Search results

Extreme events are the occasion for many people’s encounters with climate change. Though causation is complex and no one event is directly attributable to climate change, when we consider Cassandra, we can consider what people encounter in assistance after an extreme event. This chapter takes the case of assistance to displaced people after Katrina to explore how care and surveillance were intertwined. Methods include analysis of government documents as well as interviews. When we consider assistance people receive, we often focus on the intended assistance and how it worked or did not. Evaluation is difficult, not least because criteria for determining what it means to work are uncertain. However, if we include the process of gaining assistance as part of the experience, we broaden concerns from the instrumental outcomes to the mixed messages people get in assistance. Assistance appears in a context, where the most vulnerable people have reasons to mistrust government and nonprofits, and where in the United States assistance has come intertwined with supervisory rules, a focus on getting people to work, and a need to manage criminal histories. Trust in government may be limited, emergency care can operate outside ordinary legal frameworks when providers are new, and legal accountability for assistance may be experienced as confining, despite caregivers’ intent.

Over the last four decades, Turkey has built an elaborate social assistance regime, which provides extensive coverage of the poor but lacks some of the key characteristics of European minimum income protection systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore what ideational roots underlie the regime and how these ideas and paradigms historically shaped the structure of the regime. The paper focuses on two central social assistance legislations: the social pensions law of 1976 and the Law that established the Fund for the Encouragement of Social Cooperation and Solidarity in 1986.

Based on a discursive institutionalist approach, the paper combines a qualitative content analysis of parliamentary debates and official reports with a policy analysis of social assistance legislations in Turkey.

The paper shows that two competing policy paradigms shaped the ambivalent structure and design of Turkey social assistance regime: a welfare state paradigm and a state-organised charity paradigm. The welfare state paradigm, which perceives social assistance as a social right, was dominant in the 1970s and is embodied in the social pension programme. The state-organised charity paradigm, which aims to reinvigorate the Islamic tradition of charitable foundations (waqf), was dominant in the 1980s and is embodied in the Fund for the Encouragement of Social Cooperation and Solidarity. Today’s social assistance regime combines both elements in a curious synthesis.

The paper contributes to comparative social policy research and discursive institutionalism by uncovering the historical and ideational foundations of a largely neglected case, social assistance in Turkey.

The provision of library services to the housebound in the United Kingdom is extremely diverse. Local authorities vary in their attitudes to priorities just as demand itself varies. The development of housebound reader services is discussed, along with staffing requirements and also the range and selection of reading material and other requirements such as music and books on cassette.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent by which consumer acceptance of an Islamic insurance product (Takaful) in a non-Muslim majority country would be affected by consumer knowledge about its Islamic origins. Furthermore, this study identifies the degree to which various psychological traits and demographics of the consumers influence purchase intentions.

A questionnaire was distributed to a national sample of 390 respondents, half of whom were told that this insurance product is Islamic and the other half were not. The questionnaire was identical between the two groups and the only difference was the disclosure of the product’s Islamic origins. Additional measures related to consumer demographics, cognitive style and prior experience with insurance products were obtained from the respondents. Regression analysis was used to determine the drivers of consumers’ purchase intentions.

Purchase intentions for Takaful were found to be lower when the product was presented to subjects as Islamic. In addition, it was established that a consumer’s cognitive style, political orientation, yearly insurance expenditure and views of Islam influence purchase intentions for Takaful.

This paper is the first to explore the degree of acceptance of an Islamic insurance product in a non-Muslim majority country (USA) and to investigate the effects of a product’s religion of origin on the purchase intentions of American consumers.

This study aims to assess the direct relationships between internal support and job satisfaction and voluntary assistance and their indirect connections through work–family conflict among Nigerian police officers.

Survey data were collected from police officers in a midsized state police command in Ebonyi state in Nigeria. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to assess the connections between supervisor support, peer support, work–family conflict, job satisfaction and voluntary assistance.

Police officers with stronger supervisor and co-worker support are more inclined to express higher job satisfaction, whereas such support is not linked to officers' willingness to help fellow officers. Work–family conflict mediates the relationship between co-worker support and voluntary assistance. Stronger peer support is accompanied by higher work–family conflict, which then is linked to greater helping behavior.

Despite many studies on police job satisfaction, research on correlates of job satisfaction in an African context remains severely under-investigated. This study represents one of the first attempts to assess police proactive helping behavior and job satisfaction in Nigeria.

Similar to the recent emergence of food banks in other affluent nations, the genesis and ultimate entrenchment of food banks in Canada has been tightly intertwined with the dismantling of the welfare state. Through an examination of Canadian data, the authors elucidate the implications of entrenching voluntary, extra-governmental, charitable food assistance programs as an adjunct to publicly funded social assistance programs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Publicly available food bank reports, population health survey data, and the results of a study of low-income families in Toronto are reviewed to examine the food security status of social assistance recipients and their use of food banks.

In 2012, 70 percent of households in Canada who were reliant on social assistance were food insecure. Social assistance recipients comprise at least half of food bank clientele and have done so for as long as this information has been tracked, but the assistance provided by food banks appears insufficient to alter households’ food insecurity. Although food banks currently distribute over 200 million pounds of food annually, the scale of their operations pales in comparison to the food needs of those who seek their help.

In the 30 years since food banks began in Canada, there has been considerable research into this response, as well as extensive population monitoring of food insecurity. Canada provides an informative case study of an affluent country's long-term dependency on charitable food assistance and the impact this has on the food insecurity of those reliant on social assistance programs.

In the context of a care crisis in Germany, care work done by volunteers is increasingly being semi-formalized by the state and used in professional care work contexts to relieve families and professionals. However, voluntary care has not yet been adequately studied from a care-specific perspective. This study examines in what way voluntary care can be considered decent care from a care-ethical and empirical perspective.

Considering findings of a qualitative interview study, the study examines the special features of voluntary care, addresses its socio-political expansion, and asks about the decency of voluntary care in elder care and social work.

Care work done by volunteers is a special kind of care work, which has advantages but also disadvantages regarding care-ethical requirements of decent care. The study examines under which conditions voluntary care violates these requirements and how this can be countered in socio-political terms.

Voluntary care is an under-researched phenomenon despite its increasing socio-political importance. While its state-led expansion can informalize and deprofessionalize care work at the expense of users, professionals, and volunteers, its analysis can help to illuminate the preconditions for decent care.

Integration is a complex, contested and multidimensional concept. This paper aims to examine the impact of small voluntary agencies (SVA) in the integration of refugees into social, economic and citizenship structures in the UK.

This study is rooted in in-depth interviews with 20 participants and a case study (ethnography research) that focuses on a refugee-assisting organisation in Southeast England.

The findings reveal cases of exemplary leadership in actions and social solidarity exhibited by SVA through innovative actions aimed at helping individuals and communities which may be particularly disadvantaged. It revealed the mixed embeddedness that these agencies create that enable refugees to pursue a new life, employment and citizenship.

One of the limitations of the study is the focus on one case study. However, this provided an opportunity to conduct in-depth interviews and examination of the research objectives.

With the ever-decreasing government revenues, there is evidence of the tremendous achievement of the voluntary sector in many endeavours in the community. This provides an opportunity for a more strategic partnership between public and private actors.

The activities of the SVA are the catalyst to refugees’ integration as policies that enable regaining self-esteem, seeking employment or starting a business.

This study provides the opportunity to explore the relatively under-research and under-publicized role of SVA in the migrants and refugee literature.

This study aims to understand the contributions and challenges of voluntary organizations towards the integration of refugees into the job market.

Descriptive research with a qualitative approach based on interpretivism was used, applied to mediators of social entities in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

The findings of this study support the importance of voluntary organizations in the employment of refugees, based on background that will contribute directly to the training of displaced persons in the Brazilian labor market. Meanwhile, difficulties such as post-employment refugee monitoring, legislative obstacles to the verification of skills, structural and human capital limitations of mediators, the national economic crisis and the lack of government support are identified as the main challenges for long-term assistance to refugees.

The results of the study can foster greater participation of public policymakers and society in supporting the third sector, aiming at a greater reach in the provision of services of mediators for the effective integration of refugees in Brazil.

This study contributes to the literature on the integration of refugees into the labor market by demonstrating the importance of voluntary organizations in this process. It also demonstrates how the main challenges of the third sector in the Brazilian context impact its support in facilitating and maintaining the employment of displaced persons.

This article investigates whether selected features of the Canada Assistance Plan and various economic, demographic, and political factors have had any significant effect on the social assistance participation rates in Canadian provinces. The first section reviews the background to the cuirent social assistance programme in Canada and draws attention to some questions of major interest. The second section describes a reduced form model that was used for ordinary least squares estimation with pooled cross‐section, time‐series data drawn from post‐Plan experience (i.e., 1968–75). The third section presents the results of that estimation while the fourth section presents an analysis of them. The fifth and final section tentatively concludes that “Plan variables” were of less importance than “Non‐Plan variables” in determining provincial social assistance participation rates.