Martin J Smith
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584702 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin J Smith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin J |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7377-511X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 878 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 82 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1946 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Shame job”: The exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in genomics and precision medicine
The underrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in genomics and precision medicine research is a critical oversight with profound implications for health equity. This commentary examines the neglect of prospective recruitment of Indigenous participants in genomics research and its impact on the health disparity gap. It argues that this exclusion perpetuates Eurocentric biases in health care, limiting the potential of prec…
Fraught With High Tragedy: A Contextual and Chronological Reconsideration of the Maiden Castle Iron Age ‘War Cemetery’ (England)
The Iron Age ‘war cemetery’ of Maiden Castle hillfort, Dorset, England, is one of the most internationally celebrated of British archaeological discoveries, levels of trauma recorded on skeletons found there being interpreted as evidence for a Roman massacre. A new radiocarbon dating programme and reanalysis of the burial patterning, presented here for the first time, shows that the inhumations actually fall into temporal clusters of lethal viole…
The inefficiency of centralised control and political short-termism: The case of the Prison Service in England and Wales
A paradox of the New Public Management reform – an influential school of thought in the management of public services in some countries – is that, despite its rhetoric of discretion for public managers, governments frequently reassert direct input controls at the expense of managerial freedoms to deliver – and be held accountable for – agreed output/outcome objectives. The existing literature explains this by highlighting elite incentive structur…
Ships' boys, nippers and powder monkies: Skeletal evidence for life at sea at an early age from Stray Park British Naval Cemetery (Plymouth)
During the era of the British Royal Navy in the 18th and 19th centuries, young boys made up a significant portion of the crews on warships. The Navy recruited these boys from as early as 6 years old, with the goal of providing them with many years of training. They received instructions on board, the youngests spent most of their time playing, while the older ones worked. As they grew older, the boys had to take on more and more sailor’s duties. …
Crisis what crisis?’ Understanding the recurring problems of the British state
This article seeks to explain the current crises besetting the UK state, arguing their seeds can be traced back to past failures to reform Britain’s pre-modern state arrangements. We argue the perpetuation of a political cutlure organised round the highly centralising British Political Tradition has proved increasingly incompatible with a fragmented governance landscape driven by forty years of New Public Management informed reforms. We posit thi…
Brutalised, Bound and Bled: A Case of Later Iron Age Human Sacrifice From Winterborne Kingston, Dorset
Although the practice of human sacrifice in the British Iron Age is mentioned by multiple authors, both ancient and modern, physical proof of such activity in the archaeological record is comparatively rare. At Winterborne Kingston, in Dorset, the skeletal remains of a young adult female found face down near the base of a cylindrical storage pit provides clear evidence of violent death in the later Iron Age. Analysis of the skeleton suggests an i…
The asymmetric power model 20 years on
It is over 20 years since the publication of the Asymmetric Power Model (APM). In the ensuing period, Britain has faced multiple challenges: the increasing fragmentation of public services; austerity politics; devolution; and, most recently, coronavirus disease and Brexit. It is this backdrop which provides the context to this article. First, it addresses how the literature has subsequently evolved. It then examines what has changed over the last…
D printed control for commercial off-the-shelf (Cots) close-range photogrammetric reconstruction
The use of photogrammetry in archaeology and anthropology has become increasingly popular over the past decade. If the intended purpose of a three-dimensional (3D) model generated by commercial "off-the-shelf" (COTS) photographic equipment is geometric analysis or preservation by record, appropriate 3D control is recommended to improve orientation estimates and, in turn, the accuracy of the output 3D model. Further, independent measures of the qu…
Crisis and state transformation: Covid-19, levelling up and the UK’s incoherent state
This article provides a novel account of recent UK governance reforms, describing what can be termed an ‘incoherent’ state, ill-equipped to address complex, multi-dimensional policy challenges. This is evidenced through two interrelated case-studies: Covid-19 and levelling up. We highlight how the tradition of strongly centralised government combined with an ad hoc approach to reform has undermined inter-governmental relations and limited the pos…
Austerity and governance: Coordinating policing and mental health policy in the UK
Notions of network and polycentric governance highlight the possibility of innovation and adaptability in service delivery. At the same time, it has been argued that austerity and financial restrictions create intense pressures for public sector reform as public sector organizations look to new ways to deliver services. Hence the argument from governments in advanced democracies was that austerity would drive innovation. This article argues, thro…
English Devolution and the Covid‐19 Pandemic: Governing Dilemmas in the Shadow of the Treasury
This article explores the question of devolution in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on English local government. Criticism of the government's handling of the crisis is widespread and tends to focus on the highly centralised nature of the British state. Here, we attribute the challenges faced by regional and local government in responding to the pandemic primarily to the asymmetric nature of power relations that characterise financial…
A life less ordinary: Analysis of the uniquely preserved tattooed dermal remains of an individual from 19th century France
Anthropologies of the Body' often view the human form as a sort of text, onto which meanings and experiences are inscribed during people's lives, rendering the body effectively as an artefact of material culture. Such 'inscription' is generally metaphorical; however, in the case of tattooing, aspects of the way people wish to be perceived are quite literally inscribed upon the body. The current article presents analysis of an unusual 'artefact' i…
Decentralisation and central-local relations: The case of policing and mental health in England
The girl with the chariot medallion: A well-furnished, Late Iron Age Durotrigian burial from Langton Herring, Dorset
A well-furnished, Late Iron Age Durotrigian burial was found in 2010 by a metal-detectorist at Langton Herring in Dorset. This report examines all aspects of the discovery, paying particular attention to the skeletal remains, a female aged 19–24, providing the most complete, osteobiographical study of an individual buried with a mirror assemblage from the European Iron Age. A combination of artefacts and radiocarbon dating gives a range for the b…
Behavioural insights, nudge and the choice environment in obesity policy
As obesity constitutes a growing health concern over the world, it has also become an important part of public policy agendas. This paper critically analyses the development of the policy debate and measures around obesity in the UK. The paper contributes to the debate by challenging the current individualized nature of nudge policies as the most popular application of behavioural economics to policy. We argue that it may be possible to change th…
Standard methods for creating digital skeletal models using structure‐from‐motion photogrammetry
OBJECTIVES: This article assesses best practices for producing 3D digital cranial models through structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry, and whether the metric accuracy and overall presentation of photogrammetric models are comparable to physical crania. It is intended to present a user-friendly standard method of creating accurate digital skeletal models using Agisoft PhotoScan. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Approximately 200 photographs were taken…
Fallen comrades? Anthropological analysis of human remains from the siege of Turin, 1706
The construction of an underground car park beneath the main square of Turin, Italy in 2004 led to the unearthing of the skeletonised remains of twenty-two individuals attributable to the early eighteenth century. At this time the city was besieged during the War of the Spanish Succession in a hard-fought battle that resulted in unexpected triumph for the Piedmontese, a victory that marked a fundamental turning point in Italian history. The curre…
Burning questions: Investigations using field experimentation of different patterns of change to bone in accidental vs deliberate burning scenarios
A comparison between London and Baghdad surface urban heat islands and possible engineering mitigation solutions
Wounded to the bone: Digital microscopic analysis of traumas in a medieval mass grave assemblage (Sandbjerget, Denmark, AD 1300–1350)
Holding on to the past: Southern British evidence for mummification and retention of the dead in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age
Getting to the point: An experimental approach to improving the identification of penetrating projectile trauma to bone caused by medieval arrows
An Age Old Problem? Estimating the Impact of Dementia on Past Human Populations
Dementia is often seen as a "modern" challenge that humans have not had to contend with before. We argue that this condition has had considerably greater effects than previously envisaged and is a challenge that humans have already withstood successfully, on one hand at a lower incidence but on the other without the considerable clinical, technological, and social advances that have been made in recent times
The Westminster Model and the “Indivisibility of the Political and Administrative Elite: A Convenient Myth Whose Time Is Up
This article argues that the principle of indivisibility in the relationship between political and administrative elites acted as a central convention of the Westminster system for much of the twentieth century. It explores how in more recent decades this principle has been challenged by the shift to a principal–agent approach. It considers the extent to which this shift diminishes the traditional Westminster model's understanding of the minister…
Governing As New Labour: Policy and Politics under Blair
Understanding Policy Networks: Towards a Dialectical Approach
This article has two aims. First, we develop a dialectical model of the role that policy networks play in any explanation of policy outcomes. Our model is based upon a critique of existing approaches and emphasizes that the relationship between networks and outcomes is not a simple, unidimensional one. Rather, we argue that there are three interactive or dialectical relationships involved between: the structure of the network and the agents opera…
Unequal Plurality: Towards an Asymmetric Power Model of British Politics
Until recently, Rhodes's ‘Differentiate Polity Model’ (DPM) has been the most analytically-developed model of the British political system, but it is not without its problems. Here, we argue that the DPM over-stresses the diffuse nature of power in Britain and the extent to which the state has been hollowed out. Instead, we contend that the British political system is more closed and elitist than the DPM acknowledges; rather than being hollowed-o…
There is More Than One Way to Do Political Science: On Different Ways to Study Policy Networks
From Big Government to Big Society: Changing the State-Society Balance
Much of the 2010 election was fought around the issue of the recession and the public borrowing deficit. However, whilst economic policy was highly salient, there was little fundamental difference between the parties over what needed to be done. All three of the major parties accepted the need to cut the deficit through reducing public expenditure. What the response to the crisis did reveal was fundamental differences between the parties over the…
Interpreting the World of Political Elites
This paper uses an interpretative approach to analyse the relationship between ministers and officials. It argues that generally, the relationship between ministers and civil servants is harmonious. This can be explained by the fact that both sets of actors tend to draw from the same tradition, the Westminster model. The Westminster model can be understood as the building block from which both ministers and civil servants develop narratives that …
Experimental evidence for lithic projectile injuries: Improving identification of an under-recognised phenomenon
The Westminster Model and the “Indivisibility of the Political and Administrative Elite: A Convenient Myth Whose Time Is Up
This article argues that the principle of indivisibility in the relationship between political and administrative elites acted as a central convention of the Westminster system for much of the twentieth century. It explores how in more recent decades this principle has been challenged by the shift to a principal–agent approach. It considers the extent to which this shift diminishes the traditional Westminster model's understanding of the minister…
From Policy Community to Issue Network: Salmonella in Eggs and the New Politics of Food
In the last two years the issue of food has been subject to increasing political controversy with firstly salmonella in eggs and later listeria and BSE becoming the focus of conflict and widespread media attention. This is an important change. In most of the post‐war period food policy was conducted within a relatively closed policy community where issues concerning food policy were largely treated as routine technical decisions. The significance…
Re-Centring British Government: Beliefs, Traditions and Dilemmas in Political Science
Bevir and Rhodes have offered a useful addition to the tools of political scientists by developing an interpretivist approach to political science. Interpretation is a crucial mechanism for understanding the social world but one that has been underused in political analysis. This article welcomes Bevir and Rhodes’ emphasis on interpretivism but suggests that there are a number of problems in the way they use the approach. In particular: they use …
Re‐assessing the Role of Departmental Cabinet Ministers
The study of the core executive has been dominated by discussion of the Prime Ministers and Cabinet with only limited serious treatment paid to ministers. However, ministers and departments are crucial actors in the core executive. This article examines the multiple roles and varying impacts of ministers. More particularly, we initially develop a classification of ministerial roles, which builds upon, but develops, work by Headey, James and Norto…
Pluralism, Reformed Pluralism and Neopluralism: The Role of Pressure Groups in Policy-Making
Devolution in England, the British Political Tradition and the Absence of Consultation, Consensus and Consideration
This article explores the nature of devolution unfolding in England following on from the September 2014 Scottish Referendum. It argues that the process of devolution can best be understood as one of elite co-option. Limited attention is being paid to the interest of citizens and the nature of the process to date reveals little evidence to suggest that the existing structures of power in the British political system are being challenged. These dy…
Culturally Determined Patterns of Violence: Biological Anthropological Investigations at a Historic Urban Cemetery
Patterns of violence and the type and distribution of resulting injuries are highly culturally specific. In this study, skeletal data from a historic cemetery (St. Martin's, England) are combined with contemporary sources and modern clinical data to enable the patterning of violence-related injuries to be interpreted. Particular consideration was given to the possibility of a relationship between commonly occurring types of violence and those tha…
The public service ethos and the role of the British civil service
The last Conservative administration invested much time and effort in reforming the structure and organisation of the Civil Service. Yet it left untouched the core principles which underpinned Whitehall, often referred to as the public service ethos. In this article, we argue that this ethos has been defended by both conservative and liberal opinion as something fundamentally good. Yet, in reality, the public service ethos is a power/knowledge sy…
Bureaucrats, Politicians and Reform in Whitehall: Analysing the Bureau-Shaping Model
Dunleavy's bureau-shaping model has breathed new life into existing debates about the behaviour of senior bureaucrats. This article assesses the utility of this model as an explanation of the development of Next Step agencies in the last decade in Britain, using data drawn from a series of extensive interviews with senior civil servants. Our conclusion is that, although the bureau-shaping model represents a significant advance on previous models …
Understanding the ‘Politics of Catch-up: The Modernization of the Labour Party
Central Government Departments and the Policy Process
Government departments are central organizations in the development of public policy. Yet there is very little literature on the political role of departments, their internal relationships and their relationships with other departments and other government actors and institutions. This article reviews the extant literature on government departments. It argues that much of the existing research has either focused on the role of the Prime Minister …
In Defence of British Politics Against the British Political Tradition
This article explores some of the current themes round the perceived crisis in British politics in supposed an age of ‘anti‐politics’. Drawing on Bernard Crick's In Defence of Politics , it offers a critique of what is referred to as a dominant British political tradition and in so doing seeks to challenge ‘demand‐side’ accounts that ostensibly defend the traditional arena politics of the Westminster system. Instead, it argues that developments a…
From big society to small state: Conservatism and the privatisation of government
Reconceptualizing the British State: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges to Central Government
Britain is generally perceived as having a hierarchical and unified political system with power concentrated in the central institutions of the state. This conception has not only influenced analysis but has affected the behaviour of politicians. However, in recent years both conceptions of the state and, how it operates, have been challenged. Conventional approaches concerned with the internal workings of the state have largely taken the nature …
Crisis and state transformation: Covid-19, levelling up and the UK’s incoherent state
This article provides a novel account of recent UK governance reforms, describing what can be termed an ‘incoherent’ state, ill-equipped to address complex, multi-dimensional policy challenges. This is evidenced through two interrelated case-studies: Covid-19 and levelling up. We highlight how the tradition of strongly centralised government combined with an ad hoc approach to reform has undermined inter-governmental relations and limited the pos…
English Devolution and the Covid‐19 Pandemic: Governing Dilemmas in the Shadow of the Treasury
This article explores the question of devolution in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic's impact on English local government. Criticism of the government's handling of the crisis is widespread and tends to focus on the highly centralised nature of the British state. Here, we attribute the challenges faced by regional and local government in responding to the pandemic primarily to the asymmetric nature of power relations that characterise financial…
Analysing Policy Delivery in the United Kingdom: The Case of Street Crime and Anti‐social Behaviour
For all governments, the principle of how and whether policies are implemented as intended is fundamental. The aim of this paper is to examine the difficulties for governments in delivering policy goals when they do not directly control the processes of implementation. This paper examines two case studies – anti-social behaviour and street crime – and demonstrates the difficulties faced by policy-makers in translating policy into practice when th…
Central control and policy implementation in the UK: A case study of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit
The election of Tony Blair's Labour government in 1997 led to a significant increase of institutionalisation in the Prime Minister's Office, but the creation of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) in 2001 has led to a degree of formal, direct control over policy implementation. This paper seeks to explain the development of this capability in the context of contradictory features of the British political system: the high level of prime mini…
(Mis)understanding Blair
Problems of Men
The Annual Review: The Emergence of a Corporatist Institution
Of the many theories of corporatism the most adequate is that which sees the relationship as a form of interest group intermediation and policy implementation. It has been argued that the Annual Review of Agriculture is one of the best examples of a corporatist institution. This paper examines the Annual Review and demonstrates that, although it has features of corporatism, the relationship between the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Far…
Changing Agendas and Policy Communities: Agricultural Issues in the 1930s and the 1980s
Pluralists have argued that the political agenda is relatively open. If a group or party apply enough pressure then new issues should have access to the political arena. However, the theories of policy communities and the third dimension of power suggest that issues can be kept off the political agenda. Agriculture seems to provide an example where for forty years new issues did not emerge. Yet in the 1930s and 1980s pressures to change the agric…
Land Nationalisation and the Agricultural Policy Community
Labour came to power in 1945 with a commitment to nationalisation and a high degree of public support. Land nationalisation had been Labour Party policy since 1918. However, the Government did not use the opportunity of their victory to bring land into public ownership. This article analyses why the 1945 Labour Government failed to implement this policy. Previous explanations have suggested the omission was due to Labour's revisionist nature and …
Pluralism, Reformed Pluralism and Neopluralism: The Role of Pressure Groups in Policy-Making
Can British Prime Ministers Be Given the Push by Their Parties
CAN BRITISH PRIME MINISTERS BE GIVEN THE PUSH BY THEIR PARTIES? Get access R. K. Alderman, R. K. Alderman Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Martin J. Smith Martin J. Smith Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 43, Issue 3, July 1990, Pages 260–276, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a052252 Published: 01 July 1990
Public policy under Thatcher
From Policy Community to Issue Network: Salmonella in Eggs and the New Politics of Food
In the last two years the issue of food has been subject to increasing political controversy with firstly salmonella in eggs and later listeria and BSE becoming the focus of conflict and widespread media attention. This is an important change. In most of the post‐war period food policy was conducted within a relatively closed policy community where issues concerning food policy were largely treated as routine technical decisions. The significance…
Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity
Central Government Departments and the Policy Process
Government departments are central organizations in the development of public policy. Yet there is very little literature on the political role of departments, their internal relationships and their relationships with other departments and other government actors and institutions. This article reviews the extant literature on government departments. It argues that much of the existing research has either focused on the role of the Prime Minister …
The Core Executive and the Resignation of MRS Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was seen as one of the most dominant post‐war Prime Ministers and yet she was forced to resign in November 1990. Most extant explanations of her fall concentrate on relatively short‐term factors such as the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Community Charge and issues surrounding the European Community. This article argues that these accounts fail to explain Mrs Thatcher's fall because they do not place her resignation withi…
Understanding the ‘Politics of Catch-up: The Modernization of the Labour Party
Discourses of modernization: Gaitskell, Blair and the reform of Clause IV
(1997). Discourses of modernization: Gaitskell, Blair and the reform of Clause IV. British Elections & Parties Review: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 110-126
(Mis)understanding Blair
How Departments Change: Windows of Opportunity and Critical Junctures in Three Departments
Despite the difficulty of large-scale organisational change, it is clear that the last 18 years of Conservative government has seen some major changes in both the structures and cultures of government department. This paper examines why and how departments change when they do. Although ministers frequently have explicit intentions to change the cultures of departments, the often fail. The paper suggests that major, cultural reorientations of depa…
Reconceptualizing the British State: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges to Central Government
Britain is generally perceived as having a hierarchical and unified political system with power concentrated in the central institutions of the state. This conception has not only influenced analysis but has affected the behaviour of politicians. However, in recent years both conceptions of the state and, how it operates, have been challenged. Conventional approaches concerned with the internal workings of the state have largely taken the nature …
The Core Executive in Britain
The study of central government has been dominated by the recurring questions of Prime Ministerial versus Cabinet government and civil service versus ministerial power. Using the idea of 'power depend
Institutionalising the ‘Eternal Return’: Textbooks and the Study of British Politics
Anthony Birch, The British System of Government Ian Budge and David McKay (eds), The Developing British PoliticalSystem: the 1990s Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe, David McKay and Ken Newton, The NewBritish Politics Bill Coxall and Lynton Robins, Contemporary British Politics John Dearlove and Peter Saunders, Introduction to British Politics Patrick Dunleavy, Andrew Gamble, Ian Holliday and Gillian Peele (eds), Developments in British Politics 5 Bill Jones…
Re‐assessing the Role of Departmental Cabinet Ministers
The study of the core executive has been dominated by discussion of the Prime Ministers and Cabinet with only limited serious treatment paid to ministers. However, ministers and departments are crucial actors in the core executive. This article examines the multiple roles and varying impacts of ministers. More particularly, we initially develop a classification of ministerial roles, which builds upon, but develops, work by Headey, James and Norto…
The public service ethos and the role of the British civil service
The last Conservative administration invested much time and effort in reforming the structure and organisation of the Civil Service. Yet it left untouched the core principles which underpinned Whitehall, often referred to as the public service ethos. In this article, we argue that this ethos has been defended by both conservative and liberal opinion as something fundamentally good. Yet, in reality, the public service ethos is a power/knowledge sy…
Understanding Policy Networks: Towards a Dialectical Approach
This article has two aims. First, we develop a dialectical model of the role that policy networks play in any explanation of policy outcomes. Our model is based upon a critique of existing approaches and emphasizes that the relationship between networks and outcomes is not a simple, unidimensional one. Rather, we argue that there are three interactive or dialectical relationships involved between: the structure of the network and the agents opera…
Over‐reliance on Unstated Rules
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Bureaucrats, Politicians and Reform in Whitehall: Analysing the Bureau-Shaping Model
Dunleavy's bureau-shaping model has breathed new life into existing debates about the behaviour of senior bureaucrats. This article assesses the utility of this model as an explanation of the development of Next Step agencies in the last decade in Britain, using data drawn from a series of extensive interviews with senior civil servants. Our conclusion is that, although the bureau-shaping model represents a significant advance on previous models …
Changing Patterns of Government: Reinventing Whitehall?
This is the first comprehensive examination of the changing relations between ministers and civil servants since 1979. Based on an original account of power within central government and drawing on ev
There is More Than One Way to Do Political Science: On Different Ways to Study Policy Networks
Political science (58 works) · Law (50 works) · Politics (48 works) · Law (44 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Economics (33 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (33 works) · Public Administration (32 works) · Public Administration (28 works) · Political economy (26 works)