Industrial relations and adjustments to the crisis: A comparative micro‐statistical analysis of France and Great Britain

In this comparative study, the authors analyse the relationships between industrial relations and workforce or wage adjustments in response to the 2007–08 crisis, using two highly comparable establishment‐level surveys conducted in Great Britain (WERS) and France (REPONSE) in 2010–12. Notwithstanding contextual differences in the countries’ productive systems and the timing and impact of the crisis, the relationships between industrial relations and adjustment strategies appear to have been similar (trade union presence not preventing adjustments). Differences in industrial relations are therefore not found to provide an explanation for the different modes of adjustment observed at the macroeconomic level.     

Clinical and Supervisory Considerations for Transgender Therapists: Implications for Working with Clients

Transgender therapists have unique and valuable perspectives into how gender organizes the therapeutic process. Currently, in the MFT field, there is discussion of the cisgender therapist's experience in the therapy room, but no known articles on the transgender therapist's experience. This article provides insight into the experiences of transgender therapists around issues of self‐disclosure, social locations of both therapist and client, and clinical supervision. Drawing from our clinical experiences as transmen, we highlight special considerations for working with cisgender, queer, and transgender clients. Implications for supervision of transgender therapists are also discussed. As more gender diverse students seek MFT training, there is an urgent need to acknowledge their perspectives. This article is a call for beginning conversations in this direction.     

Celebrating Joan Acker: Sociologist,fearless feminist,friend

Joan Acker's life reflects a time when middle‐class women were expected to be satisfied with maintaining the home front, serving husbands and children, not having paid‐work careers. After living “the ideal” for 37 years, Acker took a new path by earning a Ph. D. and producing path‐breaking scholarship that challenged taken‐for‐granted beliefs about gender, family, work, and organizations. Acker spoke “truth to power” and was an academic heroine in posing feminist challenges to injustices involving gender, social class, and race/ethnicity, particularly (but not solely) related to the workplace. This overview lets Joan tell her story and offers reflections on her milestone publications as seen by Pat Martin.     

Developing a Cross-National Comparative Framework for Studying Labour Market Segmentation: Measurement Equivalence with Latent Class Analysis

Social Indicators Research - This article proposes a novel measurement model of labour market segmentation in Europe for cross-national comparisons, tackling three drawbacks of current approaches:...     

Finding common ground: how superdiversity is unsettling social work education

For social work education in the Netherlands, the rapid transition towards superdiversity means that its capacity to adapt to this new reality and to adjust to diverse students’ backgrounds is fiercely challenged. The key aim of this article is to discuss how social work educators are dealing with the unsettling challenges of increasing diversity, based on the research outcomes of an explorative study amongst Turkish–Dutch and Moroccan–Dutch female professionals. Two different groups of educators were asked to comment on the outcomes of this study. One of the dilemmas for educators is to determine what can be considered supportive and inclusive and as reducing inequality in education. The authors used two key theoretical concepts, ‘superdiversity’ and ‘the capability approach’. These theoretical perspectives were used to deconstruct the rather massive concepts of diversity and social justice, by emphasising contextual approaches. Both perspectives stress the urgent need to involve students as ‘active agents of change’, by building a social work community to stimulate and facilitate an on-going dialogue. To successfully fulfil a pivotal role in the upward mobility or emancipation of ethnic minority students, social work education needs to be adjusted to accommodate diverse student groups.     

‘My profession is gone’: how social workers experience de-professionalization in the Netherlands

Recently social work in the Netherlands underwent two major changes. Specialized agencies were replaced by one-stop shops (district teams) and the welfare state was replaced by a ‘participation society’, in which vulnerable groups have to rely on their social network rather than resort to professional care. The first change is termed ‘de-specialization’; the second ‘basic de-professionalization’. The research question in this article is: how do Dutch social workers experience and evaluate these two developments? Qualitative interviews with 29 experienced social workers show that most of them endorse de-specialization, as this type of aid is deemed better for clients with complex problems. Moreover, many social workers like to take on new tasks. Basic de-professionalization is met with more reserve. Social workers observe that many clients do not have a suitable network and need professional help. In addition, they feel that their profession is being degraded as lay people and volunteers take over (part of) their work. However, they feel unable to resist this development, because resistance might get them sacked. Some social workers even enhance basic de-professionalization because of their willingness to continue working as (retired) volunteers. Social workers and theorists need to address and counter the move towards basic de-professionalization.     

Changing Indigeneity Politics in Indonesia: From Revival to Projects

Through the discourse of indigeneity, rural communities around the world are joining a global network of rural justice seekers. By articulating grievances collectively, they demand state recognition while seeking support from NGOs and international development organisations. In Indonesia, the manifestation of indigenous ‘adat’ politics is no longer confined to the national struggle for the recognition of land rights, but instead, has proliferated into many localised short term ‘adat projects’. This introduction to the TAPJA special issue on adat demonstrates that both the rural poor and local elites can be the initiators or recipients of these adat projects but, at the current juncture, the latter are better positioned to benefit from such projects. The special issue shows that in Indonesia, where adat is often firmly entrenched in the state, the promotion of indigeneity claims can work in contradictory ways. Findings from across the special issue show that adat projects tend to reinforce the power of the state, rather than challenging it.     

Early-life mortality clustering in families: A literature review

Research on early-life mortality in contemporary and historical populations has shown that infant and child mortality tend to cluster in a limited number of high-mortality families, a phenomenon known as ‘mortality clustering’. This paper is the first to review the literature on the role of the family in early-life mortality. Contemporary results, methodological and theoretical shortfalls, recent developments, and opportunities for future research are all discussed in this review. Four methodological approaches are distinguished: those based on sibling deaths, mother heterogeneity, thresholds, and excess deaths in populations. It has become clear from research to date that the death of an older child harms the survival chances of younger children in that family, and that fertility behaviour, earlier stillbirths, remarriages, and socio-economic status all explain mortality clustering to some extent.     

Investigating the mechanism of marital mortality reduction: The transition to widowhood and quality of health care

While it is well known that the widowed suffer increased mortality risks, the mechanism of this survival disadvantage is still under investigation. In this article, we examine the quality of health care as a possible link between widowhood and mortality using a unique data set of 475,313 elderly couples who were followed up for up to nine years. We address whether the transition to widowhood affects the quality of care that individuals receive and explore the extent to which these changes mediate the elevated mortality hazard for the widowed. We analyze six established measures of quality of health care in a fixed-effect framework to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Caregiving and acute bereavement during the transition to widowhood appear to distract individuals from taking care of their own health care needs in the short run. However, being widowed does not have long-term detrimental effects on individuals’ ability to sustain contact with the formal medical system. Moreover, the short-run disruption does not mediate the widowhood effect on mortality. Nevertheless, long after spousal death, men suffer from a decline in the quality of informal care, coordination between formal and informal care, and the ability to advocate and communicate in formal medical settings. These findings illustrate women’s centrality in the household production of health and identify important points of intervention in optimizing men’s adjustment to widowhood.