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Purpose: In this chapter, I explore the current activist disability landscape in Bulgaria, focusing on its apparent insusceptibility to change. My objective is to examine the interplay between the conflicting parties, focusing on the factors that conditioned their successes and failures.

Methods/Approach: Relying mainly on directed content analysis, I analyzed website publications, online discussions, official statements released during the protests, as well as 18 interviews of mothers of children of disabilities and the data from five focus groups.

Findings: On the local disability scene, we discern two types of collective action – phantom disability activism and toxic grassroots mobilization. The first one held strongly to the traditionally construed notion of disability as confined in the need-based system and defined solely as medical condition. The second one – although very important for putting on the agenda issues as personal assistance and demedicalization – embraced deeply disturbing and toxic activist rhetoric, giving rise of an “abled-disabled” citizen thus reinforcing neoliberal images of human worth and failure.

Implication/Value: This chapter offers a closer look at the different meanings and implications of success, failure, and enabling or halting political renewal with regard to disability. On an empirical level, it adds more to the existing knowledge about the opportunities for, the role, the outcomes, and the specific features of alliance building in a context as Bulgaria, which presents us with specific combination of socialist legacies, post-socialist ways of abandoning disabled people, and, at best, short-term and transient embodiments of the “Nothing about us without us” tenet.

The management of secondary schools in Kenya has faced a number of challenges over the past few years. These challenges have been manifested in the many ways including lack of financial transparency, which culminate in unaffordable secondary schools fees. The aim of this paper is to present the findings of an investigation into the contribution of parents to the financial management of secondary schools in Kericho district of Kenya.

The study was exploratory in approach with a descriptive survey being used as a method of inquiry. A sample size of 30 (47 percent) was selected from 64 secondary schools in the district. From this sample, proportional sampling was then used to get seven provincial and 23 district schools into the sample. Purposive sampling was used to get the schools from each category and the respondents from each school into the sample. Questionnaires and interview schedules were used to solicit information and perceptions from principals and students.

The findings of this study indicated that Principals and students perceived parental involvement in financial management as present to some degree in most schools. The results also indicated that parental involvement had positive influence on financial management outcomes. Since schools' finance is critical in school management outcomes, it is therefore important for education stakeholders to increase parental involvement.

Parental participation can have positive impacts on the processes of teaching and learning with active and frequent contacts between parents and school administration improving school's financial accountability and transparency. Participation will strengthen the partnership between parent teacher associations, community and school administration in addition to democratizing school governance.

Based on the findings of the study, parental involvement in the area of financial management is still low in the district. It was also noted that parental involvement greatly influenced the way finances in schools were managed. From these observations, parental levels of involvement in the area of school finances affect financial transparency in schools.

This chapter uncovers the destabilizing and transformative dimensions of a legal process commonly described as assimilation. Lawyers working on behalf of a marginalized group often argue that the group merits inclusion in dominant institutions, and they do so by casting the group as like the majority. Scholars have criticized claims of this kind for affirming the status quo and muting significant differences of the excluded group. Yet, this chapter shows how these claims may also disrupt the status quo, transform dominant institutions, and convert distinctive features of the excluded group into more widely shared legal norms. This dynamic is observed in the context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, and specifically through attention to three phases of LGBT advocacy: (1) claims to parental recognition of unmarried same-sex parents, (2) claims to marriage, and (3) claims regarding the consequences of marriage for same-sex parents. The analysis shows how claims that appeared assimilationist – demanding inclusion in marriage and parenthood by arguing that same-sex couples are similarly situated to their different-sex counterparts – subtly challenged and reshaped legal norms governing parenthood, including marital parenthood. While this chapter focuses on LGBT claims, it uncovers a dynamic that may exist in other settings.

Children – their number, their welfare, their property (whom they belong to), their education – have long been a matter of public concern. What a “proper” childhood should be is always a highly politicized issue never left entirely in private hands. Modern societies in particular have rendered explicit and institutionalized the existence of a public interest in children and in childhood as constituted within, but also outside, families. In this volume, we use the expression “politicizing of childhood” in a broad sense in reference to the ways in which childhood is conceptualized not only as a primary family or parental responsibility, but, in addition, as a matter of public importance and concern, something for (welfare) state intervention. “Politicizing of childhood” encompasses the public motivation and mobilization for childhood change; the political processes in which policies are formulated, legislated and enacted; the response to policy interventions that may in turn feed back into public and political discourse, policy formulation and so on (see Ellingsæter & Leira, 2006, p. 4). The contributions in this volume illustrate one or more of these processes.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

The purpose of this paper is to understand and show how public relations contributed to enhancing the visibility of Croatian non-profit organization Foundation “Croatia for Children” and its activities within its stakeholders, as well as how public relations contributed to the mobilization of target publics in Foundation’s activities.

Using a single case study approach, data were collected over a 12-month period. Quantitative and qualitative media research was applied in order to compare visibility of Foundation in the period before and after the strategic communication campaign.

Strategic communication campaign enhanced the visibility of Foundation “Croatia for Children” in national and local Croatian media and positioned it as the primary instance for children without an adequate parental care and children in need. However, local media devoted more attention comparing to the national media. All children wishes (1,000) were fulfilled by mobilizing the target publics.

The results derived from this case study cannot be generalized since they are based on a single case in one country.

This study can serve as a starting point for another research about the role and importance that public relations have in enhancing the visibility of non-profit organizations.

The results of this study point to the role and importance public relations have in the non-profit sector in order to proactively communicate with all stakeholders in society.

This chapter examines how opponents of same-sex marriage have used rights discourse to construct an identity of themselves as victims, and construct gays and lesbians as deviant “others.” I find that conservative rights discourse has been more effective outside the courtroom than in it. This is because these arguments rely on implicit discriminatory stereotypes which are frequently exposed under the scrutiny of dispassionate judicial actors. However, in a popular arena, they are free to operate with considerably less scrutiny. Here, rights discourse is used to mask discriminatory stereotypes and lend legitimacy to positions that would be rejected if made explicitly.

This study examines the link between vacations, parental leave and voluntary turnover among Canadian organizations in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

The empirical analysis is carried out using firm-level data sourced from a survey that was completed by HR managers of 125 ICT firms operating in the province of Quebec (Canada).The organizational voluntary turnover rate was used and was obtained by dividing the number of employees who voluntarily quit an organization within the last year by the total number of its employees. Based on ordinary least squared estimates, results were generated by regressing voluntary turnover rate on vacation and parental leave.

Vacation, operationalized as the average number of annual vacation days, is negatively and significantly associated with the voluntary turnover rate of the ICT organizations surveyed. Parental leave, operationalized as the percentage of salary reimbursed during parental leave, does not significantly reduce voluntary turnover in the ICT organizations surveyed.

In light of the results of this study, if organizations in the ICT sector, in Canada or abroad, desire to reduce voluntary turnover, compensating employees through the use of additional vacation days appears to be a viable approach.

This research constitutes an empirical test of the link between turnover and two compensation practices adopted by firms. To our knowledge, there is no prior scientific evidence on that subject in the Canadian ICT sector.