Bottom-up childcare in a top-down welfare state: explaining cooperative organization among Swedish parents

Almost all children in Sweden spend at least some part of their early childhood in organized childcare, primarily in the form of preschools. About 10% of all preschools in Sweden are parent cooperatives, which make the childcare area an anomaly in the Swedish welfare state; no other service area has such a significant proportion of cooperative service providers. The parent cooperatives are initiated by the parents themselves, they are social enterprises created from the bottom-up. Why do parents decide to start a parent cooperative preschool in a welfare state where childcare is considered a social right and a responsibility for the state? This article will explore several different motives for starting parent cooperatives in Sweden, with special attention to the role of the public sector and political decisions. The findings are based on an extensive empiric study performed between the years 2003 and 2007.     

Dangers of Decentralisation in Urban Slums: A Comparative Study of Water Supply and Drainage Service Delivery in Kolkata,India

Clientelism may lead to the underprovision of services which are deemed suitable for decentralisation. Water distribution and drainage services, managed from a lower level of municipal authority, are liable to be affected by clientelism and consequent underprovision. Water quality, maintained from a higher municipal layer, is not likely to be affected by clientelism. Capture by politically influential and dominant social and religious groups is likely to take place for important services like water supply. The article suggests that awareness, measurability, importance and resource intensiveness of service are additional factors to be considered for assessing the suitability of a sector for decentralisation.     

Elevating stakeholder voice: Considering parent priorities in model development for community mental health center services

Peer-support services, including Parent Support and Training, have traditionally subscribed to a strict definition of what it means to qualify as a peer, and therefore as a provider of these services. This article examines views of peer and non-peer stakeholders in Kansas CMHCs on additional characteristics of “peer-ness.” The findings of this analysis result in a call for a broadening of the definition of “peer” in order to creatively meet the needs of families in the current service climate while still providing support for upholding the family-driven paradigm that brought about inclusion of parent voice in the treatment process—a hallmark of the PST service.     

National consistency and provincial diversity in delivery of long-term care in Canada

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the diversity in delivery of long-term care at the provincial level, within a national legislative framework that provides universal health insurance and public administration. Not all provinces have legislated provision of long-term care, but mandates for provincial long-term care programs typically address the needs of those with chronic health needs and maintain them in the community for as long as possible. Eligibility is based on common criteria of residency, health need, facility, assessment, and consent. The three common components of the service delivery system are institutional care, community-based services, and home-based services; the kinds of services within each component and the mix among them vary from province to province. There are also five common features in provincial service delivery systems: single point of entry, assessment, client classification, case management, and single administration. Throughout the article, examples from different provinces show the varying ways in which these aspects of service delivery have been addressed, and recent innovations have furthered this diversity. A detailed account of quality management systems also shows that while all provinces have adopted a common set of principles, they use a range of methods to pursue quality of care and to promote good practice.     

Understanding Mothers’ Engagement with Antenatal Parent Education Services: A Critical Analysis of a local Sure Start Service

This article discusses the issue of engagement in antenatal parent education for women living in deprived areas. The article focuses on the findings of a local evaluation of a Sure Start parent education programme designed to improve parental engagement with antenatal services. The article discusses the re‐orientation of this service, the impact on service users and the implications for professionals. Evidence suggests that this service has been beneficial for those involved and resulted in improved levels of engagement, with 9 per cent of eligible women attending prenatal sessions prior to the introduction of the Sure Start local programme's parent education service and 34 per cent of eligible women attending after its introduction. Despite this, the service only reaches a small proportion of the eligible population. The article also discusses the issue of professional resistance from mainstream services as an unintended consequence of the introduction of the Sure Start local programme and considers the implications of this for effective delivery. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).     

Facilitators and barriers to family engagement and retention of young children in mental health care: A qualitative study of caregivers’ perspectives

This study examines facilitators and barriers that influence family engagement and retention of children in mental healthcare from the parent and caregiver perspective. Researchers recruited and interviewed parents and caregivers (n=18) from urban community health and early childcare centers. The study team analyzed the data and identified barriers to retention in care, including stigma, lack of integrated health care services,and a shortage of providers with the expertise in early childhood mental health care. Social workers, case managers, parent peers, and community support groups helped facilitate parent and caregiver engagement and retention of children in care. Education,community support programs, and integrated healthcare systems would improve access to quality early childhood mental health care.     

An Aging Workforce in an Increasingly Global World

Summary

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the diversity in delivery of long-term care at the provincial level, within a national legislative framework that provides universal health insurance and public administration. Not all provinces have legislated provision of long-term care, but mandates for provincial long-term care programs typically address the needs of those with chronic health needs and maintain them in the community for as long as possible. Eligibility is based on common criteria of residency, health need, facility, assessment, and consent. The three common components of the service delivery system are institutional care, community-based services, and home-based services; the kinds of services within each component and the mix among them vary from province to province. There are also five common features in provincial service delivery systems: single point of entry, assessment, client classification, case management, and single administration. Throughout the article, examples from different provinces show the varying ways in which these aspects of service delivery have been addressed, and recent innovations have furthered this diversity. A detailed account of quality management systems also shows that while all provinces have adopted a common set of principles, they use a range of methods to pursue quality of care and to promote good practice.     

Understanding Professional Projects in Welfare Service Work: Revival of Old Professionalism?

The professional terms for occupations that provide welfare services are changing, and here the introduction of new public management in the Nordic countries since the 1990s is indicative of wider developments. The article explores professional projects in welfare service work from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. The aim is to produce a gender‐sensitive analysis of the professional projects at the lower levels of the occupational hierarchies in health care. The first part reviews the literature conceptualizing the societal and institutional embeddedness of professional projects. The institutional matrix of welfare states emerges as a key context in shaping the welfare service work performed by women‐dominated professional groups. The second part examines the case of Finland and suggests that recent reforms have created new inequalities in the system of professions, in which occupational groups in welfare service work are becoming marginalized. This signals a move away from ‘democratic professionalism’ towards a revival of ‘old professionalism’.     

How can gender discrimination explain fertility behaviors and family-friendly policies?

This paper focuses on the interaction between gender discrimination and household decisions. It develops a model with endogenous fertility, endogenous labor supply and endogenous size of government spending. Family policies which concern childcare services are assumed to reduce the time that parents spend on their children. The model shows that gender discrimination may explain differences in household decisions between countries. The solution shows a U-shaped relationship between fertility and gender discrimination if the quality of childcare services is sufficiently high. In the decreasing part of this U-shaped curve, a decrease in the discrimination level implies a related increase in fertility, women’s participation in the labor force and in family-friendly policies.     

Time with sons and daughters

We present a model of parental investment in child quality in which the effectiveness??objectively or as perceived by the parents??of parental childcare depends on the sex of the child. In particular, the time of the same-sex parent is more productive than that of the opposite-sex parent. When parents have equal wages, efficiency considerations dictate that a parent spends more time with a same-sex child than with an opposite-sex child, but parents allocate the same total time to boys and girls, and costs of raising a boy are the same as raising a girl. When wage rates differ, and the mother is the lower-waged parent, it is cheaper to produce child quality of girls than of boys. We show that many of the empirical results in terms of a different time allocation pattern, total amount of time invested in a child, expenditures on child consumption goods, and family size and composition can be explained by this technological difference and the gender wage gap, without relying on parental preferences for girls versus boys. Our analysis is largely diagrammatic.     

Child center closures: Does nonprofit status provide a comparative advantage?

Reliable access to dependable, high quality childcare services is a vital concern for large numbers of American families. The childcare industry consists of private nonprofit, private for-profit, and governmental providers that differ along many dimensions, including quality, clientele served, and organizational stability. Nonprofit providers are theorized to provide higher quality services given comparative tax advantages, higher levels of consumer trust, and management by mission driven entrepreneurs. This study examines the influence of ownership structure, defined as nonprofit, for-profit sole proprietors, for-profit companies, and governmental centers, on organizational instability, defined as childcare center closures. Using a cross sectional data set of 15724 childcare licenses in California for 2007, we model the predicted closures of childcare centers as a function of ownership structure as well as center age and capacity. Findings indicate that for small centers (capacity of 30 or less) nonprofits are more likely to close, but for larger centers (capacity 30 +) nonprofits are less likely to close. This suggests that the comparative advantages available for nonprofit organizations may be better utilized by larger centers than by small centers. We consider the implications of our findings for parents, practitioners, and social policy.     

养老服务的逻辑、实现方式与治理路径

养老服务是不同供给主体将不同内容、质量和价格的养老产品或项目,以不同的方式配送到不同需求老年群体的过程。不同供给主体基于责任驱动和利益驱动,为需求主体提供适应性养老服务,是养老服务的基本逻辑。养老服务的实现,是在特定地域、特定的社会关系网络中,通过优化配置养老服务资源,聚集整合养老服务资本,来保障有质量、有尊严的老年生活。鉴于养老服务供给的多元性和需求的复杂性,养老服务的治理则需要运用先进的合作治理与参与治理理念、选择科学的治理工具和现代化的治理技术,保障养老服务供给与需求的适应性匹配,进而保障养老服务实现方式的有序运行。     

Debating Eco/Feminist Natures

This article discusses the experiences in municipal politics of indigenous women in Oaxaca, Mexico. The data base includes in-depth interviews with the eighteen women who have been elected mayor since 1995, when the Government of Oaxaca legally recognized indigenous self-government. By looking at the women as in/outsiders of their own culture, the article examines the ways in which they question various components of the indigenous autonomous project as well as the performance of western political institutions such as political parties and the educational system. Women's views go beyond the tradition/modernity dichotomy, where tradition is associated with backward, patriarchal institutions and modernity with progress and gender equality. Both tradition and modernity are redefined in order to identify the elements that may contribute to gender equality in the indigenous self-government project of Mexico.     

A consumer cooperative association specializing in services for the elderly

Over the past 10 years, a Japanese cooperative association named Fukushi Club Seikyo (FCS) has developed a unique, non-profit business specializing in services for the elderly. It aims to promote a reciprocal support system among neighborhood community members. FCS has successively organized its active members, mainly homemakers, into workers' collectives and successfully provided various life support services at a very small charge. Their human-touch service appears in sharp contrast to bureaucratic public services and profit-making private services. The civil initiative presented by FCS suggests a potential for a community-based social service system that may guarantee quality services without raising taxes and premiums for social insurance.     

New cooperatives and local development: A study of six cases in Jämtland,Sweden

Over the last ten years or so a large number of new cooperative enterprises have been established in Sweden in many different areas of activity. The research project reported here concerns the effects which these enterprises have on local economic development. More precisely, attention is focused on the impact of the cooperatives on (1) local employment, (2) the local infrastructure, and (3) the geographical pattern of buying, i.e., how the new cooperatives distribute their purchases of goods and services among local, regional and national suppliers. Six cooperatives are investigated, all of which are located in Jämtland, a county in northern Sweden. The cases include two commercially operating enterprises, two whose operations belong to the public sector, one housing cooperative and one community cooperative. Five of the studied units have created local employment, varying between 2 and 10 full-time jobs. This represents a substantial contribution in the small rural villages where the cooperatives are located. As regards the local infrastructure, the research interest is concentrated on the significance of the new enterprises in preserving the school, the shop and the communications of the village. Here the impact is effected in two ways; (1) by creating jobs and income, thereby strengthening the population base for the service institutions, and (2) by influencing municipal decision-makers. As for the pattern of buying, very small shares — between 0 and 17% — go to local suppliers. Instead, the effects appear at the regional level, with between 38 and 100% of the purchases being made from suppliers in the rest of the county.     

Service-user participation in developing social services: applying the experiment-driven approach

ABSTRACT

Participatory approaches are needed in Finland for service users to participate in designing and developing social services. New collaborative methods are the focus of this research, as this pilot case-study analyses the experiment-driven design approach and its consequences on service users’ agency and participation. This practitioner research belongs to the pragmatist research tradition. The data comprises transcribed focus group and individual interviews of service users and social workers in group operations in a Finnish municipal adult social service organisation. The data are evaluated by content analysis. The experiments with service prototypes allowed the service users to observe the consequences of their actions in practice. Instead of only being heard and consulted, the service users found they could influence the practice in concrete ways. The professionals and organisation shaped the service users’ participation and agency by operating as gatekeepers in sharing power. The service users reported that collaboration with professionals and participation in the group gave them a sense of renewed citizenship, improved social skills and helped to manage with personal illnesses or daily struggles. The research concludes that experimentation can provide a way to utilise experiential knowledge in developing social work collaboratively.     

Child Protection,Public Services and the Chimera of Market Force Efficiency

The different agencies and professions that contribute towards child protection services have all recently had to begin to take account of the impact of market forces on their activities, yet detailed consideration of the consequences of this are slow to emerge. This article begins to consider these changes for child protection services. Having briefly described the child protection systems in England and Wales, it looks at the theoretical underpinning to the market forces approach which has become a significant ideological position in respect of public services in the UK and increasingly throughout the world. The article then considers the impact of a market forces approach on the organization of child protection services in relation to coordination versus fragmentation, profit versus professionalism, planning versus short-termism, and cooperation versus competition. It concludes that the argument that a market forces approach to child protection will lead to greater efficiency in relation to protecting children is a chimera. The article is thus of relevance for the different professions who contribute to child protection services in all countries where a market approach to public welfare is being suggested or implemented.     

Toward a Culturally Informed Rehabilitation Treatment Model for American Indian/Alaska Native Veterans

American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) have a long tradition of military service, allying with Western forces in North America since the 1700s. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that AI/AN veterans experience higher rates of overall disability and service-related disability than veterans of other races and ethnicities. It is not clear, however, that AI/AN veterans with disabilities are receiving effective, culturally informed rehabilitation services. This article examines the incidence of disability among contemporary AI/AN veterans, considers barriers to effective treatment, and points out model programs tailored to the particular needs of this population, with attention to the historical and cultural context of AI/AN military service.     

Face to face with the 'sovereign consumer': service quality and the changing role of professional academic librarians

This article considers the impact of service quality initiatives on the role of professional academic librarians.¹ It is argued that these initiatives—by asserting the dominant role of ‘sovereign’ consumers—offer a powerful legitimating device which is currently being used to support radical changes in professional work. One possible outcome of this is a weakening of professional autonomy and power to unilaterally determine levels and standards of service. The case of academic librarians is adopted to illustrate these points. Firstly, two ideal types of library and professional organisation, developed from a review of the librarian literature, are compared. These are the ‘traditional’ and the ‘service quality-led’ models. Following this, a case study of an academic library which has recently adopted various quality improvement strategies is discussed. The results of this investigation suggest that not only have service quality initiatives provided a legitimation for radical change, but they have also generated a number of unintended consequences and hidden costs for the users of library services. Finally, some of the wider problems associated with service quality initiatives in the public sector are discussed.     

La transformation de l'offre de services de garde au Québec: une brèche dans la collectivisation du travail de reproduction sociale?

In 1997, the government of Québec instituted a low‐cost and universal childcare services program most commonly available through the “centres de la petite enfance (CPE)” (early chilldhood centers). Since 2003, this model is being slowly dismantled on account of an explosion in the number of commercial daycare centers and, since 2015, an adjustment of rates according to family revenues. This research article gathers scattered information about the childcare services offer changes in Québec to demonstrate that tearing down a section of the Québécois family policy lowers the collectivization of social reproductive work.