Much of the literature that addresses youth unemployment has been framed within an economic paradigm and much less attention has been focused on the role played by country-specific value orientations in structuring economic activity.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork research and the work of experts in Europe and the United States, this book provides a culturally nuanced analysis of key issues relating to youth unemployment.
Examining the causes and consequences of youth unemployment, it explores ways forward to promote economic self-sufficiency. This pioneering work offers invaluable tailored policy solutions to tackle one of today’s most important socioeconomic issues.
The creative citizen unbound introduces the concept of ‘creative citizenship’ to explore the potential of civic-minded creative individuals in the era of social media and in the context of an expanding creative economy.
Drawing on the findings of a 30-month study of communities supported by the UK research funding councils, multidisciplinary contributors examine the value and nature of creative citizenship, not only in terms of its contribution to civic life and social capital but also to more contested notions of value, both economic and cultural.
This original book will be beneficial to researchers and students across a range of disciplines including media and communication, political science, economics, planning and economic geography, and the creative and performing arts.
There is a broad consensus that traditional philanthropy has the potential to be transformative and address inequalities and injustices, as well as provide relief to the poor. Over the last two decades individual capitalists and private corporations have become increasingly involved in philanthropy, often through foundations targeted at helping to reduce social problems associated with poverty, disease and food insecurity. This important book questions the political and ideological reasons behind rich individuals and large companies choosing to engage in poverty reduction through philanthropy. The question of concern is not whether new philanthropy is good or bad, but what motivates this form of giving and whether the sources of new philanthropy funding are legitimate. The book argues that this new philanthropy risks being a sticking plaster without long-term results, because it fails to tackle social injustice or the structural reasons for inequality.
It will be of value to academics, upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates in politics, sociology, economics and development studies.
Scale is an overlooked issue in the research on interactive governance. This book takes up the important task of investigating the scalar dimensions of collaborative governance in networks, partnerships, and other interactive arenas and explores the challenges of operating at a single scale, across or at multiple scales and of moving between scales.
First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, the volume explores the role of scale and scaling in a wide range of policy areas, including employment policy, water management, transportation planning, public health, university governance, artistic markets, child welfare and humanitarian relief. Cases are drawn from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America and span all levels from local to global. Together, the theoretical framework and the empirical case studies sensitize us to the tensions that arise between scales of governance and to the challenges of shifting from one scale of governance to another.
In the absence of public provision, many governments rely on the market to meet childcare demand. But who are the actors shaping this market? What work do they do to marketize care? And what does it mean for how childcare is provided?
Based on an innovative theoretical framework and an in-depth study of the New Zealand childcare market, Gallagher examines the problematic growth of private, for-profit childcare. Opening the ‘black box’ of childcare markets to closer scrutiny, this book brings to light the complex political, social and economic dynamics behind childcare provisioning.
Rural Places and Planning provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader ideas and practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It looks across twelve international cases, examining the values that guide the pursuit of the ‘good countryside’.
The book presents rural planning – rooted in imagination and reflecting key values – as being embedded in the life of particular places, dealing with critical challenges across housing, services, economy, natural systems, climate action and community wellbeing in ways that are integrated and recognise broader place-making needs. It introduces the breadth of the discipline, presenting examples of what planning means and what it can achieve in different rural places.
Modern welfare states are confronted with a wide variety of social and economic developments, including individualization, secularization, globalization and changing preferences and ideologies of citizens. Using in-depth analysis gathered over 15 years, this book closely analyzes the consequences of these significant changes for social policies, offering theoretical and practical insights about their responsiveness.
It includes a comparative analysis of recent developments in social assistance, sheltered work and labour market policies in the Netherlands, showing how policy makers are continually trying to incorporate societal transformations into social policies while being obstructed by the path-dependent development of welfare state institutions. The insights from the case studies are related to developments in other European countries in the areas of social assistance, sheltered work and labour market policies, and show how policy makers and politicians deal with multiple challenges, interests and perspectives on social policies. This book is essential reading for academics and students interested in the institutional development of social policies.
Universities are increasingly being asked to take an active role as research collaborators with citizens, public bodies, and community organisations, which, it is claimed, makes them more accountable, creates better research outcomes, and enhances the knowledge base. Yet many of these research collaborators, as well as their funders and institutions, have not yet developed the methods to ‘account for’ collaborative research, or to help collaborators in challenging their assumptions about the quality of this work.
This book, part of the Connected Communities series, highlights the benefits of universities collaborating with outside bodies on research and addresses the key challenge of articulating the value of collaborative research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Edited by two well respected academics, it includes voices and perspectives from researchers and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines.
Together, they explore tensions in the evaluation and assessment of research in general, and the debates generated by collaborative research between universities and communities to enable greater understanding of collaborative research, and to provide a much-needed account of key theorists in the field of interdisciplinary collaborative research.
How is London responding to social and economic crises, and to the challenges of sustaining its population, economy and global status?
Sustainable development discourse has come to permeate different policy fields, including transport, housing, property development and education. In this exciting book, authors highlight the uneven impacts and effects of these policies in London, including the creation of new social and economic inequalities. The contributors seek to move sustainable city debates and policies in London towards a progressive, socially just future that advances the public good.
The book is essential reading for urban practitioners and policy makers, and students in social, urban and environmental geography, sociology and urban studies.
I would like to begin this book on youth unemployment in Europe and America with a personal story. I emigrated from India to the US in the early 1980s as a young bride, barely out of my teens, with an undergraduate degree in economics; I also had developed skills in shorthand and typing. Within weeks of coming to America, I was able to find employment as a project secretary in a major research university, a place where I subsequently rose to the level of full professor. While I no doubt worked hard earning an undergraduate degree in business, a graduate degree in statistics and a doctoral degree in demography and public affairs along the way – and all while raising a family, I credit a good bit of my upward career mobility to an opportunity structure that gave primacy to merit. I do not have a proper counterfactual of course, but I do firmly believe that my career progression would not have followed the same path had I remained in India – and I say this with the utmost respect and love for my birth country. Despite the risk of sounding cliché-ish, I have indeed come to see America as a ‘land of opportunity’ and have personally experienced the results of what Alexis de Tocqueville labeled ‘America’s self-interest rightly understood’.
Another characteristic that is quintessentially American, risk-taking, has also seeped into my psychological makeup and has manifested itself in the many decisions I have made for myself and my family. One professional example of this free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit is my founding with my longtime colleague and mentor, Michael J. Camasso, of a successful STEM education program called Nurture thru Nature (NtN), designed to benefit disadvantaged students.
