Personal budgets in adult social care: the fact and the fiction of the Care Act 2014

ABSTRACT

Personal budgets have been heavily promoted in government policy in England as a means of increasing the personalisation of public services, particularly in the field of adult social care. The Care Act 2014 for the first time creates a statutory requirement for personal budgets to be allocated to all individuals using state funded social care. This article examines how a particular rhetoric has developed in social care policy around personal budgets, which draws freely on the language of the disabled people’s movement and suggests that grassroots ideas are the central purpose for the introduction of personal budgets into policy. It considers whether the promises made in policy are embedded in the 2014 Act and finds that there is a mismatch between claims in social care policy on the one hand and the model of personal budgets created by the 2014 Act on the other. It concludes that the policy rhetoric around personal budgets directly appropriates the language and ideas of the disabled people’s movement while promoting a wholly distinct agenda of public sector marketisation.     

EMU and the Shift in the European Labour Law Agenda: From ‘Social Policy’ to ‘Employment Policy’

This article examines the interaction between EMU and the European Union (EU) employment strategy and its implications for law. It focuses on the importance of EMU as a catalyst in the development of the EU's social and employment policy in the years following the Treaty on European Union in 1992, up to the inauguration of a new employment policy in the Treaty of Amsterdam. In analysing the EU's discourse on labour market regulation, it is arguable that a shift has occurred in the EU's position on the ‘labour market flexibility’ debate: that the EU institutions are more readily accepting of the orthodoxy that labour market regulation and labour market institutions are a major cause of unemployment within EU countries and that a deregulatory approach, which emphasises greater ‘flexibility’ in labour markets, is the key to solving Europe's unemployment ills, along with macroeconomic stability, restrictive fiscal policy and wage restraint. As the EU's employment strategy has matured, this increased emphasis on employment policy has come to displace discourses around social policy. This change in emphasis has important implications for EMU since it signals a re‐orientation from an approach to labour market regulation which had as its core a strong concept of employment protection and high labour standards, to an approach which prioritises employment creation, and minimises the role of social policy, since social policy is seen as potentially increasing the regulatory burden.     

Diffusion as a Process of Creative Adoption

This paper elaborates an integrated framework for understanding diffusion as a process of creative adoptions in the business sector. Within the context of the economics of localized technological change, adoption is viewed as a complementary component of a broader process of adjusting the technology when unexpected events in the product and factor markets push firms towards a creative reaction. When the stock of adoptions exerts a suitable combined effect both on the gross profitability of adoption and on the costs of adoption, such that the net profitability of adoption and hence the rates of new adoption follow a quadratic path, the dynamics of creative adoption can engender a S-shaped diffusion process.     

The limitations of neoliberal logic in the anti-corruption industry: Lessons from Papua New Guinea

To acknowledge concerns about the rising power of the private sector, key international anti-corruption organisations have supported initiatives that emphasise the role that businesses play in corruption. Yet the way these initiatives have impacted the practices and perceptions of anti-corruption organisations in developing countries has received scant attention. As businesses can be key perpetrators of corruption, understanding the way anti-corruption organisations respond to the private sector can highlight the efficacy of anti-corruption efforts. Drawing on interviews with anti-corruption policy makers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) conducted between 2008 and 2009, this article shows how two international anti-corruption organisations perceived and worked with the private sector. It finds that there have been some initiatives designed to address, and raise awareness about private sector corruption in the country, reflecting international trends. At the same time the private sector is viewed, often uncritically, as an anti-corruption champion; this has affected the way anti-corruption organisations engage with businesses operating in the country. This article argues that despite a change in international discourse about the private sector’s role in corruption, in developing countries like PNG, neoliberal logic about the nature of the state still guide anti-corruption activity. These findings have implications for the efficacy of international anti-corruption efforts.     

Digital Infrastructure for Diversity—On Digital Bookshelf and Google Books

Diversity is a core value of cultural policy, and new global digital conditions for creative industries mean new challenges for diversity at a national level. Internet has become a new infrastructure for services and platforms, and global actors as Google and Amazon are changing the play. This article concerns digitization of books, the collection of the National Library of Norway and cultural policy. The results indicate the National Library's digital collection contributes to diversity in terms of demography, content, dissemination and techno-cultural aspects. For policy makers, libraries and researchers the study demonstrates a national digital service's contribution to expanded diversity.     

The Housing and Planning Act 2016: Rewarding the Aspiration of Homeownership?

In May 2016 the Housing and Planning Act 2016 became law, the first purely Conservative government intervention on housing in England since the 1990s. This article examines the Act's key provisions pertaining to social housing and the government's stated aim of increasing rates of homeownership. The Act, through the Starter Homes Scheme, extension of the right to buy to housing association tenants and changes to security of tenure in the social sector, has been heralded as a ‘landmark’ piece of legislation. This article scrutinises these policy measures and assesses their effectiveness and likely impact. It is contended that the Act exposes the government's promotion of homeownership above all other housing tenures. The article further explores the deep moralisation at the heart of the homeownership narrative and the intensification in the residualisation of social housing in England which, it is argued, is the inevitable consequence of the reforms.     

The donor-conceived child's "Right to Personal Identity": the public debate on donor anonymity in the United Kingdom

On 1 April 2005, with the implementation of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Disclosure of Donor Information) Regulations 2004, United Kingdom law was changed to allow children born through gamete donation to access details identifying the donor. Drawing on trends in adoption law, the decision to abolish donor anonymity was strongly influenced by a discourse that asserted the ‘child's right to personal identity’. Through examination of the donor anonymity debate in the public realm, while adopting a social constructionist approach, this article discusses how donor anonymity has been defined as a social problem that requires a regulative response. It focuses on the child's ‘right to personal identity’ claims, and discusses the genetic essentialism behind these claims. By basing its assumptions on an adoption analogy, United Kingdom law ascribes a social meaning to the genetic relatedness between gamete donors and the offspring.     

The who, what, and why of risk adjustment: a technology on the cusp of adoption

Risk adjustment (RA) consists of a series of techniques that account for the health status of patients when predicting or explaining costs of health care for defined populations or for evaluating retrospectively the performance of providers who care for them. Although the federal government seems to have settled on an approach to RA for Medicare Advantage programs, adoption and implementation of RA techniques elsewhere have proceeded much more slowly than was anticipated. This article examines factors affecting the adoption and use of RA outside the Medicare program using case studies in six U.S. health care markets (Baltimore, Seattle, Denver, Cleveland, Phoenix, and Atlanta) as of 2001. We found that for purchasing decisions, RA was used exclusively by public agencies. In the private sector, use of risk adjustment was uncommon and scattered and assumed informal and unexpected forms. The most common private sector use of RA was by health plans, which occasionally employed RA in negotiations with purchasers or to allocate resources internally among providers. The article uses classic technology diffusion theory to explain the adoption and use of RA in these six markets and derives lessons for health policy generally and for the future of RA in particular. For health policy generally, the differing experiences of public and private actors with RA serve as markers of the divergent paths that public and private health care sectors are pursuing with respect to managed care and risk sharing. For the future of RA in particular, its history suggests the need for health service researchers to consider barriers to use adoption and new analytic technologies as they develop them.     

Family in Dutch migration policy 1945–2005

This article looks at how and why the concept of ‘family’ was used in Dutch migration policy in the period between 1945 and 2005. Throughout this period differences were made between migrant women and migrant men. Whereas the migration of men was associated with labour migration, the migration of women was equated with family migration. Migrant women were constructed as wives and mothers (and not as workers). This construction of women was combined with a victimhood discourse in which women were presented as victims of repressive religion (usually Islam), domestic violence, trafficking and prostitution, and discriminatory government policy. The victimhood discourse was successfully used to acquire rights for migrant women (mostly the right to stay), but as a result all migrant women came to be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. In this article, I show how this combined family and victimhood discourse was used by governments, by (migrant) organizations and, to a lesser extent, in court cases to create differences between migrant men and women. The ‘success’ of the victimhood discourse is not only explained by the fact that it fitted (Western) ideas on femininity. It was also used to give a humanitarian face – albeit beneficial to women only – to an essentially restrictive immigration policy.     

Convergence in British Cultural Policy: The Social,the Cultural,and the Economic

It is increasingly the case that cultural policy at all levels of governance is expected to address a suite of concerns much broader than those traditionally associated with the arts and creative practice. Indeed, in many nations, including most notably Britain, the concerns of cultural policy now embrace the economic and the social, as well as the cultural. In Britain, this convergence is occurring as part of a broader policy concern to ameliorate social exclusion by providing people with opportunities to participate in the creative economy. Drawing on the findings of a major study of the factors shaping cultural policy internationally, this article identifies and maps the priorities, key intersections, and convergences associated with these priorities in British cultural policy. The article argues that, in spite of taking different forms and having varying emphases depending on the constituency and the level of governance involved, the convergence agenda currently dominating British cultural policy is nevertheless remarkably consistent in terms of the discourses surrounding culture, the remit of the cultural sphere, and strategic policy implementation.     

Autopoietic Law and the 'Epistemic Trap': A Case Study of Adoption and Contact

This paper examines autopoietic theory with reference to functionally differentiated social sub-systems, particularly law, science, and politics. It sets out to 'test' the practical relevance of autopoietic theory in relation to ongoing debates about post-adoption contact and personal identity issues. Law has resisted social scientific pressure to regulate post-adoption contact in the context of a social policy approach, which emphasizes the relationship between identity development and genealogical continuity. I argue that law's response to this pressure relates to the particular nature of adoption as this is expressed through legislation and case law. Law's refusal to intervene in post-adoption contact reflects its self-referential operations and its attempts to avoid epistemic entrapment by a social scientific discourse. Applying autopoietic theory to law's practical operations in adoption clarifies its explanatory value, provides a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between law, politics, and social science and indicates areas that require theoretical refinement.     

The role of the Asia Pacific Partnership in discursive contestation of the international climate regime

After withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, the US Bush Administration and the Australian Howard Government pursued an international climate change policy focussed on voluntary international agreements outside the UN climate negotiations. This strategy included the formation of several climate agreements directed at technology development, including the 2005 Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP). The APP provides a model for international climate change policy directed at voluntary national greenhouse gas intensity targets, technology development through sectoral public–private partnerships and technology diffusion through trade. This article situates the APP within these US and Australian inspired climate agreements formed outside the UN negotiations. Bäckstrand and Lövbrand’s (in M. Pettenger (ed.) The social construction of climate change: power knowledge norms discourses, 2007) discourse analysis in relation to the international climate negotiations is used to explore differences between the APP and UN climate treaties. We find the APP embodies a discourse of what we call ‘deregulatory ecological modernisation’ that promotes limited public funding to ease informational failures in markets for cleaner technologies and management practices. The deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse is a deeply intensive market liberal approach to international climate change policy, which contests binding emission reduction targets and the development of a global carbon market. The USA, Australia, Japan and Canada represented a core group of countries that used the APP to promote the deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse and thereby contest any deepening of developed nations' emission reduction targets for the post-2012 period. However, with changes of leadership and new parties in power in the USA and Australia, it appears that the deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse has lost ground compared to a reengagement with discourses supportive of developed country emission reduction targets and equity-based adaptation and technology transfer assistance for developing nations.     

Enterprising Culture: Discourses on Entrepreneurship in Nordic Cultural Policy

The sphere of arts and culture has been going through a process of economic reevaluation during the last few decades. Parallel to the rise of a creative economy discourse, which both in its political and scientific forms has highlighted the economic significance of culture and arts, entrepreneurship has become a feature in the cultural policy of many countries. In this article, we compare how entrepreneurship is established and used as a concept in cultural policy discourses in two Nordic countries, Norway and Finland. Through analyzing policy plans and documents, we discuss what is seen as positive cultural or artistic activity in the framework of entrepreneurship, and we identify the eligible cultural subjects of this discourse.     

Copyright Givers and Takers: Mutuality,Altruism and Instrumentalism in Open Licensing

Over the past three decades, open licensing has evolved from hacker culture thought experiment to a transformative force in applied copyright across a range of industries. Yet very little empirical research exists to understand its disparate uses. This article examines social practices and attitudes about open licensing in order to examine the practical experience of creators and consumers who use this tool and in order to assess its value in moderating the negative consequences of extensive copyright. The discussion about the role of open licensing in creative industries and communities tends to be polarized into two vantage points. Either (1) it is a new, altruistic paradigm enabling creative communities to rework copyright to fit their vision for the cultural commons, or (2) it is a radical theft of creative labor, encouraged by Google and other digital industrial powerhouses, to cheat creators out of their share of profits. Both of these rhetorical vantage points presume a monolithic and largely either selfless or unaware base of creative laborers. We analyze data from a series of surveys across a range of creative fields and practices to show that creators employ open licensing for a variety of reasons, including instrumental purposes oriented toward skirting the many impediments created by institutions and law, rather than merely because they are unaware or selfless.     

文化创意产业中的知识产权保护方法与策略

对文化创意产业来说,以创意成果为客体的知识产权,通过保护方法的恰当选择和保护策略的实施,不但可以使创意者、权利人的合法权益得到全方位的保护,还可以为创意灵感的产生、创意成果的转换、创意经济价值的实现营造出一个稳定、和谐的外部产业环境。     

Digging for Gold or Justice? Misrecognition and Marginalization of “Illegal” Small-Scale Miners in Ghana

Artisanal small-scale mining remains a concern to many mineral-rich countries in the developing world. In Ghana, a significant number of those engaged in the sector are operating illegally. The ubiquity of the illegal mining sector has posed a policy challenge to the government, and high-handed measures to curb the problem have failed. This study contributes to our understanding of the problem by providing a more nuanced alternative perspective to the illegality discourse that has informed discussions and policy till now. Based on qualitative primary data collected from Noyem, a mining community in Ghana, the study shows that the so-called illegal small-scale mining is an outcome of existing social injustices suffered by the miners. It further reveals that those engaged in the sector are not homogenous but differentiated by class and motive. The study recommends among others that government addresses the identified social injustices rather than simply focusing on law enforcement to address the problem.     

Keeping Creativity Downtown: Policy Learning from San Francisco,Seattle, and Vancouver for Municipal Cultural Planning in Toronto

I examine Toronto's interest in the policy learning process regarding possible solutions to development pressure downtown though understanding policies from San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. Grounded by the analysis of creative city interventions and incorporating a theoretical framework of policy adaptation, the investigation is informed by interviews with fifty-one multi-sector stakeholders, historical and archival materials, and policy documents. Return to urban living and the creative cities movement challenge city centers in preserving creative and cultural businesses and organizations. Emergent data themes include: (1) research and strategic planning; (2) stakeholder partnerships; and (3) economic development incorporating economic benefit and social good.     

Social rights,child rights,discrimination and devolution: untangling the web

Abstract

This article examines judicial reviews of two areas of social security policy and practice in the UK – the household benefit cap and the restriction of bereavement benefits to bereaved spouses and civil partners. While each case ostensibly concerned discrimination against claimants, in practice much of the legal argument centred on the impact on claimants’ children. The judiciary is revealed to be deeply divided on the lawfulness of the acknowledged discrimination. The article considers what lessons can be drawn about the relative weight that ought to be afforded to claimants’ property rights, the best interests of affected children, anti-discrimination provisions and the state’s stated policy imperatives of cost control and administrative convenience. Insights are also sought into whether devolutionary differences can be identified between the approaches of courts in London and Belfast.     

The Exclusion of (Failed) Asylum Seekers from Housing and Home: Towards an Oppositional Discourse

‘Housing’– the practical provision of a roof over one's head – is experienced by users as ‘home’– broadly described as housing plus the experiential elements of dwelling. Conversely, being without housing, commonly described as ‘homelessness’, is experienced not only as an absence of shelter but in the philosophical sense of ‘ontological homelessness’ and alienation from the conditions for well‐being. For asylum seekers, these experiences are deliberately and explicitly excluded from official law and policy discourses. This article demonstrates how law and policy is propelled by an ‘official discourse’ based on the denial of housing and the avoidance of ‘home’ attachments, which effectively keeps the asylum seeker in a state of ontological homelessness and alienation. We reflect on this exclusion and consider how a new ‘oppositional discourse’ of housing and home – taking these considerations into account – might impact on the balancing exercise inherent to laws and policies concerning asylum seekers.     

论广东贩毒犯罪案件的特点及查缉对策

由于广东所处的特殊地理位置和特定的社会经济环境,改革开放以来贩毒犯罪案件较为突出。为了有效地侦查贩毒案件,本文具体分析了贩毒犯罪案件的一些特点,并在此基础上提出缉毒的具体侦查对策。