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The purpose of this study is to discover the uniqueness of China's online livestreaming industry and to make preliminary predictions about its future.

Providing a panoramic description of China's online livestreaming industry and a comparative analysis with other countries' online livestreaming industries.

China's online livestreaming industry is world leader in general. In terms of user size and age structure, although China has a high proportion of online livestreaming users, the proportion of anchors is not high, while the age structure of users in both China and other countries shows the characteristics of younger users. In terms of policy, the difference between China and foreign support in online livestreaming is small, but developed countries have stricter regulations.

The research in this paper has great significance in gaining an in-depth understanding of the development status and trends of China's online livestreaming industry and in designing accurate support policies.

In recent decades, childhood in Japan has undergone significant transformations. Government policies geared at boosting women's labor force participation, a declining fertility rate, rising costs of having children on the one hand, and increased spending on public childcare and support measures for families, on the other hand, contribute to these ongoing changes. Having only one child is becoming the norm while mothers' role in society is shifting. The traditional family structure is moving from the previously predominant male breadwinner model to more dual-earner families. Children now spend significant amounts of time in care and education institutions.

In this chapter, we analyze current configurations of early childhood in institutions and the family from a policy perspective and regarding children's predominant education and care arrangements. Drawing on various survey data sets and evidence from demographic statistics to pedagogical ethnographies, we look at how childcare policies and families reshape the organization of children's lives and outline how institutions and educators create learning experiences aligned with the values of a collectivist society. However, despite being deeply rooted in traditional child-rearing goals, many parents also subscribe to rigorous educational arrangements from early childhood onwards to prepare children for success in a competitive education system. The chapter finishes with an outlook on future directions of how policymakers and the ongoing institutionalization of childhood continue to change children's lives.

Whilst an urgent need for collaboration is increasingly seen in education to better respond to socio-educational challenges, in practice, collaboration between primary school teachers and their partners is hampered by barriers. The aim of this study is to shed light on these barriers from a human resource management (HRM) angle, using the ability, motivation and opportunity (AMO) framework.

Quantitative and qualitative data were collected amongst staff in 16 child centres offering joint pre-school, education and childcare.

The authors' findings suggest that in general, both teachers and childcare workers perceive themselves as skilled and motivated for collaboration. They perceive aspects of opportunity to perform as most important barriers.

Based on this research, school leaders are advised to organise opportunities for collaboration, especially by fostering an inclusive organisational climate and scheduling sufficient time for collaboration.

This paper contributes to the relatively scarce body of research on HRM within the education sector. Furthermore, it illustrates the applicability of the AMO model for gaining insight into how educational management can be utilised to foster increased collaboration between teachers and childcare workers.

Research shows that parental employment and education status affect the amount of parental childcare time, which is a fundamental determinant of children's outcomes. In this paper, the authors study whether being overeducated – working in a job that requires less education than the level of education acquired – is related to the time parents devote to their children.

The authors set two main hypotheses. First, overeducation might lead to more childcare time if being overeducated is the result of the individual prioritizing family over career. Second, overeducation might lead to less childcare time if overeducation is the result of lower ability. The authors estimate time use equations using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2004 to 2019.

The authors find that overeducated parents devote less time to childcare than matched parents, especially in the weekend sample. The authors’ results suggest that overeducation is not a deliberate choice prioritizing family over career.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on the implications of being overeducated on childcare.

The paper aims to recommend legal and regulatory reforms to better prevent child abuse in childcare institutions in Hong Kong.

A summary of investigation report and news reports are referred to in describing the abuse incidents which occurred in a children’s residential home. Routine Activity Theory (RAT) is used as the framework for identifying the causes. Local and overseas legislation, regulations, case law, and policies are analysed to provide recommendations for reforms.

There are systematic failures such as workload issues, inadequate supervision, and the absence of continuing professional development (CPD) that contributed to the incidents. The regulations governing the operation of childcare centres and criminal laws against child abuse are long overdue for an update in Hong Kong. On the institutional side, this paper recommends enacting regulations that mandate CPD, lower the staff-to-child ratio, and strengthen the Social Welfare Department’s (SWD) supervisory powers over childcare centres. From the criminal law perspective, it is recommended that “reasonable chastisement” be abolished as a defence of corporal punishment, and that there be new offences for failure to report suspected child abuse incidents and causing or allowing the death/serious harm of a child.

The child abuse incidents, occurring in a childcare institution, have drawn wide public concern. Reform is required to protect vulnerable children and regain public confidence.

This paper investigates the relationship between health and labour market participation considering the potential role played by the presence of children and elderly persons (with/without disabilities) in Italian households.

The authors use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and full-information maximum likelihood to estimate a two-equation model (one equation for labour force participation and one for health status) with instruments to address the endogeneity of the labour force participation choice. The model is estimated separately by gender.

The authors find that while the presence of children, elderly persons or both is positively associated with the health status of both genders, the presence of disabled elderly persons exerts a negative role. As for participation, interesting differences emerge. The presence of children discourages women's participation but is positively associated with men's labour force participation. Interestingly, a caring role for elderly persons without disability emerges for both genders when the presence of children is combined with that of elderly people. Gender differences are also at work for the role of childcare services and elderly and/or disabled home care/assistance.

The findings indicate a possible caring role for elderly persons without disabilities, neutralizing the effect of the presence of children on the labour force participation of both genders. The results also suggest that greater coverage of care services should increase the active participation of women in the labour market.

This study aims to conduct a geographical analysis of the distribution and type of activities developed by social enterprises in rural and urban areas of Ireland.

The study analyses data of more than 4,000 social enterprises against a six-tier rural/urban typology, using descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests to test six hypotheses.

The study shows a geographical rural–urban pattern in the distribution of social enterprises in Ireland, with a positive association between the remoteness of an area and the ratio of social enterprises, and a lack of capital-city effect related to the density of social enterprises. The analysis also shows a statistically significant geographical rural–urban pattern for the types of activities developed by social enterprises. The authors observe a positive association between the remoteness of the areas and the presence of social enterprises operating in the community and local development sector whereas the association is not significant for social enterprises developing welfare services.

The paper shows the potential of using recently developed rural–urban typologies and tools such as geographical information systems for conducting geographical research on social enterprises. The findings also have implications for informing spatially sensitive policymaking on social enterprises.

The merging of a large national data set of social enterprises with geographical tools and data at subregional level contributes to the methodological advancement of the field of social enterprises, providing tools and frameworks for a nuanced and spatially sensitive analysis of these organisations.

The article explores to what extent party politics has influenced the different trajectories in Spain and Italy in terms of gendered active social policies (ASPs) (i.e. ALMPs and WLBPs). Second, it investigates how social and political modernization in the two countries has facilitated or hindered party competition on gendered ASPs.

To investigate to what extent parties support gendered ASPs, the article relies on an original content analysis of party manifestos issued during the 2010s national elections. A total of 1387 quasi-sentences have been coded. The results were then quantified to graphically show how positions differentiate across parties and countries.

The content analysis of party manifestos displays that party politics matters: gendered ASPs are backed in a very different way by the Spanish and Italian parties. While in Spain all political parties have strongly championed ALMPs and WLBPs, this is not the case for the Italian parties. The research has also stressed that the specific path of social and political modernization is an important intervening variable that alters positively or negatively parties' support for gendered ASPs.

The article contributes to widen theoretically and empirically the literature on ASPs in the Southern European countries. Theoretically, it questions the supposed homogeneity of the Southern social model and investigated the alleged bifurcation between Italy and Spain, focusing on those policies – ASPs – that constitute the foundations of the Southern model: familialism and dualization. Furthermore, this bifurcation was analyzed adopting a gender perspective, and exploring adherence to or departure from the Southern model. Third, the article focuses on the politics of ASPs demonstrating that inspecting the political arena can contribute to explain policy change.

Swedish society has systematically worked to improve children's health and well-being since the early twentieth century and is considered a leading figure globally in battling violence against children. Awareness of violence against children and its detrimental effects on development and health is generally high in Sweden. Violence is also broadly recognised as a violation of human rights. A ban on corporal punishment was enacted in 1948 in social childcare institutions, in 1958 in schools, and in 1979 at home. The more recent landmark was the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, established as law on 1 January 2020. In line with convention's Article 12, stating that a child has the right to express their views in all matters affecting them, more attention to child participation has been paid since 2020. This chapter provides several recent examples of strategic measures that have been used to enhance child participation in governmental assignments and enquiries and state-funded research. We discuss the examples considering the United Nations convention and child participation methods and pinpoint opportunities and obstacles to further develop and consolidate child participation as a norm in publicly funded societal activities.