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This paper addresses some of the future challenges that the vote to leave the European Union (EU) may have on the UK’s constitutional framework. The potential abolition of the Human Rights Act 1998 and its replacement with a Bill of Rights is examined in relation to the interpretation of freedom of expression. More specifically, this is analysed in relation to the often conflicting freedoms to express homophobic views and to freely express one’s sexual identity. With EU law protecting many of the recently won rights favouring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality, the purpose of this paper is to underline the potential dangers should this layer of international scrutiny be lost and highlight where more improvements for equality are still needed.

This paper offers a critical reflection on the recent political and judicial rhetoric which has accompanied the issues of LGBT social and legal equality. Recent judgements from domestic and European courts are analysed to identify how any potential re-interpretation of freedom of expression may affect the LGBT community.

While the UK has made welcome strides in improving the legal equality of the LGBT community, it is argued that the potential loss of judicial scrutiny from the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice may have negative consequences. An examination of recent judicial and political discourse demonstrates that homophobic expression – or at least tacit acceptance of it – still permeates throughout these institutional spheres.

The paper highlights how the subtleties of constitutional changes following Brexit may threaten the current progression of LGBT rights in the UK and proposes that a commitment to freedom of expression must give greater recognition to the right to express sexual identity.

This chapter focuses on the Swedish agriculture policy from the 1940s to 1960s. Which gender visions were explicitly and implicitly expressed in Swedish agricultural policy discourse during the formative period of the welfare state? In what way were farming women, men and families represented in debates in the Swedish Riksdag (the Parliament) in the parliamentary processes, in bills, proposals and protocols? The point of departure is the concept of family farm, its introduction and the different understandings and discussions it was met with.

The article examines how social scientific information is discursively utilized as an argumentative and rhetorical resource at debates held during plenary sessions at the Finnish parliament. The authors analyze the speeches given by members of parliament by using the methodological perspective of constructionist discourse analysis. It is found out that the objectivity and authority of social scientific information in parliamentary discussion can be undermined by using at least four types of arguments stressing (1) contradictions, (2) politicization of information, (3) uncertainty of information and (4) the inability of scientific knowledge to solve value conflicts. The speakers utilize social scientific information instrumentally to solve a certain social problem defined in advance, to provide statistical evidence, to show a causal relationship, or to justify an individual argument. However, social scientific information can also be used conceptually to bring larger perspectives to conversation or to reveal unnoticed aspects of the problem under discussion. Social scientific information often penetrates the symbolic definition struggles under way, and in this respect it alters social reality. In conclusions, the serious difficulties built into the professional position of librarians as providers of neutral facts are considered.

The establishment and implementation of a relatively strict immigration regime in Norway has taken place within a vocabulary of equality, humanity, social justice and decency. One aspect is an insistence on a “restricted and controlled” immigration in order to protect a state of equality in Norway and avoid the emergence of a new “underclass.” Another is the stress on Norway’s humanitarian traditions and the rich country’s responsibility towards people in need, also globally. A whole rhetoric has evolved where immigration politics appears as a matter of decency, somehow apart from the more pragmatic tug-of-wars affecting other fields of politics. On the one hand, a “restricted and controlled” immigration is necessary in order to protect certain moral qualities of Norwegian society. But on the other, immigration politics has also appeared as an indicator of the moral qualities of the Norwegian nation-state thus requiring “decent policies” in order not to threaten the image of a nation embodying such moral qualities.

Using Dean's (2010) analytics of government, this research explores how regimes of governing practices are linked to the underlying policy rationalities in dealing with the UK government's COVID-19 testing policies as a strategy for governing at a distance, including how targets were set and operationalized.

This paper draws on the UK government's policy documents, other official publications (plans) and parliamentary discourse, together with publicly available media information related to its COVID-19 policies.

This research reveals that, with respect to the governance of COVID-19 in the UK, testing has the dual role of inscription for the government's performance and classification for the pandemic risks. The analysis illustrates that the central role of testing is as a technology for classification for identifying and monitoring the virus-related risks. Moreover, our discourse analysis suggests that initially COVID-19 testing was used by the UK government more for performance communication, with the classificatory role of testing and its performativity as a strategic device evolving and only being acknowledged by government gradually as the underlying testing infrastructure was developed.

This paper is based upon publicly available reports and other information of a single country's attempts to control COVID-19 over a relatively short period of time.

This paper provides a critical understanding of the role of (accounting) numbers in developing an effective government policy for governing COVID-19.

Opinion is divided on whether a new power of entry should be introduced for social workers in cases where individuals seem to be hindering safeguarding enquiries for community-dwelling adults at risk in England who have decision-making capacity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and circumstances of situations where access to an adult at risk is denied or difficult and what helps those in practice. The study consists of a literature review, a survey of adult safeguarding managers and interviews with social care staff in three case studies of local authorities. As part of the contextual literature review, during 2014 the authors located parliamentary debates on the subject and this paper reports on their analysis.

Following approaches were used in historical research, documentary analysis was carried out on transcripts of parliamentary debates available online from Hansard, supplemented by other materials that were referenced in speeches and set in the theoretical context of the representations of social problems.

The authors describe the content of debates on the risks and benefits of a new right to access for social workers and the role of parliamentary champions who determinedly pursued this policy, putting forward three unsuccessful amendments in efforts to insert such a new power into the Care Act 2014.

There are limits to a focus on parliamentary reports and the limits of Hansard reporting are small but need to be acknowledged. However, adult safeguarding research has surprisingly not undertaken substantial analyses of political rhetoric despite the public theatre of the debate and the importance of legislative initiatives and monitoring.

This paper adds to the history of adult safeguarding in England. It also offers insight into politicians’ views on what is known/unknown about the prevalence and circumstances of the problems with gaining access to adults with capacity where there are safeguarding concerns and politicians’ views on the merits or hazards of a power of access.

Alcohol-related disorder in Australia’s night-time economy has precipitated an expanding regulatory and legislative framework. A key feature is the growth of police-imposed discretionary justice, one example of which are Victoria’s banning provisions. Banning notices are imposed on-the-spot, may be issued pre-emptively, but permit no right of independent appeal. However, there has been little analysis of the enactment, implementation or use of police-imposed banning provisions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper draws upon a detailed examination of the record of parliamentary debate of the banning notice legislation to document how the provisions, and their embedded procedural vulnerabilities, were legitimised. In addition, an analysis of Victoria Police data informs consideration of the ongoing scrutiny of the police power to ban.

The absolute discretion afforded to police officers, and a lack of effective oversight, has created the potential for the disproportionate and discriminatory implementation of Victoria’s banning notice powers. The findings highlight procedural vulnerabilities within the provisions, and concern regarding the particular risk of banning notices for vulnerable recipients.

The nature of Victoria’s banning provisions created the circumstances for their inequitable imposition, but public scrutiny of their use and effect is limited. Omissions and deficiencies in the published data restricts meaningful analysis of how banning works in practice.

The research underpinning this paper was the first detailed examination of the implementation and ongoing scrutiny of Victoria’s banning notice provisions. The findings presented in this paper highlight key procedural vulnerabilities resulting from the passage of the legislation and the absence of effective oversight.

Despite an abundance of studies on hybridization and hybrid forms of organizing, scholarly work has failed to distinguish consistently between specific types of hybridity. As a consequence, the analytical category has become blurred and lacks conceptual clarity. Our paper discusses hybridity as the simultaneous appearance of institutional logics in organizational contexts, and differentiates the parallel co-existence of logics from transitional combinations (eventually leading to the replacement of a logic) and more robust combinations in the form of layering and blending. While blending refers to hybridity as an “amalgamate” with original components that are no longer discernible, the notion of layering conceptualizes hybridity in a way that the various elements, or clusters thereof, are added on top of, or alongside, each other, similar to sediment layers in geology. We illustrate and substantiate such conceptual differentiation with an empirical study of the dynamics of public sector reform. In more detail, we examine the parliamentary discourse around two major reforms of the Austrian Federal Budget Law in 1986 and in 2007/2009 in order to trace administrative (reform) paradigms. Each of the three identified paradigms manifests a specific field-level logic with implications for the state and its administration: bureaucracy in Weberian-style Public Administration, market-capitalism in New Public Management, and democracy in New Public Governance. We find no indication of a parallel co-existence or transitional combination of logics, but hybridity in the form of robust combinations. We explore how new ideas fundamentally build on – and are made resonant with – the central bureaucratic logic in a way that suggests layering rather than blending. The conceptual findings presented in our paper have implications for the literature on institutional analysis and institutional hybridity.

The purpose of this study is to apply a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords and their collocations in the US presidential discourse from Clinton to Trump to discover the meanings of these words and the collocates they have. Keywords are salient words in a corpus whose frequency is unusually high (positive keywords) or low (negative keywords) in comparison with a reference corpus. Collocation is the co-occurrence of words.

To achieve this purpose, the investigation of keywords and collocations is generated by AntConc, a corpus processing software.

This analysis leads to shed light on the similarities and/or differences amongst the past four American presidents concerning their key topics. Keyword analysis through keyness makes it evident that Clinton and Obama, being Democrats, demonstrate a clear tendency to improve Americans’ life inside their social sphere. Obama surpasses Clinton as regard foreign affairs. Clinton and Obama’s infrequent subjects have to do with terrorism and immigration. This complies with their condensed focus on social and economic improvements. Bush, a republican, concentrates only on external issues. This is proven by his keywords signifying war against terrorism. Bush’s negative use of words marking cooperative actions conforms to his positive use of words indicating external war. Trump’s positive keywords are about exaggerated descriptions without a defined target. He also shows an unusual frequency in referring to his name and position. His words used with negative keyness refer to reforming programs and external issues. Collocations around each top content keyword clarify the word and harmonize with the presidential orientation negotiated by the keywords.

Limitations have to do with the issue of the accurate representation of the samples.

This research is original in its methodology of applying corpus linguistics tools in the analysis of presidential discourses.

Marshall (1950, p. 10) saw civil citizenship rights as concerning individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, property ownership rights, personal liberties and rights to justice. Women obtained many of these rights only after the acknowledgement of their political citizenship (Walby, 1997, p. 175) and much later than men did. Civil citizenship includes a whole range of issues which cannot be covered in this book. This book focuses on the gender aspects of ownership and land succession. Land succession is interrelated with a series of other civil citizenship rights issues such as access to training and education. While succession is also interrelated with issues of social (social security eligibility), economic (division of labour in the families) and political (political participation and representation) citizenship issues, these relations are to be discussed later.