Social Entrepreneur: Same or Different from the Rest?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - A social business responds to social problems usually ignored by institutions, mobilizing resources and generating...     

Are there electoral cycles of emigration? An empirical investigation based on European data

Economic literature suggests that economic factors and the availability of amenities act as determinants of migration choices together with socio‐demographic factors. Migration has also been found to be the consequence of political instability. This article argues that specific political events, i.e., democratic elections, may be linked to migration flows. By using European data over the 1999‐2012 time period, our system GMM estimations reveal that there is an emigration political cycle across European democracies and across the young democracies of Central and Eastern European countries. We observe that regular elections tend to diminish emigration ratios, whereas endogenous elections have the opposite effect. These results suggest special challenges for governments and oppositions, which are also discussed.     

Assessing the relevance of higher education courses

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program's competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this alignment, a process that we call assessing the relevance of a course. Using information from the course syllabus (objectives, contents and assessment scheme), our instrument produces indicators for characterizing the syllabus in terms of a competence list and for assessing its coherence. Because assessment involves quality, the results obtained can also be used to revise and improve the course syllabus. We illustrate this process with an example of a methods course from a mathematics teacher education program at a Spanish university.     

Choice Functions: Rationality re-Examined

On analyzing the problem that arises whenever the set of maximal elements is large, and a selection is then required (see Peris & Subiza 1998), we realize that logical ways of selecting among maximals violate the classical notion and axioms of rationality. We arrive at the same conclusion if we analyze solutions to the problem of choosing from a tournament (where maximal elements do not necessarily exist). So, in our opinion the notion of rationality must be discussed, not only in the traditional sense of external conditions (Sen 1993), but in terms of the internal information provided by the binary relation.     

Effects of variations in water quantity and quality in the structure and functions of invertebrates’ community of a Mediterranean urban stream

Urban Ecosystems - Urban streams provide important ecosystem services to cities’ population, from the maintenance of urban biodiversity, temperature, humidity and air quality to improving...     

Urban ecosystem Services in Latin America: mismatch between global concepts and regional realities?

Urban Ecosystems - Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the most urbanized and biologically diverse regions in the world but is often characterized by weak environmental governance and...     

Social work and applied theatre: creative experiences with a group of homeless people in the city of Seville

This article presents a series of creative social intervention experiences developed with a group of homeless people in the Spanish city of Seville. These experiences are part of an applied research project that uses theatre as a tool to aid social work, and they are led by a group of homeless people who have become actors through this initiative. The group is known as ‘Theatre of Inclusion’ and has been running for a decade now. Using group social work and applied theatre techniques, this initiative creatively exposes the needs of this collective and also generates spaces in which they can reclaim their dignity. The systematisation of these experiences highlights the potential of combining disciplines such as social work and theatre to work with vulnerable collectives, in the same way Jane Addams did. The aim is also to move beyond the dominant welfare proposals in place in Spain currently, which are intended to meet the needs of homeless people.