The transition from state care to adulthood: international examples of best practices

Around the world, the transition from adulthood is a difficult time for many youth. It is even more difficult for those who are transitioning to adulthood without the benefit of a support network full of family and friends. Youth leaving state care face a transition to independence and adulthood without many of the skills and supports most others take for granted. Preparedness is key to a successful transition, and youth leaving state care tend to be lacking it. In order for youth to truly be prepared for the transition process, they must have support in key areas of their lives: relationships, education, housing, life skills, identity, youth engagement, emotional healing, and adequate financial support. Without these supports, the dismal outcomes for youth transitioning to adulthood will remain unchanged. The United States, England, and Australia have successful programs targeting youth as they transition out of state care. These initiatives bring together and address the variety of needs of this unique population and aim to improve outcomes. While many of these programs and policies are in their infancy, they show promising results, and each contributes valuable experience to successfully working with youth through this tough transition.     

States,regimes, and decisions: why Jews were expelled from Medieval England and France

This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews became financially less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England’s growing regime of rights and representation and France’s emergent absolutist patrimonialism.     

Confronting or Complementing? A Case Study on NGO–State Relations from Kerala, India

NGOs have, of late, found some of their traditional domains, such as provision of micro-credit and participatory development, coinciding with or being taken away by the state. How do they position themselves and retain relevance vis-a-vis the state in the changed scenario? Tracing the trajectory of interventions of a local NGO in Kerala, India, this article shows that NGOs exhibit ‘multiple identities’—selective collaboration, gap-filling and posing alternatives—in the process of engagement with the state. The ‘strategizing’ of such identities may hold the key to their relevance vis-a-vis the state.     

Attentional Engagement in Infancy: The Interactive Influence of Attentional Inertia and Attentional State

We evaluated the interactive influences of attentional state and attentional inertia on infants' level of attentional engagement. We assessed infants' distraction latencies longitudinally at 6.5 and 9 months as they explored toys, and we coded both their attentional state (focused vs. casual) and how long they had been looking at the toy at each distractor onset. Consistent with previous results, both attentional state and attentional inertia contributed to differences in distraction latency. Importantly, the level of attentional engagement was interactively determined by attentional state and attentional inertia. Infants were most resistant to distraction when they were judged to be in a state of focused attention following relatively long looks to the toy, and they were equivalently less resistant to distraction under all other conditions. These results are consistent with a general conceptualization of attentional engagement resulting from the interaction of multiple processes.     

The Capacity of Community‐Based Organizations to Lead Local Innovations in Welfare Reform: Early Findings from Texas

Community‐based organizations (CBOs) are now cast among the lead actors in welfare reform. But do they have adequate capacity to perform this critical leadership function? Early findings from fifteen state‐funded projects in Texas show that state planners must carefully assess the capacity of a CBO to initiate and sustain an innovation at the local level. The authors examine six organizational variables that predict success or failure: goals, management, technology, funding, community involvement, and performance.     

利益代表与社会整合——法团主义视角下的武汉工会(1945-1949)

针对多元主义这一社团政治理论预设存在的盲区,本文以法团主义理论为视角,以战后武汉工会为研究对象,考察其是否具有利益代表职能及强组织凝聚力,并执行社会整合功能。研究发现,战后武汉工会不具备法团主义整合方案所要求的基本条件,其整合模式既异于国家法团主义模式,又不同于社会法团主义模式。究其原因,弱势独裁的政府始终未能实现行政权力的集中化、分层化与制度化;政府对社会的专制控制使得民间社会趋于萎缩,无法发展出充分专业化分工的社会团体。先天的不足使武汉工会只有法团主义的形而无其神,最终无法担负起社会整合的功能。     

Cities, states, trust, and rule: new departures from the work of Charles Tilly

In the light of his essay “Cities, States and Trust Networks,” contributors to this collection were asked to consider ways of building on or departing from the late Charles Tilly’s work. The authors in this collection addressed four major themes: (1) historicism and historical legacies, (2) trust networks and commitment, (3) city–state relations, and (4) democracy and inequality. Authors concentrating on historicism examined how, despite unanticipated consequences, social action nonetheless produced systematic, durable, social structures; they particularly focused on processes of identity formation and cultural reproduction. In regard to trust networks, contributors discovered a striking variety of forms and relationships and they investigated their origins and their relationship to institutions and culture. Looking at city–state relations, authors uncovered the richness and intricacy of the ties linking cities and states and showed that city–state relations were important not simply in terms of the autonomy or dependence of mutual ties, but also in the quality of these relationships. Besides the ties between cities and states other authors sought to focus on empires and wondered about the degree to which empire formation involved similar processes as state formation. Several authors developed this theme. Authors pursuing themes of democracy and inequality stressed how changes in citizenship and the expansion of parliamentary democratic forms might have complicated effects. The relationship between democracy and inequality was mediated by elites and institutions. Democracy constrained inequality but inequality also constrained democracy. Increased state capacity might enable states to remedy old inequities but it might also allow them to perpetrate new ones. The authors’ varied responses suggest promising directions for research on cities, states, and trust networks.     

Why Do Entrepreneurs Enter Politics? Evidence from China

This article examines the determinants of the entrepreneur's political participation by employing a unique matched firm-institution data set from China. We find that the likelihood of an entrepreneur's participation can be explained by the underdevelopment of markets and market-supporting institutions. According to our estimates, the probability of entering politics decreases by 8–20% from the mean when the institutional indices improve by one standard deviation. Our findings support the view that the institutional environment shapes the private entrepreneur's motivation to participate in politics; they also provide an example of how private entrepreneurs respond to state/market failure in developing and transition countries. (JEL G1, H00, O10, P2, P3 )     

Retiree Health Insurance and Disengagement from a Career Job

Over the past two decades the prevalence of partial/phased retirements has increased dramatically, redefining retirement and the way in which retirement benefits are evaluated. Specifically the effect of retirement benefits on the transition away from a state of career employment has become the primary issue of interest. This study uses data obtained from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Rand HRS files, to examine the relationship between access to retiree health insurance (RHI) and the decision to leave one’s career job. We employ a Cox Proportional Hazard Model to estimate how RHI affects the probability that an individual disengages from their career job, given they have not yet done so. Results indicate that those with access to RHI are 21% more likely to leave their career employer in all time periods than similar individuals without RHI. Several robustness tests including stratified estimation and propensity score matching are performed and no evidence of bias is detected.     

Adolescent Alcohol Use and Intergenerational Transfers: Evidence from Micro Data

Using the first seven waves (1997–2003) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), this paper investigates the effect of adolescent alcohol use on the amount of transfers they receive from their parents. Exploiting cross state and time variation in the price of alcohol, the main finding is that greater binge drinking among youths is associated with receiving significantly lower parental transfers. From a theoretical standpoint, one way to interpret this finding is to imagine an altruistic parent using pecuniary incentives to influence child behavior. Given that for many teenagers parental allowance is an important component of their income, limiting and monitoring such transfers may help reducing the chances of excessive drinking by youth.     

Voluntary organisations and local government: lessons from a Danish case study

The purpose of this article is to analyse the changing relationships between local government and voluntary organisations in the decentralised Danish welfare state within the field of social policy. Here major changes in public discourse have brought voluntary organisations more to the forefront in a welfare state model whose distinct public character might be fading. However, little attention has been devoted to potential problems resulting from intensified co-operation. The article explores these issues using evidence from a case study of the links between public authorities and seven voluntary organisations in the city of Aalborg in northern Jutland. This case study raises the question of whether voluntary organisations, as argued in public debate, can generally be regarded as the antithesis of the bureaucratically and paternalistically organised public social services. Rather, they seem to be co-actors, actively constructing new paradigms and practices in social policy, that cannot be captured in conventional dichotomous models. This suggests that the public bureaucracy versus altruistic voluntary organisation, or distinctions usually made between professional and volunteer motives, may be of limited use. The author wishes to thank Per Selle for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Catharina J. Kristensen and Claus B. Olsen for their help with the English version.     

Bedbugs and Grasshoppers: Translation,Myth and the Becoming of the Nation‐State

How is literally, a nation translated? This paper looks at translation practices as historical process and practice rather than submitting them to causal explanations with respect to the constitution of the nation‐state. It takes as its starting point, two contemporary Malay words negeri (province, state) and negara (country, nation‐state) and how they once had opposing definitions. Working with over three hundred years of dictionaries and lexicons, mainly English‐Malay dictionaries, the words negeri and negara were translated and defined very differently from current dictionaries – nor are they clarified today. What then happened to these words and how were they understood and translated over time, and in what possible context within the language of post‐colonial nation‐state formation? What do the processes of translation offer or convey that disrupts the singularity of nations and nationalism? Writings on translation do not necessarily shed any further clarity but they offer a space in which we can think about translating practices and what they enact in the narrative of the nation.     

Uneasy Settlements: Reparation Politics and the Meanings of Money in the Israeli Withdrawal from Gaza

Negotiations about reparations tend to take the language of interests and to deal primarily with monetary compensation for disadvantaged groups. In such proceedings, aggrieved claimants are likely to make a variety of claims about the use of money to represent their experience, ranging from demands for increased compensation to rejections of the entire process altogether. This article draws attention to the communicative functions of money in the reparation process. It claims that actors may grudgingly agree to attach a monetary value to what they hold sacred, but simultaneously strive to preserve their sense of self‐worth and to elicit identification by raising moral critiques about the use of fiscal logic. To exemplify, the article focuses on the 2005 removal of Jewish‐Israeli settlers from Israeli‐occupied territories. It shows that settlers indeed demanded to be compensated fiscally for their lost property. At the same time, it shows that they raised objections to the use of fiscal logic in representing their experience and offered alternate logics of evaluation. The settlers resisted shame and devaluation through such competing logics, demanding that the state reaffirm a positive and embracing relationship with them despite its decision to evict them.     

Preparing young people in Canada for emancipation from child welfare care

Reviewing preparation-for-independence programs operating in Canada at present yields a number of observations. 1. A well-developed range of preparation-for-independence programs exists across Canada despite regional differences in both mandate and resources. 2. The resources, however, do not meet the need. There are not enough for each young person to be assured of getting what he or she needs for a successful transition. 3. Failure to develop an adequate resource will be costly in the long run. Those whom child welfare, in its parenting role, fails to prepare for independence and support adequately during the transition will most likely come to the attention of social services again either as social assistance recipients before adult welfare, or as parents and families requiring the services of the child welfare system within which they themselves grew up. 4. At the field level, effective solutions have been demonstrated. What remains to be achieved is the development of both political will and financial commitment on the part of the government to support the maintenance of existing programs, and the proliferation of an adequate range of additional programs. It must be ensured that all children for whom the state assumes responsibility benefit from an adequately supported transition into productive adulthood. As pointed out in a literacy program proposal prepared by the Pape Adolescent Resource Centre in Toronto: Unless the problems were addressed effectively, the probability was that the teens would be discharged from children's aid society care without the ability to support themselves in the community either economically or practically. In the absence of familial or institutional supports, a street life awaited them. Many had begun to apprentice for that reality. [Martin 1986: 2] Where the state has intervened to rescue a youth from inadequate parenting, the obligation exists for the state to properly complete the undertaking.     

Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes

Charles Tilly emphasizes that state formation is a contingent and violent process: states develop as they extract resources, including currency, from a population. Neochartalist approaches to money challenge what I call the extractivist view of state formation because they see currencies as public institutions established by governments, not a resource to be seized from a population. At the same time, neochartalists rarely address how state institutions capable of establishing monetary institutions emerge. In this article, I propose a framework to analyze the entangled development of the institutions of money and state. I then showcase its usefulness by revisiting a series of crowd actions and militarized responses in eighteenth-century Massachusetts and Pennsylvania today known as Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, focusing on the initially ad hoc and then routinized funding mechanism that enabled emerging state actors to deploy armed groups. In closing, I argue that despite the violence involved in the emergence of the institutions of state and money, citizens and inhabitants can begin to imagine democratic ways of institutionalizing money today.     

The Interactive Relationship Between Class Identity and the College Experience: The Case of Lower Income Students

To probe the role that college context plays in influencing the class-based aspects of identity for lower income students, we interviewed 30 lower income students, 15 from an elite college and 15 from a state college. Significant disparities of wealth between students at the elite college heightened awareness of class, and led to feelings of intimidation, discomfort, inadequacy, deficiency, exclusion, and powerlessness among lower income students, feelings that were less prevalent among state college students. Students at both colleges acquired new forms of cultural capital and coped with class-based discontinuities between who they were before college and who they were becoming, but these issues became heightened for the elite college students.     

“STREETVILLE FOREVER”: ETHNICITY,COLLECTIVE ACTION,AND THE STATE

Contemporary state policies in European and American societies mark a shift from older forms of governance focussed on the centrally concentrated state toward strategies that aim to limit governmental intervention by getting people to govern themselves. This means that individuals and communities are charged with carrying out roles and functions that were traditionally performed by the state. In this article I examine the conditions in which local people in an urban neighbourhood in the United Kingdom who were the objects of this new mode of governance came to negotiate and resist its policies and structures. Residents and community workers came together in opposition to the local Council to make demands that they considered to be of interest to the members of their neighbourhood across ethnic, racial, gender, and class boundaries. In so doing they crafted a multiracial neighbourhood identity that was more inclusive than the categories deployed by the state. This examination of collective initiatives that resist and challenge the state's strategies for local governance illuminates some of the complexities, contradictions, and limits of the contemporary state.     

International Adoptee Identity and Community: Emerging Lessons Learned from Adoptee Experts

Abstract

With tens of thousands of international adoptees placed in the United States since the 1950s, several critiques of the current structure of international adoption have begun to emerge. These critiques highlight the challenges many adoptees face around issues of identity and community. Their stories have also given us insight into oppressions that have prevented their voices from being heard in a more significant way. Community-based participatory research over 7 years of postadoption service work has given the author valuable insights into the current state of international adoption, the challenges faced by adoptees, and what can be done to improve conditions for current and future adoptees. This conceptual article synthesizes the opinions of adoptees into an analysis of the challenges they face and offers possible solutions to move forward. The concepts in this article can be used as groundwork for further discussion around the needs of the adoptee and how they can be addressed by the adoption industry. Specifically, the article calls for the emergence of adoptee identity and community as a valid response to the oppression experienced by many international adoptees.     

Communicating about infectious disease threats: Insights from public health information officers

The public health communication challenges that arise in times of infectious disease threats (IDTs) were examined using the Risk Amplification through Media Spread (RAMS) Framework and in-depth phone interviews with 40 national, state, and local public health information officers (PIOs). Interviewees shared their experiences and insights related to how IDTs are communicated to the public, including the different types of traditional and social media used, how they develop and assess IDT messages, and their perceptions regarding the IDT risk amplification process. Theoretical and practical implications for health public relations and public health communication are discussed.