Peter Matthews
Biographic Data
| ID | 376589 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Matthews |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Matthews |
| SIGNATURE | MATTHEWS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Stirling |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2014-1241 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 139 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Progressive for all? The experience of LGBTQ+ people in the Scottish social security system
Since devolution in 1999 the Scottish government has worked to advance a more progressive (compared to the UK government) policy agenda across a wide range of policy areas. This included reforms to the social security system which sought to remove some of the stigmatising and punitive aspects of the UK system. In parallel to these developments, the Scottish government internationally portrayed itself as a leader in LGBTQ+ rights. Drawing on quali…
On Re‐reading Weinreich's Languages in Contact
Uriel Weinreich's pioneering monograph on Languages in Contact is now more than fifty years old.1 It is so justly famous that I have heard a speaker at a conference upbraided, after a talk that merely happened to have words like ‘languages’ and ‘contact’ in its title, for not referring to it. But like any other book, it is of its day, and it merits critical re-reading in the light both of the problems that have arisen since the 1950s and of what …
Queer utopias of housing and homelessness
While there is evidence that discrimination against LGBTQ + people can cause homelessness, or worsen experiences, in this paper we consider law, policy and practice to tackle homelessness among LGBTQ + people. Contrasting the different legal systems across the UK nations of England, Scotland and Wales, we firstly consider how law, as structured around the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family, can be designed to discriminate against LGBTQ + peo…
Farmer identities and perceptions of public good provision
Agricultural policy discourse highlights the role of farmers as providers of public goods to justify agri-environmental measures. England’s post-Brexit agricultural policy reform, with its originally stated aim of ‘public money for public goods’, presented an opportunity to assess how farmers respond to this idea. Informed by social psychological accounts of how farmer management reflects their identities, our thematic analysis of qualitative int…
Researching LGBTQ+ homelessness and building social justice in the UK & the US
LGBTQ+ homelessness research is an emerging area growing in importance in the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. Research to date indicates that methodology and participant recruitment are particularly challenging for this group. Sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as homelessness and poverty are taboo topics that are often stigmatized. Homelessness for LGBTQ+ people is therefore under-reported both by third sector organizations and gover…
Understanding homelessness and housing among LGBTQ+ people – where are we in 2024
Some Useful Sources
As noted in the themed section, the links between housing, housing policy, and social policy have always been disparate, with housing famously described as the 'wobbly pillar' of the welfare state.Therefore, in these sources we provide some key texts to understand: housing provision in a mixed welfare economy; changes in housing policy; and how social policy interacts with housing policy.Given the path-dependent and nation-statespecific nature of…
Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals Asset-based Welfare and Housing in Great Britain
The role of housing in providing a welfare asset has been widely explored. With the growth in home ownership between 1979 and 2008 and erosion of the welfare state, housing wealth has become part of the welfare mix in the UK. Here, we present analysis of housing outcomes, as measured in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in Great Britain. This shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual …
Dog fouling and potholes
Local governments around the world are increasingly coproducing services with citizens, commonly as a response to austerity. A common approach is to use ‘citizen sensors’, relying on citizens to report issues digitally through web portals or apps. There is mixed evidence about how different citizens act in different environments with concerns about resulting (in)equity in outcomes. This paper examines citizen-reporting of maintenance of the publi…
Social Policy and Queer Lives
Social Policy as an academic discipline has been at the forefront of many progressive movements in society, exploring problems of poverty, hardship, exclusion and suffering, government intervention, and the critical appraisal of those interventions. Yet it has been strangely silent on issues of sexual identity and gender identity and the inequities faced by the LGBTQ+ community. In this article we draw upon lesbian and gay studies, and queer stud…
Translating research for policy
The question of how to make academic research more useful to government, and frustration over its lack of obvious use, have long been the subject of policy makers’ and scholars’ attention. These have driven the global development of institutionalised links between the two communities, while also leading to a broad consensus as to why the goal is often not realised. In order to better explain the barriers, this paper takes the concept of “translat…
Unequal and Gendered
A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively ‘co-produce’ services. Via a case study of a UK council’s decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed a…
The experience of living in deprived neighbourhoods for LGBT+ people
Research in urban studies on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people and their housing choices has focused on economic choices and the role of exclusion, or conversely higher household disposable income, in residential location. Evidence on lived experiences has focused on residence in so-called 'gaybourhoods' with high concentrations of non-heterosexual households, or experiences within the home. Contrasting to this scholarship, in this …
Everyday stories of impact
Research into the barriers of getting evidence produced by academics into policymaking processes has often highlighted the lack of research on academics and what they do, as compared to what policymakers do. This was most recently highlighted in a systematic review of the literature (Oliver et al, 2014). This paper reports on research carried out with academics who were tasked with producing evidence reviews for the UK Department for Communities …
Stefan Müller-Doohm (tr. Daniel Steuer), Habermas
As an undergraduate studying history, a professor was attempting to explain Habermas’ thesis in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in a lecture. They described how, like all German
Decentring Urban Governance
What is housing studies for and what impact does it have
In a plenary speech to the 2014 European Network for Housing Research Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, Professor Duncan Maclennan argued that housing research had to make itself more relevant and
Mario Diani,The cement of civil society
Professor Marco Diani is a world-leading scholar on social movements. His book The Cement of Civil Society begins with the widely held proposition that the UK saw an unprecedented rise in protest a
After Urban Regeneration
Focusing on the history and theory of community in urban policy, and including a unique set of case studies that draw on artistic and cultural community work, After Urban Regeneration engages with debates on how urban policy has changed and continues to change following the financial crash of 2008.
After Urban Regeneration
Focusing on the history and theory of community in urban policy, and including a unique set of case studies that draw on artistic and cultural community work, this book engages with debates on how urban policy has changed and continues to change following the financial crash of 2008.
Social networks, social capital and poverty
Our understanding of the links between social networks and the causes or solutions to poverty have been enhanced through theoretical and empirical research on the concept of social capital. In this paper we discuss how social networks and social capital have commonly been presented as a problem or a panacea in policy regarding neighbourhoods and worklessness and then contrast this with recent evidence. We conclude that policy misrecognises the li…
The “Pink Pound” in the “Gaybourhood”? Neighbourhood Deprivation and Sexual Orientation in Scotland
The emergence of geographic concentrations of non-heterosexual individuals – so-called “gaybourhoods” – is often linked to housing, demographic characteristics of the non-straight population and wider discrimination. These neighbourhoods are associated with narratives of gentrification with the non-straight population acting as gentrification pioneers. In popular imagery, non-straight households are typically portrayed with higher disposable inco…
Neighbourhood Belonging, Social Class and Social Media—Providing Ladders to the Cloud
The growth of social media over the past decade has transformed how we have interacted with the World Wide Web. This paper presents data from a research project coproduced with community organisations that had created an online archive through a Facebook site of a deprived neighbourhood in Edinburgh, Scotland. Framing the data from this site in the literature on class, place, stigma and belonging, the paper presents further evidence of the ‘we-be…
Good Times Bad Times – The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
Bourdieu and the Big Society
There is concern that the ‘localism’ promoted by the UK Coalition Government will further empower the already powerful. This paper uses Bourdieu’s theory of practice to theorise middle-class public service use. Building on a previous evidence review (Matthews and Hastings, 2013) it considers whether the habitus of the middle-classes enables them to gain disproportionate benefit from public services. Service provision is understood as a ‘field’ ma…
Bourdieu and the Big Society
There is concern that the ‘localism’ promoted by the UK Coalition Government will further empower the already powerful. This paper uses Bourdieu’s theory of practice to theorise middle-class public service use. Building on a previous evidence review (Matthews and Hastings, 2013) it considers whether the habitus of the middle-classes enables them to gain disproportionate benefit from public services. Service provision is understood as a ‘field’ ma…
Archaeobotany in Australia and New Guinea
Archaeobotany is the study of plant remains from archaeological contexts. Despite Australasian research being at the forefront of several methodological innovations over the last three decades, archaebotany is now a relatively peripheral concern to most archaeological projects in Australia and New Guinea. In this paper, many practicing archaeobotanists working in these regions argue for a more central role for archaeobotany in standard archaeolog…
Homo Economicus in a Big Society
Problems of housing supply and affordability in England have long been recognized by policy-makers. A key barrier to supply is seen to be community activism by so-called not-in-my-back-yard activists (NIMBYs). The localism policy agenda, or devolving decision-making down to the local level, is central to how the UK coalition government seek to overcome this opposition. This conceives NIMBYism as a demonstration of homo economicus – of the rationa…
A Short History of Structural Linguistics
This concise history of structural linguistics charts its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists a language is a self-contained and tightly organised system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This idea has its origin in the nineteenth century and was developed in the twentieth by Saussure and his followers, in…
Middle‐Class Political Activism and Middle‐Class Advantage in Relation to Public Services
Since the late 1960s social policy scholarship has been concerned with the distribution of the resources or benefits across social gradients. This article presents a review of the literature on one mechanism by which inequity might be produced – activism by middle‐class service‐users enabling them to capture a disproportionate share of resources. The review used the methodology of realist synthesis to bring together evidence from the UK, the USA …
Being Strategic in Partnership – Interpreting Local Knowledge of Modern Local Government
Broad and international literature exists on networked governance which has both described and informed recent transformations in local government. Reforms in the UK have led to the development of strategic partnerships to join up services and solve wicked issues. In Scotland, these are referred to as Community Planning Partnerships. Evidence from numerous studies has highlighted the partial nature of this transformation, particularly around comm…
Mind the Gap? The Persistence of Pathological Discourses in Urban Regeneration Policy
Urban regeneration policy has historically framed policy problems using a discourse that pathologizes areas and spatial communities. Since 2001 in England and 2002 in Scotland, a structural change in policy has occurred where city‐wide partnerships are now meant to overcome structural spatial inequalities, countering pathological explanations. This paper uses historical and discourse analysis to evaluate one of the major community regeneration st…
Dog fouling and potholes
Local governments around the world are increasingly coproducing services with citizens, commonly as a response to austerity. A common approach is to use ‘citizen sensors’, relying on citizens to report issues digitally through web portals or apps. There is mixed evidence about how different citizens act in different environments with concerns about resulting (in)equity in outcomes. This paper examines citizen-reporting of maintenance of the publi…
Everyday stories of impact
Research into the barriers of getting evidence produced by academics into policymaking processes has often highlighted the lack of research on academics and what they do, as compared to what policymakers do. This was most recently highlighted in a systematic review of the literature (Oliver et al, 2014). This paper reports on research carried out with academics who were tasked with producing evidence reviews for the UK Department for Communities …
Social networks, social capital and poverty
Our understanding of the links between social networks and the causes or solutions to poverty have been enhanced through theoretical and empirical research on the concept of social capital. In this paper we discuss how social networks and social capital have commonly been presented as a problem or a panacea in policy regarding neighbourhoods and worklessness and then contrast this with recent evidence. We conclude that policy misrecognises the li…
Unequal and Gendered
A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively ‘co-produce’ services. Via a case study of a UK council’s decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed a…
The “Pink Pound” in the “Gaybourhood”? Neighbourhood Deprivation and Sexual Orientation in Scotland
The emergence of geographic concentrations of non-heterosexual individuals – so-called “gaybourhoods” – is often linked to housing, demographic characteristics of the non-straight population and wider discrimination. These neighbourhoods are associated with narratives of gentrification with the non-straight population acting as gentrification pioneers. In popular imagery, non-straight households are typically portrayed with higher disposable inco…
[Transitions to Agriculture in the Pacific Region] a Possible Tropical Wildtype Taro
Neighbourhood Belonging, Social Class and Social Media—Providing Ladders to the Cloud
The growth of social media over the past decade has transformed how we have interacted with the World Wide Web. This paper presents data from a research project coproduced with community organisations that had created an online archive through a Facebook site of a deprived neighbourhood in Edinburgh, Scotland. Framing the data from this site in the literature on class, place, stigma and belonging, the paper presents further evidence of the ‘we-be…
Social Policy and Queer Lives
Social Policy as an academic discipline has been at the forefront of many progressive movements in society, exploring problems of poverty, hardship, exclusion and suffering, government intervention, and the critical appraisal of those interventions. Yet it has been strangely silent on issues of sexual identity and gender identity and the inequities faced by the LGBTQ+ community. In this article we draw upon lesbian and gay studies, and queer stud…
Problem definition and re-evaluating a policy
This article seeks to problematize notions of objective policy evaluation using the techniques of interpretive policy analysis, and use the findings to develop a new evaluation and new proposals for policy improvement. It presents evidence from ethnographic fieldwork on the same set of urban regeneration (or renewal) policies in two Scottish neighborhoods between 1989 and 2009. The analysis showed that the policy was variously understood as a fai…
National Museum of Ethnology, Japan
The experience of living in deprived neighbourhoods for LGBT+ people
Research in urban studies on lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people and their housing choices has focused on economic choices and the role of exclusion, or conversely higher household disposable income, in residential location. Evidence on lived experiences has focused on residence in so-called 'gaybourhoods' with high concentrations of non-heterosexual households, or experiences within the home. Contrasting to this scholarship, in this …
Queer utopias of housing and homelessness
While there is evidence that discrimination against LGBTQ + people can cause homelessness, or worsen experiences, in this paper we consider law, policy and practice to tackle homelessness among LGBTQ + people. Contrasting the different legal systems across the UK nations of England, Scotland and Wales, we firstly consider how law, as structured around the norm of the heterosexual nuclear family, can be designed to discriminate against LGBTQ + peo…
Researching LGBTQ+ homelessness and building social justice in the UK & the US
LGBTQ+ homelessness research is an emerging area growing in importance in the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. Research to date indicates that methodology and participant recruitment are particularly challenging for this group. Sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as homelessness and poverty are taboo topics that are often stigmatized. Homelessness for LGBTQ+ people is therefore under-reported both by third sector organizations and gover…
Understanding homelessness and housing among LGBTQ+ people – where are we in 2024
The longue durée of community engagement
Habermas’ critical theory, and particularly his theory of communicative action, has been applied in the theory and practice of communicative planning. The concept of creating a public sphere in planning processes has been used as an ‘ought’ that planners should seek to achieve to create a communicative rationality. Accepting some of the critique of communicative planning from an agonist and Foucauldian perspective, this paper presents a new appli…
Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy
Epidemic Self-Injury in an Adolescent Unit
[Transitions to Agriculture in the Pacific Region] a Possible Tropical Wildtype Taro
The other Greeks
A Short History of Structural Linguistics
This concise history of structural linguistics charts its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists a language is a self-contained and tightly organised system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This idea has its origin in the nineteenth century and was developed in the twentieth by Saussure and his followers, in…
Motives for Language Change
This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally pub…
National Museum of Ethnology, Japan
Planners, developers and power
No abstract available
Archaeobotany in Australia and New Guinea
Archaeobotany is the study of plant remains from archaeological contexts. Despite Australasian research being at the forefront of several methodological innovations over the last three decades, archaebotany is now a relatively peripheral concern to most archaeological projects in Australia and New Guinea. In this paper, many practicing archaeobotanists working in these regions argue for a more central role for archaeobotany in standard archaeolog…
Mind the Gap? The Persistence of Pathological Discourses in Urban Regeneration Policy
Urban regeneration policy has historically framed policy problems using a discourse that pathologizes areas and spatial communities. Since 2001 in England and 2002 in Scotland, a structural change in policy has occurred where city‐wide partnerships are now meant to overcome structural spatial inequalities, countering pathological explanations. This paper uses historical and discourse analysis to evaluate one of the major community regeneration st…
Problem definition and re-evaluating a policy
This article seeks to problematize notions of objective policy evaluation using the techniques of interpretive policy analysis, and use the findings to develop a new evaluation and new proposals for policy improvement. It presents evidence from ethnographic fieldwork on the same set of urban regeneration (or renewal) policies in two Scottish neighborhoods between 1989 and 2009. The analysis showed that the policy was variously understood as a fai…
The longue durée of community engagement
Habermas’ critical theory, and particularly his theory of communicative action, has been applied in the theory and practice of communicative planning. The concept of creating a public sphere in planning processes has been used as an ‘ought’ that planners should seek to achieve to create a communicative rationality. Accepting some of the critique of communicative planning from an agonist and Foucauldian perspective, this paper presents a new appli…
Rebel cities
Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution, by David Harvey, London, Verso Books, 2012, 208 pp., £12.99 (hardback), ISBN 13 978-1844678822 Rebel Cities is David Harvey's lates
Middle‐Class Political Activism and Middle‐Class Advantage in Relation to Public Services
Since the late 1960s social policy scholarship has been concerned with the distribution of the resources or benefits across social gradients. This article presents a review of the literature on one mechanism by which inequity might be produced – activism by middle‐class service‐users enabling them to capture a disproportionate share of resources. The review used the methodology of realist synthesis to bring together evidence from the UK, the USA …
Taro
Homo Economicus in a Big Society
Problems of housing supply and affordability in England have long been recognized by policy-makers. A key barrier to supply is seen to be community activism by so-called not-in-my-back-yard activists (NIMBYs). The localism policy agenda, or devolving decision-making down to the local level, is central to how the UK coalition government seek to overcome this opposition. This conceives NIMBYism as a demonstration of homo economicus – of the rationa…
Shaping Places
As I discuss below, I read Shaping Places as a somewhat biased reader; however, I hope I am not alone in considering it to be a very good book. The book extends an agenda that Adams & Tiesdell (201
Scottish Politics (2nd edition)
Being Strategic in Partnership – Interpreting Local Knowledge of Modern Local Government
Broad and international literature exists on networked governance which has both described and informed recent transformations in local government. Reforms in the UK have led to the development of strategic partnerships to join up services and solve wicked issues. In Scotland, these are referred to as Community Planning Partnerships. Evidence from numerous studies has highlighted the partial nature of this transformation, particularly around comm…
After Urban Regeneration
Focusing on the history and theory of community in urban policy, and including a unique set of case studies that draw on artistic and cultural community work, After Urban Regeneration engages with debates on how urban policy has changed and continues to change following the financial crash of 2008.
After Urban Regeneration
Focusing on the history and theory of community in urban policy, and including a unique set of case studies that draw on artistic and cultural community work, this book engages with debates on how urban policy has changed and continues to change following the financial crash of 2008.
Social networks, social capital and poverty
Our understanding of the links between social networks and the causes or solutions to poverty have been enhanced through theoretical and empirical research on the concept of social capital. In this paper we discuss how social networks and social capital have commonly been presented as a problem or a panacea in policy regarding neighbourhoods and worklessness and then contrast this with recent evidence. We conclude that policy misrecognises the li…
The “Pink Pound” in the “Gaybourhood”? Neighbourhood Deprivation and Sexual Orientation in Scotland
The emergence of geographic concentrations of non-heterosexual individuals – so-called “gaybourhoods” – is often linked to housing, demographic characteristics of the non-straight population and wider discrimination. These neighbourhoods are associated with narratives of gentrification with the non-straight population acting as gentrification pioneers. In popular imagery, non-straight households are typically portrayed with higher disposable inco…
Neighbourhood Belonging, Social Class and Social Media—Providing Ladders to the Cloud
The growth of social media over the past decade has transformed how we have interacted with the World Wide Web. This paper presents data from a research project coproduced with community organisations that had created an online archive through a Facebook site of a deprived neighbourhood in Edinburgh, Scotland. Framing the data from this site in the literature on class, place, stigma and belonging, the paper presents further evidence of the ‘we-be…
Good Times Bad Times – The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (18 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · History (10 works) · Public Administration (10 works)