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This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes. This book makes an important contribution to the debates in this area by: reporting on original international comparative research; reflecting on and critically assessing current activating policies; evaluating the consequences of these policies, as well as challenging the premises they are based on; including the perspectives of service users in its analyses; and offering recommendations for the future design of activating policies.

While reforms of welfare policies have been widely analysed, the reform of welfare administration has received far less attention. Using empirical case studies, this book provides significant new insights into the way welfare administration is being internationally transformed. Particular attention is given to the effect on welfare clients, staff and agencies. This book presents a critical analysis of governance practices in welfare administration and examines shifts in the participants, practices and processes of welfare administration. It presents original empirical case studies that highlight the effects of reforming welfare governance on welfare subjects, staff and agencies and provides a much-needed international and comparative perspective of changing welfare governance. It is aimed at scholars and advanced students of sociology, social policy, economics, public administration and management, as well as social policy practitioners and service delivery workers.

The idea of American exceptionalism has made frequent appearances in discussions of criminal justice policies—as it has in many other areas—to help portray or explain problems that are especially acute in the United States, including mass incarceration, retention of the death penalty, racial and ethnic disparities in punishment, and the War on Drugs. While scholars do not universally agree that it is an apt or useful framework, there is no question that the United States is an outlier compared with other industrialized democracies in its punitive and exclusionary criminal justice policies. This book deepens the debate on American exceptionalism in crime and punishment through comparative political, economic, and historical analyses, working toward forward-looking prescriptions for American law, policy, and institutions of government. The chapters expand the existing American Exceptionalism literature to neglected areas such as community supervision, economic penalties, parole release, and collateral consequences of conviction; explore claims of causation, in particular that the history of slavery and racial inequality has been a primary driver of crime policy; examine arguments that the framework of multiple governments and localized crime control, populist style of democracy, and laissez-faire economy are implicated in problems of both crime and punishment; and assess theories that cultural values are the most salient predictors of penal severity and violent crime. The book asserts that the largest problems of crime and justice cannot be brought into focus from the perspective of a single jurisdiction and that comparative inquiries are necessary for an understanding of the current predicament in the United States.

In the last decade, developed welfare states have witnessed a pendulum swing away from unconditional entitlement to social assistance, towards greater emphasis on obligations and conditions tied to the receipt of financial aid. Through administrative reforms, conditions of entitlement have been narrowed. With the introduction of compulsory work for recipients, the contract between the state and uninsured unemployed people is changing. The product of research funded by the European Union, this book compares ‘work-for-welfare’ — or workfare — programmes objectively for the first time. It considers well-publicised schemes from the United States alongside more overlooked examples of workfare programmes from six European countries: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Britain. It is the first time that details of workfare programmes have been collated in such a format. This book provides an analysis of the ideological debates that surround compulsory work programmes and gives a detailed overview of the programmes implemented in each country, including their political and policy contexts and the forces that have combined to facilitate their implementation. Similarities and differences between programmes are explored. Explanations for differences and lessons for policy makers are discussed.

In comparison to other linguistic movements in India, Orissa is the single instance of a pan-regional linguistic identity that made a successful negotiation with the colonial state by using constitutional means. Subsequently, like many other linguistic movements that culminated in statehood in postcolonial India, its appeal waxed and waned. It gradually declined in the second half of the twentieth century, as language came to be displaced by issues of development as the prime movers of identity politics. This book addresses these broader questions of poverty, marginality, ethnicity, and identity in Orissa in the twentieth century. The work challenges the idea of 1947 as a watershed and seeks to grapple with the themes of regionalism, language-based ethnicity, centre–state relations, and the interrelationships between development and democracy across this divide.

The 500 million Muslims who live in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute roughly one-third of the world’s Muslims. Their lives in the twenty-first century are challenging and diverse. Too often in recent years, they have been unfairly associated with terrorism, as anyone with a Muslim name who has passed through a Western airport will attest. But South Asian Muslims do what other people do: they educate their children, earn livings, travel widely, discuss their faith, settle disputes, arrange marriages, cope with politics, struggle with governments, and support football teams. United by shared adherence to the Holy Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims of South Asia speak numerous languages, follow different local customs, and have varied aspirations for their own lives and those of their children. The essays in this book probe such aspects of Muslim life. The authors’ concerns range from great political debates that have affected Muslim lives to marriage on the east coast of Sri Lanka, schools and media in Pakistan, women’s groups in Bangladesh, and football teams in Kolkata. This work will interest readers who wish to discover the multi-faceted lives of South Asia’s Muslims.

Children and child welfare sit at the heart of New Labour's plans for social inclusion — but how does the government view ‘children’ — is it reflecting public opinion, or leading it? How does New Labour perceive ‘child welfare’? What are the motivations behind, and objectives of, current social policy for children? Are the ‘Rights of the Child’ being subsumed under ‘duties and responsibilities’? This revisionist account provides critical answers to these questions within a historical framework and from a child-centred perspective. The book not only offers a provocative account of contemporary policies and the ideological thrust behind them, but also provides an informed historical perspective on the evolution of child welfare during the last century.

Child poverty and the well-being of children is an important policy issue throughout the industrialised world. Some 47 million children in ‘rich’ countries live in families so poor that their health and well-being are at risk. The main themes addressed in this book are: the extent and trend of child poverty in industrialised nations; outcomes for children – for example, the relationship between childhood experiences and children's health; country studies and emerging issues; and child and family policies. All the contributions underline the urgent need for a comprehensive policy to reduce child poverty rates and to improve the well-being of children. Findings are clearly presented and key focus points are identified for policy makers to consider.

Childhood poverty has moved from the periphery to the centre of the policy agenda following New Labour's pledge to end it within twenty years. However, whether the needs and concerns of poor children themselves are being addressed is open to question. The findings raise critical issues for both policy and practice – in particular the finding that children are at great risk of experiencing exclusion within school. School has been a major target in the drive towards reducing child poverty. However, the policy focus has been mainly about literacy standards and exclusion from school. This book shows that poor children are suffering from insufficient access to the economic and material resources necessary for adequate social participation and academic parity. It will be an invaluable teaching aid across a range of academic courses, including social policy, sociology, social work and childhood studies. The book will also be of interest to those who want to develop a more inclusive social and policy framework for understanding childhood issues from a child-centred perspective.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, both Britain and Japan are facing similar issues caused by globalisation, slower economic growth and a rapidly ageing population. Social policy in the two societies, which has developed differently due to the differences in their national resources, socio-economic systems, cultural values and political agendas, is at an interesting turning point. This book examines topical issues with up-to-date information; compares and contrasts selected policy areas between the two societies; and presents original material written by leading scholars in each country.

Since 1997, child-welfare services have been faced with new demands to engage fathers or develop father-inclusive services. This book emerges from work by the author as a researcher and educator over many years, on the issues posed by this agenda for child-welfare practitioners, in a variety of contexts. In locating fathers, fathering, and fatherhood within a historical and social landscape, it addresses issues seldom taken up in practice settings. The book explores diversity and complexity in fathering in different disciplines such as psychoanalysis, sociology, and psychology, and analyses contemporary developments in social policies and welfare practices. The author employs a feminist perspective to highlight the opportunities and dangers in contemporary developments for those wishing to advance gender equity. A key strength of the book is its inter-disciplinary focus.

Spanning the complete era of the Conservative governments and the first term of New Labour, this book looks at mechanisms of corporate power and influence; corporate opinion and influence in a range of social policy areas including: education, training, health and social security; changing business influence on social policy in recent years in an international context and business involvement in social policy initiatives and welfare delivery. By exploring business views and opinions, power, influence and involvement in social provision, this book helps to address important questions in social policy.

This book offers a new way to conceptualize and study differences among democracies, focusing on political conduct and interaction as well as related taken-for-granted assumptions. With an empirical basis in a multimethod study of Portugal and Spain, pioneers in the worldwide turn to democracy that began in the 1970s, the argument identifies how political inclusion and equality vary substantially as a result of processes that the book theorizes: Nationally predominant forms of democratic practice constitute cultural legacies of the countries’ pathways to democracy during the 1970s. Whereas Portugal moved from dictatorship to democracy through a social revolution that inverted hierarchies and reconfigured cultural patterns while also generating thorough political democratization, Spain experienced a regime-led process of political transition under pressure from the opposition. The book shows how this contrast in pathways put in place ways of understanding democracy that have had deep consequences for political inclusion and conduct. Points of contrast in contemporary democratic practice include patterns of interaction between social movement protest and elected power holders as well as conduct within representative entities and in crucial secondary institutions such as the news media and the educational system. Consequences are identified in distributional outcomes, housing and welfare state policies, employment policy, and in the handling of economic crises. The implications of Spain’s less inclusionary democratic practice for cultural “others” such as Catalans are taken up in the chapter on the Catalan crisis. Implications for democratic theory and for sociological and political science theory are also taken up.

To this day, the Turkish state officially denies that what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was genocide, while the Western scholarly community is almost in full agreement that what happened to the forcefully deported Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was genocide, in which approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished. This book studies why denial of collective violence persists in Turkish state and society. To capture the negotiation of meaning, it undertakes a qualitative analysis of 356 contemporaneous memoirs penned by 307 authors in addition to secondary sources, journals, and newspapers. The main theoretical argument is that denial is a multilayered, historical process consisting of the interaction of the structural elements of collective violence and situated modernity with the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events. In this empirical case, denial emerged through four stages: (1) the initial imperial denial of origins of violence commenced in 1789 with the advent of systematic modernity until 1907; (2) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a decade from 1908 to 1918; (3) early republican denial of actors of violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (4) the late republican denial of responsibility for violence started in 1974 and was still present in 2009 when the book was completed.

At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race. Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by widespread farmer protests against “land grabs.” Dispossession without Development argues that beneath these conflicts lay a profound transformation in the political economy of land dispossession. While the Indian state dispossessed land for public-sector industry and infrastructure for much of the 20th century, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies since the early 1990s prompted India’s state governments to become land brokers for private real estate capital—most controversially, for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Using long-term ethnographic research, the book demonstrates the consequences of this new regime of dispossession for a village in Rajasthan. Taking us into the diverse lives of villagers dispossessed for one of North India’s largest SEZs, it shows how the SEZ destroyed their agricultural livelihoods, marginalized their labor, and excluded them from “world-class” infrastructure—but absorbed them into a dramatic real estate boom. Real estate speculation generated a class of rural neo-rentiers, but excluded many and compounded pre-existing class, caste, and gender inequalities. While the SEZ disappointed most villagers’ expectations of “development,” land speculation fractured the village and disabled collective action. The case of “Rajpura” helps to illuminate the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism that underlay land conflicts in contemporary India—and explain why the Indian state is struggling to pacify farmers with real estate payouts. Using the extended case method, Dispossession without Development advances a sociological theory of dispossession that has relevance beyond India.

Eastern welfare systems have largely been neglected by Western social policy. There is very little information in the West about their operation and the differences between them. Yet, as China and South-East Asia emerge as a major regional economic block, it is vital to understand the social models that are in operation there and how they are developing. This book puts the spotlight on the Chinese and South-East Asian welfare systems, providing an up-to-date assessment of their character and development. In particular, it examines the underlying assumptions of these systems and how the processes of globalisation are impacting on them. As well as specific country case studies, there is a valuable comparative analysis of Eastern and Western welfare states. The book provides a unique insight into the main South-East Asian welfare systems and chapters have been written by experts living and working within them. It focuses on ‘Confucianism’ and globalisation to provide an account of tradition and change within the South-East Asian cultural context.

In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with a poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbors. Yet the homesteaders’ impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929, Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. In the words of Helena Haugen Kanten, who staked a claim with her widowed mother in 1905: “We stole the land from the Indians.” How did this extraordinary, largely unknown encounter between Dakota people and Scandinavian immigrants come to pass? Who were the people who experienced this episode in U.S. history? What does their experience teach us about landtaking, dispossession, and coexistence? This book upends prevailing assumptions about the experience of Native Americans, immigrants, and women in this period. It reveals Scandinavians’ and Dakotas’ resistance to assimilation, and their use of citizenship to combat attacks on their cultures. It documents women’s use of land to leverage resources for themselves and their families, and recounts the efforts of Dakota women to gain autonomy in the use of their allotments, even as Scandinavian women staked and “proved up” their own claims. It chronicles the intertwined stories of Dakotas and immigrants—women and men, farmers, domestic servants, and day laborers—and their shared and contrasting struggles to maintain a language, sustain a culture, and navigate their conflicted ties to more than one nation.

Social cohesion is one of the declared objectives of the European Union and, with some 16 per cent of EU citizens at risk of poverty, the need to fight poverty and social exclusion continues as a major challenge. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the EU Social Inclusion Process, the means by which it hopes to meet this objective, and explores the challenges ahead at local, regional, national, and EU levels. It sets out concrete proposals for taking the Process forward, and provides an analysis of policy formulation and assessment. Setting out the evolution and current state of EU cooperation in social policy, the book examines what can be learned about poverty and social exclusion from the EU commonly agreed indicators. Taking the position of outside, but informed, observers, the authors explore the further development of the common indicators, including the implications of Enlargement, and consider the challenges of advancing the Social Inclusion Process – strengthening policy analysis, embedding the Process in domestic policies, and making it more effective. Proposing the setting of targets and restructuring of National Action Plans and their implementation, they emphasise the need for widespread ‘ownership’ of the Process at the domestic and EU level, and for it to demonstrate significant progress in reducing poverty and social exclusion.

The expansion of the European Union (EU) has put an end to the East-West division of Europe. At the same time it has increased the cultural heterogeneity, social disparities and economic imbalances within the EU, exemplified in the lower living standards and higher unemployment rates in some of the new member states. This book describes the education systems, labour markets and welfare production regimes in the ten new Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries. In three comparative chapters, discussing each of these domains in turn, the text provides a set of theory-driven, comprehensive and informative indicators that allow comparisons and rankings within the new EU member states. Ten country-specific chapters follow, each written by experts from those countries: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. These chapters provide detailed information on each country's education and training systems, labour market structure and regulations, and its provision of formal and informal welfare support. An important component of each country chapter is the explanation of the historical background and the specific national conditions for the institutional choices in the transitional years.