Nordic Civic Society Organisations and the Future of Welfare Services
Nordic Civic Society Organisations and the Future of Welfare Services

Author: Aila-Leena Matthies

Publisher: Nordic Council of Ministers

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9289312890

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When well functioning national welfare states are put under pressure, also the tasks of civic society and citizens' mutual responsibility are being re-defined. Hence, the significance of the civic society organisations in one of the most successful and stable circumstances of welfare states - in Northern Europe - is of great interest. This publication gives a first comprehensive overview of existing research on civic society organisations in the area of welfare services in the five Nordic countries. Besides a comparative Nordic analysis, focussed national contributions are provided. Finally, leading European researchers connect the Nordic debate in to a stimulating European context. How far are the Nordic welfare traditions still of significance, since all welfare states are similarly challenged by the global market economy? Can welfare organisations provide opportunities even for the most vulnerable groups to achieve full citizenship?

Civil Society Organizations, Unemployment, and Precarity in Europe
Civil Society Organizations, Unemployment, and Precarity in Europe

Author: Simone Baglioni

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-04-14

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0230391435

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This book provides a Europe-wide comparative analysis of the role of civil society organizations active in the field of unemployment and precarity. It illustrates how crucial civil society organizations are for the inclusion of the young unemployed, mainly in two ways: by delivering services and by advocating policy.

International Encyclopedia of Civil Society
International Encyclopedia of Civil Society

Author: Helmut K. Anheier

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2009-11-24

Total Pages: 1722

ISBN-13: 0387939962

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Recently the topic of civil society has generated a wave of interest, and a wealth of new information. Until now no publication has attempted to organize and consolidate this knowledge. The International Encyclopedia of Civil Society fills this gap, establishing a common set of understandings and terminology, and an analytical starting point for future research. Global in scope and authoritative in content, the Encyclopedia offers succinct summaries of core concepts and theories; definitions of terms; biographical entries on important figures and organizational profiles. In addition, it serves as a reliable and up-to-date guide to additional sources of information. In sum, the Encyclopedia provides an overview of the contours of civil society, social capital, philanthropy and nonprofits across cultures and historical periods. For researchers in nonprofit and civil society studies, political science, economics, management and social enterprise, this is the most systematic appraisal of a rapidly growing field.

Participation, Marginalization and Welfare Services
Participation, Marginalization and Welfare Services

Author: Aila-Leena Matthies

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1317083970

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Current debates around participation and marginalization dominate the agenda of many European political forums. There is an increasing concern about the stability of social cohesion and a growing number of particular groups of people who are regarded as being at risk of being socially excluded or marginalized. This volume goes beyond the surface of public discussions to look at the central role played by welfare services in European societies in either strengthening or hindering participatory citizenship and democracy. In current discussions welfare services - understood in a broad sense - are centrally positioned: there are high expectations that welfare services can hinder marginalization and enable participation. Yet marginalization is, in most cases, rooted in the deeper structures of society, with economy, participation and involvement dependent on political or highly personal factors, which are beyond the scope of welfare services. This groundbreaking volume posits that participation and marginalization are ’twin’ concepts, expressing opposing sides of one and the same processes faced by individuals and communities. It will be essential reading for social workers, sociologists and policy-makers throughout Europe.

Civic Engagement in Scandinavia
Civic Engagement in Scandinavia

Author: Lars Skov Henriksen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 3319987178

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Since the 1990’s, a number of studies have documented a remarkable high and stable amount of popular engagement in civic organizations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Often these countries have been considered deviant cases against the proliferating decline of social capital studies. However, despite great international interest in the Scandinavian region, the volume argues that the civil societies and the civic engagement of these countries remain poorly understood. Most interest in the Scandinavian welfare models addresses the balance between state and market, but under communicates the role played by civil society and popular engagement in associations and voluntary organizations. The contributions offer a coherent portrait of stability and change in formal and informal forms of civic engagement over the past 25 years as well as offering contextualized knowledge of the history and institutional design in which Scandinavian civil societies are embedded.

The State and Civil Society
The State and Civil Society

Author: Nicole Bolleyer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 019107621X

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State regulation of civil society is expanding yet widely contested, often portrayed as illegitimate intrusion. Despite ongoing debates about the nature of state-voluntary relations in various disciplines, we know surprisingly little about why long-lived democracies adopt more or less constraining legal approaches in this sphere, in which state intervention is generally considered contentious. Drawing on insights from political science, sociology, comparative law as well as public administration research, this book addresses this important question, conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. It addresses the conceptual and methodological challenges related to developing systematic, comparative insights into the nature of complex legal environments affecting voluntary membership organizations, when simultaneously covering a wide range of democracies and the regulation applicable to different types of voluntary organizations. Proposing the analytical tools to tackle those challenges, it studies in-depth the intertwining and overlapping legal environments of political parties, interest groups, and public benefit organizations across 19 long-lived democracies. After presenting an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical framework theorizing democratic states' legal disposition towards, or their disinclination against, regulating voluntary membership organizations in a constraining or permissive fashion, this framework is empirically tested. Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the comparative analysis identifies three main 'paths' accounting for the relative constraints in the legal environments democracies have created for organized civil society, defined by different configurations of political systems' democratic history, their legal family, and voluntary sector traditions. Providing the foundation for a mixed-methods design, three ideal-typical representatives of each path - Sweden, the UK, and France - are selected for the in-depth study of these legal environments' long-term evolution, to capture reform dynamics and their drivers that have shaped group and party regulation over many decades.

Neoliberalism, Nordic Welfare States and Social Work
Neoliberalism, Nordic Welfare States and Social Work

Author: Masoud Kamali

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 1351620215

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How have three decades of neoliberalism affected the Nordic welfare states as well as the organisation, education and practices of social work in those countries? During recent decades the welfare states of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have gone through dramatic changes infl uenced by the political triumph of neoliberalism. This has led to both the electoral success of extreme right and mainstream neoliberal parties, and to the neoliberal ideological transformations of social democratic parties. The neoliberal doctrine of making governance cheaper has thus been made the focus of governance and has led to increased marginalisation and social problems. This is the first book to comparatively explore the role of neoliberal reforms on social work and social policy across the Nordic welfare states. The richly theoretical and empirical chapters explore and illustrate the consequences of the dominance of neoliberal policies and provide an analysis of the effects of globalisation, glocalisation, welfare nationalism, symbolic violence and forced migration. The book provides valuable insights into the shortcomings of retreating welfare states in a time of increasing glocal social problems. Neoliberalism, Nordic Welfare States and Social Work should be considered essential reading for critical social work education. Students, scholars, educators and researchers of Nordic countries and beyond have much to learn from this book.

Transformations of European Welfare States and Social Rights
Transformations of European Welfare States and Social Rights

Author: Stine Piilgaard Porner Nielsen

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 3031466373

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This open access edited book investigates European social rights in practice from socio-legal perspectives. It brings together fourteen socio-legal scholars, representing Nordic and Western European countries, who analyse different aspects pertaining to European social rights, namely the regulation of social rights, encounters between welfare professionals and citizens, and citizens’ mobilisation of social rights. These three different aspects from the structure for the sections in the anthology, each analysing transformations related to regulation, encounters and rights mobilisation. The book contributes to the existing literature as it focuses on interdependent transformations on macro, meso and micro levels which are key for understanding processes and contexts related to European social rights in practice. It speaks particularly to academics in sociology of law and/or regulation.

Co-production
Co-production

Author: Victor Pestoff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1317996690

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Public management research has in recent years paid increasing attention to the third sector, especially to its role in the provision of public services. Evidence of this is the rising number of publications on the topic, as well as a growing number of sessions and papers on the topic in academic conferences of the EGPA and IRSPM. However, much of the discussion on its role is motivated at least as much by ideology as by fact. We still lack a proper empirical understanding of what happens when the third sector is drawn into public service provision. In this thematic presentation of Co-Production: The Third Sector and the Delivery of Public Services, we will try to enhance this understanding by presenting several new studies on the subject. We also introduce the concepts of co-production, co-management and co-governance as a conceptual framework that enables us to better understand such developments.

Social Enterprise in Western Europe
Social Enterprise in Western Europe

Author: Jacques Defourny

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-04-12

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0429619626

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In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project on which this book is based was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. Social Enterprise in Western Europe –the third volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide – will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region.