Search results for "PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION"
showing 10 items of 1623 documents
Nesting self-employment in education, work and family trajectories of Romanian migrant returnees
2019
Challenging a biased view towards self-employed returnees as neoliberal selves, as the normalized approach of the migration–development nexus tends to depict them, this article builds an alternative conceptual framework to unpack the variegated experiences of migrant returnees’ self-employment trajectories in post-socialist Romania. The authors argue that the overemphasis on the benefits of return migration for origin countries through the skewed focus on the migrants’ accrual of human and financial capital and their ostensible entrepreneurial orientation has resulted in disregarding more influential biographical and cultural aspects. Life story interviews with middle-aged participants reve…
The contested concept of vulnerability – a literature review
2018
The concept of vulnerability is widely used in the social sciences as well as in policy making, health and social care services and in social work, referring to a variety of groups or individuals, ...
Digital transparency and Web 2.0 in Spanish city councils
2016
Abstract The purpose of this study is to provide a Web 2.0 Disclosure Index to measure the Web 2.0 presence of Spanish city councils and the information disclosed by them on these media, and to test whether the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media by local governments improve their Web 1.0 digital transparency. We have structured the Web 2.0 Index as the sum of three partial indexes, referred to presence, the content and the interactivity of the Web, and we have estimated these indexes by a content analysis of the city council's websites. We find that the use of Web 2.0 tools has an essentially ornamental focus, and thus it is necessary to increase the content disclosed, especially at the …
Four aspects of politics in Max Weber’s Politik als Beruf
2019
The article offers a rereading of Weber’s Politik als Beruf as a conceptualisation of politics contingent and controversial activity in terms of the four aspects of politics: politicisation, polity, politicking and policy. Weber discusses politics as a concept abstracted from its content. All four aspects can be found in his exposition of the concept. Weber mentions first policy as the direction of politics and demarcates his focus on the state-type polities. Then, he presents the formula on politics as striving for power, consisting of chances to politicise its distinct shares, and discusses historical types of professional politicians and their styles of politicking. Weber illustrates th…
More Choice for Better Choosers: Political Freedom, Autonomy, and Happiness
2016
A substantial literature finds that freedom in the sense of an expanded opportunity set is positively related to happiness. A contrasting literature, however, finds that an excess of choice can have socially undesirable outcomes. We test the effect of two types of freedom—autonomy and political—on happiness using five waves of World Values Survey data (1981–2008). We find evidence supporting the claim that equipping people with the tools to direct the course of their lives (i.e. increasing autonomy freedom) incentivizes the desire to investigate alternatives (e.g. political parties) before making a decision. The effect of freedoms on happiness is diminished in contexts where individuals hav…
Social Inequalities in French Secondary Schools : From Figures to Theories
1996
In spite of the unified type of junior secondary school (the "college") implemented in France since 1975, significant social inequalities of school careers can be observed today. A specific longitudinal study sheds some light on the variety of mechanisms which generate these social inequalities. Difference in academic progress is one mechanism, but parents' strategies are also important. Finally, another aspect of social inequality arises from the school attended, some schools being more selective at the streaming points, these "school effects' being related to the social characteristics of the pupils of the catchment area. All these facts and figures have some relevance with regard to diff…
Does cultural policy matter? Political orientations, cultural management models, and the results of public cultural action in Barcelona and Valencia
2020
Since the beginning of the 20th century, analyses of local cultural policies have sought to highlight their instrumentalisation in projects for urban renewal and/or city branding. In general, the s...
Common Core in Danger? Personalized Information and the Fragmentation of the Public Agenda
2021
The diversification of information sources has reignited the controversy on media-induced fragmentation endangering social integration. The media's capability to set the public agenda and create issues as a common core is a pivotal part of the public sphere and contributes fundamentally to society's cohesion. Algorithm-driven sources like social media that personalize content to the preferences of individuals and their social networks are considered agents of fragmentation of the public sphere. Politically extreme individuals relying on them may be particularly vulnerable to losing touch with society's common core. We employ an innovative operationalization of fragmentation on the individu…
The interplay between media-for-monitoring and media-for-searching: How news media trigger searches and edits in Wikipedia
2016
This study investigates how traditional news media and Internet services have become entangled in recipients’ habits of gathering information on current topics. Push media enable citizens to scan the issue environment while pull media enable them to seek out in-depth information if information needs have been elicited. Furthermore, content quality in many pull media may increase when more users generate content, removing flaws and adding information. We expected that TV and newspaper coverage of an issue will lead to increases in (a) searches for and (b) user edits in related articles in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Our findings reliably support the hypotheses, but the extent to whic…
The Europeanization of Health Care Coverage Decisions: EU-Regulation, Policy Learning and Cooperation in Decision-Making
2013
The paper presents two cases of Europeanization in health policy – an area that has so far been viewed as hardly affected by European integration. We show that even in the less likely case of coverage decision-making, some traces of Europeanization can be found. This is possible because the Commission has a strong interest in further integration in this field and all other relevant actors have motives to at least engage in cooperation. Our first case deals with the EU’s transparency directive and shows that this has forced member states to establish formal decision-making procedures, but did not result in a harmonization of decision-making processes and institutions, which is why the Commis…