From charity to client-oriented social service production: A social profile of religious welfare associations in Western European comparison

The social profile of Western European religious welfare associations has never been studied in empirical detail. It is the aim of a Mannheim comparative project to systematically collect data on the qualitative and quantitative dimension of church social service provision in Europe. There are huge variations in the organizational structure of religious welfare associations in the European countries, which to a great extent can be accounted for by the historical configurations of the church-state relationships. Starting from these organizational differences it can be suggested that also the range of social activities of religious welfare associations will vary all over Europe. Consequently, special light will be shed on the target groups for which social services are provided as well as on the number, form, and capacity of institutions operating in these fields. These data may provide an interesting insight into the internal structure of the third sector in general and into the national potentials of the churches in the face of a Europeanization of social policy in particular.     

Gruppen leiten und beraten

Coaching and leading of groups is on one hand a basal competence in higher education, on the other hand it makes high demands to academic developers, who as ??new professionals?? support the development of this competence. The following contribution is concerned with a continuous education for professional academic developers, which places with this objective coaching as consultation format and methodology for leading groups in the center. This program, conceptualized by the authors, is the first of its kind in Germany. It started at the center for higher education of the Technical University Dortmund in April 2011 and will be completed in June 2012.     

Subjective and Objective Parameters Determining 'Salience' in Long-term Dialect Accommodation

In this article, we will present empirical results of a longitudinal study on long-term dialect accommodation in a German dialect setting. An important model of explaining which linguistic structures undergo such convergence and which do not makes use of the notion of 'salience'. Dialect features which are perceived by the speakers as 'salient' are taken up and given up more easily and faster than those which are perceived as 'less salient'. The notion of salience has a tradition which goes back to the 1920s. We will discuss this research tradition, apply the criteria for salience that played a role in it to our results, and discuss the question of whether perceived (subjective) salience can be explained in objective (structural-phono logical or phonetic) terms.     

Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Politiken und ihre kulturellen Grundlagen

The cultural foundations of welfare state policies and their contribution to the development of welfare states are gaining increasing attention in comparative welfare state research. The article introduces reflections on how the impact of cultural factors on the development of welfare state policies can be analysed. “Culture” is conceptualised here as potentially contradictory and subject of negotiations and change. The article includes a proposal to distinguish three different levels with regard to the relationship of welfare culture and welfare state policies. These include the values and models on which welfare state policies are based, the values and models towards the welfare state that are dominant in the population, and the discourses of social actors in relation to such values and models. Using this approach, two different types of processes in ways in which cultural change can contribute to change in welfare state policies can be distinguished.     

Characterization of Revenue Equivalence

The property of an allocation rule to be implementable in dominant strategies by a unique payment scheme is called revenue equivalence. We give a characterization of revenue equivalence based on a graph theoretic interpretation of the incentive compatibility constraints. The characterization holds for any (possibly infinite) outcome space and many of the known results are immediate consequences. Moreover, revenue equivalence can be identified in cases where existing theorems are silent.