Chapter 11. The Economics of Group Care Practice

Abstract

For the past two decades, economic influences have significantly impacted the provision of health and welfare services for children, young people and their families in communities around the world. The dynamic of cost has reshaped both the nature and provision of group care services, promoting de-institutionalization and transforming the nature of caring services offered in local communities. In a reappraisal of themes identified in his seminal contribution more than two decades ago, this leading authority looks back at key themes impacting on the economics of social care that shape group care services for the new millennium.     

Using data on offender mobility in ecological research

This article presents some findings on neighborhood structure, police recorded crime, and offender mobility for the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The highest crime rates were found in the inner-city neighborhoods. The findings further show that the occurrence of different types of petty crime in residential neighborhoods is associated with different neighborhood characteristics. It was found that offenders reside predominantly in lower-social status neighborhoods. Using data on offender mobility it is shown that violent crime and vandalism are the more locally committed crimes, as compared to residential burglary and other property crime. Finally, it is proposed that data on offender mobility can be used to gain more insight into the link between certain neighborhood characteristics and crime.     

Local aid workers in the digital humanitarian project: between “second class citizens” and “entrepreneurial survivors”

This paper examines the experiences of Filipino workers recruited for technology and communications work by international aid agencies involved in the Typhoon Haiyan response. Filipino workers, many of whom were personally coping with the social and economic impact of this disaster, were hired on short-term contracts to test and implement various digital humanitarian innovations such as feedback and hazard mapping technological platforms. These workers were doubly marginalized: first, as tech workers whose work was viewed by aid officers on the ground as less substantial than that of food or shelter programs; and second, as local voices often drowned out by national and international colleagues. Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers’ aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project’s ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers.     

Capturing Brazilian society in movement: from cordiality to circulation and “spaces between” in Maria Augusta Ramos’s Futuro junho (2015)

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Maria Augusta Ramos’s 2015 observational documentary Futuro junho (Future June), filmed in the Brazilian city of São Paulo in the lead-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Taking as its starting point a connection, established by one of the film’s four main “characters,” or subjects, between Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s influential work on cordiality and the idea of circulation between public and private spheres, the article explores how circulation (economic, urban, media, and cultural) is portrayed in the documentary, as well as how it foregrounds both spatial and temporal movements. This is complemented by a discussion of the film’s own circulation through attention to critical reviews which have debated the film’s success in documenting, in a timely way, a national conjuncture characterised by crisis and conflict as well as unpredictability and rapid change. The article argues that by imbricating and intertwining multiple cultures of circulation, and by drawing attention to the varied economic and urban experiences of its characters and the spaces between them, Futuro junho captures a Brazil in flux.     

Public spheres on the move: the embodied deliberation of cycling in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Across Los Angeles, mass bike events have exploded in popularity and regularly stop cars to allow thousands of bodies to move together through the city. We argue that such “mobility events” are shared physical practices that embody political deliberation. By challenging dominant regimes of power, they create public spheres “on the move”, concretely and conceptually. While these publics have emancipatory potential, this potential is ambivalent because embodied practices can still reinforce social divisions. Our interdisciplinary approach, in conjunction with interpretive methodologies, contributes to the mobilities and political science literatures by tying together the structural factors and everyday practices at play in sociopolitical phenomena.     

Endogenizing Labor Mobility: A Partisan Politics Explanation

Much of the existing literature shows that factor mobility across industries has important political economic implications but that it is exogenous to the political process. This article argues that labor’s mobility across industries can be endogenous to changes of power relations due to partisan reasons. Based on a general equilibrium model, the prediction is that, when unions are decentralized, governments led by left-wing parties seek and obtain higher labor mobility than do governments led by rightist parties. However, as unions become more centralized, this distinction becomes less clear-cut. Time series cross-sectional analyses of OECD countries from 1960 to 1999 support this prediction and the endogenous labor mobility hypothesis.     

Contagious insecurity: war,SARS and global air mobility

Neglect of the cross-cutting confluences between different domains of security can lead to insular notions of global security as well as to lost opportunities for security sensitive contributions to the adjoining issue areas. This article attempts to overview the patterns of interactions during three security scenarios of early 2003: wars, as, for example, the War against Terror and the war in Iraq; pandemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); and air mobility. The overview approach is meant to draw attention to the synoptic interplay between global security scenarios that go beyond the usual disciplinary and conceptual boundaries separating security studies, global health and mobility infrastructures. How does the context of war amplify other security concerns? What were the synoptic interactions within temporally situated ‘bundles’ of security-related concerns? How did global air mobility politics and pandemic politics construct their combined security problematiques? The main research findings point to the relatively unique yet momentary qualities of the emergent nexus of security scenarios. This sheds light on the difficulties of managing pandemic diseases as purely epidemiological processes, on the complexities of securing global air mobility networks, and on how tense situations are prone to lead to speculative projections as people's fears find different somatic, material and political manifestations. The primary material for the textual analysis is provided by World Health Organization's SARS chronology.     

宪政视角下的住宅建设用地使用权期限立法评析

在宪政体制下,物权立法应以宪法为最高评价标准。根据宪法委托理论与法律保留原理,作为关涉公民切身利益的重要权利,住宅建设用地使用权期间届满后的法律后果应由法律尽快明确规定,既不能等待几十年后,也不能在此间默示或明示行政立法,以防部门利益合法化。就此而言,《物权法》的立法安排失之妥当,而目前相关立法思路也是错误的。     

浅析监视居住制度的缺陷及对策

监视居住是一种刑事强制措施。由于立法方面的先天不足，导致在司法实践中公安司法机关很少适用这一刑事强制措施。监视居住成了刑事强制措施体系中的“鸡肋”。随着《中华人民共和国刑事诉讼法》的修改列入全国人大的立法计划，监视居住这一强制措施的存废问题引起了法学界和司法实务界的广泛关注。     

农民地位代际流动“四维度”作用机制研究

基于国家制度性因素、社会结构性因素、家庭先赋性因素和个人自致性因素"四维度"分析框架,对农民阶层地位代际流动作用机制进行跨学科的比较研究,能够很好做到宏观与微观研究的融合,并充分考虑时间、空间、人口流动因素的影响。国家制度性因素、社会结构性因素、家庭先赋性因素和个人自致性因素对农民阶层地位代际流动的作用机制是因时而异、因地而异和因人而异的,这就要求我们在判断"四维度"因素对农民阶层地位代际流动作用机制的过程中要切实做到因地制宜、因时制宜和因人制宜。