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Purpose: The aim is to explore how family relations are affected by societal changes in relation to informal and formal caregiving and self-determination of older adults.

Design/methodology/approach: Care managers (CMs)/social workers (SWs) (N = 124) participated in a comparative vignette study including Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. Systems theory was used.

Findings: Japanese CMs/SWs clearly describe their efforts to create networks in a relational way between formal and informal actors in the community. South Korean CMs/SWs balance between suggesting interventions to support daily life at home or a move to a nursing home, often acknowledging the family as the main caregiver. In Sweden, CMs/SWs highlight the juridical element in meeting the older adult and the interventions offered, and families primarily give social support. Regarding self-determination, the Japanese priority is for CMs/SWs to harmonize within the family and the community. South Korean CMs/SWs express ambivalent attitudes to older adults’ capability for self-determination in the intersection between formal and family care. Swedish CMs/SWs adhere to the older adult’s self-determination, while acknowledging the role of the family in persuading the older adult to accept interventions. The results suggest emerging defamilialization in South Korea, while tendencies to refamilialization are noticed in Japan and Sweden, albeit in different ways.

Research limitations/implications: In translation, nuances may be lost. A focus on changing families shows that country-specific details in care services have been reduced. For future research, perspectives of “care” need to be studied on different levels.

Originality/value: Using one vignette in three countries with different welfare regimes, discussing changing views on families’, communities’ and societal caregiving is unique. This captures changes in policy, influencing re- and defamilialization.

A growing body of work suggests that welfare and punishment should be understood as alternative, yet interconnected ways of governing poor and marginalized populations. While there is considerable evidence of a punitive turn in welfare and penal institutions over the past half century, recent studies show that welfare and carceral institutions increasingly comanage millions of people caught at the intersection of the welfare and penal sectors. The growth of “mass supervision” and the expansion of the social services sector help explain the blurring of welfare and punishment in the United States in daily practice. We suggest that these developments complicate the idea of an institutional trade-off and contend that welfare and punishment are best understood along a continuum of state management in which poor and socially marginalized populations are subjected to varying degrees of support, surveillance, and sanction. In presenting the punishment–welfare continuum, we pay particular attention to the “murky middle” between the two spheres: an interinstitutional space that has emerged in the context of mass supervision and a social services–centric safety net. We show that people caught in the “murky middle” receive some social supports and services, but also face pervasive surveillance and control and must adapt to the tangle of obligations and requirements in ways that both extend punishment and limit their ability to successfully participate in mainstream institutions.

Purpose – Young people exhibiting serious behavior problems represent an enormous challenge for municipal child welfare services in Norway. In working with these youngsters, it is vital to create opportunities for them to participate in the decisions affecting their lives. The study aims to explore the dilemmas involving issues of participation on the one side and protection on the other: it is one where the child welfare worker is being required, on the one hand, to provide youths with an opportunity to participate in decisions affecting them while at the same time being required to protect those youths in their care from harming themselves in various ways. These two concerns of participation and protection are spelled out specifically in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Children of which Norway is a signatory.

Methodology – This study draws from a qualitative reanalysis of interview data from a 15-year longitudinal study of 85 child welfare clients in Norway. They were followed up at three points in time: first when they became clients (age 14–15), next when they were young adults (age 20), and finally when they were 30 years old. All of these 85 informants had initially come to the attention of child protection authorities owing to the severity of their behavior problems.

Findings – The chapter describes how these young people experienced both participation and protection of the child welfare services at the time they were provided and later on when they had become adults. One important finding of the study is that, as adults, their opinions had changed and they then believed that the protection usually in the form of guardianship earlier provided to them as youngsters had been beneficial to them.

This article has two objectives: to clarify the organizational and managerial differences between social entrepreneurship and social enterprises and to investigate the role of social enterprises and their impacts on the welfare systems of European countries. The authors describe social entrepreneurship as a trend across all forms of enterprises and social enterprise as the institutionalization of a new typology that is distinguished by specific features from its inception. By relying on a theoretical analysis, the article supports the interpretation of social enterprise as an innovative institutional tool that can have a role in supporting growth and welfare. The essential features of social enterprise, which justify their competitiveness vis-à-vis public and for-profit organizations in the production and delivery of general-interest services, are thoroughly investigated. The article sheds light on the contribution of social enterprises to reforming and democratizing the traditional European welfare systems, which – since the 1980s – have revealed their inability to distribute welfare services inclusively and cope with the growing phenomena of poverty and inequalities.

In the decades since World War II, Australia has moved from a vibrant, universalist welfare system, based on the rights of citizens to receive income support, to a residualist system that is highly targeted, based on harsh and increasingly punitive eligibility requirements and which re-defines recipients as ‘clients’. These developments have happened slowly, some would say insidiously, as Australia moved from a supportive environment where the notion of collective responsibility for the vulnerable was accepted and, indeed, embraced. More recently collectivism has been replaced by the notion of individualism in what McDonald (2006, p. 10) refers to as ‘a silent surrender of public responsibility’. Individuals and/or their families are expected to absorb their own welfare needs as much as possible, while those that fall to the public purse are treated with some suspicion, particularly if they fall into categories of the ‘undeserving’ poor. In Australia the ranks of the ‘undeserving’ appear to be widening beyond single parents and the unemployed to include those with disabilities and young people.

In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

This chapter focuses on an innovative effort in the Italian context in which a complex web of partnerships was created as the foundation of an alternative model of health care. More specifically, the start-up of a health-care organization – Welfare Italia Servizi (WIS) – is analyzed and discussed with respect to its sustainability.

The process of organizing a sustainable health care is analyzed through the theoretical lenses of multi-stakeholders management and partnership perspectives.

The possibility of developing dense knowledge about the WIS’s case has stemmed from our collaboration with the organization board with regard to a research process intended to monitor the organizational start-up and its sustainability challenges.

The case provides new insights into the dynamic nature of building multi-stakeholder partnership in a complex environment; the developmental life-cycle challenge of multi-stakeholder partnership, and the meaning of sustainability. The case suggests a tapestry of issues such as how sustainability may be “paradoxical,” dynamic, led by different and sometimes conflicting logics, and changeable over time like a growing tree in an intricate forest.

The case can stimulate learning and discussions both within the community of practitioners and the community of academics with respect to which promising conditions could help address the challenge of starting-up a sustainable organization in the health-care field.

Federal immigration policy embodies national ideas about membership. Nevertheless, attitudes toward immigration within a nation are not invariable. Regional policies vary dramatically in their support or antagonism toward immigrants. In addition, immigration policy profoundly affects other areas of governmental authority. This chapter explores the relationship between state-level immigration policy and family reunification for Hispanic/Latino children in the United States. The quantitative analysis utilizes data from the National Council of State Legislatures (NCSL) (2008–2014) as well as data gathered from the Child Welfare Outcomes Report published by the Department of Health and Human Services. The results show that while Hispanic/Latino children are not overrepresented in the child welfare systems of the states with the most antagonistic legislation, they are returned to the custody of their parent(s) in smaller percentages compared to whites in the states with the most antagonistic bills compared with the states with the most supportive bills.

Rural welfare is more than addressing problems of ‘poverty’. As we argue here, social policy initiatives are also conceived by governments as solutions to geographical problems about uneven regional development and population distribution. What these problems were, and how welfare provision could solve them, has varied from generation to generation and takes shape in place-specific ways. That welfare provision has operated as de facto geographical development and population policy is particularly the case in Australia, in its context of massive continental size and heterogeneous rural places. In Australia, the ‘rural’ means much more than just the ‘countryside’ surrounding or between networks of cities and towns (in the traditional European sense; see Gorman-Murray, Darian-Smith, & Gibson, 2008). ‘Rural Australia’ is inserted into national politics as a slippery geographical category, coming to encompass all of non-metropolitan Australia (each of Australia's states only having one major city), within which there is great diversity: broadacre farming regions involving the production of cash crops at scales of thousands of squared kilometres; regions producing rice and cotton with state-sponsored irrigation; coastal agricultural zones with smaller and usually older land holdings (often the places of traditional ‘family farming’ communities); single industry regions focused around minerals extraction or defence (many of Australia's major defence bases being located outside state capitals either in sparsely populated regions in Australia's north or in smaller ‘country towns’ in the south, where they dominate local demography); semi-arid rangelands regions dominated by enormous pastoral stations leased on Crown land (single examples of which rival the United Kingdom in size); and remote savannah and desert regions many thousands of kilometres from capital cities, supporting Aboriginal communities living on traditional country mixing subsistence hunting and gathering with government-supported employment and food programmes. In this context, rural welfare performs a social policy function, but also becomes a means for government to comprehend, problematise and manage geographical space.

Civil society-based institutions have had a significant historical impact in Europe on the one hand in formation of modern notions of the nation and on the creation of national identity and on the other hand in definition of citizenship rights and understanding of the democratic culture. If support for citizenship rights through civil society organizations – at the workplace and in public institutions – is weakly articulated, it creates a fragile democratic culture and, consequently, less comprehensive social protection. The possibility of civil society becoming a locus for democratic learning, political reflexivity and governance depends, firstly, on its specific institutional mechanisms and, secondly, on the broader institutional configuration, which civil society forms part of.