Idea Of Welfare Research Articles

Is something rotten in the state of Denmark? Austerity measures from a child and youth perspective

Inspired by Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies and the lived citizenship approach, this article examines austerity in Denmark from the perspectives of 39 disabled children and young people. The article investigates austerity as a phenomenon encompassing symbolic, material, and affective dimensions. It sheds light on financial cutbacks and their consequences, and points to a more general development in political ideas of welfare. Following the financial crisis, policies aimed at economic growth and productivity, coupled with austerity measures, have created a domino effect. The combination of cutbacks and the political portrayal of disabled people as a “cost problem” legitimises the deterioration of the group’s living conditions and access to public services and assistance. Due to austerity measures, disabled children and young people have increasingly come to experience their relationships with local governments as exhausting and stressful for themselves and their parents, which causes them to develop feelings of guilt and shame.

Forensic Law in Hypoglycaemia-3

“Environmental Enrichment” (EE) is a proven alternative therapy for Type 2 diabetes related complications. EE preserves the Purkinje cells in the brain. The latter is a promising therapy for prevention of diabetes related mental disorders. Sensory nerves are at higher risk of damage in the hyperglycemic milieu leading to diabetic neuropathy. Patients lose sensation in their lower extremities making them vulnerable to injury because they do not feel the pain, which is a warning sign of tissue damage. That can lead to catastrophic outcomes because with high blood glucose, wounds get difficult to heal. Gas gangrene and tissue necrosis develop, leading to the only resort being amputation and life change challenge. Early diagnosis of diabetes is nevertheless crucial in prolonging the onset of diabetes and its complication. To date many candidate early biomolecules have been reported which are promising early indicators for diabetes. However, advancement in this field of research has not been reported. Holistically diet, lifestyle, mental health and clinical treatment of Diabetes and Thyroid Disease, including Addison’s Disease, plays an important role in patient welfare. Tragically many patients die young or go through life suffering from the old Victorian Stigma of being tainted by having to treat an uncurable illness. This is not a joke as suggested in September 2006 in ignorance by a Hertfordshire Insurance Broker describing Diabetes with Neuroglycopenia as a Joke and Nonsense. This caused Obstructed Justice in Law of a critical life-threatening complication of Diabetes and Endocrinology Disease in Hypoglycaemia Unawareness and now in 2023 Otitis Externa and Osteomyelitis as disclosed in a tragic young law student death with likely clinically undiagnosed Otitis Externa and Osteomyelitis. A patient requiring clinician prescribed Insulin justifies clinical respect and understanding in English Law which has been misunderstood since 1994 with sad consequences in this investigation. Today in recovering and managing the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 we move forward with new welfare ideas. It is a delight to be able to share some latest work for future research based on 44 years T1 Diabetes experience complimented by Purkinje Cell environmental welfare.

On welfare pluralism, social policy and the contribution of sociology: Revisiting Robert Pinker.

On occasion it makes sound sense to undertake a retrospective review of a late colleague's contribution to his or her subject area. This applies to Robert Pinker, Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, who died at the age of 89 in February 2021. Over a long life he made a major impact on working for press freedom and to social work studies, but this article concerns his work on social policy, and particularly on the idea of welfare pluralism, a many-faceted idea the exploration of which powered two pathbreaking books Social Theory and Social Policy (1971) and The Idea of Welfare (1979). In the twentieth century many states including the United Kingdom had greatly expanded their welfare provisions for their citizens, and, in some, an academic subject area, often called social administration or social policy had grown in response. Pinker started writing in the 1960s, dissatisfied with the conventional approach of Richard Titmuss and others, almost exclusively concerned with the state and welfare. He made the case for a radical rebalance toward including everyday experiences of obligations and how familial informal welfare practices are strengthened, weakened or modified by formal social services. However, ahead of his time, Pinker was arguing for an enhanced sociological imagination in the study of social policy and on the very idea of "welfare". This article has sections reflecting the facets of Pinker's thinking about welfare pluralism, including "social policy's past", "exchange and stigma", "taking informal welfare seriously", "divergent views of altruism", "comparative studies", "on a mixture of means to welfare" and "aspects of Pinker's legacy". The idea of welfare pluralism is now familiar. But Pinker's crucial pioneering role, depth of understanding of the issues and grasp of their intertwining is seldom recalled. This article should help to meet the need for his contribution to be reinserted into the mainstream of sociological thought on welfare, so enriching new research.

The Brazilian School Feeding Program: social representations of teachers and educational coordinators

Abstract Social representations were identified about school feeding by teachers and educational coordinators nationwide in schools assisted by the Brazilian School Feeding Program. For this qualitative research, 56 educational coordinators and 57 teachers were interviewed, who are involved in food and nutrition Education. The interviews were analyzed using collective subject discourse and interpreted by social representations. The comments were mostly unanimous in all regions of Brazil, and the coordinators presented similar remarks to the teachers. Although the Program incorporates the perspective of school meals as an educational tool, the interviewees reproduce the idea of welfare with food linked to the financial needs of students. It is noteworthy that they do not receive training and do not have a partnership with the nutritionist to include the subject of food in the classroom. In conclusion, this study found that there is a lack of knowledge of their roles as agents of the School Feeding Program.

De artículos de primera necesidad a necesidades básicas insatisfechas. Una mirada al proyecto de bienestar en el siglo xx uruguayo a través del debate sobre el costo de vida

Objective/Context: This article studies how the Uruguayan State conceptualized the idea of “necessity” in relation to the welfare project throughout the twentieth century. Throughout the first half of the century, the Uruguayan State developed a sustained policy of price control based on the concept of basic necessities. During the second half, the system began to crumble under the growing influence of liberal economic approaches and authoritarian processes. In the democratic revival context of the 1980s, these ideas began to be replaced by the concept of unsatisfied basic needs based on the influence of international organizations. Methodology: Through a methodological approach that focuses on the debates in Parliament and the public sphere, the text studies different meanings associated with the idea of necessity in relation to welfare. Originality: The documentary review offers an unprecedented journey through the transformations of the notion of necessity, showing that, while in the 1920s, the products were related to food, in the 1940s, they expanded to include multiple goods associated with the standard of living of the middle class. Simultaneously, the State developed commercial intermediation activities and promoted regulatory mechanisms that sought to control prices and ensure the supply of these goods. From the 1970s onwards, the concept of unsatisfied basic needs contributed to restricting the social role of the State by transforming the idea of welfare linked to universalist policies for the popular sectors to the development of targeted policies aimed at sectors below the poverty line. Conclusions: These policy debates transcended political-ideological alignments and were sustained by relatively shared principles of moral economy that varied between the first and second half of the 20th century.

Общественное благо в концепции государства всеобщего благосостояния

In the context of the idea of welfare, the task of state social security is considered, in which the public good is understood primarily as the welfare of citizens. The content of welfare and the role of the state in protecting economic and social welfare are revealed. It is emphasized that the right to well-being and a dignified life does not have an unambiguous interpretation, and in different political doctrines this right takes on a different meaning.

Care workers’ ambivalence towards family care partners: informal decision-making processes when older people consider relocation to a residential home

The aim of this article is to reveal how care workers in the home-help service interpret the influence of family care partners when older people’s relocation to a residential home is considered. Based on interviews with 33 care workers, this article investigates how they use their discretion. The analysis shows that the care workers express ambivalence towards family care workers and that they informally influence decision-making processes despite prevailing care management systems. The conclusion drawn are that welfare ideas in transformation and diffuse areas of responsibility may not benefit either care workers, family care partners or a care receiver’s self-determination.

Welfare Mentality as a Challenge to European Sustainable Development. What Role for Youth Inclusion and Institutions?

This paper takes a free-market approach to the idea of welfare. That is, the analysis does not reject the role of the welfare state to fight against poverty and inequality but underlines the perils of the welfare mentality’s proliferation. Sustainable development requires more individual responsibility and less dependence on the state and its redistribution function. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims at showing that welfare mentality imposes challenges on sustainable development. The second aim is to identify the factors associated with welfare mentality. We use data from several international databases and apply correlation, principal components, and multiple regression analyses on a sample of 28 European countries. The results of our study show that welfare mentality negatively influences sustainable development by being positively correlated with the risk of poverty and the percentage of young people not in employment, education, or training (NEET). At the same time, countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Luxembourg, widely acknowledged as welfare policy heavens, register low values in terms of preference for redistribution. The main determinants of welfare mentality are found to be a high level of NEET and a low level of economic freedom. This result points to the role of youth inclusion and free-market institutions in diminishing people’s welfare expectations and encouraging them to take better control of their own lives to reach prosperity and not depending on state support.

Dirty History and America's White Trash: American Eugenics and the Problem of Purity

Sue Currell’s paper discussed the idea of purity on several levels of discourse: firstly, as a historical trope by which both “welfare” and eugenics were promoted as progress, seen in the metaphorical ideas of welfare as “social house cleaning” or the pure and thereby efficient body during the 1930s. Secondly, how “pure” records such as well-intentioned documentary photographs aiming to uplift the rural poor were “infected” with the “fictions” of eugenic discourse around gene impurity. Finally, how researching the history of eugenics raises further trouble by hanging out the “dirty laundry” of the process of history making itself, in raising the problematic of historical knowledge and pure truths/transparent meanings, arguing that the methodological issues raised by researching eugenics highlight mostly an “impure”, tainted, or incomplete historical record that needs acknowledgment.

Reinterpreting the Connotation of “Sustainability” and the Expansion of Social Policy in China

This article examines the interplay between welfare ideas and institutional development and then seeks to explore the ideational background for social policy expansion in China. It focuses on the welfare semantics and narratives that underpin the grand social policy transformation since the millennium. The primary research question concerns whether the approach of “sustainability” is related to social policy in China, and, if yes, how and to what extent. Through the analysis of academic literatures and government documents on social policy in China, we explore the new “sustainability approach” to Chinese social policy that is constructed by social experts and international agencies. While the old sustainability approach overwhelmingly links the “sustainable development” of social policy to the issue of financial affordability and the adequacy of benefit levels, the newly interpreted approach highlights the significant meaning of social policy for long-term and inclusive development over the upcoming decades. Against this backdrop, a holistic national plan for socio-economic modernization has incorporated social policy. Beyond economic and ecological objectives, social development with a focus on social policy has become a key pillar of sustainable development in China.

Playing the Green Card – The Commodifying Fiction of a Derivative Jardin-Forêt

With the point of departure in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) – site François Mitterand (Dominique Perrault, 1989–95) and more specifically its central but inaccessible jardin-forêt, this essay problematizes what has been described as the neoliberal shift in architecture and urbanism. The BnF and its garden-forest has been interpreted as a last breath of modernist urbanism and welfare ideas. Yet, rather than dismissing this Grand opération as a tardy spasm of modernism, it is perhaps more productive to consider the ensemble an exponent of the derivative, or spin-off, spatial logic currently sustaining the fiction of urban fertility and growth.

A Brief History of the Social Wage: Welfare Before and After Racial Fordism

This essay explores the legacy of racially allocated welfare in South Africa, focusing on the history of the migrant labor system. In outlining a relationship between racial capitalism and precarity—the immediate consequence of the denial of welfare—the essay argues that the promises of universal welfare that came with the transition to democracy were ultimately displaced given the advent of neoliberalism after 1994. If the anti-apartheid struggles strove to dismantle white supremacy, in practical terms, such struggles lacked the concrete capacities to address the abject everyday material conditions of life under apartheid. The enormity of the historical injury and the implementation of less than effective policies to address land, housing, services, and employment has led to renewed social struggles since 1994 that have been primarily focused on restoring the idea of welfare for all.

Standing up to complexity: researching moral panics in social work

Moral panics are central to social work policy and practice. Voluntary agencies and statutory bodies (including governments) create and sustain moral panics in order to raise awareness of, and win support for, their own understandings of social issues and problems. This is not a neutral enterprise; on the contrary, moral panics often have consequences that are negative, whether intended or unintended. Far from leading to greater social justice and a more equal society, they may reinforce stereotypes and lead to fearful, risk-averse practice. This paper discusses one such moral panic in 2013 that centred on the story of ‘Maria’, a Bulgarian Roma child living in Greece. The paper explores the meaning and use of the concept of moral panic before unpacking this case-study example in more detail. We argue that the moral panic over ‘Maria’ has much to tell us about ideas of welfare and protection, institutional racism and children and childhood, as well as the connections between ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’. We conclude that social work as a profession must stand up to complexity, and in doing so, be aware of its own role in relation to moral panics.

A Study on the Status of the Idea Supported Platform: Focusing on the Diffusion of the Creative Economy Town

Recently, the government is seeking a paradigm shift from catch-up strategies to leading strategies. This study describes the current status of the Creative Economy Town, as a welfare idea supported platform for value-added ideas, and suggests the diffusion directions. Received (June 15, 2015), Review Request(June 16, 2015), Review Result(July 01, 2015) Accepted(July 23, 2015), Published(August 31, 2015) 130-741 Div. of Creative Korea Supporting, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, 66, Hoegi-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea e-mail: dbchung@kisti.re.kr 130-741 Div. of Creative Korea Supporting, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, 66, Hoegi-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea e-mail: sungjin.kim@kisti.re.kr 130-741 Div. of Creative Korea Supporting, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, 66, Hoegi-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea e-mail: ubizconsulting@gmail.com (Corresponding Author) 130-741 Div. of Creative Korea Supporting, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information, 66, Hoegi-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea e-mail: younghunh@kisti.re.kr A study on the status of the idea supported platform: Focusing on the diffusion of the Creative Economy Town Copyright c 2015 HSST 38 The Creative Economy Town supports the commercialization and startup through collecting ideas, professional mentoring, and public/private connection. Results of the 2014 satisfaction survey suggests that mentoring services are the most urgently needed to improve. Besides, enhancing homepage usability, clarifying the coverage of public/private connection, providing a variety of contents are required. The Creative Economy Town will have to provide consumers with one-stop personalized services for supporting ideas through continuous improvement.

Social work practice and social science history

Social work may be regarded as a product of the Enlightment together with other social sciences. The ontological shift from religious perspectives to a secularly based responsibility that opens up for political as well as individual action is regarded as a baseline for modern social work. Social work itself has struggled to develop an academic identity and a sustainable social field within the social sciences. Social work has historically experienced a gap between research and practice, relating to social sciences and other subjects as part of its teaching without a firm scientific foundation for social works own practice. If social work earlier developed related to ideas of welfare and social policy in practice it may now be moving in a new direction towards more than being based on scientific development within its own field. Over the last decades the need for scientific development within social work has strengthened its relation to research and social science. There seems to be arguments to support that social work is moving with research in directions which may be regarded as an epistemological turn based on understanding of knowledge production as well as a linguistic turn where the construction of meaning enhance the importance of regarding different lifeworlds and worldviews as basis for claiming some egalitarian positions for different positions as clients as well as researchers and practitioners.

The Death of the Horse

The role of the horse has changed significantly in Scandinavia as a consequence of the modernization and urbanization processes. At the same time the conceptions of horses have changed from work and hierarchy related servant and workmate to anthropomorphic and scientific animal conceptions. Consequently, the goal of the farmers, to get the work done and keep the horse and equipment fit to perform, has been replaced by the goal of leisure horse owners: a happy horse and the purpose for the horse to feel well. The ideas of human welfare have created an idea of a welfare horse.

Robert Pinker, the Idea of Welfare and the Study of Social Policy: On Unitarism and Pluralism

AbstractThis article reappraises the distinction upon which Robert Pinker has insisted since the 1970s between the heuristic and the normative dimensions of concepts and theories associated with ‘welfare’ in social policy studies, a distinction prompted by, for instance, the writings of Richard Titmuss. It discusses Pinker's differentiation of forms of study which seek to account for the likenesses and unlikenesses within and between the welfare systems of different countries from forms of study aiming to establish moral criteria by which one system of welfare can be deemed superior to another. In particular, it highlights his emphasis on the need for social policy as a subject to attend to: (a) the reality of everyday ideas of social welfare and ‘faring well’ in general; (b) how everyday ideas of ‘faring well’ are exhibited in what he has called ‘conditional altruism’, whether exercised within families, towards strangers or across nations; (c) the practices undertaken by individuals and families to attain freedom and security as well as to meet those of their needs commonly taken within social policy studies to be the components of ‘welfare’; (d) the difficulties, moral, political, social and economic, associated with Titmussian welfare unitarism, in contrast to welfare pluralism. The article thus provides a review of aspects of Pinker's many published papers as well as his influentialSocial Theory and Social PolicyandThe Idea of Welfare.

Social work practice and social science history

Social work may be regarded as a product of the Enlightment together with other social sciences. The ontological shift from religious perspectives to a secularly based responsibility that opens up for political as well as individual action is regarded as a baseline for modern social work. Social work itself has struggled to develop an academic identity and a sustainable social field within the social sciences. Social work has historically experienced a gap between research and practice, relating to social sciences and other subjects as part of its teaching without a firm scientific foundation for social works own practice. If social work earlier developed related to ideas of welfare and social policy in practice it may now be moving in a new direction towards more than being based on scientific development within its own field. Over the last decades the need for scientific development within social work has strengthened its relation to research and social science. There seems to be arguments to support that social work is moving with research in directions which may be regarded as an epistemological turn based on understanding of knowledge production as well as a linguistic turn where the construction of meaning enhance the importance of regarding different lifeworlds and worldviews as basis for claiming some egalitarian positions for different positions as clients as well as researchers and practitioners .

Nutrition and the Mediterranean diet. A historical and sociological analysis of the concept of a “healthy diet” in Spanish society

In this paper our aim is to analyse the way the relationship between health and food has been changing at the same time as Spanish society itself. From the beginnings of the consumer society until the present day the modernization process has made its imprint on the guidelines public bodies have issued to the public on caring for their health and diet. Beginning in the sixties with a welfare idea of a healthy diet, very typical of the decade, and meant for a population with nutritional problems, today we have guidelines for an overfed population. The social trends dominant in each historical moment are shown throughout this transformation process and the dietary recommendations have been part of the social change. However, the perceptions of the administration itself on what constitutes a healthy diet have also made their mark on the criteria. The modernizing nature of the paternalistic administration of the sixties can be easily seen in contrast with the public bodies of the eighties competing with the messages from the food and agricultural businesses. As the 20th century drew to a close, dietary advice was in keeping with a background dominated by considerations on the nature of social change and in which both public bodies and citizens trusted in the truths of science as a reference point for correct action. At the beginning of the 21st century reflexivity and questioning of scientific power appear and also an increase in public preoccupation with food risks. Each stage is analysed relating historical background and dietary recommendations.

The Idea of Welfare and the Welfare State

While the general idea of the welfare state may seem clear enough in practice, the content of the basic concept of welfare, the relationship between individual welfare and social welfare, and the relationship between any concept of welfare and the state are all disputed. the aim here is to provide a guide to at least some aspects of these disputes and therefore to reveal some of the complexities that lie within the idea of the welfare state.