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The study aims to deal with three theoretical approaches to answer the research question: Does political reform in rentier States (Kuwait as a model) lead to political stability? The first approach: Following the steps of political reform in rentier States leads eventually to political stability. The second approach: Political stability in rentier States does not necessarily lead to political reform. The third approach: In rentier States, the decisive factor in interpreting the correlation between political reform and political stability requires explaining other intermediary factors.

David Easton’s input-output model: Easton defined the political system as the interactions related to the authoritarian allocation of values in society, that is, the distribution of resources by decisions adopted by individuals, and provided a framework for analysis of the political system in which it sees an integrated circuit of a dynamic nature that starts with inputs and outputs feedback, input and output. Inputs refer to the effects of the environment on the system. Outputs are the effects of the system on the environment, which are the decisions and policies taken by the system to meet the demands. Reverse feedback is the flow of information to the system about the results of its actions, the results of its decisions and policies. Generate new inputs in the form of a demand or support, and the system’s feedback feeds a kind of movement.

It can be said that the future of the rentier state is particularly dangerous in the Arab countries where the problem today is the sharp drop in oil prices, which requires the need to enter into the stage of major transformations and work to bring about fundamental changes and enter into radical constitutional, economic, political and social reforms before turning them from the state rent to countries that lack political stability.

The aim of this research is to present a theoretical study of political reform. The study began to consolidate the concept of political reform, which was and still is the goal of many political and social reform leaders and movements, in addition to being a major topic in political theories. Reform can be carried out by violence and by peaceful change. In any case, reform remains a humanitarian need that cannot be ignored or avoided, because the alternative is worsening and deteriorating political and social conditions.

The Arab Spring revolutions set many challenges for the Arab countries. These countries had to start political reforms. The State of Kuwait was one of the most important rentier countries that, after the Arab Spring revolutions, was concerned with ensuring that individuals and groups exercised their political rights through political participation in decision-making. It guarantees the human existence of society and protects it through the law and its legislation, and grants rights and freedoms and does not oppose it.

Political reforms lead to accommodating the demands of the opposition, increasing the political participation of citizens, activating the political role of women, activating the role of civil society and increasing political mobility.

The importance of the research paper is to emphasize the term rentier state and confirm the importance of reform in rentier countries and the paper asks whether the expansion of political rights, citizenship and participation will lead to stability or instability in these countries.

This article analyses a major healthcare and social welfare reform establishing new regional and integrated wellbeing services counties in Finland. The authors approach the reform and service integration as a knowledge management (KM) issue and analyse how KM appears and contributes in the context of integrated care, specifically in the process of integrating social and health care.

The article analyses the case organisation's KM initiatives in light of the integrated care literature and recognises the tasks and requirements for effective KM when building integrated health and social care system. The empirical research material for this qualitative study consisted of the case organisation's strategy documents, the results of an external maturity assessment, KM workshop materials and publicly available documentation of the Finnish health and social care reform.

This study identifies the mechanisms by which KM can support health and social services integration. At the macro level, national coordination and regional co-operation require common information structures. At the meso level, a shared regional strategy with shared objectives guides both organisational decision-making and collaboration between professionals. At the micro level, technology supported and data-driven planning of service chains complements the experiences of professionals and may help remove obstacles to integration.

This study contributes to the literature on integrated care by providing a more comprehensive view of the role and tasks of knowledge and KM when reforming health and social services than approaches focussing solely on health informatics and internal efficiency.

This article explores to what extent the long debate in England over the funding of long-term care (LTC) has involved learning from abroad.

It draws on Mossberger and Wolman’s (2003) framework which proposes criteria for assessing policy transfer as a form of prospective policy evaluation: awareness; assessment and application. The documents examined are the sources cited by the reports that examined funding LTC in England since 1999. The study uses interpretive content analysis in a deductive approach (applying the framework) that focuses on both manifest and latent content.

It finds that both the reports and the cited studies tend to focus on a fairly narrow range of nations, with most attention on Germany, Japan and Scotland. Most studies broadly do not provide much in the way of a clear rationale, and the level of details provided varies. There is relatively little focus on problems. Aims, objectives and goals are little mentioned in some studies, but they tend to be fairly abstract or “high level.” Similarly, there is limited detail on settings. Finally, only a few studies provide a clear recommendation.

It focuses on the neglected topic of the evidence behind reports which are intended to provide recommendations for policy change. The Mossberger and Wolman’s (2003) framework has been used in a small-scale but appears to be well-suited for this purpose.

Poverty transitions can be explained by two opposing theories: the traditional sociological approach that focusses on social stratification and individualisation theory, which emphasises on life course risks for all strata. Both perspectives have been investigated extensively for income poverty while neglecting other important poverty indicators, such as deprivation or the receipt of social assistance. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the latter to investigate the impact of social stratification (e.g. social class), life course risks (e.g. health problems), and their interactions on the probability of social assistance entry for Germany.

The analysis utilises survey data containing a sample of first-time social assistance entrants and a sample of the residential population. Applying case-control methodology, logistic regression is conducted to model the impact of social stratification determinants, life course risks, and their interactions on the probability of social assistance entry.

Social stratification determinants, particularly social class, have a significant effect. However, their effect is weaker than the effect of life course risks. Contrary to the prediction of individualisation theory, the poverty-triggering impact of life course risks varies substantially by social stratum. The combination of both theories yields high predictive power.

This paper is the first to comprehensively test social stratification and individualisation theory with respect to social assistance receipt as a poverty indicator. It is the first paper that investigates the entire population at risk of social assistance entry in Germany.

This paper aims to unpack the sets of policy ideas underpinning the use of social innovation, thus permeating the allegedly politically neutral language of the concept.

Drawing on Daigneualt (2014), this paper adapts a four-dimensional approach to investigate the sets of ideas underpinning different conceptualisations of social innovation, particularly in relation to who the actors driving social change are, the nature of the problems addressed, the objectives pursued and the means used to achieve these objectives.

Applying the four-dimensional approach to a corpus of literature, this paper found evidence of two different perspectives along each dimension, namely, a radical empowerment approach and an incremental market-oriented one.

A limitation of the study is the focus on academic literature, whereas a broader focus on policy discourse may give further insights. However, this paper argues that this study can be the ground for future research to investigate whether and how the two approaches identified have been adopted in different institutional and policy contexts.

The paper contributes to the development of social innovation research by boosting and encouraging further investigation on how different sets of ideas underpin social innovation discourse and its use as a policy concept.

A narrative has developed in recent years to link ageing without children to support needs in later life. Social care has long been viewed as a private, familial responsibility, whilst health care is a societal, public good. Childlessness is framed negatively in terms of increased demands on care services and wider family networks. As governments tackle the issue of how to fund and deliver an equitable and sustainable long-term care sector, this paper aims to argue that it is more critical than ever to evaluate views of childlessness in the context of ageing.

Policy-oriented commentary paper.

If the focus on childlessness and ageing is through a lens of a potential care deficit, this continues to frame ageing without children as a risk and does little to challenge increasing reliance on unpaid care. Research and policy need to explore how to make access to social care more equitable and reduce expectations of unpaid care. They also need to increasingly emphasise exploration of aspects of later life beyond the issue of care, for example, by more of a focus on communities, what matters to people to age well and lives that extend beyond traditional views of nuclear families.

This paper uses the UK as a contextual example to argue that the research and policy communities have a role to play in evaluating their constructions of childlessness and ageing and questioning whether they do little more than legitimise government’s unwillingness to take responsibility for social care.

Recent studies in education attempt to ‘criminologise’ some of the current practices and policies of higher education institutions – that is, to deconstruct certain philosophies and practices which may be discriminatory, offensive, and biased to certain social groups. Recent theoretical frameworks problematize current higher education policies, many of which are taken for granted. This paper adopts a critical perspective, shedding light on some practices as they occur in higher educational institutions, by human and non-human agencies. The study applies a ‘detective’ approach examining some problematic uses of technology a higher education institution. In this proposed approach, researchers play the role of ‘detectives’, investigating possible breaches of good practice (possibly discriminatory) committed by higher education actors (referred hereafter as ‘defendants’). Most of these offences are committed through the use of educational and institutional technologies. The purpose of this theoretical approach is to empower alienated social groups against such practices by identifying ‘defendants’ and the implications of their acts. The study uses empirical data from interviews, visits, and observations to explain the ways in which defendants respond to the accusations levelled against them by other users of educational technologies. The investigation revealed that technology was used, among many other functions, to manoeuvre around the legal and ethical system serving the interests of some stakeholders. Then, the study categorises these manoeuvres, explaining the legal implications of each category, and recommending consideration of important academic and institutional issues.

Today, low-income people seeking resources from the federal government must often work through non-profit organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints that the poor must face today to secure resources through non-profit organizations.

This is a conceptual paper. The authors review cases of non-profit organizations providing federally supported resources to the poor across multiple sectors.

The authors find that to accept government contracts serving the poor, nonprofit organizations must often engage in one or several practices: reject clients normally consistent with their mission, select clients based on likely outcomes, ignore problems in clients’ lives relevant to their predicament, or undermine client progress to manage funding requirements. To secure government-supported resources from nonprofits, the poor must often acquiesce to intrusions into one or more of the following: their privacy (disclosing sensitive information), their self-protection (renouncing legal rights), their identity (avowing a particular self-understanding) or their self-mastery (relinquishing authority over daily routines).

The authors show that the nonprofits’ dual role as brokers, both liaisons transferring resources and representatives of the state, can complicate their relation to their clients and the predicament of the poor themselves; the authors suggest that two larger trends, toward increasing administrative accountability and demonstrating deservingness, are having both intended and unintended consequences for the ability of low-income individuals to gain access to publicly funded resources.

Within societies in the 21st century, individuals who are embedded in a controlled context that impedes their political actions deal with the tensions they are experiencing through attempts at resistance. Several studies that examine individual infrapolitics in organizations explain how the subtle mix of compliance and resistance are constructed at the level of individual identity in a complex mechanism that both questions the system and strengthens it. However, the interplay between managers' identities and management accounting tools in this process is a topic that deserves more investigation. The aim of this article is to understand how the subtle resistance of individuals constructs neoliberal reforms through management accounting (MA).

The authors conducted a case study on three health and social organizations two years after major reforms were implemented in the health and social services sector in Québec, a province of Canada. These reforms were part of a new public management dynamic and involved the implementation of accounting tools, here referred to as New Public Management Accounting (NPMA) tools.

The authors’ findings show how managers participate in reforms, at the same time as attempt to stem the dehumanization they generate. Managers engage in subtly resisting, for themselves and for their field professional teams, the dehumanization and identity destruction that arises from the reforms. NPMA tools are central to this process, since managers question the reforms through NPMA tools and use them to resist creatively. However, their subtle resistance can lead to the strengthening of the neoliberal dynamic of the reform.

The authors contribute to both the literature of infrapolitics and MA by showing the role of NPMA tools in the construction of subtle resistance. Their article enriches the MA literature by characterizing the subtle forms of resistance and showing how managers engage in creative resistance by using the managerial potential flexibility of NPMA tools. The article also outlines how NPMA tools play a role in the dialectic process of resistance, since they aid managers in resisting reform-induced dehumanization but also support managers in reinventing and reinforcing what they are trying to fight. The authors’ study also illustrates the dialectic dynamic of resistance through NPMA in all its dimensions: discursive, material and symbolic. Finally, the authors contribute to management accounting literature by showing that NPMA tools are not only the objects of neoliberalization but also the support of backstage resistance to neoliberalization.