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In recent years there has been a dramatic expansion in both the number and scope of policy proposals explicitly intended to reduce inequality proffered by policymakers in the Democratic Party. In the following, it is argued that this state of affairs is the result of a complex series of developments triggered by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests. OWS dramatically enhanced both the salience and the politicization of economic inequality. These developments altered the strategies of elites and organizations within the institutional left and advantaged elite movement allies within the Democratic Party. In combination, these indirect and elite-mediated responses resulted in antiinequality positions becoming integrated into both the partisan identity and the platform of the Democratic Party. Despite the Occupy movement being relatively short-lived and explicitly eschewing reliance on institutional politics, it nonetheless had a significant impact on conventional politics. By significantly shifting the political discourse around the issue of inequality, the movement reshaped the political landscape in a manner that created new opportunities and openings for political actors. As organizations within the Democratic Party's coalition increasingly adopted antiinequality messaging this both pressured and incentivized establishment Democrats to fully embrace an antiinequality agenda. This account is consistent with a theory of political parties in which the key actors are activists and interest groups, not party leaders, and social movement research that suggests that movements are often more influential in the earliest stages of the policymaking process.

This chapter describes the current state of special education in Israel as well as what the future holds with possible solutions to improve services for individuals with disabilities. Israel is a very complex society and, as such, the educational system is very complex as well. The development of the special education system in Israel will be described as well as the current policies. In addition, different service delivery models will be explained. Inclusionary practices in Israel will be discussed as well as the prevalence and incidence rates of different disabilities in Israel and how they have changed over time. Finally, different strategies and models for implementation of services will be described and the importance of teacher training to meet student needs will be highlighted.

Welfare state retrenchment in advanced industrialized countries seeks to expand market-like logics in public services, based on the assumption that public services benefit from non-state initiative and competition. This logic gained a stronghold in policymaking, but its implementation nevertheless struggled to find acceptance. Public university tuition is one such case where policymakers aimed to increase investment in human capital through cost sharing. While students in some countries accept them as a necessary evil, opposition arises in others. Students in Germany and Turkey took to the streets in support of tuition-free higher education. Despite differences in their political contexts and the differential mediating role political culture plays, student mobilization reversed right-wing parties' policies. This article focuses on how opposition to tuition policies is covered by the news in both countries. Using a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling with qualitative analysis, I show that student protests and tuition policy discussions are reported separately. In both countries, student protests involving confrontation were highlighted whereas reports on institutional actors dominated policy discussions. However, when movements pressure political parties to “own” an issue in their platform, party endorsement subsequently amplifies issue salience even if movement organizations and parties are not covered together by the media. This indicates an indirect effect of movements' collective action on news coverage. Political party endorsements mediate the amount of coverage movement issues receive. This finding provides insights into how opposition to welfare state retrenchment might navigate difficulties in closed media cultures that heavily favor institutional actors.

This study investigates how university libraries in Nigeria are staffed and presents staff development opportunities and learning activities that sustain staff.

A survey research design was adopted. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 46 universities and 400 respondents consisting of 46 heads of libraries and 354 professionals from federal, state, and private universities. Content of the instrument was based on literature comprising six questions. The 327 (92.4%) usable responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and presented in simple frequency tables.

The study showed that library workforce in Nigerian universities included different categories of professionals and para-professionals having diversified job opportunities and duties. Most libraries had staff development budget and respondents received various forms of assistance to foster learning. Although all nontransferable skills recorded high mean, respondents accorded less importance to nonlibrary personal skills that can be used to leverage the expectations of recruitment, retention, and sustainability.

The study was limited to practicing professionals but has staffing implications for all libraries across Nigeria.

Many professionals may lack the appropriate multi-skills that would enhance exploring new approaches and breaking out of traditional ways of operation in the different library and outside library settings.

The study contributes to knowledge about sustaining library staff in relation to adopting the recommended skills on a broad scale, and assessing how their acquisition can change the perception of professionals to its immense contributions to sustaining them in the workforce.

This chapter considers the difficulties faced when trying to develop an ethics framework for all social sciences because of the variety of disciplinary approaches and traditions involved. In recognition of the need for issues of research governance to operate separately from researchers and ethics committees the former Social Science committee of Science Europe organised a workshop in June 2015 with representatives of the Member Organisations to assess the state of art and to present ideas on how to move this issue forward. The key issues discussed and the recommendations resulting from this workshop are explored in this chapter.

Purpose – We build on prior research of social movement communities (SMCs) to conceptualize a new form of cultural support for activism – the social movement online community (SMOC). We define SMOC as a sustained network of individuals who work to maintain an overlapping set of goals and identities tied to a social movement linked through quasi-public online discussions.

Method – This paper uses extensive data collected from Stormfront, the largest online community of white nationalists, for the period from September 2001 to August 2010 totaling 6,868,674 posts. We systematically analyzed the data to allow for a detailed depiction of SMOCs using keyword tags. We also used Stata 11 to analyze descriptive measures such as persistence of user presence and relation of first post to length of stay.

Findings – Our findings suggest that SMOCs provide a new forum for social movements that produces a unique set of characteristics. Nevertheless, many characteristics of SMOCs are also in line with conventional offline SMCs.

Originality of the paper – This research broadens our understanding of the differences between online and offline SMCs and presents the special case of the SMOC as a way for scholars to conceptualize and study social movements that use the Internet to form their collective identity.

In creating a response to tropical storms Stan (October, 2005) and Dolly (May, 2008), the Center for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI) began encouraging the Guatemalan residents to get involved with disaster planning. Other international organizations are, also, beginning to finance projects to train the poorest communities in disaster planning but, funding is difficult because, sadly, avoidance does not “sell” as well as post-disaster relief and reconstruction projects.