This paper explores how the UK Time Use Survey (UKTUS), together with the author\'s qualitative interviews and focus groups with London parents, can inform current policy debates about childcare and parental employment. It also refers to the international literature about long-term trends in...

Performance management in TECs1 and urban initiatives has developed in the 1990s into a “contract culture†characterised by heavy reliance on quantitative indicators as the basis for funding arrangements. These indicators may have perverse effects. Firstly, they may distort the design...

This paper examines the lessons for the New Deal era of some older strands in UK and European labour market measures; the Community Programme of the 1980s and the experience of “entreprises d'insertion in France, Spain and the Netherlands. It considers whether the institutional...

This paper discusses two conflicting discourses about the role of temporary work agencies. Some labour market analysts argue that they mobilize the unemployed labour reserve to undercut established employees' pay and conditions, thus offering the unemployed worse opportunities than they could...

J<sc>ones</sc> M. and W<sc>oods</sc> M. New localities, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. During the mid-to-late 1980s, 'locality' was <italic>the</italic> spatial metaphor to describe and explain the shifting world of regional studies. The paper argues that the resulting 'localities debate' threw this baby out with the bathwater and rather than...

This book offers a new geographical political economy approach to our understanding of regional and local economic development in Western Europe over the last twenty years. It suggests that governance failure is occurring at a variety of spatial scales and an ‘impedimenta state’ is emerging....

Many theories have been put forward to explain attitudes towards ambiguity. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test for the existence of Comparative Ignorance when it is tested over events with a range of different likelihoods. A total of 93 subjects valued a series of gambles, one...

The processes by which culture influences economic variables need to be exposed in order for the concept to be a useful tool for prediction and policy formulation. We investigate the attitudes and experimental behaviour of Malaysian and UK subjects to shed light on the nature of culture and the...