International Journal of Social Welfare最新文献

Swedish welfare organisations have a long history of promoting gender equality and inclusivity, involving implementation of more gender-inclusive language (e.g., non-gendered terminology). This study analysed the use of non/gendered expressions at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, as state policy is realised in conjunction with personalised service in textual interaction in screen-level bureaucracy. We drew on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to analyse 378 email interactions between clients and social insurance officers, focusing on gendered institutional terminology and gendered person references. The findings suggest that social insurance officers avoided a heteronormative language, in line with Swedish official public language policy, but that a gender-neutral language may come at the cost of formality, standardisation, and de-personalisation. The study brings new knowledge on the ways in which street-level bureaucrats manage responsiveness and standardisation in digital text-based interaction with clients.

Social investment policies advocate for more and better jobs by supporting families' work-life balance and investing in human capital. But do they really help to boost employment prospects for women? Earlier literature suggests a positive relationship, but not enough attention has been paid to the type of employment, or to who the actual beneficiaries of these measures are. This article combines ISSP survey data with OECD and national data in a multilevel analysis to determine whether social investment policies benefit female employment, improve job prospects, and apply to all women irrespective of their educational level. We find that training and childcare policies are associated with higher employment levels, however, the claim that social investment increases chances for better job prospects finds little empirical support. These findings suggest that active labour market and childcare policies are associated with more women's employment, but they might still be following a push to ‘just work’.

Promoting outflow from the welfare system has been one of the main objectives of activation-focused welfare reforms implemented across Europe over the past decades, with the underlying assumption that labour market attachment is the route to self-sufficiency. This article assesses this assumption by investigating the extent to which the propensities and determinants of welfare persistence and cycling are differential for native and second-generation young adults located in the opposite ends of labour market structure. Using panel administrative data from the Statistics Netherlands (CBS), it follows the welfare-to-work transitions of Dutch native and second-generation young adults in the Netherlands during a 6-year observation period (2010–2015). Simultaneous effects of labour market segmentation and ethnic penalty are modelled using a first-order Markov transition model that accounts for endogeneities from initial conditions and unobserved heterogeneity. The results suggest that welfare exit is not a good predictor of self-sufficiency in the Dutch context, and there are differential prospects for achieving and sustaining self-sufficiency among Dutch native and second-generation young adults. A considerable degree of welfare persistence in the medium term and welfare cycling in the long term are found among individuals who had fallen out of self-sufficiency. Such patterns of precarious welfare-to-work transitions are particularly common among non-Dutch workers employed in the secondary labour market.

The article analyses a new culture of responsibilisation implicated in a recent management reform in the Swedish Public Employment Service. Based on an interview study and organisational documents, it is shown that the reform entails a new form of responsibilisation of jobseekers as well as caseworkers. As jobseekers are expected to ‘carry their own case’ through the administrative job-search process, they are obliged to manage tasks that used to be in the caseworker's area of responsibility. Furthermore, caseworkers are expected to regulate themselves in new ways and change their mind-set according to new organisational values and behavioural norms, requiring a restraining of their availability to clients. It is argued that the employment agency is increasingly turned into the agency of the active and responsible jobseeker, which entails one further shift towards individual responsibility in Swedish labour market policy and one further step towards the breakup of a personal caseworker–jobseeker relationship.

With the increasing aging of the Chinese population, the issue of safeguarding the welfare of older adults has emerged in social governance. Currently, the primary strategy to address this issue is the guardianship system, which is plagued with various challenges in judicial practice. Through two consecutive and contingent studies, for the first time, this research investigated the status quo of China's guardianship disputes involving older adult wards, analysed the missing role of social workers during the civil litigation process of these disputes, and identified the subtypes of disputes to which judicial social work could contribute. In the first study, 12 members of a district court of Shanghai who have dealt with such disputes were interviewed to explore the potential roles of social workers. Findings highlight the prospects of social workers serving as assessors and conveners during court hearings, supervisors and moderators after the court hearing, and facilitators and carers throughout the litigation process. In the second study, 16 cases of guardianship disputes involving incapacitated older adult wards were extracted from this court through systematic sampling and processed with crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis. Findings reveal the types of cases in which social workers should intervene. This article advocates for involving professionally trained social workers in China's civil court setting to safeguard incapacitated older adults' welfare further.

Variable time work is no longer abnormal in the post-industrial economy and is accelerating due to digitisation and the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous studies have revealed a causal relationship between working time variability and work–life balance at the individual level; however, there has been less discussion of the role of the institutional context. This study examines the interplay among childcare policy, schedule control, and its relationship with work–life balance. We conducted a multilevel analysis using the European Working Conditions Survey. The analyses revealed that childcare policy has a U-shaped relationship with work–life balance for female variable time workers without schedule control. In contrast, workers with schedule control and male workers did not have a curvilinear relationship with the outcome. Our analyses imply that sufficient childcare intervention and its interaction with schedule control are necessary to offset the negative effect of childcare services on work–life balance.

The Korean government initiated a multi-tiered benefits system for older people, but the relative poverty rate of the older population remains the highest among developed economies. This paper employed the Shapley decomposition and four efficiency criteria to evaluate the anti-poverty efficacy and efficiency of major public transfer benefits with the Korea Welfare Panel Study 2006–2018. The results present that the Korean public pension exerted the greatest efficacy among the programmes. The efficacy of the Basic Pension, operating as a means-tested benefit, significantly increased when implemented in 2008 and expanded in 2014. In terms of efficiency, the contributory public pension supported only 40% of older adults in poverty. However, the generous coverage of the Basic Pension since 2008 might have led to more than half of recipients not experiencing absolute poverty. Therefore, this paper concludes with suggestions for more financial support targeting the economically vulnerable.

Concerns exist regarding the impact on our lives of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Using a large dataset of 137 countries over the period 2005–2018 from multiple sources, we estimate the causal effect of AI on individual-level subjective wellbeing. Our identification strategy is inferred from the gravity framework and uses merely the variation in exogenous drivers of a country's AI development. We find a significant negative effect of AI on an individual's wellbeing, in terms of current levels or expectations of future wellbeing. The results are robust to alternative measures of AI, identification strategies, and sampling. Moreover, we find evidence of significant heterogeneity in the impact of AI on individual wellbeing. Further, this dampening effect on individual wellbeing resulting from the use of AI is more prominent among young people, men, high-income groups, high-skilled groups, and manufacturing workers.

In the last decades, Housing First model has become a feasible alternative to the traditional “staircase” systems in caring for the most vulnerable homeless people. The analysis that we present in this work is referred to Hábitat, a pioneering HF programme in Spain, which has been evaluated attending to both costs and outcomes. A randomised controlled trial was carried out and the collected data was explored through a Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA), including the estimation of Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratios (ICER) and acceptability thresholds of the programme's spending. The results highlight the capacity of the programme to significantly improve the participants' life satisfaction levels, reduce the number of homeless nights, and increase the rate of institutional coverage. Even though the programme involves significant short-term expenditure on accommodation, positive effects in net terms are demonstrated supporting the usefulness and viability of HF model.

Rapid demographic ageing constitutes a significant challenge for the Chinese social system. As China has only recently begun developing a long-term care (LTC) policy, care provision is currently based on family care. However, the prevalence of such care is declining due to low social recognition and conflicts between family members' care and work responsibilities. Thus, a comprehensive LTC policy should expand extra-familial care services and make family care attractive. Germany's LTC insurance is an example of a policy that integrates extra-familial and family care. This study analyses whether China's LTC policy can gain insights from Germany's LTC policy in view of the findings from Chinese LTC pilot projects. We argue that a policy that supports extra-familial and family care would facilitate the LTC provision preferred by older people, while also supporting relatives who wish to provide care according to their values of intergenerational solidarity.