Introduction This paper explores the experiences of staff working on a sex offender treatment programme for people with a learning disability. This area has not previously been the subject of research. Method Semi-structured interviews were carried out with eight participants working on a treatment programme for sex offenders with a learning disability. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Results Four superordinate themes emerged from the data: rewards and motivation; the challenge of effecting change; the personal impact of work; and ways of managing the impact of work Conclusions The results suggest that working on the treatment programme is a complex and challenging experience. Participants both shared and had distinct ways of meeting the challenges of work and this had an impact on the process of effecting change with group members and their own well-being – these issues were reflected in relation to the themes of empathy and humour.

Health and social care systems, primarily designed for people with single diseases rather than those with multimorbidity (two or more long-term conditions [LTCs]), are becoming more complex. With increases in the older population, a rise of multimorbidity and greater fragmentation in the care landscape, little is known about how multimorbidity affects the patient’s task to find appropriate care in the right place and at the right time (i.e. care navigation). Difficulties in care navigation have proven to cause delays in access and use of inappropriate services. For older individuals with a number of LTCs, there is an urgent need to support them in appropriately navigating the care system to maximise their health and wellbeing. Using a mixed method design, this study aims to map the personal care network (PCN) of older people (aged 55 years and over) with multimorbidity. It explores the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support this patient group in finding their way through the care system. The research involves three stages, addressing the overall question: “Navigating the care system: what is feasible and acceptable with regard to the use of ICT to support older people with multimorbidity?” A scoping review brings together the limited literature on care navigation in older people with multimorbidity and identifies gaps in knowledge. The results demonstrate that navigating the care system is perceived to be a daunting task for many patients. Patients have to learn through experience, rather than being able to rely on systems and actors within the care environment. The gaps in knowledge and practice, identified in the scoping review, are the drivers of the second stage of the study. Stage two investigates from a patients’ perspective, the structure and composition of the PCN surrounding older people with multimorbidity. People and services (actors) involved in the care for this patient group are explored through data from self-administered questionnaires (n=62) and semi-structured interviews (n=7). PCNs are visualised through Social Network Analysis (SNA), detailing those actors involved in the network and their relationship. The application of framework analysis enables a definition of roles and responsibilities within the PCN. Stage three of the study outlines the process of creating data-driven personas for the design of digital PCN navigation support for the study population. This study stands at the intersection of care and ICT. With the expansion of research informing design of ICT for care, this study delivers a number of original contributions to the field. First, the study develops and applies a new conceptual framework: Patient-Centred-Design. Patient-Centred-Design is grounded in and connects three distinguished theories (patient-centred care, patient empowerment and user-centred design). Secondly, the use of innovative methods dictated by this conceptual framework provides valuable additions to the field of SNA by comparing pre and post interview maps of PCNs. Thirdly, this study contributes to health and social care by filling current gaps in care navigation in older people with multimorbidity. Finally, theoretical and practical additions are presented to the field of Human-Computer Interaction through the provision of design requirements.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a rapid expansion of welfare – including education, social security, and health care – in China. But this expansion has not been evenly distributed; some cities have expanded welfare very rapidly while other cities have lagged far behind. Why do we see this variation? To answer this question, we need to begin by exploring the reasons why an authoritarian regime would expand welfare at all; after all, the government is not responding to voters. To understand both the motivations and variations of welfare expansion, this dissertation focuses on business-government relations, particularly (1) the role of big business, (2) the effect of bureaucratic structures, using development zones as a case study, and (3) the resources municipal politicians bring with them to their positions. This dissertation makes two major contributions. First, departing from the traditional state-centered approach in the study of authoritarian governance, it offers an alternative approach that focuses on the “demand” side of welfare provision by examining the role of big business. In countries without formal democratic institutions, firms’ influence on social policy is more capability based: large firms are more influential. Second, this project examines the bureaucratic structure of development zones and finds that they have a unique administrative structure (including higher political ranking, central government support and supervision, and more professional personnel), which enables the zone government to be more responsive to the needs of business, resulting in a better welfare provision. The dissertation also offers an explanation to distinct social policy priorities (i.e. human capital vs. social security) across cities by tracing how mayors’ work experience and political connections shape their decisions on cities’ growth strategies, which in turn contributes to differences in social policy outcomes. Empirically, this dissertation employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitatively, it involved the construction of an original panel dataset with economic, political, and demographical information on all 336 Chinese cities from 2001 to 2012. Qualitatively, it offers in-depth case studies on several cities based on primary sources in Chinese language, including local gazetteers (difangzhi), yearbooks, newspapers, and published as well as unpublished internal government documents.

Informed by particular theories of migration and of new global migrations as problematic European states, pulled by both exclusionary particularist and inclusionary universalist tensions, have taken increasing measures to restrict access to ‘unwanted’ forced migrants to their territories and welfare states. To these ends governments have devised welfare policies for forced migrants which are simultaneously mechanisms of deterrence and internal immigration control, in tension with their obligations to protect refugees. These are systems of ‘Welfare as Control’. 1990s UK legislation has increasingly eroded and separated asylum seekers’ social rights, culminating in the “qualitative leap” (Cohen, 2001) of the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act (IAA), which introduced a separate and inferior welfare ‘safety net’ for asylum seekers, explicitly designed to control their migration externally and internally. These legislations have implicated welfare and social care workers in implementing welfare fraught with tensions of control. In their 1999 IAA New Labour extended this to utilise voluntary sector agencies to implement key sections of the deterrent ‘safety net.’ An intensive ethnographic case study grounded in critical realism was undertaken with a voluntary sector organisation in this contradictory positioning of delivering Welfare as Control, as a Reception Assistant for the Home Office’s National Asylum Support Service (NASS). Using observation and gathering insider accounts and documents over eight months in 2002-2003, the ethnography explored the lived experiences, practices and understandings of service providers and people seeking asylum, in this everyday world at Refugee Arrivals Project. The setting resonated with tensions, dilemmas and compromises. RAP’s autonomy was constrained by NASS’ chaos, bureaucratic dominance and imperative to restrict and control access to welfare, compromising the organisation’s ability to address clients’ often ‘complex and multiple’ needs. Asylum seekers experienced “anormalised” (Geddes, 2001) lives, loss of autonomy and dignity in Reception, feeling they were “hanging” out of control in multiple uncertainties, with those the safety net was designed to protect, often least protected. Although RAP used their discretion and ethical urges to increase the “informal gain” and fill the gaps of social rights in practice, (Morris, 2002), their integrity was threatened. This research contributes to a new ‘Sociology of Forced Migration’ (Castles, 2003) and has implications for all voluntary and public sector agencies and workers embroiled in delivering ‘Third Way’ policy generally, but specifically Welfare as Control.

Thesis (MPH) -- University of Limpopo, 2011.

Abstract not available

The dissertation investigates support by economists for the global policy shift away from unfunded public pension schemes towards funded private pension schemes. Influential economists and institutions, including the World Bank, present a suite of economic arguments that suggest that this shift will have positive effects on national economies, particularly in the context of aging. The arguments may be categorised according to their relation to the operation of three sets of institutions: capital markets, labour markets and political systems. In capital markets, the transition is purported to increase private and national saving, increase the quantity and quality of investment, and provide more efficient private administration. In labour markets, it is claimed that the shift will reduce labour market distortions associated with public pensions, which inhibit competitiveness, produce unemployment and encourage early retirement. According to the World Bank, public pensions systems cause these distortions without achieving their stated objective of reducing inequality. In the political sphere, the shift is purported to insulate the pension system from political pressures, which otherwise inevitably lead to crisis. The thesis provides evidence which refutes these claims. The best research, including studies by orthodox economists, indicate that the shift does not increase savings or investment, or improve the quality of financial investment. The main effect of tax concessions associated with private pension systems is to divert to private pension funds savings that would occur in any case via other mechanisms. The tax concessions are also regressive, even in systems with compulsory elements. Private administration of pensions, particularly in a plural consumer market setting, is highly inefficient, with customers at a disadvantage in dealing with providers due to the complexity and opacity of products and pricing. A negative relationship is found between public pension spending and levels of elderly poverty, suggesting that reducing public pension spending increases levels of elderly inequality. Public pensions are found not to explain differences in economic growth between regions. Elements of system design which distort labour markets, such as by encouraging early retirement, can easily be adjusted. However, such elements are explicit government policy in several countries. A review of public and private pensions finds that examples of public system crisis are associated with instances of economic and political collapse, rather than system design. Private funded systems are found to be more vulnerable, not less, to the same external influences. Relatively generous universal public pension systems are found to be financially sustainable despite demographic change, assuming modest levels of economic growth.

No description available.

At the beginning of the 21st century the welfare state is under pressure from two sides. On the one hand, there is "globalisation", on the other hand seems to be some sort of normative crisis of the welfare state’s moral foundations. The welfare state is said to curtail individual freedom and autonomy. <br>This article rejects this assumption by exploring the philosophical and moral foundations of the welfare state, thereby demonstrating that it is essentially necessary for individual freedom and autonomy. Furthermore, it is shown that individual freedom is also the core principle of liberal democracy and that the welfare state is therefore an indispensable prerequisite for democracy itself.

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts. Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply the procedures to data on income and leisure hours for individuals in Germany, the UK, and the USA. We find that no country first-order stochastically dominates the others in both dimensions for all years of comparison. Furthermore, while in general the USA stochastically dominates Germany and the UK with respect to income, in most periods Germany stochastically dominates with respect to leisure hours. Finally, we find evidence that bivariate poverty is lower in Germany than in either the UK or the USA. On the other hand, poverty comparisons between the UK and the USA are sensitive to the subpopulation of individuals considered. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of the evolution of income inequality in Vietnam between 1993 and 2006. We construct consistent estimates of annual household income using five nationally representative household surveys. Our main finding is that Vietnam’s rapid growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequality between 1993 and 2002 and an unchanged level of inequality between 2002 and 2006. We find that strong growth in employment income and robust growth of cropping income played an important role in decreasing rural inequality, while the growth of wage income and the stagnation of household business income similarly contributed to the reduction in urban inequality. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement on provincial poverty level in Vietnam. My main finding is that provinces that were more exposed to the U.S. tariff cuts experienced faster decreases in poverty between 2002 and 2004. I subsequently explore three labour market channels from the trade agreement to poverty alleviation. Provinces that were more exposed to the tariff cuts experienced (1) increases in provincial wage premiums for low-skilled workers, (2) faster movement into wage and salaried jobs for low-skilled workers, and (3) more rapid job growth in formal enterprises.