Responsibilisation,social work and inclusive social security in Finland

ABSTRACT

In this article responsibilisation in social work is studied by analysing two Finnish state-level policy documents (called final report and research report) which concern a current activation initiative called inclusive social security (ISS). It is asked how social workers and clients are constructed as responsible subjects in these documents. Responsibilisation refers to the advanced liberal mode of governmentality, which aims to strengthen citizens’ abilities to self-governance through various techniques that include the intertwined elements of surveillance and empowerment. It is demonstrated that the policy documents construct the social workers’ and the clients’ responsibilities partly in different ways. The final report leads activation to be based on shared responsibility and social work to be more community-based, whereas the research report strengthens more individual-based responsibility of clients and social workers. For the clients, the interpretation of ISS based on shared responsibility would probably be less stigmatising and paternalistic than the one based on individual responsibilities, i.e. approaching long-term unemployed citizens as being personally ‘at risk’ and thus a justified target group of individualised techniques for activation. For social workers and clients, future activation appears to be a wide mix of different techniques, moral expectations and possible ways of being a responsible subject.     

Gender differences in social workers’ assessments and help-giving strategies towards single parents

The study investigates Swedish male and female social workers’ assessments and help-giving strategies towards single parents applying for income support. The study was carried out with the help of a vignette distributed as a mail questionnaire. Results show that social workers tend to conform to assessments and help-giving strategies that are consistent with expectations linked to their own gender role.     

Implications of temporal aggregation on the relation between two time series

Using a simple theoretical model and giving an empirical example it is investigated if it matters whether we use (monthly) averages or end-of-period (month) data in performing Granger-causality tests. It is shown that no major problems are to be expected if the two series are temporally aggregated in the same way, but non-trivial problems can occur if the two series have different kinds of temporal aggregation.     

Job Insecurity and the Timing of Parenthood: A Comparison between Eastern and Western Germany

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the economic determinants of fertility behavior by addressing the role of job insecurity in couples’ intentions concerning parenthood and its timing. It starts from the hypothesis that cultural values moderate individuals’ reactions to job insecurity and the way it is related to family formation. With a systematic thematic content analysis of a set of semi-structured interviews with childless men and women around the age of 30 in eastern and western Germany, we are able to show that there are substantial differences in the consequences of job insecurity on intentions to have a first child. In western Germany, a relatively secure job career is expected to precede family formation, and this sequence of transitions is rather rigid, whereas in eastern Germany job security and family formation are thought of and practiced as parallel investments. We suggest that the lack of convergence in family formation patterns between eastern and western Germany after the unification of the country in 1990 is partially related to different attitudes toward job insecurity in the two contexts.     

Spaces of Participation in Pre‐School: Arenas for Establishing Power Orders?

This article reports an ethnographic study of pre‐school children's social knowledge domains. Results show how the children's shared knowledge concerning social status and social differentiation in the group was strengthened and confirmed during a traditional teacher‐led ring game, where they were supposed to choose a friend. We suggest that from the perspective of the children, the game situation may be understood as, at the same time, a space of participation and an arena for establishing the power order. From the perspective of the teacher, pedagogical intentions may be challenged as they encounter and are mediated and interpreted by children's peer‐cultures.     

Basic aspects of evolution strategies

Evolution strategies (ESs) are a special class of probabilistic, direct, global optimization methods. They are similar to genetic algorithms but work in continuous spaces and have the additional capability of self-adapting their major strategy parameters. This paper presents the most important features of ESs, namely their self-adaptation, as well as their robustness and potential for parallelization which they share with other evolutionary algorithms.Besides the early (1 + 1)-ES and its underlying theoretical results, the modern ( + )-ES and (, )-ES are presented with special emphasis on the self-adaptation of strategy parameters, a mechanism which enables the algorithm to evolve not only the object variables but also the characteristics of the probability distributions of normally distributed mutations. The self-adaptation property of the algorithm is also illustrated by an experimental example.The robustness of ESs is demonstrated for noisy fitness evaluations and by its application to discrete optimization problems, namely the travelling salesman problem (TSP).Finally, the paper concludes by summarizing existing work and general possibilities regarding the parallelization of evolution strategies and evolutionary algorithms in general.     

Joint custody and co-parenting: not by law but by love

In recent years, joint custody and co-parenting of children after divorce or separation has received considerable attention. The authors advocate wider recognition of this option to sole custody and visitation, review pertinent legal and other literature, identify indications and contraindications, and briefly discuss the implications for social workers.     

Interne und externe Coachings in Unternehmen

When organizations employ coaching as an instrument for personnel development, the question arises whether they should opt to engage internal or external consultants. In a first step, this article identifies the characteristics of internal and external coaches by means of a series of criteria. It then goes on to discuss the factors which influence the suitability of choice between an internal or external coach at the level of the organization, in terms of the coachee and in terms of the coach. It becomes apparent that there is a situational consideration of the advantages and disadvantages. The article concludes with an actual example which demonstrates possibilities to combine the advantages of internal and external coaching.     

Dependence and uncertainty in broker strategies of research intermediaries

This study examines how a research intermediary can successfully manage collaboration among research partners, while mitigating resource dependence in multi-partner programs. For that purpose, two fundamentally different strategies are explored: tertius gaudens and tertius iungens. Previous literature has not addressed the possibility that the effective deployment of tertius broker strategies may be contingent on multiple factors. Using a qualitative in-depth case study, we contribute to the literature by showing that the effective development of the tertius broker strategies in our study context is contingent on partner type, business integration and product readiness.     

Understanding platform business models: A mixed methods study of marketplaces

Recent technological advances have enabled the emergence of novel business models based on digital platforms. Marketplace like Airbnb or Uber offer such digital platforms to connect previously unmatched demand-side and supply-side participants through innovative forms of value creation, delivery and capture. While countless firms claim to offer the next ‘Airbnb for X’ or ‘Uber for Y’, we lack knowledge about the defining business model characteristics of these marketplaces. To close the gap, this paper provides a conceptually and empirically grounded taxonomy of their business models. Applying a mixed methods approach, it first develops an integrative framework of marketplace business models. Guided by the framework, the research systematically analyzes 100 randomly selected marketplaces with content analysis and binary coding. The gathered data is analyzed with cluster analysis techniques to develop a taxonomy for marketplace business models. The clustering process reveals six clearly distinguishable types of marketplace business models and thus shows that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating, delivering, and capturing value with marketplaces and platforms in general. We characterize these distinctive types on basis of the qualitative and quantitative findings. Among others, we find that two of these types are highly aligned with business model characteristics associated with the so-called sharing economy. The findings are discussed against platform, marketplace, and sharing economy literature to contribute to a higher integration of different literature streams that are concerned with similar organizational types and phenomena.