EU Children in Brexit Britain: Re-Negotiating Belonging in Nationalist Times

This article contributes to debates on identification, home and belonging by focusing on EU children in Brexit times.¹ The article combines attention to the emotional and affective side of integration with a focus on the effects of the discursive practices of the state on these processes. The article explores how Italian children and their parents navigate the increasingly neo-assimilationist pressures in Britain. Specifically, it looks at children's ways of accommodating their parents’ values of mobility, multilingualism and transnationalism with the revived nationalist logic now dominant. The article argues for renewed scrutiny into the role of public discourses on migrants’ experiences, which illuminate the redrawing of the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion at moments of crisis.     

The Development of an Internet-Based Treatment for Problem Gamblers and Concerned Significant Others: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

Problem gambling creates significant harm for the gambler and for concerned significant others (CSOs). While several studies have investigated the effects of individual cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for problem gambling, less is known about the effects of involving CSOs in treatment. Behavioral couples therapy (BCT) has shown promising results when working with substance use disorders by involving both the user and a CSO. This pilot study investigated BCT for problem gambling, as well as the feasibility of performing a larger scale randomized controlled trial. 36 participants, 18 gamblers and 18 CSOs, were randomized to either BCT or individual CBT for the gambler. Both interventions were Internet-delivered self-help interventions with therapist support. Both groups of gamblers improved on all outcome measures, but there were no differences between the groups. The CSOs in the BCT group lowered their scores on anxiety and depression more than the CSOs of those randomized to the individual CBT group did. The implications of the results and the feasibility of the trial are discussed.     

Towards an actor-oriented approach to social exclusion: a critical review of contemporary exclusion research in a Swedish social work context

Social exclusion has emerged as a key concept within Swedish social work research during the last decade. Yet, despite the plethora of conceptualisations put forward there is a dearth of critical discussion on potential pitfalls and limitations following this fragmentation. This article investigates the deployment of social exclusion in national social work research during the period 1999–2016. Three separate but linked research strands are identified: (1) a policy-absorbed approach, characterised by conceptual and analytical closeness to the Swedish policy discourse on exclusion, (2) a diluted approach, characterised by conceptual confusion and conflation and (3) an autonomous approach, distinguished by its conceptual and analytical distance from the official policy discourse on exclusion. Based on presented findings, we argue that there is need for an actor-oriented approach to social exclusion within social work research. We conclude with proposing a multi-level analytical framework that involves studying the sequence of events leading up to people being denied access to social, economic, material, cultural and/or political resources.     

Organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior

In this research note, we examine the relationship between organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior in a global sample of 165 nonprofit organizations operating in a single, rapidly growing field of nonprofit activity. Our findings show a strong relationship between organizations' entrepreneurial behavior and levels of organizational capacity. We discuss our results relative to the importance of both organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior in a rapidly growing nonprofit subsector. The results contribute to the continued development and refinement of theoretical and empirical work on the causal links between organizational capacity and entrepreneurial behavior more generally.     

Maternal-biased parental leave

The division of parental leave time between parents is in most countries extremely skewed towards mothers. In this paper we argue that, although it may be rational for a family to let the mother take the main part of the parental leave, the division is too skewed towards the mother even from the family’s own perspective. The reason for this inefficiency is that parents have present-biased preferences, which make them place too much weight on the immediate utility effects of childcare. Time-consistent welfare can therefore be improved by increasing fathers’ share of the family’s parental leave time. In the light of recent regulations in the parental leave system in many countries, we argue that provision of commitment devices is more preferable than regulation when preferences are heterogeneous or uncertain.     

Improving coordination in an engineer-to-order supply chain using a soft systems approach

An empirical study in the ship-building sector has been undertaken to understand the problems associated with the coordination of engineer-to-order (ETO) supply chains and to reveal insights into opportunities for improvements based on the application of soft systems methodology. A number of alternatives to improve coordination of supply chain have been proposed based on the comparison between a soft systems model and actual practice. These alternatives were summarised into seven general principles that help define the role of individual companies in coordinating ETO supply chains, highlighting the company’s structures and interdependencies that lead to project tardiness. Due to the specific nature of a project which changes according to the context, it is difficult to generalise the soft systems model. Nevertheless, future research can further explore some of the principles proposed to deal with coordination problems experienced in other types of ETO project operations, such as construction and oil and gas.     

Cost-efficient observation of working postures from video recordings--more videos, more observers or more views per observer?

In ergonomics, assessing the working postures of an individual by observation is a very common practice. The present study investigated whether monetary resources devoted to an observational study should preferably be invested in collecting many video recordings of the work, or in having several observers estimate postures from available videos multiple times. On the basis of a data set of observed working postures among hairdressers, necessary information in terms of posture variability, observer variability, and costs for recording and observing videos was entered into equations providing the total cost of data collection and the precision (informative value) of the resulting estimates of two variables: percentages time with the arm elevated <15 degrees and >90 degrees. In all 160 data collection strategies, differing with respect to the number of video recordings and the number of repeated observations of each recording, were simulated and compared for cost and precision. For both posture variables, the most cost-efficient strategy for a given budget was to engage 4 observers to look at available video recordings, rather than to have one observer look at more recordings. Since the latter strategy is the more common in ergonomics practice, we recommend reconsidering standard practice in observational posture assessment.