**PRE-PUBLICATION VERSION - Forthcoming in Politics, early 2016** This article engages with popular narratives of community and cohesion, explored through a series of focus groups in Bradford and Birmingham. The paper argues that the participants interviewed used discourses propagated by government to make sense of these narratives in their neighbo...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the term ‘resilience’ – and its highly agent-centric conceptualisation – when applied to how individuals and households respond to hardship. We provide an argument for social conditions to be embedded into the framework of resilience analysis. Drawing on two different perspectives in social theory, namel...

This thesis deals with New Labour’s development of Community Cohesion and welfare reform policy between 2001 and 2010. It argues that there was a disjuncture between the linguistic presentation and the actual aims of cohesion and welfare policy. This was symptomatic of deeper processes of coercion and consent, designed to create citizens amenable t...