Social work as gendered issue from a generational point of view

Social work is a gendered activity in terms both of its workforce and of the students who enter this profession. In this paper we analyse the underlying dynamics of this phenomenon in the Italian context, according to the characteristics and points of view of different generations of social workers. Data from a 2008 survey of 1000 interviews and 50 in-depth informant interviews are considered. Two multinomial linear models have been included in order to analyse the perceptions of younger and older social workers with regard to social work as ‘female work’ or ‘male work’. The results show that the perception of social work as a matter of gender is stronger among younger social workers, and that the younger generations appear to be less oriented towards equal gender roles. Longer work experience contributes to explaining different gender models. The chronological age of social workers, however, seems to be a less important variable in explaining the differences between generations.     

CONGESTION MODELS AND WEIGHTED BAYESIAN POTENTIAL GAMES

Games associated with congestion situations à la Rosenthal (1973) have pure Nash equilibria. This result implicitly relies on the existence of a potential function. In this paper we provide a characterization of potential games in terms of coordination games and dummy games. Second, we extend Rosenthal's congestion model to an incomplete information setting, and show that the related Bayesian games are potential games and therefore have pure Bayesian equilibria.     

Competences and social participation in local social policies: the Italian Area Social Plans

Drawing on the results of research on 20 Area Social Plans, the article analyses the competences for participation and the role that they perform as a linkage between models/theories and practices of participation. We investigate in particular the conceptual models and representations of officials and politicians in regard to the competences deemed important for promoting social participation. Besides giving voice to those who actually design and implement the Plans, often working on the front line, these representations enlighten the strengths and weaknesses of social participation. The underlying trend that emerges from the research is the centrality of a relational framework of participation. This entails some problems. There is a risk of a reductive vision which gives overwhelming weight to personal skills of communicative type. This would devalue both institutional contexts (in terms of resources and facilitating factors or, conversely, disincentives) and the intersubjective dimension at the basis of communicative skills. The risk, in short, is the trivialisation of relational skills. The most important point is that conceiving skills as equivalent to personal abilities leads to evasion of questions concerning how to elicit, transmit, and reorganise knowledge for participation.     

Asylum seekers in Europe: the warm glow of a hot potato

The Common European Asylum System calls for increased coordination of the European Union (EU) countries’ policies towards asylum seekers and refugees. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis of the effects of coordination, explicitly modelling the democratic process through which policy is determined. In a symmetric, two-country citizen-candidate setup, in which accepting asylum seekers in one country generates a cross-border externality in the other, we show that coordination is desirable. Internalizing the externality leads to a welfare improvement over the non-cooperative outcome. However, contrary to suggestions by many observers, we show that allowing for cross-country transfers in the cooperative outcome leads to a welfare inferior outcome because the possibility of compensation exacerbates strategic delegation effects.