Accounts of professional and institutional tension in the context of Swedish elderly care

This article describes need assessment dialogues, the circumstances surrounding care, and the provision of residential care and in-home support for the elderly in Sweden, as seen from a communicative perspective. The purpose was to systematically describe and analyse the accounts of welfare officers concerning elderly care. The research questions were: How is the internal care context perceived and constituted through discourse? How do welfare officers manage the daily demands, expectations, tasks, and dilemmas in the encounter with the individual citizen? What significance do the welfare officers give their work and their professional tasks?Eleven interviews with welfare officers from elderly and handicapped care organisation of three municipalities were held, and a discursive analysis was made from the collected data. Four characteristic discursive phenomena in the welfare officers' accounts were observed: (I) the rights of the elderly, (II) living at home, (III) good relations, and (IV) the complaisance. The study shows that the dialogues with elderly contain communicative dilemmas and mixed loyalties. The welfare officers navigate between different perspectives and double approaches. She/he uses the navigating as a strategy and proficiency in their work. However, these proficiencies remain largely unnoticed and unreflected as techniques, strategies, or tools for attaining favourable care.     

The use and non‐use of assistive technologies from the world of information and communication technology by visually impaired young people: a walk on the tightrope of peer inclusion

In affluent societies how people use technology is symbolic of various values and identities. This article investigates the symbolic values and use of assistive technologies from the world of information and communication technology (ICT) in the daily lives of 11 visually impaired young Norwegians. The article draws on a qualitative interview study and employs an interactionist approach. While the use of ICT is found to symbolise competence, belonging and independence, the use of ICT assistive technologies is found to symbolise restriction, difference and dependency. Thus, ICT and ICT assistive technologies have inherently contradictory sets of associations. To fit in as ordinary young people the visually impaired participants reject ICT assistive technologies whenever possible. The partially sighted participants who are somehow capable of participating in online interactions with their peers without ICT assistive technologies reject them. The blind participants, however, do not have the option of participating online without ICT assistive technologies and, consequently, they accept ICT assistive technologies.     

Resistance as a means of creating accountability in child welfare institutions

This paper investigates the identity constructions of youths who are objects of special interventions in the area of child welfare. The aim of the paper was to explore the various dimensions of resistance to institutional identities among youths in special schools and foster‐care institutions. Interviews were conducted with adolescents aged between 12 and 15, identified as having social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. The analysis generates knowledge about society's interventions as well as how adolescents respond to offered institutional identities by adopting different kinds of discursive resistance. The paper highlights the different types of discursive resistance that adolescents use to present themselves as accountable individuals and discusses the importance of considering resistance as a positive force rather than as something that must be defeated.     

Collective empowerment: A comparative study of community work in Mumbai and Stockholm

Mumbai and Stockholm are worlds apart in terms of public services, infrastructures and standard of living. However, both cities have known common problems of social exclusion and marginalisation related to neo‐liberal globalisation. Social workers are facing similar challenges regarding collective empowerment as a strategy for community work. This comparative study explored how collective empowerment is undertaken by community workers. The research participants were 13 informants from community‐work organisations in the two settings. Semi‐structured interviews were used and were analysed with the help of Atlas‐ti 6.2 (ATLAS.ti Scientific Software Development GmbH D‐10623 Berlin Germany). Social work in Mumbai is in a context of extreme poverty and mainly within the informal sector, whereas in Stockholm most social work is done in relation to a public welfare model. In Stockholm, interventions are aimed towards strengthening social networks, without direct aim at social change. In Mumbai, community workers organise people for collective empowerment to strengthen marginalised groups and achieve social change.     

Inequality aversion and antisocial punishment

Antisocial punishment—punishment of pro-social cooperators—has shown to be detrimental for the efficiency of informal punishment mechanisms in public goods games. The motives behind antisocial punishment acts are not yet well understood. This article shows that inequality aversion predicts antisocial punishment in public goods games with punishment. The model by Fehr and Schmidt (Q J Econ 114(3): 817–868, 1999) allows to derive conditions under which antisocial punishment occurs. With data from three studies on public goods games with punishment I evaluate the predictions. A majority of the observed antisocial punishment acts are not compatible with inequality aversion. These results suggest that the desire to equalize payoffs is not a major determinant of antisocial punishment.     

Capitalizing the Crisis? Explanatory Factors for the Design of Short‐time Work across Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development Countries

This article looks at the financial and economic crisis 2008–10 in 18 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development states and seeks to investigate explanatory paths for the subsidization of further education within short‐time work programmes. Several hypotheses are put to the test: first, a classical partisan difference argument; second, a varieties of capitalism approach proposing a successful joint rallying of employers and employees for subsidization in coordinated market economies; and, lastly, the merged hypothesis that right‐wing parties in a coordinated economic context might subsidize feeling the pressure to overcompensate an ‘issue ownership’ of left parties in the field of employee‐friendly policies. We identify four explanatory paths: coordinated economies in the sample subsidized when they were economically closed or highly indebted. The results also support our combined hypothesis, that New Zealand – a left‐governed liberal market economy – and right‐governed coordinated market economies of the non‐Scandinavian type subsidized.     

Sparse Markov Chains for Sequence Data

Finite memory sources and variable‐length Markov chains have recently gained popularity in data compression and mining, in particular, for applications in bioinformatics and language modelling. Here, we consider denser data compression and prediction with a family of sparse Bayesian predictive models for Markov chains in finite state spaces. Our approach lumps transition probabilities into classes composed of invariant probabilities, such that the resulting models need not have a hierarchical structure as in context tree‐based approaches. This can lead to a substantially higher rate of data compression, and such non‐hierarchical sparse models can be motivated for instance by data dependence structures existing in the bioinformatics context. We describe a Bayesian inference algorithm for learning sparse Markov models through clustering of transition probabilities. Experiments with DNA sequence and protein data show that our approach is competitive in both prediction and classification when compared with several alternative methods on the basis of variable memory length.     

Flexible pair-copula estimation in D-vines using bivariate penalized splines

The paper presents a new method for flexible fitting of D-vines. Pair-copulas are estimated semi-parametrically using penalized Bernstein polynomials or constant and linear B-splines, respectively, as spline bases in each knot of the D-vine throughout each level. A penalty induce smoothness of the fit while the high dimensional spline basis guarantees flexibility. To ensure uniform univariate margins of each pair-copula, linear constraints are placed on the spline coefficients and quadratic programming is used to fit the model. The amount of penalizations for each pair-copula is driven by a penalty parameter which is selected in a numerically efficient way. Simulations and practical examples accompany the presentation.     

Bilanzmanipulation und Managementpräferenzen bezüglich der Strenge des Systems der Rechnungslegungsregulierung

The present paper analyses the political economy of accounting regulation. It develops a game theoretic model of earnings management in a capital market context. Various forms of information asymmetry are examined. The analysis shows that the preferences of managers over the strictness of accounting regulation depend on the nature of the information asymmetry. In a number of instances, managers prefer to be subject to strict regulation. This result contradicts the often heard assertion that managers prefer lax regulation and has implications for regulatory competition.     

Verlustnutzung von Kapitalgesellschaften bei Umwandlungen – Eine ökonomische Vorteilhaftigkeitsanalyse

This paper investigates the potential utilization of tax loss carry-forwards in case of reorganizations of corporations from an economic point of view. Thereby, we analyze the tax impacts of indirect utilizations of tax loss carry-forwards by means of increasing assets’ book values as well as the tax impacts of the minimum taxation. The paper illustrates that the implementation of minimum taxation on transfer gains – which is reasonable at first glance – results in the following effects: Contrary to assumptions made in literature, the consequence of the regulation is that no reorganization can be utilized in order to avoid minimum taxation of current earnings in a profitable way. Surprisingly, for reorganizations due to other intentions it may be economically reasonable to let tax loss carry-forwards lapse at least partially. From an economic viewpoint this is in breach of the objective net principle.