Search results for "PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION"

How Brexit affects EU external action: The UK’s legacy in European international cooperation

2018

Abstract What exactly Brexit means for British engagement in European external affairs and development cooperation, is highly unclear, while its potential impact is considerable. After the general election in the UK on 8 June 2017, uncertainty regarding the direction, process and timing of the Brexit negotiations and the risk of a disorderly separation have risen further. The government position of a ‘hard Brexit’ seems no longer to be carved in stone. Yet, given the expected – total or partial – withdrawal of a major EU member state, like any area of EU politics, also European development policy faces a number of challenges: short-term problems regarding existing legal obligations, looming…

Living on a knife’s edge: Temporal conflicts in welfare service work

2012

This article considers the temporal variations of agency from the point of view of social and health care workers’ experiences and the social structures and practices of the contemporary public service sector. It is based on an interview study of 24 Finnish welfare service workers. The results show that the public service sector increasingly operates according to market principles and an economic-rationalistic framing of time, contrary to the relational understanding of time in care practices. To maintain their sense of self as skilled professionals, workers actively reassess and adjust their identities according to the exigencies of working life, but not without difficulties. The results …

2016

Abstract Public Service Platforms (PSPs) are a new type of technology platform. They are based in the philosophy of New Public Management (NPM) and support public services for citizens in quasi-markets. This article increases our understanding of the business models behind these PSPs in terms of their Value Propositions, structures, networks, and financing. We interviewed representatives from 14 PSP providers in four public sectors in Sweden: education, healthcare, elder care, and public pensions. We identified a “Traditional view” with its focus on public agencies and neutral information and an “Emerging view” that includes dialogues, user evaluations, long-term perspectives on choice, pro…

Volunteer satisfaction in sports clubs: A multilevel analysis in 10 European countries

2020

Regular voluntary engagement is a basic resource for sports clubs that may also promote social cohesion and active citizenship. The satisfaction of volunteers is an imperative factor in this engagement, and the purpose of this article is to explore individual and organizational determinants of volunteer satisfaction in sports clubs. Theoretically, our study builds on the actor-theory concepts where volunteer satisfaction depends on subjective evaluations of expectations and experiences in a sports club (‘logic of situation’), so that positive evaluations lead to higher satisfaction and, hopefully, retention of volunteers. This research uses a sample of 8131 volunteers from 642 sports clubs…

From fringe to fringe: the shift from the clericalist League of Polish Families to the anticlericalist Palikot Movement 2001–2015

2017

The period between 2001 and 2015 brought two events in Poland that deserve to be called phenomena. In 2001 the rightist, clericalist League of Polish Families entered the Sejm. Ten years later, the leftist, anticlericalist Palikot Movement achieved spectacular success in the 2011 elections. These events give a picture of a radical shift in the Polish political scene: a rightist clericalist party disappeared from the right flank of the political scene, while a new, leftist-anticlericalist formation appeared. The article makes reference to a set of five explanations on both the causes and consequences (and permanence) of the observed changes. I argue that only a concurrence of a number of com…

Promoting neoliberal ideology in Finnish rural community development : the creation of new moral actors

2019

Today’s political ambitions are based on the neoliberal aspiration to diminish the state’s role and responsibilities, and to transfer those responsibilities to local communities and individuals in ways that idealise those communities, promising to ‘give power to the people’. Instead of highlighting individualism, neoliberalism now celebrates communities and participation. This article deals with the effects of this ideology with regard to Finnish rural policy objectives. Drawing on Finnish village action programmes as data, we argue that these ideological views aim to transform individuals and create new moral actors. Our research indicates that Finland’s rural policy objectives invoke acto…

Proximal Paradox

2000

In today's societies relationships between near relatives and friends appear to be somewhat paradoxical. Some accounts present them as the social ideal, exalting the solidarity and altruism represented by proximal relationships. By contrast, others point to the social dangers in such relationships when they are conducted in the public sphere. In order to grasp the coexistence of these opposite views, this article attempts to place proximal relationships in the explanatory context of a gift economy, a concept with a long history in anthropology and which has lately been the focus of interest of a significant group of social thinkers.

Institutional Agonism: Axel Honneth’s Radical Democracy

2017

Axel Honneth may be criticised for reducing political philosophy to moral psychology. In what follows, I argue that if his theory of recognition is reframed as one of democracy, quite another pictu...

Measuring populism across nations: testing for measurement invariance of an inventory of populist attitudes

2019

Abstract The rising voter support for populist parties in Western Democracies in recent years has incited academic interest in populist voters and attitudes connected to the voting propensity of populist actors. In line of this research, numerous scales to measure populist attitudes among voters have been proposed. In most cases, however, the measurement of populist attitudes was tailored to specific countries and its applicability to cross-national research on populism was not assessed. This article uses a cross-national survey to assess the measurement invariance, reliability, and validity of a deductively developed inventory for populist attitudes. The findings suggest that there is a co…

Populist Words Speak Louder? Ideology-Inconsistent Personalization and Voting for Populist Candidates

2021

Abstract The private background of populist politicians oftentimes seemingly contradicts the populist ideology—which can be taken up in political communication. Using two experiments (nStudy 1 = 734; nStudy 2 = 568), we investigate the effects of such ideology-inconsistent personalization on the evaluation of and voting for a populist candidate. We manipulate the politician’s localness and social class (Study 1) and traditionalism in family life (Study 2). Results reveal a number of effects on candidate evaluation which translated into voting intentions. An upper-class background of the populist politician yielded negative effects, but less so among populist voters. However, references to a…