The contributions of welfare typologies to international social work practices

This paper is concerned with the link between studies of welfare typologies and studies of international social work. Its objective is to show how welfare typologies could be used to strengthen the role of international social work practices to support international exchange of ideas on welfare issues. To meet this objective, three analytical tasks are implemented. The first task is to show that professional imperialism could weaken the potential of international social work practices to promote international exchange of ideas on welfare issues. The second task is to discuss the importance of welfare typologies in supporting the development of international social work by challenging professional imperialism. The third task is to discuss a research project on a defamilization typology. This project provides empirical evidence of the contributions made by welfare typologies to international social work practices.     

Defamilisation and welfare state regimes: a cluster analysis

The role of gender as a source of social stratification within and between welfare states is increasingly being paid attention to in the welfare state regimes debate. Defamilisation has emerged as a potentially important concept in this context, as it enables the comparison and classification of welfare states in terms of how they facilitate female autonomy and economic independence from the family. However, the methodology used, or the understanding of the concept, limits existing defamilisation typologies. These typologies have therefore been unable to provide an accurate examination of welfare state variation using this concept and, indeed, have in some ways undermined and devalued the usefulness of defamilisation. This article uses cluster analysis to build upon previous research and resurrect the concept of defamilisation. In contrast to existing work in this area, the analysis produces a five-fold typology of welfare state regimes. This typology differs in many ways from existing models of welfare state regimes, although some core countries emerge as regime ideal types. The article concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of cluster analysis, and defamilisation, for welfare state modelling and future research in this area.     

A typology of child protective service cases: design and implementation issues for social work administrators

Case typologies can help to delineate client problems and needs, inform the design of service delivery, and measure service outputs and outcomes. The author describes the development of a typology of the child protective services cases of one large public department of social services. To assist social work administrators develop and apply case classification schemes within their agencies, this typology is used to illustrate the following key conceptual and methodological issues: (1) reasons for case typologies: (2) identifying and selecting case attributes: (3) re-organizing and reducing the number of attributes: and (4) forming groups.     

From Defamilialization to Degenderization: Toward a New Welfare Typology1

This article discusses the debate on gendering welfare states. It criticizes typologies based on the differentiation between degrees of familialization and defamilialization and proposes a new typology based on the notion of genderization and degenderization. It also argues against the notion of regime types, which includes outputs in their classification systems. Instead it argues that typologies should concentrate on policies to make it possible for researchers and policymakers to analyze the influence of different types of policies on different societies. It is important to know whether similar policies would lead to different outcomes under different socio‐economic or cultural conditions. The article goes on to show how one could analyze family policies based on a typology based on genderization and degenderization.     

AUSTRALIAN LIVING STANDARDS: SOME GENDER CONSIDERATIONS

This paper is an exploration of the contemporary definitions in use of the idea of a standard of living as it has been developed in social policy and economic research both in Australia and overseas. It is suggested that the assumptions underpinning the idea of a standard of living in areas such as poverty research or the analysis of redistributive policies and their effects are neither tenable nor useful. The concept is flawed because it makes unreasonable assumptions about the household and the nature of women's domestic labour. Consideration of the gender blindness of much economics suggests the need for a major revision in our approach to the idea of a standard of living.     

Interrogating the hybrid economy approach to Indigenous development

In the contemporary debate about remote Indigenous economic development, Jon Altman's hybrid economy approach is the major alternative to the dominant neo‐liberal perspective. Altman's approach emphasises the continuing customary economic activity of remote‐living Indigenous Australians and their legitimate aspirations to live and work on their ancestral lands. Based on a close reading of Altman's writings, this paper analyses the hybrid economy model – which is grounded in Altman's observations of outstation life in Arnhem Land – and the approach to economic development Altman derives from it. It makes explicit the numerous assumptions underpinning the hybrid economy approach to Indigenous development. Some of these assumptions are more controversial than others. It is argued that while Altman's approach celebrates the unique skills and contributions of culturally‐connected Indigenous people, it is predicated on a pessimistic assessment of the likelihood of mainstream education and employment ‘closing the gap‘.     

The Welfare Modelling Business

The paper starts out by identifying a substantial increase in the use of welfare state typologies within comparative studies. This has developed to a degree where many authors take it for granted that the world consists of a limited number of well-defined welfare regimes. This discussion took off in 1990 and it is expected to continue as an important dimension of welfare and social policy research long into the next millennium. It is shown that the idea of ordering welfare states according to ideal-typical models dates back to the late 1950s and was elaborated substantially during the early 1970s, though rather unnoticed. The publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990 is identified as the starting point for what has now become a whole academic industry, here entitled the Welfare Modelling Business. Different typologies with different degrees of differentiation are discussed: should we consider welfare capitalism to come in two, three, four or more models? Though the differentiation into regimes is widely recognized, there have, of course, been many discussions about problems and shortcomings. Two major issues are elaborated: the one-sided focus on social insurance provisions and the simultaneous neglect of personal social services; and the parallel one-sided focus on state and market and the neglect of civil societal institutions such as family and networks. The paper concludes that welfare typologizing must take into account the kinds of programmes analysed: context matters.     

Making Sense of "Absence": Towards a Typology of Absence in Social Representations Theory and Research

Identifying, locating and interpreting both what is present and what is not present in theory and data lies at the core of scientific practice. Most experienced researchers know that social reality and psychological phenomena cannot always be apprehended directly, and that the forces that shape them must often be inferred rather than positively demonstrated. Yet, the important analytical problems raised by "absence" have rarely occupied the centre stage in professional journals. The aim of this paper is to sensitise researchers to the problem of absence. It considers the various guises in which absences may appear, their repercussions in the research process, and the solutions that researchers have used to render absences visible. The paper focuses on the issue of absence as it appears in theory and research on social representations. A typology of absence, structured in terms of the research process, is proposed. The typology is intended purely as a heuristic tool. It identifies and discusses forms of theoretical, methodological, empirical and analytical/interpretive absences. This typology is used to explore forms of absence and their interrelationships throughout the research process in three studies on social representations. The discussion as a whole contributes to reaffirming the radical character of the theory of social representations by stressing how the latter locates the space of explanation at the interface between individual and collective representations, between social and cognitive processes, between intentional and non-conscious dynamics, and between material and symbolic realities.     

The Contributions of the Health Decommodification Typologies to the Study of the East Asian Welfare Regime

Since Esping‐Andersen presented the three worlds of welfare typology thesis, the study of the classification of welfare regimes has been dominated by his work and the debates surrounding it. This article is concerned with two important responses to his work. The first response is the development of welfare typologies based on the principle of decommodification. The second response is the concern that East Asian countries are underrepresented in the 18 members of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) studied by Esping‐Andersen. As a result, there are calls for expanding the scope of the studies on the classification of welfare regimes to those in East Asia. This article makes contributions to these two responses by presenting two analytical tasks. The first task is to develop two health decommodification typologies based on two different methods (cluster analysis and Esping‐Andersen's index‐based regime construction). Both of them cover the 18 OECD members studied by Esping‐Andersen and four tiger economies (Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore). The second task is to demonstrate that the two health decommodification typologies provide important information for the debate on the existence of two essential preconditions for the development of an all‐encompassing East Asian welfare regime, namely the existence of significant differences in the welfare systems between the East Asian countries and the 18 OECD countries studied by Esping‐Andersen (1990 ) and the existence of significant similarities in the welfare systems between East Asian countries.     

自杀与现代人的境况——涂尔干的“自杀类型学”及其人性基础

涂尔干在《自杀论》中提出的“自杀类型学”是他对自杀研究做出的一个重要的理论贡献。他通过自杀的社会类型展开的广泛解释和论述,是和其著作中的一些实质问题密切相关的。本文检视了这个类型学的一些关键方面和存在的问题,并结合涂尔干的人性论进行了比较深入的分析,强调了涂尔干社会理论的人性基础;这种分析也表明,涂尔干的自杀类型学是他继《社会分工论》之后对个体与社会关系问题的进一步思考和推进。另外,涂尔干通过对作为社会事实的“自杀潮”的独特的社会病理学分析,深刻揭示了现代人的生存境况。因此,《自杀论》的经典意义在于其将理论图式与时代问题紧密结合起来的研究范式,这充分体现了古典社会理论的本质特征。     

Motivation, Purpose and Processes in Pension Reform

The worldwide nature of the pension reform debate and the wind of change which seems to prevail justify the search for clear answers to three questions: (1) Why change the legislative and institutional framework of social security? (2) What do governments and society at large hope to achieve through change? and (3) If change is desirable, how can it be achieved without disrupting the country's social and financial order? The motivations which incite reformers fall into a few neat categories. A simple typology, as suggested in this article, should help avoid confusion in the public interpretation of recent policies and trends. A regrettable source of untidiness in the pension reform debate is also the use of ambiguous terminology. This is not merely a semantic concern. It has to do with the political meaning that the term conveys, as it may reflect an ideological stance and thus become a divisive issue. Another advantage of putting pension reform into a clearer conceptual framework is that it introduces and explains five specific goals which are common to all contemporary reformers. They are (1) social acceptability, (2) financial sustainability, (3) political feasibility, (4) coherence with economic and labour market realities, and (5) client-friendly management and administration. Ideally the perfect reform should aim at all five goals. In the real world, however, reformers have to settle for less because political feasibility – one of the five – is likely to limit their ambitions of fully meeting the other four.     

Comparing long-term care systems: A multi-dimensional,actor-centred typology

Like other fields of social policy, the organization of long-term care (LTC) varies temporally and geographically. The present article aims to advance the comparison of LTC systems worldwide by proposing a conceptual framework to analyse variation, putting a special focus on analysing the role of public and private actor types. In a precluding literature review of existing LTC typologies, we find that there are various promising classification approaches, but with an overwhelming concentration on European countries and often constructed in-transparently and superficially. Building on the concept of the care/welfare mix, we develop a multi-dimensional, actor-centred typology of LTC systems. In doing so, we employ the methodological procedure of theoretically constructing a typological attribute space. We argue that three dimensions, that is service provision, financing and regulation, are crucial for differentiating types. Furthermore, we chose an actor-centred approach, asking who bears the main responsibility in each dimension. Five relevant types of corporate actors are distinguished: state, societal actors, private for-profit actors, private individual actors, and global actors. Finally, we present and discuss the resulting attribute space and further illustrated the typology's use by exemplarily classifying three countries.     

Qualitative data preservation and sharing in the social sciences: On whose philosophical terms?

Over the past decade, an academic debate has developed surrounding qualitative data preservation and sharing in the social sciences, and has been characterised as one between supporters and opponents of this movement. We reframe the debate by suggesting that so‐called ‘opponents’ are not resistant to the principle of data preservation and sharing, but ambivalent about how this principle is being put into practice. Specifically, qualitative researchers are uneasy about the foundational assumptions underpinning current data preservation and sharing policies and practices. Efforts to address these concerns argue that the inclusion of the ‘contexts’ of data generation, preservation and reuse will adequately resolve the epistemological concerns held by the qualitative research community. However, these ‘solutions’ reproduce foundational assumptions by treating ‘context’ as ontologically separate from, rather than constitutive of, data. The future of qualitative data preservation and sharing in the social sciences is dependent on shedding its implicit unitary foundational model of qualitative research, and embracing ‘epistemic pluralism’ and the diversity of philosophical perspectives representing the qualitative researcher community.     

Trends in Domestic and International Social Work Research: A 10-Year Review of American Research Journals

ABSTRACT

This article presents a typology of international social work research and analyzes trends over a 10-year period (1995–2004) based on reviews of 707 articles from three major American social work research journals: Social Work Research, Journal of Social Service Research, and Research on Social Work Practice. The analysis revealed there was a considerable increase (3.5%) in the total amount of research articles, particularly a higher increase in international social work research (2.8%) than national social work research (0.8%). A small decline was detected in transnational comparative research (?0.4%).     

The social condition of the New Zealand people: a pre-election review of social indicator information

ABSTRACT

Many social commentators have considered that alongside the fiscal transparency enjoined by contemporary New Zealand governments, there should be a complementary social responsibility reporting. This task is usually assigned to social indicator frameworks. However, at present (as the 2017 election looms) there is a faltering in the provision of social indicators which have been in place in New Zealand for almost two decades, with the exception of the recent 2016 survey data from Statistics New Zealand and Ministry of Social Development that were made available within a month of writing this article. Having commented on the current status of the New Zealand social indicator system, we present data from the General Social Survey and the Quality of Life survey to at least convey recent trends in subjective social well-being and reported behaviours and experiences. References are also made to the accumulating literature on social well-being in New Zealand, followed by suggestions for more systematic indicator development and underpinning research.     

Modeling Role Enactment: Linking Role Theory and Social Cognition

In our dynamic social world, a premium is placed on the individual's ability to innovate and to change ( Giddens 1984 ; Sewell 1992 ; Simmel 1955 ). Yet traditional role theory has difficulty accounting for innovation, leaving unanswered the question of how individual level negotiations affect social‐structural processes (see Callero 1994 ). This study addresses this tension by linking role theory with social cognition. By positioning behavior and cognition as two interrelated continuums, I stretch the meaning of role enactment to include 4 role typologies. I utilize these typologies as a heuristic to chart the processes through which individuals adapt to and affect a role performance over time. I conclude by outlining how sociocognitive role typologies aid social researchers in accounting for individual efficacy in response to social‐structural situations.     

Understanding the Downshifting Phenomenon: A Case of South East Queensland,Australia

A quality of life survey of a sample of households across the Brisbane‐South East Queensland region has identified about 28 percent of people as ‘downshifters.‘ They are defined as people who voluntarily make a long‐term change in their lifestyle – other than planned retirement – which reduces income and adjusts their lifestyle conditions. A typology of downshifters is developed on the basis of their motives for downshifting and their socio‐economic and demographic characteristics using a Two Step Cluster Analysis. Results indicate that the social and economic circumstances and the reasons and methods of downshifting tend to vary substantially across the clusters.     

Health Technology Literacy: A Transdisciplinary Framework for Consumer-Oriented Practice

Abstract

The present study developed a typology of self-reported coping strategies used by older adults in adapting to vision impairment using qualitative analyses. Narrative data were examined from three previous quantitative studies of adaptation to vision loss. Major themes in coping with vision loss included difficulty in balancing norms of independence with the functional losses resulting from eye disease, and the importance of the informal social network. Importantly, a number of coping mechanisms that have not been examined in prior quantitative work were identified through the present qualitative analyses. Implications of this typology of self-reported coping with age-related vision loss for research and practice are discussed.     

Studying democratic innovations: toward a problem-driven approach to case study research

ABSTRACT

Hajer and Wagenaar (2003. Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv, 16) advanced a conception of policy analysis – “Deliberative Policy Analysis” – that “rests on three pillars: interpretation, practice and deliberation.” This form of policy analysis, they argued, supports “more direct, participatory forms of democracy” involving “democratic deliberation on concrete issues” (xv, 29). Since their writing, empirical research on such initiatives – “democratic innovations,” for short – has blossomed. However, while deliberative policy analysis is itself post-positivist in orientation, many researchers bring a (quasi-) positivist orientation to their work on democratic innovations. A key challenge for deliberative policy analysts is, then, how to participate in this field of inquiry while maintaining a post-positivist orientation. Pragmatist philosophy, I submit, can help them to meet this challenge. Pragmatism rejects a number of positivist assumptions about the nature of empirical inquiry. Relatedly, it supports the claim that policy analysis should be interpretive, practice-oriented, and deliberative. Indeed, it suggests that policy analysis cannot avoid being so. By way of illustration, I indicate how pragmatism points to an approach to case study research that rests on the three pillars.     

Representing personal and common futures: Insights and new connections between the theory of social representations and the pragmatic sociology of engagements

To understand social issues and practices such as those related to climate change and technological change that are clearly future-oriented – collectively experienced events that are “not yet” – and co-constructed by different actors, we need nuanced conceptualizations of how people think about, negotiate and co-create futures that allow us to understand not only what people (can) think and do about future-related issues but also how that happens, what for and with which implications. However, so far, one of the key theoretical approaches that has conceptualised how people make meaning in situations of change and uncertainty – the socio-psychological social representations theory (SRT) – has not often engaged with the future or with different forms of temporality. By contrast, the French pragmatic sociology of engagements and critique (PS) has engaged with these notions, conceptualising them in relation to materiality and a plurality of moral orientations – two dimensions often seen as key to how collective futures are made and imagined. To offer a more nuanced and systematic conceptualization of how people represent the future and with what consequences, this paper will present, compare and synthesise SRT and PS, as a first step towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on social change and representations of the future.