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I am a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University of Gloucestershire and an Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Stirling.
I evaluate public services for the people who fund and run them, and I build theory to explain why what gets measured so rarely matches what gets done. My research examines how large organisations make decisions, how frontline staff really work, and how services can find out what is genuinely making a difference.
My evaluation work has informed decisions by the Home Office, the College of Policing, police and crime commissioners, police forces, local authorities, children’s social care and domestic abuse services. My current work centres on violence prevention, safeguarding and early intervention with children and families.
Alongside this applied work, I am developing homomorphic rationality, a new theory of how organisations make decisions. It brings formal tools from economics and mathematics into criminology, where they are rarely used. Its starting point is simple. When a frontline worker records a decision, the record shows what was decided, but not how it was reached. Two very different ways of working can produce identical paperwork, so an organisation often cannot tell good practice from poor practice by looking at its own data. The theory goes further, setting out a formal limit on what any system of records, targets and inspection can confirm about the work it governs. Records can reveal when practice has failed, but they cannot, on their own, confirm that it has succeeded.
My specialism is teaching post graduate students, mature students, and those returning to education after a break. I ground difficult theory in concrete, real-world examples, so students understand the idea before they meet the theory. I mainly teach criminological theory and research methods. My teaching draws directly on live evaluation work, so students see how research is done in real services, under real constraints.
I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
I welcome prospective PhD and MRes students interested in how public services and large organisations actually work: frontline decision-making, the evaluation of public sector interventions, safeguarding and early intervention, violence prevention, and domestic abuse. If you are considering a research degree, I am happy to talk through an early idea before you write a full proposal.
Publications from Dr Daniel Ash can be found in the Research Repository.