Against the De Minimis Principle

According to the class of de minimis decision principles, risks can be ignored (or at least treated very differently from other risks) if the risk is sufficiently small. In this article, we argue that a de minimis threshold has no place in a normative theory of decision making, because the application of the principle will either recommend ignoring risks that should not be ignored (e.g., the sure death of a person) or it cannot be used by ordinary bounded and information-constrained agents.     

Interviewing parents of children in care: Perspectives, discourses and accountability

The ‘parental perspective’ in child care work is a matter of concern and is actively solicited by practitioners, managers, policymakers and researchers for differing reasons. This paper argues that the search for such a stable “parental perspective” should be abandoned and suggest that research should embrace a social constructionist turn by concentrating on how parents' views are negotiated conversationally in discourse. Using data drawn from research interviews with parents of children in care and employing conversation and discourse analytic methods, the paper demonstrates how there are critical issues of accountability, blame, and testing at stake in the interview encounter, as interviewer and interviewee jointly produce a moral version of the client, the institution, the case and its attributes. The implications of this argument are delineated.     

Communication with parents in child welfare: skills, language and interaction

This paper reviews the literature on communication between professionals and parents/carers in health and social care. It notes that there is considerable research on doctor–patient communication and counselling, but much less on professionals who visit families in their homes. While there is a large literature on good practice and communication skills, there is little research on the actual encounters themselves. What counts as 'communication' in such publications is explored. The paper suggests that there is much to be gained by considering research in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics on professional–client encounters. Examples of some of the key concepts are discussed and an engagement with this literature is recommended.     

Narrative transformation in child abuse reporting

This paper examines how a case of child abuse is turned into ‘political news’. It raises the following questions: (i) which moments in the chain of events concerning child abuse are selected for coverage by the media; (ii) what is the nature of the transformation of institutional events into a particular type of covered event; and (iii) what is the dynamics of struggle over definitions of reality and the projection of certain causal links. We compare how the trade press and the national press report child abuse by concentrating on three different cycles of a particular case, Stephanie Fox (cycle 1: discovery of Stephanie's death; cycle 2: the conviction of Stephen Fox; and cycle 3: the inquiry report). Our primary focus is on the narrative transformation of the storyline as different voices and discourses are recruited to substantiate different agendas. We show how different rhetorical strategies are deployed to account for the facts of the case, while linking this up with the current situation of the reader of such media reports. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public support for the social rights and social obligations of the unemployed: Two sides of the same coin?

In light of the ever‐growing shift towards activation in European welfare states, the present article examines the relationship between citizens’ welfare generosity (i.e., support for social rights) and welfare conditionality (i.e., support for social obligations) with regard to the unemployed. Using data from the 2014 Belgian National Elections Study, we found that generosity and conditionality appear to be two sides of the same coin. The two factors are negatively correlated, and most of their respective attitudinal drivers are quite similar in strength, yet opposite in direction. In addition to self‐interest and conventionally recognised ideational beliefs, such as egalitarianism and individualism, beliefs about welfare deservingness – an explanatory factor that has remained understudied in the field – are particularly influential in shaping people’s welfare preferences. A stronger emphasis on criteria of deservingness such as control, attitude and reciprocity considerably lowers support for social rights and strengthens support for social duties.     

Albanian Entrepreneurial Practices in Human Smuggling and Trafficking: On the Road to the United Kingdom via Brussels, 1995–2005

The authors studied the entrepreneurial culture among Albanian smugglers and traffickers using 43 Albanian judicial files in Belgium from 1995–2005. They analyse the niches that these “entrepreneurs” created as well as the way they invested profits. The authors also analyse the personal agency of the smuggled and trafficked clients, and practices that may help to explain the specific entrepreneurial culture. Short comparisons are made with other ethnic criminal groups engaged in similar activities during the same period in Belgium.     

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.     

Axiomatization of ratio equilibria in public good economies

Using consistency properties, we characterize the cost-sharing scheme arising from the ratio equilibrium concept for economies with public goods. The characterization turns out to be surprisingly simple and direct. In contrast to most axiomatic characterizations based on reduced games and consistency properties, our characterization requires that in the reduced game, the players take as given the proportions of the costs paid by the members of the complementary player set, rather than their utility levels. Received: 4 July 1996/Accepted: 28 March 2001     

National Numbers in Context: Maps and Stats in Representations of the Post-Yugoslav Wars

This article critically examines and contextualises the role of nationality statistics and maps in representations of the post-Yugoslav wars. Approaching these wars, a conflict involving competing nationalisms centred upon modern technologies of power/knowledge, I deploy the term “national numbers” to refer to the discursive node where numerical data about the nationality of the population and territorial mappings converge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork since 1996, this article explores how the reliance on national numbers and their territorialisation functions as the lynchpin of a dominant “mosaic” mode of representation of the post-Yugoslav wars. Examining their workings within local and international governance, in experiences of “ethnic cleansing” in the post-Yugoslav states and in discourses aiming to know, understand, explain, and represent the violence, it then makes a case for a healthy dose of critical distance with regard to the deployment of national numbers. In particular, we need to contextualise them in relation to the role of national categories and other lines of differentiation in Yugoslavia. Anthropologists and other social scientists, who take pride in providing strongly contextualised understandings of social phenomena, seem to be particularly well placed to do so.