Comparing the Experiences of Highly Skilled Labor Migrants in Sweden and Japan: Barriers and Doors to Long-term Settlement

As labor markets become increasingly global, competition among industrialized nations to attract highly skilled workers from abroad has intensified. Spurred by concerns over future economic needs caused by the demographic challenges of an aging population, both Japan and Sweden have joined this global competition. This article examines Japanese and Swedish immigration policies for highly skilled migrants and compares the highly skilled migrants’ experiences in the two countries through interviews with these migrants. Despite Japan and Sweden's completely different approaches to immigration itself, both countries’ policies, as well as the experiences of the skilled migrants, are strikingly similar. Highly skilled migrants experience language barriers and prejudice in both countries, making it difficult to build social networks with natives. Career development seems to be perceived as a common problem, although less so in Sweden, where labor markets are more flexible. Overall, these issues reduce both Japan's and Sweden's ability to retain skilled migrants. While they share similarities, Sweden's famed work–life balance and gender equality give it an edge in the competition for skilled migrants, which Japan does not share. This comparison identifies which social conditions facilitate or impede skilled migrant settlement.     

A Systems Approach to Social Entrepreneurship

Currently, disabilities organizations are increasingly being challenged by the requirement for individualized service, expectations to show personal outcomes, and the need to base their services on evidence-based practices. Social entrepreneurship (SE) is being put forward as an innovative approach for dealing with these challenges. This article presents a systems approach to SE based on a program logic model. This model identifies the input factors (a strong social vision, exploiting opportunities, maximizing resources), throughput strategies (entrepreneurial orientation, critical thinking skills, networking, capacity building), and outcome components (improving people’s lives, community-building, improving society) of SE at the micro, meso, and macro level. Also, the importance of planning for contextual changes as a social entrepreneur is discussed. The article concludes with presenting three inspiring practices regarding SE in the field of disabilities organizations.     

Disability,personalisation and community arts: exploring the spatial dynamics of children with disabilities participating in inclusive music classes*

This paper uses personalisation and the capabilities approach to explore inclusive music classes for children with disabilities in Scotland. It provides a unique insight into the impact of participation through the voices of the disabled young musicians, their parents and tutors. The study highlights the power of inclusive spaces to transform lives, to build confidence and contest disabled identities. It engages in the spatial dynamic of opening up inclusive spaces, as well as exposing emerging tensions in the liminal space that is created through movement between safe and supported spaces and the antithesis, spaces that disempower and marginalise. The findings suggest good practice around personalisation, when conceived of from a social justice perspective, as a template for working with other marginalised groups and in other professional settings.     

NGO Strategies in an Authoritarian Context,and Their Implications for Citizenship: The Case of the People’s Republic of China

This study argues that different cities in China have different resource environments available for NGOs. Organizations react to these resource environments by constructing appropriate resource strategies, which in turn shape the characteristics and structures of the NGOs of that city. It further examines how these characteristics and structures influence the construction and performance of citizenship in an authoritarian environment. Specifically, some types of NGOs encourage Chinese citizens to be passive, while others offer a model for people to actively engage with social issues. This is aptly demonstrated in an analysis of NGOs operating across four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, and Nanjing—which reveals three different types of resource environments and behavioral models for NGOs. We subsequently discuss the implications of each model for citizen engagement.     

Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a ‘time of austerity’, care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time‐consumers and homecare workers as resource‐wasting time‐takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self‐sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low‐waged care work are required to eschew a rights‐bearing, present‐tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of ‘care’ into those of ‘time consumption’, and by emphasizing the virtue of present‐tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time‐monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers’ pay.     

Romantic Relationships and Criminal Desistance: Pathways and Processes

In dominant theories of criminal desistance, marital relationship formation is understood to be a key “turning point” away from deviant behavior. Empirical studies supporting this claim have largely focused on the positive role of marriage in men's desistance from crime, and relatively few studies have examined the role that nonmarital relationships may play in desistance. Drawing on 138 longitudinal in‐depth interviews with 22 men and women reentering society from prison, this article extends the scope of desistance research by additionally considering the significance of more fleeting and fluid relationships, and the diverse processes through which romantic relationships of all sorts are linked with criminal behaviors. We present an empirically based typology detailing six processes, grouped within three conceptual categories, through which romantic relationships had their effects. These pathways include material circumstances, social bonds and interactions, and emotional supports and stressors. We also consider gender differences in these processes. While more tenuous bonds to marginally conventional partners would seem to exert little effect, as one of the few relationships and social roles available to many former prisoners, we found that they wielded important influence, if not always in a positive direction.     

From Health Crisis to Rights Advocacy? HIV/AIDS and Gay Activism in China and Singapore

The relationship between HIV/AIDS and gay activism has been primarily informed by the American experience and understudied in nondemocratic contexts. Drawing upon qualitative research on China and Singapore, we refine understanding of HIV/AIDS’ influence on the development of gay activism under authoritarian conditions, by examining the processes through which activist organizations interact with laws and regulations, political norms, HIV/AIDS funding, and government responses to both HIV/AIDS and collective organizing. We show how HIV/AIDS’ influence plays out in multiple patterns, depending on the strategic responses that gay activists select from a constrained range of options to shape their organizations’ destinies. Therefore, we provide insights for development agencies and international donors into whether and how international assistance intended to encourage activism and wider social change are mediated by political and legal controls on local activism.