Inequality in Social Insurance Participation and Generosity: Do Firm Characteristics Matter?

Income inequality in China has been much documented and debated. However, one important aspect of income inequality – social insurance inequality – has been largely understudied. We use a large national panel of firm data to examine the possible influence of various firm characteristics on the inequalities in social insurance participation and generosity in the period 2004–07. Our findings reveal substantial ownership sector and regional gaps in social insurance provision by firms, with the private domestic sector and those in the central region lagging behind. Unionized firms, larger firms, and firms with greater market shares also tend to provide better social insurance to their employees. While being an exporting firm is linked with greater social insurance participation and generosity, being a purely exporting firm, however, is associated with reduced social insurance generosity. Lastly, highly educated workers receive substantially better social insurance coverage than their less educated peers. These social insurance inequalities are highly relevant as China pushes forward with establishing a unified social insurance system across urban‐rural boundaries, ownership sectors and industries.     

Teacher,Researcher and … Policy Actor? Social Work Academics’ Involvement in Social Policy

This cross‐sectional quantitative study expands the knowledge on the level of involvement of social work academics (SWAs) in social policy formulation processes, and the factors associated with this. SWAs are an interesting case for exploring the academia–policy nexus because they are affiliated with a profession in which the discourse regards social policy as a target of intervention. The study took place in Israel, where social work is strongly embedded in academia and enjoys relatively high professional status. The study drew upon a sample, which consisted of 57 per cent of all SWAs in Israel, and employed questionnaires developed specifically for the study. The findings show that the highest levels of involvement were in activities characterized by more active, public sphere routes of influence within the policy arena that were undertaken in conjunction with traditional social work partners. Social work scholars engaged in these activities more during the initial stages of the policy process. These forms of policy involvement reflect the dual impact of academia and the social work profession upon SWAs. Associated with level of involvement were individual factors, which included academic rank, perception of the social role of academia, perceived individual policy role, and perceived policy competencies. By contrast, factors linked to institutional support for policy engagement were not found to be associated with policy involvement.     

Strength matters: Tie strength as a causal driver of networks’ information benefits

Studies of social networks have often taken the existence of a social tie as a proxy for the transmission of information. However, other studies of social networks in the labor market propose that the likelihood of information transmission might depend on strength of the tie; and that tie strength is a potentially important source of the tie's value. After all, even if job seekers have social ties to those who have valuable job information, the seekers will gain little information benefit when the ties do not actually transmit the information. This paper clarifies the conditions under which social ties might provide information benefits. We use a survey vignette experiment and ask MBA students about their likelihood of relaying job information via strong ties (to friends) or weak ties (to acquaintances), holding constant the structural locations spanned by the tie and job seekers' fit with the job. The results support the claim that strength of tie has a causal effect on the chances of information transmission: potential referrers are more likely to relay job information to their friends than to acquaintances. The larger implication of these findings is that whatever benefits there might be to using weak ties to reach distant non-redundant information during job search, these benefits need to be considered against the likely fact that people connected via weak ties are less likely to actually share information about job opportunities than are people to whom the job seeker is strongly tied.     

The social benefits of water and sanitation projects in Northern Colombia: Cost‐Benefit Analysis,the Water Poverty Index and beyond

Water, and Sanitation projects play an important role in alleviating water‐related poverty in developing countries. There are several methodologies that will not only assess the performance of these projects but will also help to better identify the problem and its characteristics, and to improve the efficiency of the investment. The Water Poverty Index is one of them. It is a very useful tool that helps to measure water stress at the household level in a holistic way, and to identify priorities. It is important, however, to complement it with a Cost‐Benefit Analysis that will take into account the costs of the project. A case study in Northern Colombia illustrates this point.     

Reconsidering “community liberated”: How class and the national context shape personal support networks

The “community liberated” thesis has been influential in describing contemporary social support systems. Specifically, “community liberated” argues that people do not seek support in their immediate neighborhood but rather entertain a network of far-flung ties to support-providing alters. This paper uses personal network data from six countries – Australia, Germany, the US, Austria, Hungary and Italy – to evaluate this argument and shows that the degree of liberation of one's community is strongly linked to one's socioeconomic status – specifically, one's education level. Additionally, we describe strong country-level heterogeneity in the spatial dynamics of personal support networks and find national contexts to be moderating the effect of education on community liberation, especially in Italy and Hungary, thus suggesting network geographic dispersion to be linked to national economic structures and labor markets. The paper thus elucidates the effect of two different, yet related social contexts on personal networks: the class context and the national context.     

Named social workers – better social work for learning disabled people?

In 2016, the Department of Health in England announced that it would pilot the role of Named Social Worker. We chose to be part of the pilot because we regularly witness too many people’s lives being defined by restrictions imposed by professionals. Erroneous associations between the concepts of risk and danger have become the norm in how learning disabled people’s decision-making is perceived and managed. However, we believe social workers educated in the social model of disability and grounded more generally in disability studies offer an alternative perspective. The pilot is an opportunity to test our hypothesis that social work practice rooted in social model thinking can successfully challenge oppressive practice and disabling barriers, thus providing the opportunity for social workers to genuinely be ‘servants not masters’ in the lives of disabled people.     

Totally tall sounds totally younger: Intensification at the socio‐semantics interface

In two social perception experiments, we explore the relationship between the social meaning and the semantic/pragmatic properties of the intensifier totally in American English. In Experiment 1, we show that totally is perceived as a more salient index of social identity categories – measured in terms of Age, Solidarity and Status attributes – when it targets a scalar dimension grounded in the speaker's attitude, as opposed to when it occurs in contexts where the scale is provided by the subsequent predicate. In Experiment 2, we show that the social indexicality of totally is even more salient in contexts in which the intensifier, by virtue of its pragmatic contribution, invites a stance of heightened proximity and convergence between the interlocutors. These results point to a principled connection between the semantic, pragmatic and personality‐based social meanings of totally, providing new insights into the dynamics whereby different layers of meaning conspire to determine what an expression ‘says’ when deployed in interaction.     

What is gained and what is left to be done when content analysis is added to network analysis in the study of a social movement: Twitter use during Gezi Park

As social movements relying on the weak ties found in social networks have spread around the world, researchers have taken several approaches to understanding how networks function in such instances as the Arab Spring. While social scientists have primarily relied on survey or content analysis methodology, network scientists have used social network analysis. This research combines content analysis with the automated techniques of network analysis to determine the roles played by those using Twitter to communicate during the Turkish Gezi Park uprising. Based on a network analysis of nearly 2.4 million tweets and a content analysis of a subset of 5126 of those tweets, we found that information sharing was by far the most common use of the tweets and retweets, while tweets that indicated leadership of the movement constituted a small percentage of the overall number of tweets. Using automated techniques, we experimented with coded variables from content analysis to compute the most discriminative tokens and to predict values for each variable using only textual information. We achieved 0.61 precision on identifying types of shared information. Our results on detecting the position of user in the protest and purpose of the tweets achieved 0.42 and 0.33 precision, respectively, illustrating the necessity of user cooperation and the shortcomings of automated techniques. Based on annotated values of user tweets, we computed similarities between users considering their information production and consumption. User similarities are used to compute clusters of individuals with similar behaviors, and we interpreted average activities for those groups.     

Yet another minority issue or good news for all? Approaching LGBT issues in European social work education

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the questions of why to include and how to approach LGBT issues in the context of European social work education. Referring to social work’s commitment to LGBT people, the article points out its ongoing relevance as questions of marginalisation and discrimination point far beyond formal equality in legislation and normalisation of homosexuality within existing societal institutions. Furthermore, new questions and dynamics in rapidly changing and highly diverse societal contexts bring about new challenges in addressing LGBT issues. Against this background, the article discusses problems of representation and knowledge and underlines the potential of a queer approach. A queer perspective questions taken-for-granted assumptions about sexual orientation, gender identity and intimate relationships. It challenges normalising categories of sex, gender and desire and brings out possibilities existing beyond the heteronormative order. This way, it offers social work education a powerful theoretical lens to address issues on sexual orientation and gender identity not only as yet another minority issue, but as transversal matter and as good news for all. In this article, we use the acronym LGBT to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people. LGBT is meant to include and at the same time emphasise the differences between people who do not (exclusively) define themselves as heterosexual and who cannot or do not want to match or identify with binarities of sex, gender and desire. We do not use the acronym LGBTI because we find it problematic to include intersex people without taking explicitly into account their specific situations and needs. Making a plea for a queer approach, we share – of course – a critical view on categorisations and identity labels.     

Differences between paid and unpaid social services for beneficiaries

In many Western welfare states, social work services that have traditionally been provided by paid employees are being replaced by family support, community support, informal networks, and volunteering. For the field of social work, it is relevant to know what it matters to beneficiaries whether services are provided by volunteers or by paid employees. The central question of this article is therefore as follows: What are the differences between unpaid and paid social services for beneficiaries? The article is based on literature review and focus groups. Our results suggest that beneficiaries do experience some differences regarding the advantages of volunteer services for beneficiaries that can be summarized in three propositions: (1) services provided by volunteers are more relational than are services provided by paid employees, and they are therefore perceived as more equal, flexible and sincere. (2) The effects of volunteer services for beneficiaries are not exclusively positive. (3) Although particular tasks may appear to be interchangeable to some extent, the relative advantages of a given task depend upon whether it is performed by a paid worker or by a volunteer. Additional research is needed in order to provide further validation.