Ian Greener

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 on to examine morphogenetic social theory and its potential to meet these criticisms before concluding by characterising the elements of a path-dependent system incorporating insights from both new institutionalism and morphogenetic social theory.

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 also highly contextualized and are therefore of limited value when applied in different contexts. The paper then presents a new framework which, it is argued, provides a more useful way of examining centralization and decentralization by providing a way of categorizing policies and actions and avoids the problems of being contextually constrained. The paper ends with a discussion of how the framework can be applied in a health context and shows how this framework helps avoid the problems found in previous discussions of decentralization.

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 and economic institutions in the global economy (or assuming that they will somehow be overcome) is naïve, and runs the risks of allowing the more extreme forms of the ‘new’ economic model of networked learning to colonise discourses of democracy and student‐centredness.

Decentralization as a Means to Reorganize Health-Care in England: From Theory to Practice?

Decentralization provides graphic illustrations of many of the recurrent themes in contemporary health policy and management as power and control are re-located within health-care systems (Pollitt 2005). This oscillating balance of power — a ‘perpetual struggle’ (Pollitt 2005) — involves the formation and dissolution of new organizational forms, the re-location of health-care managers and a commensurate shift in their roles and responsibilities. Whilst it is possible to suggest that this process of organizing and reorganizing has a marginal impact on service delivery, decentralization (and centralization) affects the ways in which organizations are managed and in which they relate to other local and national organizations. As the current wave of health-care reforms in the UK appears now to be leaning toward decentralization in the form of localism (such as mutual ownership) and new freedoms (from central government) aimed to create high performing organizations, it is instructive to examine how this process of organizing, reorganizing and potentially disorganizing health-care is played out in the English National Health Service (NHS).

The Governance of Health Policy in the United Kingdom

This chapter explores the process through which the health consumer has been constructed through health policy in the United Kingdom (UK) National Health Service (NHS). It suggests that we should consider the traditions from which policy-makers draw as being both ideational and structural coalitions that attempt, at particular moments in the service’s history, to change the interactional relationship between those delivering health services on the one hand, and the users of health services on the other.