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Over recent decades there has been growing interest in the ways in which citizens can take responsibility for their own destinies as civil society actors. One of the key sites that has been identified as having the capacity for nurturing, as well as for expressing active citizenship, has been the third sector. This book unpacks the contested notions of active citizenship and the third sector and identifies the claims about the varying ways in which the third sector promotes active citizenship. Drawing upon a range of empirical studies from across the globe, the book then explores the diverse responses to global and local economic and political pressures with a view to answering the questions: How far have  third sector organisations’ contributions to the promotion of active citizenship been affected  - or not - as a result of such factors? And how have third sector organisations in varying contexts been responding to ideological, political and structural challenges? The final section of the book explores opportunities and challenges for the future, identifying a range of ways in which new approaches are being spawned, both locally and beyond, for example, with the development of international networks supported by new digital technologies. The future for the third sector remains uncertain - and contestable, the authors conclude. But despite the challenges involved, they identify the third sector’s continuing  potential to promote active citizenship based upon values of equality, social solidarity, human rights and social justice.

This book readdresses the question of how full citizenship may be preserved and developed in the face of enduring labour market pressures. The book clarifies the relationship between changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship, discusses possible ways in which the spill-over effect from labour market marginality to loss of citizenship can be prevented, specifies this problem in relation to the young, older people, men and women and immigrants, offers theoretical and conceptual definitions of citizenship as a new, alternative approach to empirical analyses of labour market marginalisation and its consequences, and highlights the lessons to be learned from differing approaches in European countries.

As populations age around the world, increasing efforts are required from families and governments to secure care and support for older and disabled people. At the same time women and men are expected to increase and lengthen their participation in paid work, making combining caring and working a critical issue for social and employment policy and economic sustainability. This book widens the international debate, previously focused primarily on childcare, to explore the experiences of people of working age who support their partners, older relatives or a child with a disability or serious illness. The focus is on the situations of working carers in different welfare systems: Nordic (Finland, Sweden), liberal democratic (Australia, England) and East Asian (Japan, Taiwan). The book opens with two chapters which delineate the main features of the demographic, labour market and care challenges facing each of the six countries considered. It then presents in nine comparative chapters comparative analysis of the demand for care, the policy context in which family care is provided by people of working age and the personal and familial impact of doing so. These chapters each explore evidence from two countries, drawing on both existing datasets and new empirical material, highlighting what can be learned from individual experiences, considering the direction of policy change and the influences upon it, and summarising key outcomes for working carers. The editors’ concluding chapter considers convergence and differentiation in work - care reconciliation policy and practice, noting the influence of both common challenges and cultural preferences.

Continuing professional development (CPD) has become a defining issue in twenty-first century social work. There is widespread consensus in favour of CPD. But what is it? Are there discernible international trends? What are the barriers to participating in CPD? What do social workers think about and want from CPD? This book seeks to answer these questions. Based on a survey and interviews with social work practitioners, Continuing Professional Development in social work offers a unique insight into the possibilities and challenges of CPD and the issues it presents for newly qualified and experienced social workers in practice. Combining the perspectives of social workers and their managers with international research, assures its global appeal. It offers possible directions for the future of post qualifying social work education, making it essential reading for practitioners, educators, managers and policy-makers.

This book focuses on policies, primarily in the United Kingdom, which are designed to facilitate the participation of disabled people in wage work. The book takes a critical approach to these policies by examining three main issues. First, the way in which eligibility rules and assessment procedures increasingly mean disabled people have responsibility for their own financial support as the legitimacy of their benefit receipt is questioned. Second, the book examines policies that are supposed to support disabled people into paid work. Problems with the supply side focus of policies upon employability are highlighted, as are those associated with demand side interventions in labour markets where the fear is that disabled workers will be less productive than other workers. The market-based nature of provision to ‘support’ people into wage work is highlighted as being particularly disadvantageous to disabled people. Third, the book examines the nature of ‘work’ in the agenda to get more disabled people into paid employment. It questions the narrow definition of work and productivity that frame policies, and which pose a challenge to disabled people as they are based on norms of productive capacity to which they are often unable to conform. Alternative ways of understanding and valuing the contribution that disabled people make are considered. The book argues that the focus upon increasing the participation of disabled people in wage work is problematic for the core demands of the disabled people movement, is counter to the social model of disability and means many disabled people face an increasingly precarious financial future.

This book provides a qualitative account of working conditions within the contemporary service economy. As the largest employer in the modern labour market, investigating its realities demonstrates a number of problematic issues. The quest for profitability, efficiency and customer satisfaction drive a number of practices that can be interpreted from a social harm perspective. The use of zero-hours contracts, temporary work agencies, just-in-time management, lean working, and emotional labour, underpinned by targets and performance management reflect the imperatives of capital and the requirement for profitability. In relation to the employees who work in such precarious forms of employment, a number of harms appear. The ‘Victorian’ working conditions noted at individual operators such as Sports Direct are not anomalies but instead represent the normal functioning of the sector. In considering work from a social harm perspective, the book offers a unique contribution to the sociology of work and criminological or social harm studies. The social harm consideration of systemic violence is extended by an ultra-realist perspective that accounts for the symbolic violence of ideology and the problematic subjectivities willing to inflict harm on others. In its conclusions, the book asks for a consideration of the role of ideology and political economy in debates which seek to fix the harms of work.

This book investigates whether, and if so how, the patterns of change of labour market policies in EU member states have altered since the emergence in 2010 of reinforced pressures on public spending (‘fiscal austerity’). More specifically, the book explores, through national case studies, whether retrenchment or expansion have taken place; whether there has been a shift in the logic of activation policies; and how retrenchment and expansion of protection have been distributed across the well-protected and the less well-protected labour market populations. Looking at the big European picture, do we see a convergence or a divergence in labour market policy trends and outputs? Can we identify different patterns of change across member states? Last but not least, we ask whether there has been a divergence or convergence in labour market insecurity that can be associated with the ongoing policy changes and macroeconomic conditions

The ongoing economic crisis raises fundamental questions about the political and social goals of the European Union, particularly the feasibility of harmonising social and education policy across member states. The forward momentum of the European project is clearly faltering, raising the possibility that the high water mark of European integration has been achieved, with implications for many aspects of education and social policy, including lifelong learning. This timely book makes a major and original contribution to the development of knowledge and understanding of lifelong learning in an expanded Europe. A wide range of contributors look at the contribution of lifelong learning to economic growth and social cohesion across Europe, focusing on its challenge to social exclusion. It draws on comparative data from the EU Sixth Framework Project Lifelong Learning Policy and Practice in Europe (LLL2010), which ran from 2005 - 2011 and involved twelve European countries and Russia. Very little research has been conducted to date on the nature of lifelong learning in post-Soviet countries, and this book provides important insights into their evolving education and lifelong learning systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and academics in the UK and Europe, especially those from social policy, adult and comparative education, equality studies and practice of lifelong learning.

The economic crisis has revealed the dark side of deregulation in the labour market: rising unemployment, limited access to social security and, due to low wages, no savings to count upon in bad times. This book casts light on the empirical relationship between labour market deregulation through non-standard contracts and the three main dimensions of worker security: employment, income and social security. Focusing on individual work histories, it looks at how labour market dynamics interact with the social protection system in bringing about inequality and insecurity. In this context Italy is put forward as the epitome of flexibility through non-standard work and compared with three similar countries: Germany, Spain and Japan. Results show that when flexibility is carried out as a mere cost-reduction device and social security only relies on insurance principles, deregulation leads to insecurity. The political economy of work security and flexibility is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and policy makers interested in the outcomes of labour market developments in advanced economies over the past twenty years.

Recent years have seen a ‘quiet revolution’ in the way that the sex industry is regulated and governed. The consensus around what the problems of prostitution are has broken down and in its place a plethora of contradictory themes has emerged. This book examines the total package of reforms and proposals that have been introduced in this area since May 2000. It provides a detailed analysis and critical reflection on the processes, assumptions, and contradictions shaping the UK's emerging prostitution policy. What are the unintended consequences of recent policies and how do they impact on the populations that they regulate? Do they contain any possibility for radical intervention and/or new ways of governing prostitution? The book describes the impact these policies have on indoor sex workers, street-based sex workers, young people, men, and those with drug-misuse issues. It also looks at the assumptions made by policy makers about the various constituencies affected, including the communities in which sex work takes place. The book addresses the contradictions in current policy on prostitution in England and Wales.

The focal point for this book is on the ‘how’ of resilience, the on-the-ground processes surrounding the fate of residual inner-city areas deemed ‘service hubs’ (e.g. clusters of voluntary sector organizations) faced with the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. Put as a question, what accounts for their resilience when other arrangements of collective consumption (especially social housing) have been severely curtailed or fallen by the wayside entirely? After all, even those most convinced of pervasive neoliberalism acknowledge that residual mechanisms of support, survival and ‘staying put’ from bygone eras still persist in the city – it is just that they ignore or assume away the resilience inherent in this process, the actual means of resilience, the agents of resilience, the consequences of such resilience, and how these tendencies may differ comparatively. These empirical and conceptual gaps will map onto to five cornerstones that structure the book: neoliberalism and post-welfarism as the context and the threat; resilience as the response and the organizing concept; the voluntary sector as the agent; the inner-city as the territorial focus; and comparison as the method. Empirically and comparatively, the book seeks to understand how processes of resilience play out across 10 different inner-city neighborhoods in 3 global city-regions (London, Los Angeles and Sydney), in an attempt to learn from these places, both differences and similarities.

This book discusses current social and caring welfare professions and their practices in a number of European countries in a comprehensive and structured way. It presents research-based knowledge in order to offer insights into the current practices of social and caring welfare professions in countries with different cultural, social and political contexts, as well as deeper knowledge about the subtle, dynamic, affective and interactive aspects of professional work. This challenges the view that social and caring welfare professionals’ work concentrates on rational use of knowledge. The book also discusses contextual factors influencing professionals’ work (e.g. government control, organisation models and inter-professional collaboration), and explores knowledge concerning the ways attitudes, emotions, identities and education affect professional work. The book is structured in four themes, the first being knowledge, reflection and identity, the second control, regulation and management, the third collaboration, conflict and competition and the final theme being assessment, negotiation and decision-making. These themes are central to social and caring professions in Europe in the current situation where they face new demands and expectations.

Sociologists’ Tales presents the narratives of 33 UK sociologists from different generations, many internationally recognised, writing about what sociology means to them. The different tales together reveal the changing context of sociology and how this has shaped the authors’ practice. Providing a valuable insight into why sociology is so fascinating, it gives advice to those wanting to study or develop a career in sociology reflecting on why the contributors chose their career, how they have managed to do it and what advice they would offer the next generation. This unique volume provides an understanding of sociology and its importance, and will have wide appeal among students, young sociologists thinking about their future and professional sociologists alike.

In past few decades, most democratic European countries sought to achieve a more equal division of labour between men and women, both within families and organisations. At the same time, they wanted to offer individuals and families sufficient freedom to determine their own roles. But how far can the basic values of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ be realised in the daily division of labour in a complex modern society? How can they be linked with other principles, such as ‘solidarity’ and ‘efficiency’? This book starts from the challenge of balancing these values in all sections of modern society, introducing the Combination Model as a scientific tool for studying the division of professional and family work. Following an integrated conceptual approach, the book explains the historical evolution of the division of labour in modern welfare states. Three policy models are developed to illustrate how a democratic division of labour can be conceived in the long-term and the Complete Combination Model is presented as the most suitable for the development of an integrated policy programme.

After the financial crisis of 2008, youth unemployment soared across Europe, leaving a generation of highly qualified young people frustrated in their search for secure, meaningful work. This extensive collection summarises the findings of a large-scale EU funded project on Strategic Transitions for Youth Labour in Europe (STYLE). Including the often overlooked and unheard voices of young people themselves, this eclectic range of chapters discuss the distinctive characteristics of the current phase of youth employment. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes of European youth unemployment and assesses the effectiveness of labour market policies across the region.