Naturalization and Earnings: A Denmark–Sweden Comparison

The determinants and consequences of the naturalization of immigrants is a hot topic in the political debate in Europe. This article compares the effect of naturalization on the income attainment of immigrants in two Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Sweden, using longitudinal register data from 1986 and onward. Sweden is characterized by low obstacles to naturalization, and existing studies provide inconclusive evidence regarding the impact of naturalization on labor market outcomes. Denmark is instead characterized by higher barriers to naturalization, as well as a virtual inexistence of previous studies on the topic. Results, obtained through individual fixed-effect regression analysis, suggest similar effects in both countries. A consistent naturalization premium is detected for immigrants of Asian and African descent, but not for any other immigrant group. The similarity across contexts arguably questions the use of more stringent naturalization laws to promote the economic integration of immigrants.     

Social work programmes in the social democratic welfare regime

In this article we examine the emergence of social worker training in the Nordic countries and discuss the possible effects that the social democratic welfare regime has had on such training. We also discuss the development in recent decades of the academisation of the training and the establishment of social work as a subject of research and teaching. The early history of social worker education is based on archival material, national inquiries and secondary sources. Our presentation of the recent history of social work education is based on the responses to a questionnaire sent to teachers of social work in 33 Nordic social work programmes, and on a survey of course syllabi and prospectuses. It is also based on the reading lists for the social work courses in these programmes.     

What Is a Life Worth? Robustness of VSL Values from Contingent Valuation Surveys

The value of a statistical life (VSL) is a key input for estimating the benefits of policies that save lives. Several recent studies have obtained estimates of the VSL from contingent valuation surveys, i.e., by asking people to say how much they would pay to reduce their risk of dying. This article examines statistical factors that may influence the estimates of the VSL obtained from such surveys. We examine the importance of distributional assumptions, the choice of the welfare statistics of interest, the procedure for computing them, outliers, undesirable response effects, and internal validity of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) responses. We illustrate the importance of these factors using dichotomous-choice and open-ended WTP data from four recent contingent valuation surveys.     

The discretion and power of street-level bureaucrats: an example from Swedish municipal eldercare

This paper focuses on discretion in the frontline practice of social work with elderly people in Sweden. The aim is to describe and analyse how care managers in municipal eldercare use discretion and power in needs assessment and decision-making. Emanating from Lipsky's concept of discretion, we identify the conditions of decision-making, which along with the concepts of structural power and intentional power constitute the theoretical framework of our analysis. Eight care managers from four Swedish municipalities were observed and interviewed. The researchers carried out 38 observations and nine in-depth interviews. The analysis led to the identification of four techniques in the decision-making process of care managers: reject, execute, transform needs and control. The consequences of these practices are discussed at the end of the paper.

Denna artikel handlar om beslutsprocessen inom socialt arbete med äldre i Sverige. Syftet är att beskriva och analysera hur några biståndsbedömare inom kommunal äldreomsorg, som exempel på frontlinjebyråkrater, använder sitt handlingsutrymme och sin makt. Utifrån Lipsky's begrepp handlingsutrymme, beskriver vi de villkor för beslutsfattandet som tillsammans med begreppen strukturell och intentionell makt, utgör ramen för analysen av det empiriska materialet. Åtta biståndsbedömare, från fyra svenska kommuner, har observerats och intervjuats. Sammanlagt har 38 observationer och nio djupintervjuer genomförts. I analysen framträder fyra handlingssätt i biståndsbedömarnas beslutsprocess: avvisa, expediera, omvandla behov och kontrollera. Konsekvenserna av dessa handlingssätt diskuteras avslutningsvis i artikeln.

Handlingsutrymme

Strukturell Och Intentionell Makt

Frontlinjebyråkrater

Beslutsfattande

Äldreomsorg

Biståndsbedömare     

Organization Community Embeddedness: The Social Impact of Enterprise Restructuring in the Post-Communist Czech Republic

The aim of this paper is to examine the impactof the enterprise restructuring process, which hastypified the experience of post-communist industry, onlocal communities. It is argued that restructuring has had differential impacts on communities,and one key factor in making this judgment is the natureof the enterprise community relationship inherited fromthe former state socialist regime. Conceptually, this relationship can be understood in terms ofthe social and institutional embeddedness of theenterprise in its local community. The paper draws uponresearch into three large former state enterprises in the now Czech Republic in order to examinethe effects of different degrees of embeddedness on theimpact of restructuring decisions to reduce enterpriseoverstaffing, and to unburden the enterprise of its social and welfare assets andactivities.     

Do Trade Union Leaders Violate Subjective Expected Utility? Some Insights From Experimental Data

This paper presents the results of two experiments designed to test violations of Subjective Expected Utility Theory (SEUT) within a sample of Italian trade union delegates and leaders. Subjects priced risky and ambiguous prospects in the domain of gains. Risky prospects were based on games of chance, while ambiguous prospects were built on the standard Ellsberg paradox and on event lotteries whose outcomes were based either on the results of a fictional election or on the future results of the 1999 European Parliamentary election in Italy and the U.K. The experiments show that, although risky prospects were priced at their expected values on average, trade union delegates and leaders did violate SEUT when assessing ambiguous prospects. Moreover, their behaviour depended on the source of uncertainty (Ellsberg paradox vs. electoral results; fictional vs. real election; Italy vs. U.K. election outcomes). We discuss the implications of these results for the economic theory of the trade union.     

Independence in multi-way contingency tables: S.N. Roy's breakthroughs and later developments

In the mid-1950s S.N. Roy and his students contributed two landmark articles to the contingency table literature [Roy, S.N., Kastenbaum, M.A., 1956. On the hypothesis of no “interaction” in a multiway contingency table. Ann. Math. Statist. 27, 749–757; Roy, S.N., Mitra, S.K., 1956. An introduction to some nonparametric generalizations of analysis of variance and multivariate analysis. Biometrika 43, 361–376]. The first article generalized concepts of interaction from 2×2×2$2\times 2\times 2$ contingency tables to three-way tables of arbitrary size and to larger tables. In the second article, which is the source of our primary focus, various notions of independence were clarified for three-way contingency tables, Roy's union–intersection test was applied to construct chi-squared tests of hypotheses about the structure of such tables, and the chi-squared statistics were shown not to depend on the distinction between response and explanatory variables. This work pre-dates by many years later developments that expressed such results in the context of loglinear models. It pre-dates by a quarter century the development of graphical models. We summarize the main results in these key articles and discuss the connection between them and the later developments of loglinear modeling and of graphical modeling. We also mention ways in which these later developments have themselves been further generalized.     

Und wer coacht die Coaches?

Business coachings have become one of the most important instruments in human resource-development. However, scientific examinations of risks and side effects of coachings are still limited. This article presents first empirical results regarding negative effects of coaching for clients. Further, we explore which negative effects result from coachings for coaches. 20 coaching experts were questioned within a problem-centered interview. Results show that negative effects for coaches and clients are multifaceted. Causes of negative effects for coaches and clients partly overlap, for instance when considering the differentiation between psychotherapy and coaching.