This book is the second edition of what is, in effect, a high level textbook for students who need more depth than is usually provided in introductory textbooks on social or public policy. After a brief introduction examining what policy analysis is, the book is split up into three parts which deal with what the authors term macro-level analysis, including globalisation, political economy, the post-industrial economy, technological change and structure of power; meso-level analysis exploring governance, policy networks, institutions and policy transfer; and micro-level analysis, dealing with decision making, implementation and evaluation and evidence. Finally, a conclusion is presented exploring policy analysis and welfare states.

What is surprising about the book, from the perspective of someone who never uses textbooks of any kind in his teaching, is how good it is. What the authors are successful in doing is putting together contemporary scholarship in an accessible and rigorous form, giving good introductions to the subjects that they cover, but also managing to go into a level of depth not usually found in texts whose primary audience is meant to be students. I am impressed not only by the depth of writing here, but also the range of it – outside of introductory texts, few books attempt to cover as much ground, and even fewer manage to do it at all successfully. Whereas the book does not have the range of a classic text such as Parsons' (Reference Parsons1996), it is half the length of that book, so far more likely to be read, as well as being better organised as its structure means that, even if students do not read it all, they are likely to find chapters of interest on a wide range of social science degrees.

The range of topics chosen by the authors is generally good, and is supplemented by around 40 boxes which have useful additions to the main arguments in the text that cover a range of useful subjects such as worlds of welfare, SARS and the New Public Management. Again, students will find the range of these short accounts extremely useful as they add an extra dimension to the account in the main text (for example, by explaining how Scottish politics work), but also by providing short case studies that illustrate the points made by the authors (for example, the 1957 Rent Act as a case of policy failure).

I have only a few quibbles. First, although, as I said above, the range of topics chosen is generally good, I am not sure that policy transfer works as a subject on its own, and there are alternatives, such as social learning theory for example, that have a deeper literature and which might have been more useful for students. Equally, I would have preferred the chapter on decision making and personality to be more social theoretical, extending its critique of rational choice theory through to providing a deeper analysis of alternative ways of theorising structure and agency and extending the section presented on Giddens' work there.

My second quibble is that the structure sometimes leads to students having to work through competing perspectives on the same events in separate chapters. This occurs most obviously in the first part of the book where accounts of the post-war consensus turn up in several chapters. It is always hard to avoid this, but I wonder if the book might be further improved by rethinking the way that material in the first part is presented to try and get over this problem to a greater extent.

In all then, I confess that this book has somewhat converted me from a position of scepticism toward textbooks, to thinking how I might use this particular book in my own teaching of social policy. It can be used for undergraduates as a link between introductory texts and journal scholarship, and for postgraduates as an introduction to complex topics that they supplement with more in-depth reading. The book puts together accounts of the development of social policy in the post-war period with contemporary explorations of debates in the field and case studies that illustrate their importance. I think it is the best book of its kind available for students, and I would not hesitate to recommend it.