Home Ownership, Social Insurance, and the Welfare State

Home ownership has potentially significant consequences for welfare state policy. High owner-occupancy rates may function as private insurance where social spending is low (a substitution effect). Alternatively, state income redistribution policies could raise the number of home owners (an income effect). Cross-national time-series data show that social spending is negatively related to home ownership, and mediates the positive relationship between income inequality and owner-occupancy rates. This suggests that owner-occupancy acts as a form of social insurance over the life course. Future welfare state researchers should consider the issue of home ownership in analyses of inequality and the social safety net.

Paying for the Dream of Public Ownership: Case Studies on Corruption and Privatization in China

The proceeding of privatization is a tradeoff between short-term equality and long-term efficiency. Under the existing structures of enterprise management and government powers, enterprise managers are likely to conspire with government officials to decide the way of ownership transformation and share the benefits from there. The transformation of ownership will enhance the efficiency of the company. Corruption indeed presses ahead the transformation of company ownership, whereas inequality is also aggravated during the process. Case studies are provided to demonstrate the relationship between corruption and privatization in China. Corruption and inequality are what the country pays for their dream of public ownership in 1950s. Equality, efficiency and maintaining current social and political structure cannot be achieved simultaneously during enterprise restructuring.

Justice Sector Reform in Afghanistan: From a ‘Lead Nation’ Approach to a ‘Mixed Ownership’ Regime?

The article describes the policy-making structure which governs the reform of justice in Afghanistan. It is characterized by an evolution from a bilateral to a multilateral approach, aimed at increasing the Afghan ownership. However, observing the system ‘from within’, it seems currently ruled by a mixed regime, being still deeply influenced by external inputs. As a consequence, the final outcome of the process remains uncertain.

The scoring rules in an endogenous election

Plurality rule is mostly criticized from being capable of choosing an alternative considered as worst by a strict majority. This paper considers elections in which the agenda consists of potential candidates strategically choosing whether or not to enter the election. In this context, we examine the ability of scoring rules to fulfil the Condorcet criterion. We show for the case of three potential candidates that Plurality rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies a version of the Condorcet criterion in two cases: 1) when preferences are single-peaked and, 2) when preferences are single-dipped.

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Efficient nonanthropocentric nature protection

This paper analyzes nature protection by a social planner under different ‘utilitarian’ social welfare functions. For that purpose we construct an integrated model of the economy and the ecosystem with explicit consideration of nonhuman species and with competition between human and nonhuman species for land and prey biomass. We characterize and compare the efficient allocations when social welfare is anthropocentric (only consumers have positive welfare weights), when social welfare is biocentric (only nonhuman species have positive welfare weights) and when social welfare is nonanthropocentric (all species have positive welfare weights). Not surprisingly, biocentric social welfare calls for suspending all economic activities. It is more important, however, that both anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism make the case for nature protection through different channels, though. Our analysis suggests that one may dispense with the concept of nonanthropocentric social welfare provided that in the anthropocentric framework the consumers' intrinsic valuation of nature is properly accounted for.

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Engaging Absent Fathers in the Treatment of Children

Absent fathers are often excluded from the treatment of their children for various reasons. They are often marginalized by mothers, and unintentionally excluded by clinicians. Absent fathers are also excluded from treatment in fear that their presence might undermine the competencies of single mothers, which social service agencies serve to empower. This article will discuss the potential benefits of including absent fathers in family therapy, and how to work with them once engaged in treatment.

Voice and Agency in Social Movement Outcomes

Focusing on the interactional dynamics of movements, we find that two constructs, voice and agency are critical to the development of a sense of “groupness” and can aid social movement actors in accomplishing desired goals. Voice and agency are accomplished when movement actors engage in various processes such as planning and strategizing, completion of goal-oriented tasks and other unifying activities. We examine four social movement organizations operating in separate movement contexts with different outcomes: contested gay politics in Cincinnati, Ohio and grassroots feminism in Cleveland, Ohio and New York City, New York. We find that groups will have a better chance at achieving their goals if members are able to create a unified voice, and if leaders include and draw from the strengths of those they recruit, thus allowing a sense of agency.

Organizations in Movement: An Ethnographer in the Spanish Campaign <Emphasis Type="Italic">Poverty Zero</Emphasis>

During the year 2005 many organizations took part in Poverty Zero, a campaign that aims to reach the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals for 2015. Based on participant observation and open ended interviews, this paper describes the origins, development, and evaluation of Poverty Zero in Andalusia (Spain). It examines, by means of ethnography, how DNGOs (Development Nongovernmental Organizations) create social movement networks, and explores the limits and possibilities of their advocacy activities. The paper concludes that DNGOs tend to generate centralized social movements with reduced questioning of the global system. Nevertheless, as shown in the case of the Andalusian Alliance against Poverty, the more decentralized a movement, the deeper its transformational potential.

Myths of Women and Their Reflection in a Therapy Group

One essential dilemma for modern clinical social work involves the relationship between the processes taking place inside the self and the social, cultural, and political developments affecting a person from the outside. The group-analysis approach focuses on four levels of relationships and communication within the group, among others a primordial level of shared myths, archetypical images, and the collective unconscious as an important component of psychotherapy. This article describes group-analysis therapy with women, analyzing a therapeutic process that used social myths to explore the formative institutionalization processes participants had undergone, thereby expanding themselves, growing, and changing.

Organizational Environments, Framing Processes, and the Diffusion of the Program to Address Global Climate Change Among Local Governments in the United States

Few researchers have examined how organizational environments and framing processes simultaneously influence the diffusion of organizational practices. This article combines insight from major perspectives on the diffusion of organizational innovations and from social movement studies, and shows that the adoption of a program to address global climate change by U.S. municipalities is shaped by social contagion and organizational linkages, as well as by the actions of change-promoting agents. The findings emphasize the potential as well as the limitation of the strategic efforts on the part of innovation promoters to frame adoption in a way that will appeal to potential adopters.

The once and future information society

In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an “information society.” Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support for them has never been strong, and consider the durability of their social appeal.

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Disrupting Power and Privilege in Couples Therapy

Power disparities underlie many of the issues that couples bring for therapy. People in relationships are not equal; often one partner is systematically conferred unearned advantage and dominance. This article synthesizes results from three qualitative research studies to propose a social justice approach for clinical practice with couples. Interventions are suggested to keep issues of power and privilege a central focus while addressing the ordinary issues partners present for therapy.

Use of Self in Relational Clinical Social Work

Since the inception of social work social workers have noted the importance of relationship in practice. More recently clinicians and other social workers have developed the term “use of self” to indicate important aspects of the professional relationship. How that term is defined rests on how one conceptualizes “self.” The authors suggest that from a relational perspective the concept of self changes from the notion of self as separate and constant to self as process in interaction. They demonstrate on a theoretical level as well as through a case example how defining self as process in interaction might affect clinical social work practice.

Why Social Capital Subverts Institution Building in Risky Settings

This article considers the problem of fostering confidence in institutions in a post-war context. Situated in post-war Bosnia, this article examines interactions between citizens and representatives of municipal governments on newly established local planning committees to demonstrate that an individual's confidence in an institution and his/her trust in a social intimate who works in that institution are sociologically different phenomena with correspondingly different outcomes for institution building. Contrary to the assumption that increased social capital and interpersonal trust positively affect democratic institutions, this article shows that interpersonal trust may actually undermine the development of institutional confidence.

Majority rip-off in referendum voting

Many democracies complement a parliamentarian system with elements of direct democracy, where the electorate decides on single issues by majority voting. A well-known paradox states that in a sequence of referenda one can get from an arbitrary original income distribution to one in which one player gets almost all the cake. In this paper we design a three-player game modelling the sequential modification mechanism. The strategic analysis reveals that the paradox survives even with rational strategic voters and though the right to propose is allocated to each player once: the last player receives almost the entire cake. The result can be extended to the three-party n-voter case and is for some cases similar when we consider a random rather than fixed sequence of proposers.

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The inverse plurality rule—an axiomatization

Under the ‘inverse plurality rule’, voters specify only their least preferred alternative. Our first result establishes that this rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies the minimal veto condition (MV). We then prove that the inverse plurality rule is characterized by MV and the four well known conditions that characterize scoring rules; namely, Anonymity (A), Neutrality (N), Reinforcement (RE) and Continuity (CO). Our new characterization result is related to the characterizations of approval voting and of the widely used plurality rule. We finally show how the axiomatization of the inverse plurality rule can be extended to the axiomatization of elementary scoring rules (vote for t-alternatives scoring rules). We are indebted to two anonymous referees for their most useful comments.

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Between Market and Civic Governance Regimes: Civicness in the Governance of Social Services in Europe

The paper proposes to discuss the issue of civicness in the governance of social services by analyzing policy changes relative to the regulation and governance of social services in Europe. The empirical analysis is structured around the concept of “governance regime.” The paper shows that modernization processes within the field of social services in Europe develop along two radically different regulative conceptions reflected into two different governance regimes: market-based or competitive governance vs civic-based or partnership governance. The governance of social services in Europe appears to take place within a mix between two ideal-typical governance regimes: the market-based and partnership-based governance regimes.

Clinical Social Worker as Patient Advocate in a Community Mental Health Center

As a profession, social work has always advocated for clients. Yet clinical social work settings often ignore this important aspect of practice. For mental health services in public agencies, patient advocacy is a particularly vital element because these systems are not always responsive to the individual client. The clinical social worker, trained in advocacy, systemic intervention, and psychotherapy, is the professional most qualified to fill this role. The author summarizes the history of advocacy, provides a conceptual framework for the clinical social work advocate, and provides examples from 20 years of experience as a patient advocate in community mental health.

Social Movements and Rights Claims: The Case of Action Groups in the Niger Delta of Nigeria

This article examines how the various claims to, and demands for, rights have enabled and shaped the various equity and justice seeking social movements that have emerged in the Niger Delta of Nigeria, the key point being that claims to rights are fundamental of the logic and coherence of social movements. The article is divided into three sections. The first sets the conceptual and analytical frame by elaborating on the rights–social movements nexus. This is followed by a discussion of the historical and conceptual location of the Niger Delta. The rest of the article interrogates the contexts of relative deprivation, rights denial, and injustice within which social movements have emerged in the Niger Delta. A major objective is to account for why the social movements have been largely ethnic and most recently generational and to analyze the dynamics and outcomes of the rights struggles waged by the various social movements.

Gender and Value Orientations—What’s the Difference!? The Case of Japan and the United States

This paper analyzes gendered social identity in Japan and the United States, countries with comparable postindustrial economic systems but distinct cultural traditions. Using national surveys (1995), we find gender differences in value orientations to be neither systematic nor consistent. They often disappeared after controlling for demographic and human-capital variables, though not so often for Japan. Other variables proved more important predictors of values than gender, although in different ways in Japan and the United States. We conclude by reassessing the use of the term gender in social research and the cultural meaning of gender relations by addressing the feminist concerns with issues of gender location.