Health insurance system financing reforms in the Netherlands,Germany and France: Repercussions for coverage and redistribution?

For a number of years, the Dutch, German and French health insurance systems have been attempting to contain costs and diversify their sources of finance, which traditionally have come mainly from social contributions. Diversification may involve broader‐based public finance, as well as greater recourse to private resources and operators. In the case of the Netherlands and Germany, the reforms go hand in hand with efforts to introduce competition between health insurance bodies. In France, private complementary insurance has become indispensable for adequate access to health care. However, these measures have repercussions for redistribution, which social assistance programmes have difficulty in addressing.     

Unheard voices,unmapped terrain: Care work in long‐term residential care for older people in Canada and Sweden

Daly T, Szebehely M. Unheard voices, unmapped terrain: care work in long‐term residential care for older people in Canada and Sweden This article aims to contribute to comparative welfare state research by analysing the everyday work life of long‐term care facility workers in Canada and Sweden. The study's empirical base was a survey of fixed and open‐ended questions. The article presents results from a subset of respondents (care aides and assistant nurses) working in facilities in three Canadian provinces (n= 557) and across Sweden (n= 292). The workers' experiences were linked to the broader economic and organisational contexts of residential care in the two jurisdictions. We found a high degree of country‐specific differentiation of work organisation: Canada follows a model of highly differentiated task‐oriented work, whereas Sweden represents an integrated relational care work model. Reflecting differences in the vertical division of labour, the Canadian care aides had more demanding working conditions than their Swedish colleagues. The consequences of these models for care workers, for older people and for their families are discussed.     

Coalitions and Collaboration among Three Civil Society Immigrant Organisations in Israel

This article describes the creation of a coalition among three civil society immigrant organisations in Israel. The research questions dealt with the collaborative strategies adopted by these organisations, and investigated through ethnographic interviews and document analysis what factors facilitated inter-organisational collaboration. Results showed that these organisations provided complementary services to newcomers while struggling with hostile government policies. The collaboration dynamic between the groups was successful because these immigrant associations shared similar socialistic views. Furthermore, through the promotion of personal ties, inter-organisational solidarity was forged, but overall, these activities ran counter to the dominant Israeli culture.     

The Politics and Poetics of Spaces and Places: Mapping the Multiple Geographies of Identity in a Cultural Posthuman Era

As transcendent technologies, information communication technologies (ICTs) exist beyond the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as race, gender, and class, as well as operating outside traditional binary oppositions such as good/bad, love/hate, and rational/irrational. While a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains a necessary prerequisite of interaction with virtual systems, a vast collection of technological applications now exhibit some degree of agency as they interact with humans and their environment. This development has enormous consequences for human life, human flourishing, and social organisation, raising significant ethical concerns relevant to public and policy debates. It is, therefore, pertinent to explore key epistemological questions relating to the radical and accelerated remapping of the limits of what it now means to be human. While this article does not purport to offer a pragmatic solution, it constitutes an interdisciplinary conceptual platform from which to consider the nature of the evolving human-nonhuman-machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity, civilisation, and other forms of social organisation in the modern hypermediated world. It is suggested that, by reflecting on the various representations of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology from the perspective of the arts and humanities, it may be possible to isolate those important questions which relate to subjectivity, ethics, community, and social transformation in order to prepare the groundwork for a comprehensive and critical theory of technology.     

Tracking Transformations in Health Movement Organisations: Alzheimer's Disease Organisations and their Changing ‘Cause Regimes’

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the elaboration of a framework for the systematic periodisation of health social movement organisations (HSMOs). Drawing on historical and contemporaneous data on two organisations that identify as Alzheimer's disease movement organisations (the Alzheimer's Society in Britain and the Alzheimer Society of Ireland), we consider transformations in these organisations' ‘cause regimes’. By cause regime, we refer to who and what an HSMO is fighting for, as articulated in its public self-identifications; to the broader framing of the cause and to how organisations' public self-identifications of their cause can govern or regulate their operation, including their interactions with and representations of those on whose behalf they advocate. We show that the transformation of HSMOs' cause regime can give rise to a series of organisational tensions and challenges, including the alignment of the public identification of its cause with the patient identities it promotes, or its day-to-day ‘patient identity work’.     

Social development strategies of a non-governmental grassroots women's organisation in Nigeria

Social development initiatives of rural and poor urban women in Africa are efforts that redress the post-colonial economic development planning oversights of many African nations. Grass roots movements are responsive initiatives that have provided rural women with bottom-up management and planning opportunities focused on quality of life issues for themselves, their families, the community, and, ultimately, the nation. Since 1982, Country Women's Association of Nigeria (COWAN), a non-governmental organisation, has addressed the needs of rural and urban poor women through economic activities that have empowered them and increased their levels of self-sufficiency. With COWAN's emphasis on popular participation and indigenous leadership, macro-community development practices are employed, as is the recognition of individual and collective skills and talents. Social workers of today should be aware of commonalities that exists in the struggles of these and other Third World women, for their struggles are not unlike those of oppressed groups found in the USA and other developed countries.     

Peers,proactivity, and problem-solving: A multilevel study of team impacts on stress appraisals of problem-solving demands

ABSTRACT

To date, there is a paucity of research on team-level impacts on the individual stress appraisal process despite the recognised role of teams for solving problems. Applying a multilevel approach, this study investigates the cross-level impact of team problem prevention behaviours on employee stress appraisals of problem-solving demands. It was hypothesised that team problem prevention would moderate the individual-level relationship between problem-solving demands and stress appraisals. Data were collected from 43 work teams comprised of 192 team members including all team leaders who also provided evaluations of their team’s problem prevention behaviour. Results supported the hypothesised cross-level moderating effects on challenge appraisal, but not threat appraisal. As one of the first studies to demonstrate that stress appraisals are impacted by the group, not just by individual factors, the results support a multilevel conceptualisation of stress appraisals. The findings also highlight implications for practice, broadening the scope of possibilities for stress management interventions to utilise team-level strategies such as leadership development programmes and/or team building initiatives.     

Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource

This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann's concept of decision and on Gregory Bateson's theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the article analyses how play is a way for organisations to simultaneously decide and also avoid making a decision, thus keeping flexibility and possibilities intact. In its final sections, the article discusses what happens to conditions of decision-making when organisations do not just see undecidability as a given condition, but as a limited resource indispensable for change and renewal. The article advances discussions of organisational play by exploring the consequences play has for the very conditions of organising and for key concepts in organisation theory.     

How context influences the ideologies and strategies of disabled people’s organisations: a case study from Cambodia

Abstract

Studies of disability movements have centred on exploring how movements have emerged and how their strategies have been devised to effectively advocate for the rights of the people with disabilities they represent. However, little attention has been focused on examining their organisational contexts and how they shape ideologies and choice of strategies, which have implications for the success of their advocacy endeavours. This article seeks to contribute to knowledge in this area by studying the case of a disabled people’s organisation in Cambodia. The resource dependency of disabled people’s organisations on international development partners results in their ideologies and strategies being driven by the latter. This has not only fragmented their resources, but also made their endeavours less relevant to the needs of people with disabilities. This may act to prevent such organisations from building a common ground for collective action, and from effectively pressing for social change.