James Matthews – författare

Despite the widely held belief that the social services were allocated solely on the basis of client need, and could therefore be directly contrasted with the operation of the private market, in the 1970s there remained a wide range of services for which the consumer had to pay directly at the time of consumption. Consumer charges were widely used, for example, for residential accommodation, for the provision of day care and for domiciliary services.

Originally published in 1980, Charging for Social Care provided a long overdue examination of the use of these charges in the personal social services. It analyses their historical origins, current operation and their social and financial significance. In addition, it provides a clear theoretical framework within which pricing policies should be determined and outlines the policy for pricing personal social services in the future. In undertaking this analysis Ken Judge and James Matthews had gone beyond the rhetoric which in the past had characterised discussions about charges. Their detailed and perceptive study was based on a report for the Department of Health and Social Security. It would still be of interest to students and teachers of social policy and social administration, to policy makers in both central and local government, to students of the economics of social policy and of the public sector, to social workers, and to all those with an interest in the personal social services and in public spending decisions.

Despite the widely held belief that the social services were allocated solely on the basis of client need, and could therefore be directly contrasted with the operation of the private market, in the 1970s there remained a wide range of services for which the consumer had to pay directly at the time of consumption. Consumer charges were widely used, for example, for residential accommodation, for the provision of day care and for domiciliary services.

Originally published in 1980, Charging for Social Care provided a long overdue examination of the use of these charges in the personal social services. It analyses their historical origins, current operation and their social and financial significance. In addition, it provides a clear theoretical framework within which pricing policies should be determined and outlines the policy for pricing personal social services in the future. In undertaking this analysis Ken Judge and James Matthews had gone beyond the rhetoric which in the past had characterised discussions about charges. Their detailed and perceptive study was based on a report for the Department of Health and Social Security. It would still be of interest to students and teachers of social policy and social administration, to policy makers in both central and local government, to students of the economics of social policy and of the public sector, to social workers, and to all those with an interest in the personal social services and in public spending decisions.

This thesis describes the application of a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code to accretion disc winds in two types of systems spanning 9 orders of magnitude in mass and size. In both cases, the results provide important new insights. On small scales, the presence of disc winds in accreting white dwarf binary systems has long been inferred from the presence of ultraviolet absorption lines. Here, the thesis shows that the same winds can also produce optical emission lines and a recombination continuum. On large scales, the thesis constructs a simple model of disc winds in quasars that is capable of explaining both the observed absorption and emission signatures – a crucial advance that supports a disc-wind based unification scenario for quasars. Lastly, the thesis also includes a theoretical investigation into the equivalent width distribution of the emission lines in quasars, which reveals a major challenge to all unification scenarios.