Book Review: Social Research and Disability. Developing Inclusive Research Spaces for Disabled Researchers by Ciaran Burke and Bronagh Byrne (eds.)
| Author | Jörgen Lundälv |
| DOI | 10.1177/13882627211059192 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
environment and consequently shape their discourse. It is not only about the power and legitimacy
they have regarding social policy, but also about understanding how they are organised, how dif-
ferent issues are linked with other topics in their portfolio, and how they combine different world
views in order to disseminate ideas.
Third, the whole chain of shaping discourses is thus covered, leading to new empirical insights.
The first main lesson is the role played by IOs in establishing priorities and structuring different
fields. For instance, the second chapter explains their contribution to shaping youth unemployment
as an important policy field, with education becoming a cross-cutting issue for many IOs, resulting
in a convergence of the discourse. In some other cases, it may go in the other direction. The way the
field itself is structured may impact the dynamic evolution of IOs, as with migration and care issues
in chapter 4 or the evolution of climate change in chapter 11. The way IOs contribute to establish
priorities and disseminate ideas is reflected in the effectiveness of national policies. In chapter 13,
the authors show how food security remains a fundamental problem today and assert that IOs are
part of the problem, displaying an overly optimistic trust in the markets to solve the issue. The
second important lesson is the connection between discourses and the intrinsic features of IOs,
also leading to different interactions with other IOs in the same policy field. The ILO and the
World Bank, two dominating IOs in the global governance of social policy, are organised very dif-
ferently. It leads to opposing logics regarding, labour and migration issues (chapter 2) and also sup-
ports the continuation of their dominant positions over time. The different intrinsic features of both
key players have resulted in different discourses between a social and a neoliberal discourse regard-
ing global labour standards (chapter 3), pensions (chapter 5), family policies between the North and
the South (chapter 8) and disability (chapter 9). Overall, the book shows the importance of a strong
contextual perspective for understanding the complexity of the architecture of global social govern-
ance and the variety of factors that shape this complexity and the resulting discourses.
ORCID iD
Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7123-2704
Ciaran Burke and Bronagh Byrne (eds.), Social Research and Disability. Developing Inclusive Research Spaces for
Disabled Researchers, British Sociological Association (BSA), Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Taylor & Francis
Group, 188 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1-138-38765-2
Reviewed by: Jörgen Lundälv ,Associate Professor in Social Work, Department of Social Work, University of
Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Policy from the Depar tment of Social Policy at the
University of Helsinki, Finland.
E-mail: Jorgen.Lundalv@socwork.gu.se
DOI: 10.1177/13882627211059192
Ciaran Burke (University of the West of England) and Bronagh Byrne (Centre for Children’s Rights
and co-founder of the Disability Research Network at Queen’s University Belfast) have dedicated
400 European Journal of Social Security 23(4)
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