Litigating Change? Social Movements and the Court System

Social movement actors increasingly turn to the law and pursue litigation in their efforts to bring about social change. Our article provides an overview of scholarship on collective and politicized litigation, drawing from sociolegal studies, political science, and sociology. We consider scholarship that illuminates why activists turn to litigation tactics in the first place and circumstances in which a social movement litigation strategy can be successful. We also consider additional impacts of movement litigation. Given that social movement researchers in sociology have, to date, paid only limited attention to activist litigation, we encourage scholars in the discipline to investigate further this important form of social movement mobilization.     

Social Entrepreneur: Same or Different from the Rest?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - A social business responds to social problems usually ignored by institutions, mobilizing resources and generating...     

Professions and the Social Order: Some Lessons from Burkina Faso?

The study of professions has been dominated by Anglo‐American models, with their focus on a small group of legally licensed occupations. The field has recently shifted, mainly through studies of European experience, to a wider examination of the social management of expert workers. Very little has been written about developments in Africa and their implications for the way in which we might think about professions. This paper presents a case study of the role and practices of the medical profession in Burkina Faso, which has a relatively open market for the supply of healing services and limited regulation of the suppliers, whether physicians or traditional practitioners. The study returns to classic questions about the extent to which practice is shaped by the nature of occupational niches within the division of labor or to the development of a distinctive moral character among the workers within that niche.     

Interest Groups,NGOs or Civil Society Organisations? The Framing of Non-State Actors in the EU

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Scholars have used varying terminology for describing non-state entities seeking to influence public policy or work with...     

Social Enterprises and the EU’s Public Procurement Market

European social enterprises’ participation in the public procurement process is low, even if the European public procurement law allows using special provisions for these entities. Encouraging the participation of social enterprises in the public procurement process is an important part of the effort to modernize the EU social policy. This paper demonstrates that, despite the great importance of social enterprises for the European economy, strategies on the access of social enterprises to the EU’s public procurement market are less known by the employees of the public contracting authorities in EU Member States.     

How and Why Do Social and Sustainable Initiatives Scale? A Systematic Review of the Literature on Social Entrepreneurship and Grassroots Innovation

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic...     

Social Work Intellectuals in the Twenty‐First Century: Critical Social Theory,Critical Social Work and Public Engagement

Frequently, observation of social work students in ‘live’ work is absent or haphazard. An overview of the key literature examines the need for observation of students during training, explores the strengths and challenges of live supervision and describes a planned process for conducting live supervision. This approach incorporates four phases: collaborative preparation for a session of direct practice; observation of the student's work by a field educator; debriefing and feedback; and the development of a plan for further learning steps. Brief vignettes are used to illustrate the process. The article is enriched by the inclusion of student comments from the evaluations undertaken after live supervision activities.     

“Fathers’ Rights” Activism,Discourse, Groups and Impacts: Findings from a Scoping Review of the Literature

The fathers’ rights movement emerged in its current form in the 1980s as a decentralized, transnational, grassroots network of activists, support groups, and public polemics concerning child custody and child support laws and policies in the context of separation and divorce. This scoping review reports on existing research on the fathers’ rights movement to provide a comprehensive roadmap of how the fathers’ rights movement has so far been understood and interpreted in terms of its characteristics and its impacts. Implications include specifying suggestions for future research as well as the implications for practitioners working with separated fathers and their families.     

Is Social Innovation Fostering Satisfaction and Well-Being at Work? Insights from Employment in Social Enterprises Providing Long-Term Eldercare Services

Considering insights from socio-economics, work psychology, and occupational health, this study focuses on the job satisfaction and well-being of employees working in nonprofit social enterprises (SE). We question the idea suggested by the recent literature that working for a SE brings employees a high level of job satisfaction and well-being. We also investigate whether being involved in social innovation is associated with even higher job satisfaction and well-being. Indeed, understood as a manifestation of positive social change, social innovation is expected to improve outcomes such as the quality of life at work. However, because social innovation is an umbrella concept, it embraces different innovation-related concepts. Here we explore the distinction between service innovation and workplace innovation. This article applies a multivariate analysis to an original dataset covering 1134 employees working in the field of elder homecare in Wallonia. Its implications for social entrepreneurs and scholars are also examined.     

Social responsibility and corporate web pages: Self-presentation or agenda-setting?

The recent growth of the Internet and World Wide Web has become a focus for both the popular press and social science scholars. The authors of this study examined how large corporate entities are making use of the Web to present themselves as socially responsible citizens and to advance their own policy positions.Analysis of a random sample of Fortune 500 companies revealed 90% had Web pages and 82% of the sites addressed at least one corporate social responsibility issue. More than half of the Web sites had items addressing community involvement, environmental concerns, and education. Few corporations, however, used their Web pages to monitor public opinion on issues or advocate policy positions. The number of social responsibility items on a Web page was positively correlated with the size of an organization and the implementation of tools to make a Web site more navigable, but was unrelated to a corporation's ranking within its industry. The researchers also distinguished between messages that proclaim the corporation does “no-harm”, and items that extol an organization's “good deeds.” Industry groups differed on the no-harm subscale but not good deeds.     

Professional Distance and Social Work: Stretching the Elastic?

Abstract

Professional distance and the parallel concept of models of practice reliant on professional objectivity have been major platforms in professional education. In social work, these ideas are often seen as contentious, unreasonable and, in some cases, unrealistic. Radical, feminist and rural social work approaches, for example, suggest that the expert role is not only inappropriate, but can be counter-productive and disrespectful of the people with whom we work. Postmodern approaches call for a deconstruction of professionalism in favour of context-specific partnerships between worker and client. How can workers ensure good, professional practice within a more flexible approach to professional distance and expertise? What are the issues and how may they be resolved? Are the boundaries of the professional relationship elastic and, if so, what are the consequences for practice and the individual worker? The present article explores the notion of flexible, elastic boundaries using literature and research from radical, postmodern, feminist and rural social work approaches.     

Escape from the Iron Cage? Organizational Change and Isomorphic Pressures in the Public Sector

Institutional theory suggests that organizations pursue legitimacyby conforming to isomorphic pressures in their environment.We extend previous research on institutional theory by distinguishingbetween two definitions of conformity (compliance and convergence)and by taking a comprehensive view of the organizational characteristicsthat might be subject to isomorphic pressures. This frameworkis applied to change between 2001 and 2004 in the internal characteristicsof 101 public organizations in England. We find substantialevidence of compliance but more limited support for convergence.Furthermore, the impact of isomorphic pressures was strongeron organizational strategies and culture than on structuresand processes. Thus, the relevance of institutional theory tochange in the public sector depends on the definition of conformitythat is used and the organizational characteristics that areexamined.     

Old age and prosocial behavior: Social preferences or experimental confounds?

Experimental and field evidence indicate a positive link between social preferences and age, most strikingly between the elderly and young adults. However, it is possible that the seemingly positive link between age and preferences stems from confounds in experimental procedure. In a dictator game study we find that elderly participants do indeed transfer higher shares of their endowments to their peers than a standard sample of student participants. This result holds good even in treatments accounting for wealth differences and experimenter demand effects. However, we observe no difference in behavior when we compare elderly participants and students who have not previously participated in economic experiments. Accordingly, it is possible that the seemingly stronger social preferences of the elderly are due to confounds associated with lack of experience with economic experiments. In addition, when comparing incentivized and hypothetical transfer decisions, we observe a hypothetical bias in treatments with a “take” framing, but not in treatments with the standard “give” framing.     

Transnational Debt Movements: Challenging States and International Decision-Makers,or Intermeshed with These?

A new wave of transnational civil society campaigning has emerged since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Major changes in world order occurred over this period, which impacted on the context for transnational campaigning. These changes include the end of the Cold War, followed by the embedding of the concept of global governance, including the norm of civil society participation. This article examines the strategies of transnational debt campaigns against this background. It describes the shifts in strategies over time between more consensual engagement approaches and those seeking fundamental transformation, and considers the implications for the relationship between civil society campaigns and states/international decision-makers. It concludes that transnational debt movements fit better with a Gramscian perspective on civil society as containing consensual, and counter-systemic elements, than with a view of civil society as independent of official decision-making structures. It highlights, however, the need to grasp the on-going dynamic between these different elements within civil society.