Social investments in the knowledge economy: The politics of inclusive,stratified, and targeted reforms across the globe

As countries transition from industrial to post-industrial knowledge economies, education and skills are crucial. Consequently, policy-makers around the globe have increasingly focused on social investment, that is, policies aiming to create, mobilize, or preserve skills. Yet, countries around the globe have developed social investments to different degrees and in highly different forms. Our goal is twofold: First, we introduce a new typology of social investment policies, distinguishing nine types along two dimensions: three distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified, targeted) and three functions (skill creation, preservation, mobilization). This differentiation allows fine-grained analyses of the causes and consequences of different kinds of social investments, thus offering a perspective to study the relationship between efficiency and inclusiveness in a way that goes beyond the mere discussion how social investment policies grosso modo affect inequalities (‘equalizing’ versus ‘Matthew Effects’). Second, we theorize on the politics of social investment. We argue that the interaction of policy legacies and socioeconomic factors is the main explanation for which functions of social investment policies are introduced, whereas their distributive profiles are crucially shaped by political coalitions. We illustrate with empirical material from democracies around the globe.     

Iranian consecration of Irish nationalist ‘martyrs’: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the 1981 republican prisoners’ hunger strike in Northern Ireland

This article focuses on the official and semi-official Iranian coverage and representation of the 1981 republican prisoners’ hunger strike in Northern Ireland and the related corporeal constructs of the hunger strikers as ‘martyred’ bodies. The particular characterization and utilization of Irish republican hunger strikers by media outlets, officials, and other propagandists of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was an instance of groups outside Northern Ireland appropriating Irish nationalist bodies for their own ends. IRI commentators re-articulated the starving bodies of Irish republican hunger strikers, re-infusing them with symbolic meanings in a cross-cultural and ideologically laden configuration in the service of IRI’s self-projection as the patron of worldwide struggles for justice and liberation against the twin forces of imperialism and domestic opponents. In the process, IRI added its own layers of agency and politically crafted somatic meaning to the hunger strike. Meanwhile, IRI’s extensive advocacy of the republican hunger strike in Northern Ireland was eagerly welcomed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), to which most hunger strikers belonged; with PIRA and its political wing, Provisional Sinn Féin, hoping to secure diplomatic recognition, and possibly material aid, from the Iranian government for bolstering PIRA’s domestic and international standing vis-à-vis the British government.     

Validation Study: The Iranian Version of Caregiver Abuse Screen (CASE) among Family Caregivers of Elderly with Dementia

Since abuse screening is difficult among the elderly with dementia, detection of elder abuse is a serious issue; meanwhile, the number of available tools to assess elder abuse by caregivers is limited. The aim was to evaluate validity and reliability of the Iranian version Caregiver Abuse Screen (CASE) tool. After the translating process of the tool to the Farsi language for 236 dementia participants ≥60 years old and their informal caregivers’ from outpatient’ clinics, in a cross-sectional method then the validity, reliability and factorial structure of the CASE was evaluated. The translated Iranian version CASE reveals a good psychometric property (α = 0.868) with strong internal consistency and reliability. Some variables (depression, burden, dementia intensity, and ADLs) were associated with abuse in dementia elderly. The two-factor structure was obtained in exploratory factor analysis labeled interpersonal abuse and neglect. Generally, the Iranian version of CASE approved with sufficient validity and reliability as a suitable instrument to find the risk of elder abuse among dementia caregivers.     

NAPLAN data: a new policy assemblage and mode of governance in Australian schooling

ABSTRACT

As part of a policy assemblage, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is representative of a new mode of governance for Australia's schooling systems, indicative of international trends in educational accountability based on testing. The policy assumption was that the introduction of a national performance measurement system would tightly couple school practices to national agendas targeted at improving learning outcomes. This paper presents a comparative case study of two primary schools within a single Queensland region to interrogate how coupling and decoupling strategies are enacted in respect of the policy usage of NAPLAN data. The granular analysis of the governance relationship between the school principals and their supervisors is set against the politics, policies and pressures of NAPLAN that recast the initiative as high stakes for systems, schools and their leadership. Specifically, we argue that Queensland's choice and enactment of policy instruments have produced a new mode of governance of principal conduct, but one mediated by the specific contexts of the two schools. The analysis shows how this mode has precipitated two types of decoupling.     

On the dynamic measurement of economic openness

The empirical relationship between economic openness and economic performance is much debated in the economic literature. No definitive conclusions seem to be reached yet, part of the problem being the very measurement of economic openness of a national economy. In their article in the Journal of Policy Modeling, Ruíz Estrada & Yap (2006) propose a new method to measure economic openness and to empirically assess the openness–growth nexus as a new tool for policy-makers: the Openness Growth Monitoring Model (OGM-Model). The authors claim: (i) that their method is different from and more flexible than existing empirical methods, (ii) that higher levels of openness do not lead to income growth, and (iii) that customs unions perform better than free trade areas. This short article challenges the three claims of the authors.     

Colonial workers,imperial migrants and surveillance: policing in Le Havre, 1914–40

This article explores how the police and municipal authorities of Le Havre responded to the colonial others who passed through, or resided in, the Seine-Inférieure port between the outbreak of the First World War and the defeat of France in 1940. Interrogating how the police and urban authorities monitored migrants to the port, it reveals how Le Havre’s imperial and transnational space was distinctive in terms of the peoples who established themselves in the port, the ways in which they forged links with other peripheral locations throughout the French empire, and how the local authorities attempted to control migrants and incomers from the French overseas empire. It highlights particularities of Le Havre’s urban space – notably its lack of a university and prestigious lycées, its pre-1914 history of militant strike action, its role as France’s main transatlantic port, and the presence of a small colonial population with a narrow social-economic profile – and shows how these particularities resulted in the enactment and sometimes neglect of national policies and agendas according to specific local priorities.     

Organized Interests and Political Extortion: A Test of the Fetcher Bill Hypothesis*

Objectives. Although the Fetcher Bill Hypothesis, which is that legislators introduce bills in order to extort campaign contributions from organized interests, has been given new prominence by suggestions that it can provide a general explanation of the composition of legislative agendas and the structure of interest communities, tests of the hypothesis are narrow, rare, and indirect. We provide an alternative test to more directly assesses its core implications. Methods. We test the hypothesis using single‐year and pooled‐regression analyses of 1995, 1997, and 1999 data on lobby registrations by organized interests in the American states—a venue providing substantial variation in legislative activity, the density of lobbying organizations, and the campaign finance systems that are presumed to drive rent seeking. Results. The tests provide little evidence that policy agendas induce lobby registrations. Conclusions. These results indicate that the Fetcher Bill Hypothesis cannot provide a sufficient account of the composition of either legislative agendas or lobbying communities.     

Exploring strategies for re-engaging children and young people in learning while living in out-of-home care in the Northern Territory,Australia

The education of children living in out-of-home care (OOHC) has been a long-standing concern for children and their carers, policy-makers and researchers who have long highlighted the issue of low educational attainment and disengagement among children in care. This study investigates the strategies and practices used within a pilot programme based in the Northern Territory, Australia, that aims to re-engage children living in OOHC with education and training. Drawing on qualitative interviews with programme stakeholders, including educators, carers, child and family welfare workers, as well as an analysis of programme and client documentation, this study explores the programme's strategies to achieve re-engagement. The findings highlight the role of agile child-centred practice responding to the learning needs of participants, a focus on the ‘educational futures’ of students, as well as liaison and advocacy with schools and stakeholders on behalf of children in supporting re-engagement in education settings. Barriers to successful re-engagement include limited consideration of the cultural needs of children across education and OOHC systems, in particular the disruptive impact of OOHC placement changes, as well as programme discontinuity.     

Child safety in policy: Who is being kept safe and from what?

Keeping children safe from harm is a national policy priority in Australia. Extensive inquiries and reviews have highlighted institutions' persistent failures to respond ethically and appropriately to child abuse and its life-long impacts on survivors. Policy efforts now reflect considerable emphasis on safeguarding children, including through the development of ‘child safe’ organisations. The realisation of these policy aspirations requires close attention to how ‘child safe’ is conceptualised and operationalised in different organisational contexts. Drawing on an analysis of policy in Australia and other international jurisdictions, namely New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland, this article engages critically with the notion of ‘child safe’ in policy, to explore who is to be safe, from what and how, in organisational settings. The findings suggest emergent discourses of ‘child safe’ are bound up with particular constructions of both children and safety, reflect current social and political understandings and agendas, and have implications for organisations' approaches to safety. Ensuring the safety of children in Australia and other jurisdictions requires continuing scrutiny of policy implementation to make sure current policy efforts are not reduced to compliance-based imperatives that protect organisations, but fail to create the cultural conditions that enhance children's wellbeing and safety.     

Quality of Work Life of Teaching Staff Working at a Higher Education Institution in Saudi Arabia: A Cross-sectional Study

A cross-sectional survey design was adopted to study the quality of work life (QoWL) of the teaching staff employed at a Saudi higher education institution, focusing on their ethnic backgrounds and the academic clusters in which they were employed. A total of 360 teaching staff were randomly selected using a two-stage cluster sampling method, and a self-structured quality of work life questionnaire was used to collect data. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS 19.0. The results indicated that 71% of the respondents were satisfied with their QoWL at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), Saudi Arabia. A significant difference of opinion was observed among the teaching staff on two dimensions of QoWL, viz. ‘working conditions’ and ‘psychosocial factors’ (p < 0.05). However, no significant difference was observed on other QoWL attributes, such as ‘opportunity for training and development’ and ‘job satisfaction and job security’ (p > 0.05). Given that all public universities in Saudi Arabia are governed by regulations framed by the Ministry of education, this study provides important indicators to educational policy planners on understanding the QoWL of teaching staff employed in universities across Saudi Arabia.     

Putting the parity into service‐user participation: An integrated model of social justice

Models of service‐user participation have derived from citizenship or consumerist agendas, neither of which has achieved the structural reforms important for the most marginalised social work clients. This article proposes Fraser's model of ‘parity of participation’ as an appropriately multifaceted frame for capturing the social justice aspirations of service‐user participation. A qualitative case study compared the experiences and expectations of people who had used Australian mental health services with a sample who had used Australian homelessness services to examine their expectations of participation at individual and representative levels. The findings reinforce concerns from Fraser's research about the tendency for identity‐based consumerist notions of participation to reify group identity. This leads to tokenistic service‐user involvement strategies that have little impact on participation at a structural level. Fraser's parity of participation is shown to have untested potential to reshape service‐user participation to meet the social justice aspirations of social work clients. Key Practitioner Message: ● Innovative, service‐user driven strategies for collaboration will be those which challenge existing power structures; ● Service users want their contributions to decision making to generate identifiable change in the system of social services; ● The success of service‐user participation strategies might be the extent to which political, economic and cultural opportunities are enhanced.     

The Great Cut: The Support for Private Modes of Social Evasion by Public Policy

The counterpart city represents an attempt to conceptualize the hidden spaces inhabited by social problems and ‘problem’ people who are counter to the mainstream, or included, modes of contemporary urban social life. This ‘opposite’, or negative, space comprises the spatially withdrawn and socially excluded who are largely outside the purview of the comfortable classes of the same cities. Not only has residential segregation been sustained over recent decades, so too have mobile circuits of mutual exclusion been created, which enable higher‐income groups to avoid the associated negative externalities of poverty (visibility, disorder, aggression and so on). As responsibility for dealing with social risks has become devolved to the level of the household, the desire for social evasion, as politicians, media systems and welfare patterns mark out threatening territories, has become more evident. The counterpart city is shunned in ever more elaborate ways and with the support of public policies. As the ‘spatial’ social policies, housing and urban, have become increasingly criminalized in the focus of their agendas, such interventions expend energy to facilitate this separation between affluent and poor. Traditional imperatives for public intervention are diminished as poverty has become more concealed from affluence – its costs and impacts evaded by technologies, socio‐spatial circuits and policies that skirt those who are locked into places of poverty and abject marginality, a constellation of social forces and effects I term the great cut.     

Guns,Hollywood, and School Safety: Defining the School‐Shooting Problem Across Public Arenas*

Objective. Research in agenda setting has demonstrated that dramatic news events can drive particular issues to the top of the media and governmental agendas. The objective of this study is to analyze how different aspects of an event‐driven problem compete for attention in those arenas. Methods. The method is content analysis of media coverage and congressional legislative activity following the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Results. The results show that while both agendas converged on the gun‐control aspect of the problem, they substantially diverged on other understandings of what kind of problem the Columbine shooting represented and how to address it. Conclusions. We conclude that the differing institutional structure and incentives of the news media and Congress can create or inhibit interinstitutional positive feedback in the problem‐defining process. Agenda divergences are amplified when prominent politicians cue the media to follow particular story lines that depart from actual legislative activity.     

Open Classes: Evaluation of an Innovation Program

A two-year research program was carried out to evaluate the workings of open education classes in primary schools. Four studies were conducted. Two were comparative: instruments testing cognitive and non-cognitive variables by the use of standardized as well as behavioural probe measures were administered to experimental (open) and control (traditional) classes. Tests of mathematics, reading, inquiry, cooperation, yielding to authority and creativity showed no differences between children in open and traditional classes. The work of children in the experimental class was less affected by the teachers' absence from the classroom than that of children in the control class. A third study involved interviews aimed at assessing children's views about the open classroom. A fourth study involved behavioural observations of the use a sample of children made of the special features of the open classroom.     

A Comparison of the Effects of Material and Environmental Values on Vehicle Ownership

The results of a 1988 survey of Brisbane residents demonstrate a consistent linkage between the respondent's values and their preferences for vehicle ownership and use. Through the use of the ‘Dominant Social Paradigm’ - ‘New Environmental Paradigm’ theoretical framework (e.g. Cotgrove 1982) and the testing of ‘known groups’ (business people and members of the Rainbow Alliance) the following pattern emerged. The businesspeople were less willing to conserve fuel, and were more concerned with ‘comfort’ considerations when purchasing a motor vehicle than the Rainbow Alliance respondents who were more interested in utilitarian aspects. When subsamples with similar demographic/socioeconomic characteristics (males, respondents aged 35–49 years, respondents with household incomes between $20 000 and $49 999) were compared, the Rainbow Alliance respondents were more likely to own older, less valuable vehicles with small engines and manual transmissions. The businesspeople were more likely to own air-conditioned vehicles with poor fuel economy. This finding is an example of how people's values influence their vehicle purchasing decisions and is useful to policy-makers seeking to improve the efficiency of Australia's vehicle fleet.     

Policy integration: mapping the different concepts

A growing number of studies have examined the collaboration of actors from two or more policy domains in order to integrate aims and concerns derived from one policy domain into another. In our literature review, we refer to this empirical phenomenon as ‘policy integration’, exemplified by the Health in All Policies approach. Despite the wealth of literature on the subject, the scientific community only has access to a portion of the insights that have come out of this field of research, due primarily to the fact that policy integration is discussed using a variety of different terms, which tend to be specific to the policy domain under investigation. To facilitate a more inclusive scientific debate on policy integration, we provide a comprehensive overview of the different terminologies associated with policy integration and analyse the recurring themes in the respective literature strands. What is the motivation for policy-makers to promote policy integration? What is the design of the instruments used for policy integration? How does policy integration affect the policy-making process? And how well does policy integration perform? These are the four questions guiding our study.     

Macroeconomic and financing determinants of out of pocket payments in health care: Evidence from selected OECD countries

In this paper, we examine the impact of macroeconomic, as well public and private health insurance financing (PHI) factors on out of pocket (OOP) healthcare expenditures, by using fixed/random effects and dynamic panel data methodology to a dataset of 26 EU and OECD countries for a period lasting from 1995 to 2013. The existing empirical literature has focused on testing the hypothesis that several macroeconomic and health financing determinants have an effect on OOP healthcare expenditures. Nevertheless, the related articles have not well tested the hypothesis concerning the potential impact of PHI financing on OOP spending. We find that public and PHI financing have a significant countervailing effect on OOP spending. Moreover, we show that unemployment rate has a significant positive impact on OOP expenditures. Sensitivity tests with variation of specifications and samples show that our findings are robust. We argue that policy-makers should give serious consideration to PHI institution; our results indicate that there is an inverse effect on OOP spending. We suggest that our examined countries have to provide financial risk protection to their citizens against OOP payments, rather than only attending health budgetary retrenchments in order to adjust public finances.     

Creative connections: parenting capacity, reading with children and practitioner assessment and intervention

This paper presents some findings from a study of the views of 33 parents from a diversity of backgrounds with children between 0 and 12. Twenty‐two parents were using family support services. They were asked about their views on ‘parenting capacity’ based on the dimensions of The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families (Department of Health et al.) which are now incorporated into the Common Assessment Framework used in Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills). They were also asked about reading with their children and how this enhanced their parenting capacities. Their responses were analysed using the parenting capacity dimensions of The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families. It became apparent that this common activity (parent/child reading) contributed much to children's development and to the quality of the child/parent relationship. It also enhanced parenting capacity as described in the parenting capacity dimensions. This paper presents that part of the findings which illustrates the creative connections that exist between the activity of parents and children reading together and the parenting capacity dimensions social workers use in assessment and intervention. These findings are relevant to practitioners working within current policy and practice agendas in children's services, which promote multidisciplinary working and non‐stigmatizing assessments and interventions.     

Perceptions of Academic Health Science Research Center Personnel Regarding Informed Consent Processes and Therapeutic Misconception

Introduction: Instrumentation exists to measure voluntariness and misunderstanding in informed consent processes. However, research personnel’s perspectives about using instrumentation to measure therapeutic misconceptions in research participants has not been reported. We designed a workshop to promote research personnel knowledge of emerging instrumentation and to study the perceptions of research personnel regarding such instruments.

Methods and Findings: Two nationally recognized experts who have developed psychometric instruments to measure aspects of informed consent presented their recent findings to research personnel of the Medical University of South Carolina at a one-day workshop. Following the presentations, workshop attendees divided into two focus groups and shared their perceptions regarding the presentation content. Inductive thematic analysis detected themes related to informed consent processes including: investigator/provider role clarity; investigator transparency; therapeutic misconception; and screening subjects for understanding.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest future directions in applied, proactive empirical research to better understand investigator perceptions and practices related to transparency in research, and to develop instrumentation to detect risks to the integrity of informed consent in order to promote voluntariness and autonomy and minimize therapeutic misconception in research practices.     

The ‘flood’ of 1945: regimes and repertoires of migration in the Soviet Union at war’s end

The pioneering migration scholar Eugene Kulischer employed the metaphor of the ‘flood’ to characterize the movement of peoples across Eurasia at the end of the Second World War. This article builds on that metaphor by analysing the range of Soviet citizens’ migratory movements within and back to the USSR in 1945. It pays special attention to settlers, deportees, returning evacuees, repatriates, demobilized soldiers and itinerants. Not only did these different groups of migrants appear simultaneously, but each produced the other: settlers moved to deportees’ vacated land; many demobilized soldiers and evacuees were recruited as settlers; some repatriates were deported; and those escaping deportation often became itinerants. In each case the article examines the interaction between the state’s migration regimes – its projects and provision of infrastructure to move people – and migrants’ repertoires, that is, their reliance on networks of kinship and friendship to avoid or mitigate hardship and maximize opportunities. It argues that the fulfilment of the state’s agendas with respect to migration depended not only on its regimes but migrants’ own practices.