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The purpose of this paper is to argue that the application of social policy in the North East of England is often characterised by tension and conflict. The agencies and professionals charged with implementation of Westminster driven policies constantly seek to deploy their knowledge of local conditions in order to make them both practical and palatable.

This paper examines the region via established literature from history, geography, sociology and social policy. The paper gives illustrations via empirical work which has evaluated initiatives to improve the health of long term health-related benefit recipients and to sustain individuals in employment in the region.

Central to the paper’s argument is the notion of “biographies of place”. The core of this idea is that places have biographies in the same way as individuals and possess specific identities. These biographies have been shaped by the intersections between environment, history, culture and economic and social policy. The paper identifies the region’s economic development, subsequent decline and the alliance of labour politics and industrial employers around a common consensus that sought economic prosperity and social progress via a vision of “modernisation” as a key component of this biography.

The paper argues that an appreciation of these spatial biographies can result in innovative and more effective social policy interventions with the potential to address issues that affect entire localities.

I investigate the efficacy of adopting two mental aptitudes in the financial industry: mindfulness and compassion.

A conceptual link is drawn between the powerful mental acuteness obtained from practicing Mindfulness (defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn) and Ruthless Compassion (defined by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché) and the pursuit of a noble purpose for finance, which is to channel resources into the most deserving social and/or economic activities that raise community and societal welfare.

These techniques allow decision-makers to reach new levels of awareness, giving them a competitive advantage for instance in terms of avoiding behavioral traps. Making money remains an important by-product of financial services, but not the overriding or sole criterion. An interview of Solomon Halpern, longstanding disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoché, expert in Buddhist meditation, and president of Highlander Wealth Services, illustrates how these mental tools are applied for running a small US equity fund.

The present study provides a starting point for further survey research on how these practices are becoming adopted in the industry.

This chapter is the first to analyze the impact of both ruthless compassion and mindfulness in the business of finance not only in terms of raised morality but also as an added tool to resolve informational asymetries proper to the finance business.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This study adds to the developing literature on how coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affected policing. Unlike prior research, which focused on police agencies, the authors focus on the perceptions and experiences of police officers. Specifically, about changes in workload or activities during the peak of the pandemic compared to prior to the pandemic. Additionally, officers report on changes in potential second-order effects resulting in changes from the pandemic.

The data come from the survey responses of 167 police officers from seven police agencies of various sizes from around the USA. The authors assessed mean level differences between organizations using a general linear model/ANOVA approach and report a standardized effect size.

There is a considerable heterogeneity in police officers' perceptions of organizational and operational changes made by their police agencies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that perceptions of some changes were more strongly by the agency than were others. The study’s results show there are substantive differences in how police officers from different police agencies viewed these operational and organizational changes (i.e. between agency differences). Most of the variance was primarily explained by differences between police officers within the same agency (i.e. within organization differences).

This study moves beyond the monolithic approach to studying how the pandemic affected the police agency and moves to asking officers about their experiences with these changes and the second-order effects of these changes.