Ian Greener
Biographic Data
| ID | 296871 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Greener |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Greener |
| SIGNATURE | GREENER I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4918-8019 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 317 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Education and Training, Institutionalism and the Social Determinants of Health: Using QCA to Explore Better and Worse Health in Dundee, Aberdeen and Glasgow
Drawing on institutionalist political economy, this paper argues that education should be conceptualised as a foundational institutional determinant of health rather than a contextual socioeconomic factor. Utilising data from Scotland, which faces some of the most profound health challenges within Europe, this paper uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explore data at the intermediate zone level from two of its major cities, Dundee and Aberde…
It's a wonderful NHS ? A counterfactual perspective on the creation of the British National Health Service
While there have been some studies of counterfactual analysis in history and other academic disciplines, there are very few studies in social policy and health policy. This paper explores a major critical juncture and counterfactual in the creation of the NHS. In particular, it explores the critical juncture of the discussion in the Labour Cabinet involving Bevan's proposal for nationalising the hospitals and Morrison's alternative proposal based…
Crisis in the UK National Health Service: What does it mean, and what are the consequences
There have been more‐or‐less continual suggestions that the UK National Health Service (NHS) has been suffering from one kind of crisis or another since its creation in 1948. If we are to understand the problems the NHS faces, then we need to empirically investigate what kinds of crises it has faced, if such crises have patterns to them, and whether or not they tend to lead to policy change. This article considers NHS crisis in terms of academic …
Inequality and social harm: Revisiting the Spirit Level debate by reproducing and updating it, as well as reanalysing the data with qualitative comparative analysis
This article explores the relationship between inequality and social harm, revisiting the original “Spirit Level” data from Wilkinson and Pickett, updating it for a later time period, and considering what difference it makes to their results by addressing criticisms made of their original research by using an alternative measure of inequality and expanding the range of possible causal factors. To achieve this, it makes use of both the original me…
Tolerance in QCA: Moving debates on design, calibration, analysis, and interpretation in QCA forward in macrocomparative resarch
This paper argues for three aspects of tolerance with respect to QCA research: tolerance with respect to different approaches to QCA; producing QCA research with tolerance (work that is resistant to criticism); and for QCA researchers to be clear about the tolerance of the solutions they present – especially in terms of calibration and truth table construction. Giving examples that are based on macrocomparative research, the paper organises its s…
Welfare States in the 21st Century: The New Five Giants Confronting Societal Progress
"On the 80th anniversary of Beveridge's report on the 'Five Giants' confronting societal progress in the 1940s, this innovative book examines the 'New Giants' confronting us today: inequality, preventable mortality, the crisis of democracy, job quality, and environmental degradation. Ian Greener uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis and cluster analysis across 24 countries to analyse which countries are the highest performing in relation to each …
The Beveridge report 80 years on: ‘Squalor’ and housing—‘A true goliath’
The Beveridge Report listed ‘Squalor’ as one of the ‘five giants on the road to reconstruction’, with the use of the term pointing to a broader concern than individual houses ‘unfit for human habitation’. ‘Squalor’, said Beveridge, ‘arises mainly through haphazard distribution of industry and population’ indicated anxiety about pollution and the ‘mean’, dark streets in cities and industrial towns. Apart from these references, the Beveridge Report…
Beveridge, Bevan and institutional change in the UK welfare state
This paper explores the changes to social security and health proposed in the Beveridge Report through the lens of the framework proposed by Mahoney and Thelen for exploring the relationship between political and institutional contexts, change‐agents and types of institutional change. We find that, in terms of social security, the Beveridge Report led to ‘layering’ in that it both built on an inherited legacy of institutions from the earlier Libe…
The ‘New Five Giants’—Conceptualising the challenges facing societal progress in the 21st century
This paper takes an overview of the barriers to social progress 80 years on from the original Beveridge report (Beveridge, 1942). It argues we can identify and conceptualise five alternative ‘Giants’, relating these to social theory and social debates in the 21st century, and considering the prospects for progress against these new challenges. After considering Beveridge's original Giants in their context, it considers large‐scale theories of soc…
Intra-Crisis Lesson-Drawing in Real-Time: The Pandemic Lessons Available in the UK Media during the First Months of Covid-19
This article assesses, using a framework derived from lesson-drawing, policy transfer and crisis research, the lessons offered by the media from abroad and from the past in the UK COVID-19 pandemic. The lesson-drawing literature focuses on a series of steps and questions associated with the ‘fungibility’ of lessons, and the crisis literature, with its constituent elements of threat, uncertainty and between ‘routine’ and ‘non-routine’ or ‘less rou…
Comparing country risk and response to Covid-19 in the first 6 months across 25 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries using qualitative comparative analysis
This paper explores the contextual and government response factors to the first-wave of the COVID-19 pandemic for 25 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. It considers configurations of: obesity rates; proportions of elderly people; inequality rates; country travel openness and COVID-19 testing regimes, against outcomes of COVID-19 mortality and case rates. It finds CO…
The changing governance of welfare: Revisiting Jessop’s framework in the context of healthcare
Healthcare funding and its relationship to equity and outcomes: A QCA analysis of Commonwealth Fund and OECD data
This article examines Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Commonwealth Funding data to explore the relationship between the level and means of funding of 11 different healthcare systems, on the one hand, and overall equity and health outcome measures, on the other. It utilises qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and the idea of ‘fitness landscapes’ for the clusters of funding combinations and outcomes they present…
Performance management that works? Improving public services by making use of intrinsic motivation
One of the central features of public governance in the 2000s was an extension in the use of performance management (PM), but research has suggested that the “gaming” of PM systems became commonplace and that measured performance data was often unreliable. However, PM is necessary in some form, and has fared better in some settings than others. This article presents a systematic comparison based on two case studies where success has been claimed,…
New Editor's Introduction
Introduction: Evidence and Evaluation in Social Policy
Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine – By Marc A. Rodwin
Introduction: UK Devolution
Social policy review 22: Analysis and debate in social policy, 2010
Social policy review 22Analysis and debate in social policy, 2010
This edition of this series presents an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship. It brings together specially commissioned reviews of key areas, research examining important debates in the field, and considers a range of issues including assessments of Labour's social policy after three terms in office, service-user involvement and the labour market impact of the economic crisis along with the winner of the SPA's be…
The Politics of European Union Health Policies – By Scott L. Greer
The consumer in public services: Choice, values and difference
Social Policy Review 21: Analysis and debate in social policy, 2009
Social Policy Review 21Analysis and debate in social policy, 2009: Analysis and debate in social policy, 2009
Social Policy Review 21: Analysis and Debate in Social Policy 2009
The Potential of Path Dependence in Political Studies
This article explores the difficulties with both the theoretical content and application of the concept of ‘path dependence’ in political studies, but suggests that, by combining it with insights from morphogenetic social theory, we can provide a coherent framework for its use. After providing a brief survey of the literature on path dependence, it presents a summary of the most significant criticisms made of the approach. The article then moves …
Understanding NHS Reform: The Policy‐Transfer, Social Learning, and Path‐Dependency Perspectives
This paper utilizes three perspectives in analyzing health policy in the U.K. during the formulation of the “internal market” reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s: policy transfer, social learning, and path‐dependency. By doing so, it attempts to incorporate the most significant insights from each perspective to construct a framework for analysis that better illuminates the actors, processes, and constraints involved in health policy reform,…
Towards a history of choice in UK health policy
This paper examines health policy documents from the period in which the NHS was planned through to New Labour's reforms, to examine how the terms 'choice' and 'responsiveness' are used to position both users and the public in particular roles. It suggests that health consumerism is a process that has gradually appeared in the NHS through an extension of the choices offered to patients and the terms on which they were offered. Utilising Hirschman…
Social Learning and Macroeconomic Policy in Britain
This paper examines the social learning models of policy of Hall and May attempting to create a synthesis of the best elements of each. We then apply the revised model to three specific instances of macroeconomic policy in Britain; the introduction of ‘Keynesian-plus’ policy in the 1960s, the movement from Keynesianism to monetarism, and the experiment with monetarism in the 1980s. In each case study, the degree of policy change is assessed, and …
Markets in the public sector: When Do They Work, and What Do We Do When They Don't
There is a danger that we have become so used to the idea of markets in the public sector that they become taken for granted. This article first problematises the terms ‘market’ and ‘public’, before going on to talk about markets as they are being used in present policy, and applying a morphogenetic-inspired analysis of their use. Finally, it attempts to work out when and where markets might work in the public sector, and what we might do in term…
The three moments of New Labour's health policy discourse
English This article examines the three ‘moments’ of health policy discourse under New Labour. It contends that, since 1997, there have been two significant changes: the first from an initially very Fabian rhetoric to one based instead around performance measurement and investment, and the second adding a new version ‘internal market’, based around the application of the discourse of consumerism in the NHS, to the performance discourse of the fir…
Agency, social theory and social policy
Social policy writers appear to be increasingly concerned with theories of human agency and their implications for the discipline. This article considers a recent model of agency presented by Hoggett, and attempts to marry it with the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu in order to present a framework for considering the assumptions about agency made in New Labour's social policy. The framework casts doubt upon the viability of contemporary British …
The changing governance of the NHS: Reform in a post-Keynesian health service
This article suggests that the central problems of examining governance change in the National Health Service (NHS) are located in the changing relations between the state and the professionals it relies upon for the delivery of health services on the one hand, and its positioning of the users of public services on the other. These relations are explored in depth in terms of the question as to whether market-based governance can be adequately imp…
Patient Choice in the NHS: The View from Economic Sociology
The Evolution of Choice Policies in UK Housing, Education and Health Policy
Scholarship in social policy in recent years has examined how policy positions users in a range of roles, particularly most recently in terms of their roles as ‘choosers’ through the increased use of markets in welfare. This article considers how choice policies have positioned users since the creation of the modern welfare state, presenting a history of choice policies, but also a comparative examination of how they have differed in the UK betwe…
Decentralizing Health Services in the Uk: A New Conceptual Framework
Decentralization is a central plank of current government health policy. However, it is possible to discern both centralist and decentralist movements in the UK. This paper examines existing frameworks of decentralization in relation to identifying whether policy is decentralist or not and identifies a number of problems that limit their value. Key problems relate to the way decentralization is conceptualized and defined. Existing frameworks are …
Health Authorities, Priority‐setting and Resource Allocation: A Study in Decision‐making in New Labour's NHS
This paper analyses the decision‐making process of health authorities under New Labour in the NHS through a study of their qualitative responses to questionnaires. We conclude by making suggestions for an alternative strategy less likely to antagonize local health service providers
The Other Le Grand? Evaluating the ‘Other Invisible Hand’ in Welfare Services in England
Competition and choice have become central means of improving public services in England. The former adviser to the Blair government Julian Le Grand has suggested that increased choice and competition should be the cornerstone of policy that aims to deliver more responsive and fairer results for the public. This article explores Le Grand's claims, deploying the conditions earlier suggested by him to examine the conditions which ‘quasi‐markets wil…
Health Service Organization in the UK: A Political Economy Approach
This paper revisits Harrison and Wood's (1999) account of health service organizational design in the UK to bring that account up to date. It also attempts to broaden it through an increased use of the political economy perspective it incorporated. As a consequence, the paper presents a number of alternative findings to Harrison and Wood, reconsidering their analysis of organization from ‘blueprint’ to ‘design’, and finding that Jessop's framewor…
Expert Patients and Human Agency: Long-term Conditions and Giddens' Structuration Theory
Choice or voice? Introduction to the Themed Section
Readers of this journal will have seen themed sections on partnerships, governance and citizenship (volume 5, issue 2) and ‘consumerism in social policy (volume 2, issue 1) and might be asking exactly why a further one that combines these elements is now necessary. Having considered similar topics separately in these pages, why is it now necessary to look at them together
Introduction: Evidence and Evaluation in Social Policy
A realistic evaluation of practice-based commissioning
The tendency of governments to recycle policy from previous periods presents analysts with the opportunity of assessing their likelihood of success in new time periods. This article presents a theoretical and empirical contribution toward this goal. Its theoretical contribution utilises the work of Pawson and Archer by exploring how context from previous and current periods can be compared and separated from generic policy mechanisms that underpi…
The Politics of Gender in the NHS: Impression Management and ‘Getting Things Done’
This article is concerned with gendered differences in managerial repertoires in the National Health Service. Interviews carried out with senior NHS managers across several geographical areas suggest that, from an impression management perspective, where they are able to occupy senior management positions, a different management style begins to emerge amongst women, with a separation between their ‘front‐stage, ‘backstage’ and ‘outside’ stage act…
Path Dependence, Realism and the NHS
Comparative Health Policy
COMPARATIVE HEALTH POLICY Robert H. Blank and Viola Burau Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 260 pp., £17.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333985990
Tolerance in QCA: Moving debates on design, calibration, analysis, and interpretation in QCA forward in macrocomparative resarch
This paper argues for three aspects of tolerance with respect to QCA research: tolerance with respect to different approaches to QCA; producing QCA research with tolerance (work that is resistant to criticism); and for QCA researchers to be clear about the tolerance of the solutions they present – especially in terms of calibration and truth table construction. Giving examples that are based on macrocomparative research, the paper organises its s…
The ‘New Five Giants’—Conceptualising the challenges facing societal progress in the 21st century
This paper takes an overview of the barriers to social progress 80 years on from the original Beveridge report (Beveridge, 1942). It argues we can identify and conceptualise five alternative ‘Giants’, relating these to social theory and social debates in the 21st century, and considering the prospects for progress against these new challenges. After considering Beveridge's original Giants in their context, it considers large‐scale theories of soc…
Healthcare funding and its relationship to equity and outcomes: A QCA analysis of Commonwealth Fund and OECD data
This article examines Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Commonwealth Funding data to explore the relationship between the level and means of funding of 11 different healthcare systems, on the one hand, and overall equity and health outcome measures, on the other. It utilises qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and the idea of ‘fitness landscapes’ for the clusters of funding combinations and outcomes they present…
Entrepreneurship and institution-building in the case of childminding
This article considers institution-building by 'childminder organizers' who rearranged local childminding services away from state-imposed, market-based relationships into localized co-operative arrangements instead. It explores how, through the introduction and enforcement of unified pay and conditions and of a childminding brokering system, institutions for establishing norms of practice were established. It shows how childminder organizers dep…
Social Learning and Macroeconomic Policy in Britain
This paper examines the social learning models of policy of Hall and May attempting to create a synthesis of the best elements of each. We then apply the revised model to three specific instances of macroeconomic policy in Britain; the introduction of ‘Keynesian-plus’ policy in the 1960s, the movement from Keynesianism to monetarism, and the experiment with monetarism in the 1980s. In each case study, the degree of policy change is assessed, and …
Agency, social theory and social policy
Social policy writers appear to be increasingly concerned with theories of human agency and their implications for the discipline. This article considers a recent model of agency presented by Hoggett, and attempts to marry it with the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu in order to present a framework for considering the assumptions about agency made in New Labour's social policy. The framework casts doubt upon the viability of contemporary British …
Understanding NHS Reform: The Policy‐Transfer, Social Learning, and Path‐Dependency Perspectives
This paper utilizes three perspectives in analyzing health policy in the U.K. during the formulation of the “internal market” reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s: policy transfer, social learning, and path‐dependency. By doing so, it attempts to incorporate the most significant insights from each perspective to construct a framework for analysis that better illuminates the actors, processes, and constraints involved in health policy reform,…
Patient Choice in the NHS: The View from Economic Sociology
Health Authorities, Priority‐setting and Resource Allocation: A Study in Decision‐making in New Labour's NHS
This paper analyses the decision‐making process of health authorities under New Labour in the NHS through a study of their qualitative responses to questionnaires. We conclude by making suggestions for an alternative strategy less likely to antagonize local health service providers
The new political economy of the UK NHS
This paper applies Jessop's analysis of the new political economy of welfare to the case of the NHS, exploring the insights into the changes in health policy in the UK that such a perspective offers. Alongside Jessop's analysis, the paper also considers the competing tension of path dependency in health policy, and the possibility of alternative futures to those envisaged in Jessop's model
Health Service Organization in the UK: A Political Economy Approach
This paper revisits Harrison and Wood's (1999) account of health service organizational design in the UK to bring that account up to date. It also attempts to broaden it through an increased use of the political economy perspective it incorporated. As a consequence, the paper presents a number of alternative findings to Harrison and Wood, reconsidering their analysis of organization from ‘blueprint’ to ‘design’, and finding that Jessop's framewor…
The three moments of New Labour's health policy discourse
English This article examines the three ‘moments’ of health policy discourse under New Labour. It contends that, since 1997, there have been two significant changes: the first from an initially very Fabian rhetoric to one based instead around performance measurement and investment, and the second adding a new version ‘internal market’, based around the application of the discourse of consumerism in the NHS, to the performance discourse of the fir…
The Potential of Path Dependence in Political Studies
This article explores the difficulties with both the theoretical content and application of the concept of ‘path dependence’ in political studies, but suggests that, by combining it with insights from morphogenetic social theory, we can provide a coherent framework for its use. After providing a brief survey of the literature on path dependence, it presents a summary of the most significant criticisms made of the approach. The article then moves …
The political economy of networked learning communities in higher education
This article uses the example of the recent (ill‐fated) experiment in the creation of a global education product—the UKeU—to explore how the concept of community in learning changes in this context. It uses a framework borrowed from the literature on changes in the welfare state to explain how the new economies of on line education distort the traditional ideas of learning communities. The article argues that ignoring the underpinning structural …
Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Bank: Socio-Technical Networks and the ‘Rogue Trader’
This paper examines the collapse of Barings Bank, utilizing an extended analytical framework based on Callon's sociology of translation. It shows how Leeson linked himself inextricably with Barings’ executives need for profit, mobilizing them (and others) into defending him when his activities were subject to scrutiny. It goes on to explain the process through which Leeson effectively lost control of his socio-technical network, and concludes by …
Path Dependence, Realism and the NHS
Comparative Health Policy
COMPARATIVE HEALTH POLICY Robert H. Blank and Viola Burau Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 260 pp., £17.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333985990
Two Cheers for Path Dependence — Why it is Still Worth Trying to Work with Historical Institutionalism: A Reply to Ross
The Politics of Gender in the NHS: Impression Management and ‘Getting Things Done’
This article is concerned with gendered differences in managerial repertoires in the National Health Service. Interviews carried out with senior NHS managers across several geographical areas suggest that, from an impression management perspective, where they are able to occupy senior management positions, a different management style begins to emerge amongst women, with a separation between their ‘front‐stage, ‘backstage’ and ‘outside’ stage act…
The stages of New Labour
This chapter examines the extent of change that has taken place since 1997. The key policy question is whether Labour’s approach to public reform represents an approach with a new hierarchy of goals in place, a new policy ‘paradigm’, or, instead, a variant of the Conservative approach that preceded it. Can Labour policy be divided into a series of stages or moments that show changes in Labour’s approach? Labour’s approach to public reform appears…
Choice and Voice – A Review
‘Choice’ and ‘voice’ are two of the most significant means through which the public are able to participate in public services. Choice agendas position public service users as consumers, driving improvements by choosing good providers over bad, which then thrive through greater allocations of funds as money follows their selections (Le Grand, 2007). Choice-driven reforms tend to be about trying to make public services more locally responsive (Fer…
Expert Patients and Human Agency: Long-term Conditions and Giddens' Structuration Theory
Choice or voice? Introduction to the Themed Section
Readers of this journal will have seen themed sections on partnerships, governance and citizenship (volume 5, issue 2) and ‘consumerism in social policy (volume 2, issue 1) and might be asking exactly why a further one that combines these elements is now necessary. Having considered similar topics separately in these pages, why is it now necessary to look at them together
Some Useful Sources
Clarke, J., Newman, J., Smith, N., Vidler, E. and Westmarland, L. (2007), Creating Citizen-consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services , London: Paul Chapman Publishing. An important theoretical and empirical contribution to understanding the debates around both citizenship and consumption in the UK
Decision Making in a Time of Significant Reform: Managing in the NHS
This article utilizes three empirical studies to examine the organizational and policy context within which health managers find themselves today, asking three questions of extreme relevance for the area of health organizational reform in a period in which the pace and scope of change are intense: What strategies do public service managers employ to make sure they stay up to date with what is required of them? How do public service managers deal …
Decentralizing Health Services in the Uk: A New Conceptual Framework
Decentralization is a central plank of current government health policy. However, it is possible to discern both centralist and decentralist movements in the UK. This paper examines existing frameworks of decentralization in relation to identifying whether policy is decentralist or not and identifies a number of problems that limit their value. Key problems relate to the way decentralization is conceptualized and defined. Existing frameworks are …
The changing governance of the NHS: Reform in a post-Keynesian health service
This article suggests that the central problems of examining governance change in the National Health Service (NHS) are located in the changing relations between the state and the professionals it relies upon for the delivery of health services on the one hand, and its positioning of the users of public services on the other. These relations are explored in depth in terms of the question as to whether market-based governance can be adequately imp…
Markets in the public sector: When Do They Work, and What Do We Do When They Don't
There is a danger that we have become so used to the idea of markets in the public sector that they become taken for granted. This article first problematises the terms ‘market’ and ‘public’, before going on to talk about markets as they are being used in present policy, and applying a morphogenetic-inspired analysis of their use. Finally, it attempts to work out when and where markets might work in the public sector, and what we might do in term…
The consumer in public services: Choice, values and difference
Political science (47 works) · Sociology (40 works) · Economics (34 works) · Law (32 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (28 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (18 works) · Public Administration (18 works) · Healthcare innovation and challenges (15 works)