The empowerment of marginals: strategic paradoxes

This article is about the disability movement in the Netherlands and its strategies for empowerment of disabled people. Only since the end of 2003 has the Netherlands enjoyed anti‐discrimination legislation for disabled people. But, how important actually is legislation for the empowerment of disabled people? To answer this question, we take a closer look at social movements and their involvement in empowerment and active citizenship. We criticise the disregard of differences and care in notions of active citizenship and propose instead the idea of a ‘varied society’ based on the notions of diverse and ‘careful citizenship’. One of our main arguments is that empowerment strategies necessary to create this kind of society are above all bottom‐up strategies. However, the highly organised disability movement in the Netherlands is confronted with strategic paradoxes that have ‘de‐powering’ consequences. Based on these paradoxes, five recommendations for the disability movement in the Netherlands are presented.     

Variation in Dual Citizenship Policies in the Countries of the EU

While the concept of citizenship has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, few studies focus on the increasingly prevalent reality of dual citizenship, or full membership – with its respective rights, privileges, and obligations – in two different countries. The main objective of this article is to conceptualize, measure, and classify variation in dual citizenship in the countries of the European Union. I start by recounting the historical opposition to dual citizenship and by describing its emergence in recent decades. I then develop a “Citizenshi Policy Index” that accounts for some of the intricacies associated with citizenship policies in general and dual citizenship policies in particular. I go on to apply these measures to the fifteen “older” EU countries in both the 1980s and the contemporary period – thus allowing for an analsis of the changes that have taken place over the past two decades members. Overall, the findings point to surprisingly resilient national differences that stand out in contrast to the EU's institutional “harmonization” in so many other areas.     

CHAPTER 2: Background Forces in Policies for Care and Treatment of Disability

No abstract available for this article.     

Citizenship and Labor Market Position: Turkish Immigrants in Germany and the Netherlands1

The relation between citizenship and labor market position is complex. Besides a causal impact from citizenship towards labor market position, several selection mechanisms may cause particular immigrants to choose for naturalization. We investigate the empirical relation on the basis of German and Dutch survey data. For the Netherlands we find a positive relation between citizenship and labor market position, while for Germany we find mixed results as citizenship is negatively related to tenured employment. The contrasting results may be explained by institutional differences. In Germany, economic self-reliance is more strictly required for naturalization than in the Netherlands. This may lead to a stronger incentive to naturalize for workers with a temporary contract in Germany.     

Equal Opportunities Policies in English Schools: Towards Greater Gender Equality in the Teaching Workforce?

The under‐representation of women in promoted posts is one particular pattern of occupational segregation by gender across post‐industrial societies. This phenomenon also characterizes those professions which have been described as ‘women‐friendly’, such as teaching. The development of national and European legislation and recommendations on equal opportunities reflects this concern to address the gender imbalance among the workforce. But do schools identify women's under‐representation in promoted posts as an issue? To what extent do school's policies recognize and remedy the gender imbalance at managerial level? To answer these questions this article draws on a study of women teachers' careers in nursery, primary and secondary education in England. It shows that school equal opportunities policy statements widely ignore the under‐representation of women in school managerial positions. It suggests that the constructions of gender issues in schools by those in charge of designing and implementing school policies, that is, head‐teachers and governors, represent a key hindering factor for equal opportunities policies to contribute to greater gender equality. A major argument in the article is that because head‐teachers' and governors' discourses do not always fundamentally challenge the position of women in society, school policies and practices can offer only a limited contribution to gender equality.     

Doing Disability: Disability Formations in the Search for Work*

Disability theorists have spent much time discussing how disability is defined. The theoretical roots for these debates reside in the medical, structural, and minority models of disability. The medical model views disability as equivalent to a functional impairment; the minority model sees a lack of equal rights as a primary impediment to social equality between able and disabled populations; and the structural model looks to environmental factors as the cause of disability. While debates over how to define disability are informative, there is currently an insufficient amount of empirical research looking at how people come to identify themselves as having a disability. Rather than focus on how disability is (or should be) defined, herein we look at how disability identities are constructed as people search for work. We show that people's interactions with employers and employment agencies have important influences on how disability identities are constructed. We borrow from the “doing gender” and “racial formations” paradigms to introduce an interactive approach to looking at how disability identities are constructed. We introduce the concept of disability formation to highlight how disability identities are continually negotiated through interactions with employment agencies and employers. Our findings are based on focus groups with 58 people who self‐identified as having a disability and were working or searching for work.     

The Construction of Gendered Citizenship at the Welfare Office: An Ethnographic Comparison of Welfare-to-Work Workshops in the United States and the Netherlands

In 1996 both the Netherlands and the United States adopted welfarelegislation that aimed to exchange single mothers’ relianceon the welfare state for dependence on the labor market. Thislegislation seems to indicate an end to gender-differentiatedsocial citizenship rights. However, ethnographic research onwelfare reform implementation shows that citizenship does notget constructed solely at the level of legislation. In-depthresearch in one site in the United States and one site in theNetherlands illustrates that citizenship continues to be genderedin specific ways despite the apparent end of gender differentiationat the level of policy formation.     

Not All Laws are Created Equal: Legal Differences in State Non-Discrimination Laws and the Impact of LGBT Employment Protections

In this paper, I study the impact of legal differences in state employment nondiscrimination acts (ENDAs) for gay men and lesbian women on labor market outcomes. Employing a DDD approach, I show that enacting an employment non-discrimination act is associated with increased wages of gay men and decreased employment of lesbian women. If all employment non-discrimination acts are treated as identical, these laws increased the hourly wages of gay men by 2.7% and decreased the employment of lesbian women by 1.7% and their hours worked by 0.7 hours. The results show that the strength of the law can result in heteroge-neous effects of the laws for gay men, but not for lesbian women. ENDAs with both punitive and compensatory damage provisions resulted in smaller wage increases for gay men than ENDAs with only compensatory damage provisions. ENDAs with longer statutes of limitations for complaints increased the employment of gay men, whereas laws with shorter statutes of limitations decreased employment. Based on the estimates from the state-level employment non-discrimination acts, I argue that extending federal protections under Title VII would lead to a small increase in the wages of gay men, but would significantly reduce the employment of lesbian women.     

Learning contracts in the classroom: Tools for empowerment and accountability

This paper describes the results of a study investigating learning contracts as tools for empowerment and accountability. Students ( N = 100) enrolled in five, graduate-level courses completed a brief instrument measuring key concepts of empowerment. In each class students' mean, final scores, based on first and final drafts of assignments were compared. Students felt they had decision-making power, and reported a sense of personal responsibility for their learning experience. They also demonstrated significant improvements in performance ( p < 0.0001) after revising their assignments. The findings suggest that learning contracts are an effective tool for responsibly sharing power and promoting better performance outcomes.     

All Touches are not Created Equal: Effects of Form and Duration on Observers' Interpretations of an Embrace

While several investigations have been directed at identifying the interpretations and perceptual outcomes of nonverbal behaviors, many have presented the stimulus behaviors in a static and unidimensional form that does not take into account the potential influences of their form, duration, or other dynamic features. The present experiment examined the effects of form and duration on observers' perceptions of, and attributions about, an embrace. One hundred sixty-four participants observed a videotape of two communicators enacting one of three forms of embrace for one of three durations. The results indicate that the egalitarianism of an embrace and its duration influence perceptions of its expectedness, its evaluation, how intimate it is interpreted to be, and what kind of relational attributions are made about the communicators.     

Not All Gestures are Created Equal: The Effects of Typical and Atypical Iconic Gestures on Narrative Comprehension

Observing hand gestures during learning consistently benefits learners across a variety of tasks. How observation of gestures benefits learning, however, is yet unanswered, and cannot be answered without further understanding which types of gestures aid learning. Specifically, the effects of observing varying types of iconic gestures are yet to be established. Across two studies we examined the role that observing different types of iconic hand gestures has in assisting adult narrative comprehension. Some iconic hand gestures (typical gestures) were produced more frequently than others (atypical gestures). Crucially, observing these different types of gestures during a narrative comprehension task did not provide equal benefit for comprehension. Rather, observing typical gestures significantly enhanced narrative comprehension beyond observing atypical gestures or no gestures. We argue that iconic gestures may be split into separate categories of typical and atypical gestures, which in turn have differential effects on narrative comprehension.     

Temporary Work in the Public Services: Implications for Equal Opportunities

This article examines the impact of the growing number of temporary employment contracts in the public sector on equal opportunity theory, policy and practice. Quantitative and qualitative data from two case study local authorities are utilized to examine the mechanisms by which temporary work becomes an equal opportunities issue. A strong association between part‐time work and temporary employment status is demonstrated as an important aspect of the gendered nature of temporary work. Links between ethnicity and temporary work are less clear but are based upon the insecurity of targeted funding for teachers and the under‐valuation of the skills of the workers concerned. The data indicate that temporary workers are largely excluded from equal opportunity policy and practice, bringing into question a concept of equality that can permit less favourable treatment for certain groups of workers. It is argued that public sector restructuring, particularly concerning decentralization and the quest for flexibility, has facilitated the differential treatment of employees, thereby fundamentally eroding the basis of equal opportunity policy and practice.     

Disability in the UK: measuring equality

In this article we identify the key survey data for examining the issue of equality in the lives of disabled people in the UK. Such data is essential for assessing change in quality of life over time and for the evaluation of the impact of policy initiatives. For each data source we consider definitions, data collection, issue coverage, sample size and data access. It is evident that there is only limited survey data on the lives of disabled people in the UK. A number of national surveys include questions on disability, but many offer only limited coverage. There is a tendency to focus on the medical aspects of disability and a failure to clearly distinguish disability from other health issues. Moreover, disability definitions vary and sample sizes are often too small to compare differences by age, gender, ethnicity or locality. For effective policy development there is a need to identify and measure what leads to change in disabled peoples' lives.