Search results

This article focuses on the continuity and changes in the Productive Welfare Regimes and investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic and population ageing can influence the established systems in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan.

Our research is based on document review, investigating intricate situations with numerous aspects and providing an excellent opportunity for innovation and examining theoretical presumptions in welfare regime theory, as well as exploring the complicated policy trajectories that varies among cases.

Our findings reveal that social policy responses to COVID-19 have been characterized by adopting the market-conforming role of social policy for the elderly. This is shown by many policy measures focusing on self-sufficiency and an active labour market, signalling that the COVID-19 pandemic and population ageing pressure here are viewed as an economic issue over social rights. The economic-first was adopted to maintain their proximity to the global economy as key sources of their social policy development. We can conclude by emphasizing that the responses to COVID-19 have exposed deficiencies in certain existing social policies. Yet, they have not been sufficient to catalyse substantial policy changes across domains where such change had not already been initiated, thus allowing welfare regimes to remain within productivist boundaries.

This study responds to the current debate on the welfare regime continuity and adaptation in East Asia and suggests a new perspective of policy process in the times of insecurity.

This study examines the public’s perception of cash transfers for children in societies where children's welfare is often viewed as a private affair.

Based on 12 semi-structured interviews and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) conducted in urban Jakarta, Indonesia, we explore mothers' perspectives on cash transfer programmes for children within low-income families during fieldwork in October 2023 and January 2024. In addition to the semi-structured interview, a FGD involving parents and other related stakeholders was conducted to increase data accuracy.

Our findings reveal that cash transfers function as a “caregiving allowance” in Jakarta, allowing mothers to prioritize familial obligations while maintaining a reasonable standard of living. Contrary to the “de-familisation” focus observed in advanced welfare countries, these cash transfers for children reinforce traditional family labour division (familisation). Interestingly, despite reinforcing the familisation function, the initiative receives significant support. These results clearly highlight the influence of familisation-oriented welfare production, demonstrating a focus on enhancing family resilience in the design of child-related policies in Indonesia. Overall, these results make clear the visibility of traditional division of labour influences on welfare production, revealing a focus on the familialisation effect in the design of child-related policies in Indonesia. These findings reinforce the suitability of the term “familistic welfare regime” as an appropriate descriptor for Jakarta in particular and Indonesia in general.

This study enriches our understanding of the evolution of child-related assistance in the Global South through a defamilisation lens, shedding light on the complex interplay between gender inequalities and social policy formulation in these regions. Furthermore, it offers valuable insights into the ongoing discourse on welfare regime studies in Indonesia, suggesting that mainstream narratives of productivist transition are only partially validated. The insights garnered from this research open avenues for future studies across diverse contexts.

This research contributes to the existing literature on the connection between trust and investment activities by exploring the effect of trust in the retirement system on dwelling investments.

This study utilizes data including 28 OECD countries from 2009 to 2020, and employs panel fixed effects and GMM estimators.

The analysis reveals a negative relationship between trust in the retirement system and investment in dwellings. Notably, this is found to be more evident in countries that promote neo-liberalized welfare systems.

The implications of our results are particularly relevant for policymakers and international construction firms.

The primary contribution of this paper extends the “trust–pension investment behavior” nexus. We explore whether individuals with diminished trust in the retirement system consider investing in the property market as an alternative means to safeguard their financial well-being during retirement.

This study aimed to determine the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on gig workers’ commitment to online platforms.

The study’s sample consisted of 357 gig workers in Vietnam. The data was analysed using a partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM).

The research findings suggested that the interaction between CSR and worker commitment with gig platforms has the mediating role of empowerment and trust.

The gig economy is an emerging form of employment relationship, in which gig workers’ commitments are usually to the platform rather than to a sole employer. This study suggests that gig platform owners should improve CSR perception to increase employee commitment and maintain their workforce to attract new users.

This study developed a new framework to explain the relationship between CSR and gig work commitment, and furthermore evaluated the effects of mediating mechanisms of empowerment and trust on gig worker commitment in the gig economy platform.

 Social assistance programs have been implemented in Madagascar to assist the most vulnerable and neediest poor in achieving a minimum standard of living during critical times. In the Grand South and Southeast Madagascar, where climate change, price fluctuations and sociopolitical instability threaten the population’s livelihood, the effectiveness of such aid-based programs is uncertain because of possible mistargeting. This study aims to assess the accuracy of the targeting methodology of four different types of social protection programs in Southern Madagascar.

The authors draw evidence from a national representative data set and use multiple techniques that integrate targeting performance and regression-based analyses.

Results show that cash transfers constitute the only program that effectively reaches the poorest 20% living in drought- and cyclone-affected regions. However, mistargeting is likely to occur in food, seed transfers, and the HIMO public works programs. Social inclusion information related to proximity to urban zones, religious affiliation, and number of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets are significantly associated to all program participation. Nevertheless, a serious under-coverage of the eligible poor is noted for Southern Madagascar.

This study is among the first to evaluate the targeting effectiveness of social programs in Madagascar. It introduces a novel approach to evaluating the poverty rate by utilizing a composite-based wealth score. The authors enhance the classic targeting assessment methodology by incorporating geospatial covariates, categorical, geographical and social network information into an econometric model. The study provides a comprehensive view of the main profile of beneficiaries reached by four social assistance programs in Southern Madagascar.

This study aims to examine the relationship between institutional logics and specifications quality, and how this relationship is mediated by the legitimacy of the procurement process and stewardship behaviour.

This study draws on insights from institutional logics theory, and legitimacy and stewardship behaviour literature. We conducted an extended literature review to gain a comprehensive understanding of “institutional logics” and their manifestations in organizational contexts, utilizing the 2000–2024 data collected from the EBSCO, Scopus and Web of Science databases, complemented with Google Scholar. We gather that institutional logics manifest in several forms, and that while some organizations may thrive on a single logic, in certain contexts institutional logics can manifest in combinations – “multiple logics or hybrids”. Based on this understanding, we developed testable research hypotheses, predicting the influences of institutional logics – professional logic, efficient service logic and delivery (market) logic, on legitimacy, stewardship behaviour and specifications quality. We then carried out an empirical study, adopting a quantitative cross-sectional survey design with a self-administered questionnaire to test the hypothesized relationships. The empirical data were obtained from 162 procuring and disposing entities in Uganda and analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique.

The study findings reveal that institutional logics exert a strong positive effect on the legitimacy of the procurement process and on stewardship behaviour, which, in turn, both positively influence specifications quality.

The study findings have implications for theory and practice. The study findings provide useful insights that support the conceptual and theoretical development of institutional logics theory and applications in procurement literature. In addition, the study findings enhance procurement managers’ understanding of the mechanisms through which institutional logics can foster specifications quality. However, considering the fact that the study was conducted in a single country context, and focused on the public sector only, the findings of the study might not be generalizable globally.

This study contributes to established knowledge about quality management and procurement by examining the legitimacy of the procurement process and stewardship behaviour of those involved in procurement processes as mechanisms through which procuring entities are able to use institutional logics to enhance specifications quality. In addition, the study highlights areas for future research that may be explored to increase understanding of the value of institutional logics in ensuring specifications quality, and the link between specifications quality and the general performance of procuring entities.

This study explores the differences and similarities of work value profiles in samples of business students from four countries with markedly different cultures and labor markets.

We used multiple-group latent profile analysis (LPA) to explore the differences and similarities in work value profiles across cultures (n = 317 from Switzerland, n = 313 from Spain, n = 326 from the United States and n = 327 from China).

The latent profiles mostly show similarities across countries: the largest profiles are a want it all and a humble profile with overall high and intermediate levels in all work values. An overall low work value levels profile and one stressing high security and pay emerged in all countries except Switzerland. In the Swiss sample, two unique profiles emerged: the no status and freelancers profiles.

This study has implications for employee attraction, relations and career counseling with culturally diverse populations.

Studies on work values across cultures most often make direct comparisons between samples, which can lead to excessive emphasis on sometimes small differences. By first studying within-culture differences before comparing the results across cultures, we find that there may be more similarities than differences in work values across cultures and that cross-cultural differences may have often been overstated.

The purpose of this study is to explore and prioritize the factors that determine the social insurance contribution of unorganized workers.

A two-stage procedure was adopted to recognize and prioritize factors influencing the social insurance participation of unorganized workers: first, crucial factors influencing unorganized workers’ contribution towards social insurance were identified by employing exploratory factor analysis, and in the second phase, the fuzzy analytical hierarchal process was applied to rank the specified criteria and then sub-criteria by assigning weights.

Four broad factors were identified, namely, economic, political, operational and socio-psychological, that significantly influence unorganized workers’ contribution towards social insurance. Later findings revealed that the prime influencer of unorganized workers’ contribution is employment contracts followed by average earnings, delivery of quality services, eligibility and accessibility.

The research findings are feasible as the basic propositions are based on real-world scenario. The identification and ranking of factors have the potential to be used as a checklist for policymakers when designing pension and social insurance for unorganized workers. If it is not possible to consider all, the criteria and sub-criteria assigned upper rank can be given priority to extend pension coverage for a large group of working poor.

The key factors driving social insurance contributions have been highlighted by studying the stakeholders’ perceptions at a micro level. By comprehending the challenges, there is a possibility of covering a large section of the working poor into social insurance coverage.

This paper is believed to be one of its kinds to acknowledge a combination of factors that determine the contribution of unorganized workers to social insurance. This study is an empirical investigation to prioritize the essential drivers of social insurance participation by low-income cohorts in the context of emerging countries. The present approach of employing fuzzy logic has also very limited use in social insurance literature yet.

The study aims to explore the relationship between financial literacy and general life satisfaction. The study further investigates the mediating role of financial self-efficacy in this relationship in the context of Indian rural households.

Households belonging to the rural area of the Koraput district of Odisha were taken as the sample unit of this study. A structured questionnaire was framed to collect primary data using multi-stage and convenience sampling; 299 responses were received. Data analyses were performed using partial least square-structure equation modelling through SmartPLS 4.0.

The results of the study connoted that financial literacy has a noteworthy impact on the overall life satisfaction of households with lower incomes, both directly and indirectly. Moreover, the study identified financial self-efficacy as a significant complementary partial mediator in the relationship between financial literacy and overall satisfaction with life.

The findings of the study can be used by financial regulatory authorities and policymakers to seed the financial concepts’ understanding among the rural community to enhance their financial status and thereby overall satisfaction with life.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the exploration study of life satisfaction of rural households is yet to be discovered in the context of previous research frameworks despite rural households being an intricate part of the Indian economy. The study adds to the existing literature on life satisfaction, necessitating financial literacy expertise in rural households for achieving financial self-efficacy.

Despite being a seminal explanation of the workforce emotional experiences, capable of mapping the path from the antecedents to consequences, affective events theory (AET) only offers a “macrostructure” of a working environment. To date, little is known about the universal features of the work environment that may guide the understanding of imperative work aspects triggering employees’ emotions at work. Hence, the study proposes and validates that Stafford Beer’s viable system model (VSM) can provide a holistic view of the organizational work environment, enabling a comprehensive understanding of work events or factors triggering workforce emotions.

First, the VSM structural layout is used to fill in the “macrostructure” of the “working environment” in AET to diagnose the functional and relational aspects of the work and the related work events occurring within. Using a deductive approach, 31 work events were adopted to determine the impact of VSM-based work environment events on the employees’ emotional experiences and subsequent work attitudes (job satisfaction) and behaviors (citizenship behavior). To field test the proposed nexus of VSM and AET, the survey was conducted on two hundred and fifteen employees from 39 different organizations. PLS-SEM tested the explanatory power of the suggested VSM’s systemic approach for understanding the affective work environment in totality.

The findings confirmed that the VSM metalanguage provides a holistic view of the organizational functioning and social connectivity disposing of affective work events, helpful in assessing their aggregate influence on employees’ emotions and work-related outcomes.

The findings identify how employees' emotions can be triggered by everyday work operations and social relations at work, which can affect their extra-role behaviors and necessary work-related attitudes.

The study utilized Beer’s VSM framework based on the systemic principle of “holistic view” for ascertaining the affective work environment and its related features holistically, which filled in well the macrostructure of “work environment features” with micro-structures of organizational inter-related aspects which are yet to be known in AET – a seminal explanation for managing workforce emotions.