W(h)ither the academy? An exploration of the role of university social work in shaping the future of social work in Europe

A controversial proposal to pilot the training of child protection social workers through an intensive work-based route in England is being supported and funded by the UK Government. Frontline, the brainchild of a former teacher, locates social work training within local authorities (‘the agency’) rather than university social work departments (‘the academy’) and has stimulated debate amongst social work academics about their role in shaping the direction of the profession. As a contribution to this debate, this paper explores the duality of social work education, which derives its knowledge from both the academic social sciences and the experience of practice within social work agencies. While social work education has traditionally been delivered by the academy, this paper also explores whether the delivery of training in the allied professions of probation and nursing by ‘the agency’ is equally effective. Finally, this paper explores the Helsinki model which achieves a synergy of ‘academy’ and ‘agency’. It suggests that there are alternative models of social work education, practice and research which avoid dichotomies between the ‘academy’ and the ‘agency’ and enable the profession to be shaped by both social work academics and practitioners.     

Waged Slavery – Incentivizing Unfree Labour at Cape Coast Castle in the Eighteenth Century

This article studies the payment of wages to castle slaves at Cape Coast Castle (in current-day Ghana) in the eighteenth century. A quantitative estimate shows that the wages paid to these slaves were considerably higher than subsistence costs. A large sample of wage payments is also used in order to analyse statistically the existing wage differentials among the slaves. The results indicate that a complex wage structure had been developed in order to incentivize the slaves to work and to foster loyalty towards the slaveholder.     

Making Sense of After‐School Care Dilemmas in Mothers' Stories of After‐School Care in Finland and Sweden

The study focuses on dilemmas in storied experiences of everyday after‐school care arrangements among Swedish and Finnish mothers. Finland and Sweden, which share a history of strong labour market attachment among women, arrange institutional after‐school care in similar ways. The data consist of interviews with three Swedish and six Finnish mothers. A positioning analysis of four stories shows how decisions related to children's after‐school hours were allocated among different actors. Two reoccurring dilemmas, Competent‐dependent child stories and Unburdened‐deficient mother stories, emerged from the data analysis as related to prevailing moral discourses on childhood and motherhood.     

Conditional covariance penalties for mixed models

The prediction error for mixed models can have a conditional or a marginal perspective depending on the research focus. We introduce a novel conditional version of the optimism theorem for mixed models linking the conditional prediction error to covariance penalties for mixed models. Different possibilities for estimating these conditional covariance penalties are introduced. These are bootstrap methods, cross-validation, and a direct approach called Steinian. The behavior of the different estimation techniques is assessed in a simulation study for the binomial-, the t-, and the gamma distribution and for different kinds of prediction error. Furthermore, the impact of the estimation techniques on the prediction error is discussed based on an application to undernutrition in Zambia.     

A pixel level evaluation of five multitemporal global gridded population datasets: a case study in Sweden, 1990–2015

Population and Environment - Human activity is a major driver of change and has contributed to many of the challenges we face today. Detailed information about human population distribution is...     

Money and Happiness: Income,Wealth and Subjective Well-Being

Social Indicators Research - We examine the complex relationship between money and happiness. We find that both permanent income and wealth are better predictors of life satisfaction than current...     

Auf dem Weg an die Spitze Anforderungen an Bewerber für Top-Positionen

En route to the top. Requirements on candidates for top positionsThe assessment of candidates for positions as managing director or as an executive committee member by means of management diagnostics has been frowned upon by German companies for a long time. There has, however, been a clear change of opinion regarding this matter in the meantime. The authors have developed a model of requirements to assess the competencies and potential critical for success. Six areas of responsibility are differentiated between thereby: “Ability to cope with complexity” and “development of decidedness”, “Will to create” and “establishment of structures”, “Establishment of bonds” and “ability of self-management”, and are divided into three levels: the personal level, the co-operative level and the level of corporate culture respectively.     

Hierarchische Planung für industrielle Logistikdienstleister

In this paper a planning and control system for logistics service providers (called LPS system) is developed under consideration of their specific flexibility potentials. Due to the complexity of such planning decisions (different planning levels and data quality of these levels as well as time horizons etc.), a multi-stage, hierarchical planning system is proposed which minimizes the relevant costs under consideration of the flexibilities. The advantage of a hierarchical planning concept consists in a limited planning complexity because otherwise data collection and solution development would lead to unsolvable problems in practice. The results of using LPS systems for a real-life case show a significant pay-off for logistics service providers due to the remarkable cost savings by applying a hierarchical planning concept.     

On the correlation between fraud and default risk

Identity fraud is one of the fastest growing white-collar crimes today and a serious concern in our information-based economy. This paper studies one type of identity fraud: new account fraud, where an impostor opens lines of credit using a false identity, made-up or stolen. Relying on a unique data set of consumer bank accounts, that contains information on both, fraud and default losses, I analyze the correlation between fraud and default risk. I find that common socio-economic/demographic account holder characteristics have opposite effects on estimated default and fraud probabilities. For example, women possess a lower fraud probability, but a higher default probability, compared to men, and foreigners are more likely to engage in account fraud but less likely to default than Germans. Also, the portfolio level analysis indicates that portfolio loss distributions are quite sensitive to ex ante portfolio characteristics like the share of foreigners or blue-collar workers. These findings have important implications for banks managing their consumer credit portfolios using limiting rules based on borrower characteristics, and for the adequacy of banks’ capital levels.     

Informed Public Preferences for Electricity Portfolios with CCS and Other Low‐Carbon Technologies

Public perceptions of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and other low‐carbon electricity‐generating technologies may affect the feasibility of their widespread deployment. We asked a diverse sample of 60 participants recruited from community groups in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to rank 10 technologies (e.g., coal with CCS, natural gas, nuclear, various renewables, and energy efficiency), and seven realistic low‐carbon portfolios composed of these technologies, after receiving comprehensive and carefully balanced materials that explained the costs and benefits of each technology. Rankings were obtained in small group settings as well as individually before and after the group discussions. The ranking exercise asked participants to assume that the U.S. Congress had mandated a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants to be built in the future. Overall, rankings suggest that participants favored energy efficiency, followed by nuclear power, integrated gasification combined‐cycle coal with CCS and wind. The most preferred portfolio also included these technologies. We find that these informed members of the general public preferred diverse portfolios that contained CCS and nuclear over alternatives once they fully understood the benefits, cost, and limitations of each. The materials and approach developed for this study may also have value in educating members of the general public about the challenges of achieving a low‐carbon energy future.