Book Review: Social Research and Disability. Developing Inclusive Research Spaces for Disabled Researchers by Ciaran Burke and Bronagh Byrne (eds.)

Abstract

they have regarding social policy, but also about understanding how they are organised, how different 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 differently. It leads to opposing logics regarding, labour and migration issues (chapter 2) and also supports 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 regarding 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 governance and the variety of factors that shape this complexity and the resulting discourses.