Inaug.-diss.-Kiel.

Inaug.-diss.-Kiel.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

This sandwich thesis contains 3 studies using three distinct methodologies: scoping review, quantitative study, and qualitative study. This program of research explores employment for people with disabilities who are in receipt of publicly funded disability income benefits. / Employment is a key determinant of socioeconomic inclusion and health. Yet, people with disabilities (PWD) have one of the lowest employment rates in advanced welfare states. This thesis consists of three manuscripts using three distinct methodologies to examine this phenomenon. This thesis advances knowledge in the field by examining the employment outcomes of PWD who are in receipt of public income benefits, often referred to as programs of last resort. This thesis is framed by the theory of wicked problems which serves to emphasis the stubborn problem of low employment participation rates. Despite the numerous enhancements made to social assistance programming over the last two decades to facilitate positive employment outcomes, people with mental illness remain one of the most marginalized worker populations. Manuscript one is a scoping review identifying what is known about active labour market policies within welfare to work programs for PWD. This research acts as the foundational piece upon which the other two papers build. The purpose of the review is to present the existing body of literature on this issue across all advanced welfare states and identify the gaps in the evidence base, summarize these findings and disseminate them to policy makers and other key stakeholders. Manuscript two is a quantitative study. It takes a narrower focus and examines a subpopulation of PWD. This study uses administrative data from Ontario’s Ministry of Community and Social Services to examine the system level factors associated with earnings-related exits from the Ontario Disability Support Program, Ontario’s public income system for PWD. The study draws on descriptive and inferential statistical procedures to provide an overview of income support recipients with mental illness who gain enough earnings to transition off social assistance. This study contributes data on the numbers behind system exits to inform program development within ODSP. While manuscript two answers who exits ODSP for employment, manuscript three provides insight into why and how individuals succeed in exiting the system. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with three participant groups, this study explores the process of transitioning off disability income support benefits among people with mental illness. This study adds to a small but emerging literature on the economic fate of former ODSP recipients, which will help inform policy development. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Employment is a key determinant of socioeconomic inclusion and health. Employment paid at a competitive wage equips a person with the social and economic resources they need to enjoy a decent quality of life. Yet, people with disabilities (PWD) are often underemployed or excluded from the mainstream labour market. This thesis sets out to explore the barriers and facilitators to meaningful employment for PWD, with a focus on people living with serious mental illness who are in receipt of income benefits from the Ontario Disability Support Program. This body of work begins with a global exploration of active labour market policies that are used to assist PWD enter or remain in employment. It then narrows its focus to explore the system level factors that prevent or facilitate people living with serious mental illness to transition from income benefits to mainstream employment. The study findings have implications for policy development in all advanced welfare states that could enhance successful transitions from welfare to work.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

Det övergripande syftet med studien är att undersöka och analysera socialsekreterares erfarenheter av att arbeta inom sektionen för myndighetsutövning inom barn- och ungdomsverksamheten för att få en inblick i hur de själva upplever och påverkas av eventuella hinder respektive möjligheter i arbetsmiljön. Studien bygger på kvalitativ metod och består av enskilda forskningsintervjuer. Samtliga socialsekreterare i studien beskriver sin arbetssituation som väldigt tuff med ett högt ärendeinflöde som är svårt att påverka. Många menar att det är svårt att hinna med arbetsuppgifterna inom de tidsramar som finns reglerade i socialtjänstlagen. Av resultaten i studien framgår det att socialsekreterarnas arbetsmiljö präglas av olika kulturer som inverkar på varandra, begränsar socialsekreterarnas handlingsutrymme och genererar stress. Detta har en negativ inverkan på socialsekreterarnas arbetsmiljö och leder i förlängningen till hög personalomsättning. / The overall aim of this study is to investigate and analyze the child welfare workers’ experiences of working within the public welfare agencies and to gain an insight into how they experience and how they are affected by obstacles and opportunities in their work environment. The study is based on a qualitative methodological approach and consists of individual research interviews. All child welfare workers in the study describe their work situation as very tough with a high inflow of cases which is difficult for the workers to influence. Many child welfare workers consider it to be difficult to find the time to finish their work within the timescales that are regulated in the Social Services Act. The results of the study reveal that the child welfare workers’ work environment is characterized by different cultures that influence each other, limiting the child welfare workers’ discretion and generate stress. This has a negative impact on the child welfare workers’ work environment and ultimately results in high turnover.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This analysis examines the implicatedness of the self as an embodied space of marginality, knowledge, and resistance to the discursive and material effects of systemic oppression. It explores the implications and possibilities as they relate to social collectives [in nation-state contexts] in resisting and contesting the constraining forces of dominant/dominating institutionalized power and authority in the context of speaking and/or enunciating from the space of abjectification, racialization, and outcastness that has been constructed historically by the nation-state of Britain as a body codified as included-as-excluded-as-removed from the dominant sociopolitical collective’s sense of self and identity? This study argues that enunciation in this form carries with it a politics of ontological transformation that has profound implications for the social collective that is Britain as a whole specifically in the context of social justice affirmation and the reclamation [and assertion] of a collective sense of self that is grounded in a refusal and contestation of the multi-layered hegemonic conceptual frameworks that continue to naturalize, {re}produce and sustain systemic oppression as a state of permanency [Bell, 1992]. This study will explore the permanency of oppression further in relation to the discursive and material negation and amputation of social difference [i.e. class, gender, disability, and sexuality] while centering race [and its prostheticization] as a salient organizing tool in the (re)production of a hegemonic social order. To this end this study utilizes two key interconnecting concepts, internal/internalized colonialism, and racialization. ii It suggests that racialization mediated and channeled by and through a process of internal/internalized colonialism underpins the hegemonic social order of Britain and as such both terms are re-conceptualized and subjected to a complex analysis. Finally, this study examines the theoretical possibilities for developing an anti-racialization framework as a politics of enunciation that makes usage of the concept of racialization as a tool for [1] demystifying systems of oppression, [2] understanding the processes of collective implicatedness in oppression, [3] refusing pathologization and [4] mobilizing transformation through and within a refusal of the amputative and negative capacities of the racialization process.