Class politics in the sandbox? An analysis of the socio‐economic determinants of preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare

This article analyses the socio‐economic determinants of public preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare and how they are conditioned by institutional contexts. Previous studies of childcare policy preferences have focused on attitudes regarding the provision of care. However, when it comes to questions of financing, we know astonishingly little about how supportive individuals actually are of expanding pre‐school early childhood education and care, and how support varies across different socio‐economic groups in society. This is an important research gap because childcare provision and how it is financed have redistributive implications, which vary depending on the institutional design of childcare policy. Using novel and unique survey data on childcare preferences from eight European countries, we argue and show that preferences towards expanding childcare are more contested than it is often assumed. The institutional structure of childcare shapes how income matters for preferences towards how much should be spent and how provision should be financed. Where access to childcare is socially stratified, the poor and the rich develop different preferences towards either increasing public spending or reducing parental fees in order to improve their access to childcare. The findings in this article suggest that expanding childcare in systems characterised by unequal access can be politically contested due to diverging policy priorities of individuals from different social backgrounds.     

Gentlemen v. Players: Lay--Professional Relations in the Administration of Juvenile Justice

Summary The relationship between professional social workers and laypanel members in the Scottish children's hearing system is examined.We analyse the generation and containment of conflict in thecontext of the disposal of specific cases. Finally we suggestthe implications of our material for the status of social work,the accomplishment of juvenile justice, and the direction oforganisational research.     

Parental acculturation and parenting in Chinese immigrant families: the mediating role of social support

This study provided updated evidence on how parental acculturation and social support were associated with parenting in a sample of Chinese immigrant families (n = 255). The results from multivariate regressions with a rich array of control variables showed that parents’ cultural preferences for friends, food and TV programmes of other cultures were significantly associated with more parental nurturance and less intergenerational conflict, but had no significant associations with the use of harsh discipline. Neither the length of parents’ residence in the U.S. nor their English proficiency was significantly associated with their parenting behaviours. Perceived social support played a significant mediating role in the relationships between parental acculturation and nurturance, but not in the relationships of parental acculturation with intergenerational conflict. The findings can help social service professionals to have a better understanding of the needs in supporting positive parenting behaviours and promoting intergenerational relationships in Chinese immigrant families.     

Giving in the face of risk

Decisions about how to share resources with others often need to be taken under uncertainty regarding its allocational consequences. Although risk preferences are likely important, existing research is silent about how social and risk preferences interact in such situations. In this paper we provide experimental evidence on this question. In a first experiment givers are not exposed to risk while beneficiaries’ final earnings may be larger or smaller than the allocation itself, depending on the realized state of the world. In a second experiment, risk affects the earnings of givers but not of beneficiaries. We find that individuals’ risk preferences are predictive for giving in both experiments. Increased risk exposure of beneficiaries tends to decrease giving whereas increased risk exposure of givers has no effect. We propose a simple non-linear generalization of a model allowing for other-regarding preferences, ex-post and ex-ante fairness, and risk aversion. We find some support for it in our data when risk is on the beneficiaries’ side but less so when risk is on the givers’ side. Our results point to the importance of the further development of models of social preferences that also incorporate risk preferences.     

On Preference and Freedom

We consider the role of preferences in the assessment of an agent's freedom, visualized as the opportunity for choice. After discussing several possible intuitive approaches to the problem, we explore an approach based on the notion of preference orderings that a reasonable person may possibly have. Using different sets of axioms, we characterize the rules for ranking opportunity sets in terms of freedom. We also show that certain axioms for ranking opportunity sets are incompatible.     

共和理想与公共意见的限制:休谟的国家理论考察

休谟的国家理论包含两个维度：一个是规范意义上的，即认为政治制度有野蛮与文明之分，只有文明的政府才能维护社会的稳定、自由与繁荣，其理想形式是经过科学设计的共和制政府；另一个是经验意义上的，即认为政府权威建立在人们公共意见的基础之上，其形成有着自然的历史过程，并随着经济社会条件的变化而变化。在这两个维度的基础之上，休谟一方面探讨了商业、风俗及理性的发展如何影响人们公共信念的变化，进而推动人类政治从野蛮走向文明的变化过程；另一方面，休谟指出，鉴于社会大众易受迷信的影响，社会的明智之士应当采取“审慎的社会变革观”，在尊重传统和保持权威的条件下推动正义和自由的实现，并要防范可能出现的风险。     

Autonomous Agency in Anti-Dualistic Social Ontologies: A Compatibilist Notion

Anti-dualistic social ontologies, those highlighting the intrinsic interdependency of agency and structure as two sides of the same coin, are sometimes criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of autonomous – capable and free – agency, or even denying the reality of such agency. This paper contests these claims, arguing that anti-dualistic ontologies only conflict with autonomous agency when the latter is understood in a highly voluntaristic sense, whose ideational roots go to what philosophers of free will call “incompatibilist” intuitions of freedom. Those intuitions suggest that actions (intentions, decisions) ultimately determined by extrinsic causes lack the kind of freedom presupposed by moral responsibility, so when agentive autonomy is presumed to involve such freedom, it does indeed cohere poorly with the anti-dualistic picture of intrinsically structured agency. Herein, however, an alternative, “compatibilist” notion of autonomy is advanced, such that does not conflict with extrinsic determination and is therefore congruent with anti-dualistic social ontologies.     

Mental Health and Social Justice: Gender, Race and Psychological Consequences of Unfairness

Correspondence to: Professor Michael Sheppard, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK. Summary It is not immediately obvious how social justice might relateto mental health. Mental health or ill health is, by some, thoughtto be inherent within the individual, whereas social justice,as its name indicates, resides within the realm of the social.However, where we understand social justice as, on the one hand,an issue involving equality and fairness, and on the other ashaving both material and symbolic dimensions it becomes clearthat there is an important link. In particular groups whichsuffer disadvantage and discrimination may be expected to sufferhigher rates of mental ill health. However, the key to understandingthis is by identifying the mechanisms by which this can happen.In order to do this it is necessary that we do not look at mentalhealth (or illness) in an undifferentiated way, since thereare different processes involved for different forms of mentalill health. We shall, therefore, look at this by focusing onthe issue of social justice through two significant relationships:gender and depression, and race and schizophrenia. We shallexamine the mechanisms which link these together, and show howthey are significant psychological consequences of social injusticearising in both material and symbolic form.     

Preferences and the price of stability in matching markets

This paper studies welfare tradeoffs in two-sided, one-to-one matching markets. We begin by providing theoretical upper bounds on a utilitarian price of stability, and show that these bounds vary with the composition of participants’ ordinal preference lists. We then turn to simulation experiments to describe how changes in basic characteristics of agents’ preferences can increase or decrease the average price of stability as measured by both utilitarian and Rawlsian welfare criteria. Our results indicate that markets featuring moderate degrees of correlation and positive intercorrelation in the preferences of participants exhibit the steepest tradeoffs between stability and utilitarian welfare and between stability and Rawlsian welfare.     

剖析高级社会工作师专科设置与实训效益——以台湾“专科社会工作师”改革经验借鉴

随着社会进步,各行各业分工日趋细致,大陆社会工作界该如何走向"教学─考试─训练─进用"的行业规范。本文尝试以人群服务业视角来看待社会工作职业资格制度未来发展,从当前社会问题的现况来界定医疗社会工作、司法社会工作、学校社会工作、社区社会工作等四大类别社会工作服务范围与工作内容,再深入探讨社会工作行业如何进一步与政府部门、事业单位进行系统性连结,以跨中央地方、行业协会的现有资源来支撑社会工作专业分类的理论依据。同时,另外提出现阶段由官方主导社会工作师考试所存在的问题,同步对照台湾"立法部门"近年对"专科社会工作师法"借鉴欧美专科医师制度的成因进行分析,期盼未来在大陆制定高级社会工作师职业水平考试实施办法时,是否严格执行各实习单位的实践年资纳入考证环节,再藉由成立专科社会工作学会来主导高级专科社会工作师,走向服务专科化、服务全面化的专业技术行业之列。     

Time preferences and risk aversion: Tests on domain differences

Understanding how individuals discount and evaluate the risks of environmental outcomes is a prime component in designing effective environmental policy. We use an incentivized experimental design to investigate whether subjects’ time preferences and risk aversion across the monetary and environmental domains differ. We find that subjects’ time preferences are not significantly different across the two domains. In contrast, subjects exhibit a higher degree of risk aversion in the environmental domain. Furthermore, we corroborate earlier results, documenting that women are more risk averse than men in the monetary domain, and show this finding to also hold in the environmental domain.     

Is Sweden Being Torn Apart? Privatization and Old and New Patterns of Welfare State Support

This article examines the potential impact of institutional change on popular welfare support. The encompassing welfare state of Sweden provides an interesting case where the privatization of social service delivery has been widespread over the last decades. We use survey data from five rounds of the Swedish Welfare State Survey (1992, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2010) in order to study how public preferences for the financing and organization of welfare services have changed over time. Based on a theory describing an ideal‐typical pattern of public support for an encompassing welfare model, we derive three types of public preferences: support for a pure state model, a pure market model and a mixed model (welfare services are funded by taxes but provided by private firms). We begin by tracking the development of these ideal‐typical attitude patterns between 1992 and 2010. We then investigate how preference patterns vary across municipalities displaying different degrees of privatization of social service delivery. Our results show that welfare support among Swedes over the last decades is better characterized as dynamic rather than stable. Swedes seem to take an overall more ideologically based position on the role of the welfare state over time. The share of respondents expressing such ideologically based preferences has increased from 54 per cent in 1992 to 78 per cent in 2010. This change is principally manifested in increased support for the state and mixed models. This trend seems to be parallel to the increasing share of private welfare service providers over the last decade. We also find a link between the municipal degree of privatization and support for our three ideal‐typical welfare models. Public support for a mixed welfare model and, to some extent, a market model, is comparatively stronger in municipalities where welfare services to a large extent are carried out by private actors. Conversely, data shows that public support for the traditional Swedish state model is more widespread in municipalities having a low degree of welfare services privatization. Lastly, we discuss some theoretical implications of our findings.     

转型期中国公众的分配公平感：结果公平与机会公平

本文考察了中国公众的结果公平感和机会公平感,检验并比较了社会结构解释和相对剥夺解释在中国的适用性。研究发现,大多数公众认可结果公平和机会公平,且机会公平感高于结果公平感,但二者仅微弱相关。结果公平感由收入水平决定,机会公平感主要受教育水平影响。外资和私营单位雇员比国有和集体单位雇员更具机会公平感,城市中下层就业者对结果和机会分配均持批评态度。“个体相对剥夺”而不是“群体相对剥夺”对分配公平感有决定性影响,结果公平感只受横向剥夺影响,而机会公平感则主要受纵向剥夺影响。     

Compensation for What? An Analysis of Insurance Strategies for Repairable Assets

We define a repairable asset as an irreplaceable commodity whose quality is at risk, but can be partly restored at a cost. Examples are houses, automobiles and, especially, health, for which standard monetary approaches are oversimplified. To optimize the value of insurance, the insurer and the insured have to agree upon repair strategies (when to fix the asset and how much) and compensation rules (how much money to receive for other goods). We clarify the role of the consumer's preferences in the properties of the contract, and we highlight the relationship between repair strategies and the super- or submodular structure of the repair technology.     

Managing in the Trenches of Consumer Care: The Challenges of Understanding and Initiating the Advance Care Planning Process

To better understand how community-based long-term care providers define advance care planning and their role in the process, we conducted 8 focus groups with 62 care managers (social workers and registered nurses) providing care for Ohio's Medicaid waiver program. Care managers shared that most consumers had little understanding of advance care planning. The care managers defined it broadly, including legal documentation, social aspects, medical considerations, ongoing communication, and consumer education. Care managers saw their roles as information providers, healthcare team members, and educators/coaches. Better education, resources, and coordination are needed to ensure that consumer preferences are realized.     

面对全球化挑战的知识分子

全球化具有不同的层面,这些层面之间是相互影响、相互作用,甚至是相互冲突的,例如经济的全球化与社会正义的全球化。因此,对全球化进行单纯的批评和支持是没有意义的,只有理性的分析才能阐释多元全球化。在此意义上,知识分子应担负起我们时代自我理解的重要使命。     

Group Work and Social Justice: Designing Pedagogy for Social Change

In this article the authors explore the gap between education and action in putting the social work core value of social justice into practice. Describing how their School of Social Work has taken up this challenge, the authors analyze how a new social action course helps bridge this gap and draw on student reflection on their experiences and assignments in the course to show how students concretize and interiorize the meaning of social action and social justice. Learning by doing social action through a case study, group work becomes the vehicle through which students act on social issues and work for social change.     

Bureaucracy or professionalism?

This study analyzes how the work tools of child protection services influence social work with child abuse. The article is empirically based on records, observations of the daily social work and interviews with families. The work tools include 1) rules and 2) professional knowledge and methods. The results show a complicated picture of how work tools are mixed. People-processing, i.e., the transformation of families to administrative categories, can only be achieved by professional diagnosis because of the complexity of family conflict. The diagnostic discourse, however, is rarely theoretically argued, but mixes loose diagnostic categories with narratives of actual events and moralistic statements. It is argued that the treatment of families is politically determined. Nevertheless, there is a room for maneuver for professional ideals and skills. The study suggests that this freedom of discretion does not seem to be used extensively. Solutions seem to be chosen within the narrow repertoire of legislative recommendations.     

新伦理与旧角色:五四新女性身份认同的困境(英文)

五四新女性是在学校这一现代教育平台由新文化启蒙话语塑造而成,她们的意识形态认同来自新文化,是以个人主义为核心的正义伦理;而她们的性别认同及相应的关怀伦理,却使其对“旧道德”下的女性同类有更多同情。为实现个人权利、维护神圣恋爱,她们“忽略”名分、委屈尊严,在新旧道德的模糊地带与有妇之夫结成特殊婚姻。而非正常婚姻关系的缺憾,爱情中隐含的性别等级,个人自由与关怀伦理的对立与冲突等,都导致她们陷入认同危机。新女性身份认同的困境,体现了“五四”正义伦理的道德局限,而五四文学表达的某种匮乏,亦源自这个局限。