The Future of Social Policy in Scotland: Will Further Devolved Powers Lead to Better Social Policies for Disabled People?

Scotland has laid claim to being ‘different’ from the rest of the UK with regards to disability policy. This article examines the evidence for that with regard to long‐term and social care, and discusses the possibilities opened up by the devolution of disability benefits. It asks whether Scotland will demonstrate policy divergence from the rest of the UK, and whether that is likely to be beneficial for disabled people. It argues that Scotland has the potential to create better social policies for disabled people, but faces significant challenges in doing so.     

Residential Aged Care Policy in Australia – Are We Learning from Evidence?

The residential aged care industry in Australia will expand rapidly over the next 10 years leading to substantial increases in government expenditure. Recent and future reforms are likely leading to changes in the structure of the industry with a potential impact on quality of care. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate broader public debate, based on the available evidence, about the preferred structure of this important industry. It examines the literature on the impact structure has on the quality of services and compares this with a fresh analysis of current trends. The paper argues that future policy should be evidence based and explicit about the structure of the industry that will emerge from current policy reforms.     

社会资本视角下慈善组织公信力影响因素研究

近年来我国慈善组织的公信力屡遭考验,嫣然基金事件又将慈善组织推到了风口浪尖。信任是社会资本的重要内容,从社会资本理论出发,根据文献梳理,找出慈善组织公信力影响因素主要有信息透明度、合法性、社会网络、内部治理结构以及慈善文化。目前我国慈善组织公信力提升应先从信息透明度与内部治理结构着手,为我国慈善组织深化改革提供了长远发展的突破口。     

Searchable talk: the linguistic functions of hashtags

An important dimension of social media discourse is its searchability. A key semiotic resource supporting this function is the hashtag, a form of social tagging that allows microbloggers to embed metadata in social media posts. While popularly thought of as topic-markers, hashtags are able to construe a range of complex meanings in social media texts. This paper uses the concept of linguistic metafunctions, to explore how hashtags enact three simultaneous communicative functions: marking experiential topics, enacting interpersonal relationships, and organizing text. Corpus-based discourse analysis of linguistic patterns in a 100 million word Twitter corpus is used to investigate these functions and how they relate to the notion of social search.     

‘Multicolored’ green criminology and climate change’s achromatopsia

While green criminology may be an effective name or label for the sub-field or perspective within criminology that considers a wide range of environmental issues, it is, in reality, a ‘multicolored green’ – a criminology that engages a spectrum of issues, that reflects the interests of some racial groups more than others, that reveals and analyzes environmental harms which disproportionately impact some racial groups more than others, and that can be approached from a number of vantage points or that can be viewed with variously tinted lenses. This article begins with an overview of climate change, including a discussion of its anticipated impacts and indicators of its already-being-felt effects. It then offers some general comments on the disproportionate impact of environmental threats and harms before turning to a discussion of the present and anticipated distributional impacts of climate change. Here, this article argues that climate change is, in effect, achromatopsic – it is color-blind, in that it affects us all regardless of skin color – but that those impacts will be distributed unevenly/unequally and that various groups are and will continue to be in different positions to adapt to climate change. This article concludes by suggesting that while the environmental harms caused by climate change are real – and the risks and threats they pose tangible and serious – climate change presents an exciting challenge for our creative potential as humans. In the process of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and stabilizing (or, better yet, reducing) our greenhouse gas emissions, we might better assist those geopolitical regions most at risk (i.e. poor, developing countries) to become more resilient – an approach that is necessary for both the physical health of the planet and the prospects for social justice.     

Animal rights is a social justice issue

The literature on social justice, and social justice movements themselves, routinely ignore nonhuman animals as legitimate subjects of social justice. Yet, as with other social justice movements, the contemporary animal liberation movement has as its focus the elimination of institutional and systemic domination and oppression. In this paper, I explicate the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the contemporary animal rights movement, and situate it within the framework of social justice. I argue that those committed to social justice – to minimizing violence, exploitation, domination, objectification, and oppression – are equally obligated to consider the interests of all sentient beings, not only those of human beings.     

Linking past and future: cross-border development and quality of life in the Badakhshans

The 1895 Pamir Convention divided the mountainous region of Badakhshan into separate entities under Russian and British/Afghan influence, leading to a remarkable divergence in the development fortunes of a people once united by kinship. For those in today's Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan, incorporation into the Soviet Union brought investments in education, health, physical infrastructure, and the economy. People living in Afghanistan's Badakhshan Province retained more political freedom but lived remotely within a feudal state where development investment was limited. In recent decades, both regions have experienced conflict that has affected their development. In this article, we use findings from quality of life assessments carried out by the Aga Khan Development Network to illustrate the stark differences between the Badakhshans. We discuss ongoing efforts to implement cross-border development programmes to improve quality of life in both Badakhshans, while noting that their success depends on a stable security environment in the region.     

RACIALLY HOMOPHILOUS SOCIAL TIES AND INFORMAL SOCIAL CONTROL

Social disorganization theory argues that racial/ethnic heterogeneity is a key neighborhood characteristic leading to social disorganization and, consequently, higher levels of crime. Heterogeneity's effect is argued to be a result of its fragmentation of social ties along racial/ethnic lines, which creates racially homophilous social networks with few ties bridging racial/ethnic groups. Most studies of social ties in social disorganization models, however, have examined their quantity and left unaddressed the extent to which ties are within or across different racial groups. This study goes beyond previous studies by examining the effects of both racially homophilous and interracial friendship networks on informal social control. Using multilevel models and data from 66 neighborhoods with approximately 2,300 respondents, we found that heterogeneity actually increased the average percentage of residents with interracial friendship networks, but the percentage of residents with interracial networks decreased the likelihood of informal social control. In contrast, the percentage of residents with White racially homophilous networks increased the likelihood of informal social control. Examining the microcontext of individuals’ networks, however, we found residents with interracial ties reported higher likelihoods of informal social control and that this effect was enhanced in neighborhoods with higher percentages of non‐White racially homophilous networks.     

Class war-on-terror: counterterrorism,accumulation, crisis

This article discusses US counterterrorism from a class perspective. It sees counterterrorism as a state policy with differential effects on different social classes. In doing so, the article starts to address a lacuna in critical studies of counterterrorism, which tend to be rather structural and formal, thus ignoring the pertinence of counterterrorism to the field of social dynamics. To partly rectify this blind spot by addressing some class implications of counterterrorism, the article examines the effects of counterterrorism policy on capital accumulation and its social conditions. It notes that counterterrorism has different implications along class-lines: for dominant capital, it signifies appropriation of public money and direct participation in political decisions; for everyone else, it means material dispossession and political exclusion. Given that counterterrorism was developed between two crises of neoliberalism, the article distinguishes between economic crises, which tend to benefit capitalism, and political crises, which can be destructive, and suggests that counterterrorism is partly a restructuring of the neoliberal state so that it can manage recurring economic crises, while preventing their evolution into political ones.     

Conclusion: agency,context and emergent post-uprising regimes

This conclusion summarizes the evidence explaining the divergent trajectories taken by post Arab uprising states in terms of multiple variables, each illustrated by an iconic case, namely: State Failure and Competitive governance (Syria), Regime Restoration and Hybrid Governance (Egypt) and Polyarchic Governance (Tunisia). Factors include the starting point: levels of opposition mobilization and regimes' resilience – a function of their patrimonial-bureaucratic balance; whether or not a transition coalition forms is crucial for democratization prospects. Context also matters for democratization, particularly political economic factors, such as a balance of class power and a productive economy; political culture (level of societal identity cleavages) and a minimum of international intervention. Finally, the balance of agency between democracy movements, Islamists, the military and workers shapes democratization prospects.