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This book addresses key questions about whether inequality in incomes, wealth, and education have been widening in a consistent fashion across 30 rich nations, and whether this is exacerbating social problems and undermining the healthy functioning of democratic processes.
This book discusses men’s friendships in relation to queer, discursive, and intersectional feminist theories. It analyses stories of intimacy, touch, hugs, and conversations, connecting these with current discussions within feminism and critical masculinity studies on “new” men, men’s political activism, and how friendships are lived and conceptualised in relation to heteronormative relationship ideals. Drawing on individual and dyadic interviews with middle-class Swedish men, all engaged in or sympathetic to feminist issues in some sense, this volume shows that Swedish gender equality ideologies as well as feminist, therapeutic, neo-liberal, and individualist discourses prevalent in the Western world structured the men’s friendships and their engagement with gender politics. Chapters cover friendship temporalities, gendered friendship ideals, friendship as men’s politics, and friendship as performed in interaction. Bridging the literatures of feminist research and friendship, the author points to tensions and contradictions in pro-feminist men’s political projects and in contemporary masculine positions.
What is the configuration of institutions and policies most conducive to human flourishing? The historical and comparative evidence from the world's rich democratic countries suggests that the answer is capitalism, a democratic political system, good elementary and secondary schooling, a big welfare state, employment-conducive public services, and moderate regulation of product and labor markets. This set of policies and institutions, which sociologist Lane Kenworthy calls social democratic capitalism, improves living standards for the least well-off, enhances economic security, and very likely boosts equality of opportunity. And it does so without sacrificing the many other things we want in a good society, from liberty to economic growth and much more. While the Nordic nations have been social democratic capitalism's chief practitioners, there is good reason to think other affluent countries, including the United States, will move in this direction in coming decades.
This collective volume on quality of work in the European Union offers a comprehensive analysis on the current situation of the tensions between work and welfare in Europe, with a special emphasis on employment-related issues. The volume tackles a crucial aspect of employment policies, namely the strengthening of the quality dimension in the decisions taken by policy-makers to foster the performance of the labour market and to combine this orientation with the demands of workers for welfare, protection and a better reconciliation of work and family life. Quality of work has been on the agenda of policy-makers, practitioners and academics for the last few years, promoting a wide debate. The book provides a contribution to this debate and takes into consideration a range of issues associated with the analysis of work quality from an innovative perspective. Relevant subtopics including a conceptual and political analysis of work quality, wage differentials and in-work poverty, gender issues or workers' direct and indirect representation in the firm and its relation with work quality are addressed.
Written by eminent scholar Chiara Saraceno, this Advanced Introduction offers a synthetic overview of the core theoretical and policy issues involved in family policy, currently the most dynamic sector of social policies in both developed and developing countries. It discusses the three primary areas of family policy in contemporary society: financial support for the cost of children, short and long term care for children and dependent people, and work-family conciliation.
Demonstrating the ways in which the micro and macro-economic constitutions of Europe have reacted to legal measures enacted to counter the economic crisis of the past decade, this innovative book takes an interdisciplinary approach in its attempt to understand and portray the metamorphosis of the European Economic Constitution. It contains contributions from leading scholars and experts in European economic law, discussing the challenges, solutions found, problems arising and possible approaches to embed the economic constitution in the broader constitutional framework of the EU. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial}
Explores family policies related to households of children with disabilities, providing an in-depth, evidence-based review of legal, programmatic issues.
Includes 20 selections, reflecting the thinking and research in welfare state studies, these readings are organized around a series of debates - on welfare regimes, globalization, Europeanization, demographic change and political challenges.
This book examines the risk factors surrounding children at risk of experiencing and perpetrating violence, and looks at the positive role that children's rights can play in their protection. The authors propose that violence in childhood is not spontaneous: that children are raised to become violent in poorly functioning families and child-unfriendly environments. They may be exposed to toxic substances in utero, to maltreatment in infancy, to domestic violence or parental criminality as they grow up. Each of these risk factors is empirically linked with the development of antisocial and aggressive behaviour, and each reflects a violation of children's rights to protection from maltreatment. The authors show how respecting children's rights and safeguarding them from exposure to violence can shift the balance between risk and protective factors and, as a result, reduce the incidence and severity of childhood violence. This book will be essential reading for professionals working in child protection or with young offenders, academics, students, practitioners and policy-makers.