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Abstract
As demographic shifts are occurring in many urban cities in the USA, human service organisations (HSOs) are challenged to provide services conducive to the local region's demographic profile. In order to create urban societies where immigrant populations can thrive, prosper and become productive citizens, it is important to understand the human service landscape of the region. As part of a larger community-based participatory research project, this study explores human services geared towards the New American population in a midwestern region of the USA. This includes human service access and utilisation, as well as barriers and facilitators of human service provision and delivery, among the growing New American population. Based on the responses received from a web-based survey, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, this study (N = 165) uses a human service equity lens to situate HSOs and community capacity at the centre of migration and human service research. Knowledge gained from this study will help promote improved service delivery systems; address the quality of direct services; and improve accessibility, accountability and service coordination among HSOs to serve the diverse New American population, which can be replicated to many other similar urban regions across the globe.

This article assesses Russia's post‐Soviet efforts to reform its public service in order to meet the challenges of social and economic transition and describes both obstacles to the creation of a modern public service and efforts to overcome them. First, the authors provide a snapshot of the public service in Russia since 1991. Second, they describe aspects of the Soviet legacy that have impeded efforts to modernize the public service. Third, they identify some of the traumas of transition experienced in the 1990s that have circumscribed efforts at reform. Finally, the authors identify gaps between the legislation enacted by the Duma and the limited implementation of that legislation to date. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of public service reform in Russia.

The growth of service work has introduced the customer as a third party to the employment relationship. Yet dominant images of customer relations portray docile service workers offering de-personalized care to sometimes aggressive but otherwise not much more agential customers. This paper seeks to bring humanity back into an analysis of customer service, and to reinterpret customer service interaction as a human relationship. Using labour process analysis and data from call-centre workers and their customers, we rerepresent customers as many-faceted, complex and sophisticated social actors and introduce a new conceptual framework of the roles customers play: as mythical sovereigns, functional transactants and moral agents, thereby offering a more accurate representation of customer service and the role of the actors involved in it.

Former consumers of independent-living programs for youth in out-of-home care present their views of the services they received. The youth found that skills classes and stipends for independent living were helpful, that instruction in managing a budget was particularly valuable, and that the services lessened the stigmatization and isolation of being in care. Foster parents and specialized independent-living workers eased the transition out of care, but regular public child welfare caseworkers were not helpful in this regard. The young people report that being in care was difficult to tolerate and that the transition out of care was often abrupt and difficult to manage.

At the intersection of social history, the sociology of law and the sociology of elites, the thesis goes back to the origin of a key concept of the French Republican State: public service. Between 1870 and 1940, this idea, which preceded the new regime, is reshaped by different types of actors in a more democratic sense, as an aggiornamento of state-thought. The legal circles (senior officials of the Conseil d'État and law professors) took a prime position during this update. They notably made advantage of the rise in importance of administrative litigation to legitimate their position as opposed to civil law specialists and impose a vision "from above" of public service, understood as true science of administration. By retracing the sequence of events that made a myth from the Blanco case of 8 February 1873, the thesis aims to give an account of the construction of a profession, that of a lawyer specialising in public law or in administrative law, at the same time as the creation of a "public" field. Actors distant from the legal field (state engineers, philanthropists, social theorists of all kinds, civil service trade unionists) gravitate to this field, struggling either not to let the State's conception of generosity to the public be imposed on them, or to get the point of view of those dominated in this field (lower and middle bureaucrats, primary school teachers) across. The enquiry therefore highlights the unequal and differentiated distribution of interest for the "public", visible in the understanding of the democratic claims of the time (the right to strike and unionise in the civil service, municipalism, the Act of Parliament on income tax), that certain actors consistently tried to translate into categories of law regarded favourably as the only right approach to the social world. Finally, in an effort to think within the contemporaries of the time's mindset (i.e. without reading history backwards and by taking virtual history into consideration), this socio-historical work enables the understanding ...

Public sector organisations are confronted with growing health and social care needs in combination with severe resource constraints, prompting interest in innovative responses to such challenges. Public service and social innovation is poorly understood, particularly where innovators must navigate between the norms, practices and logics of public, private and civil society sectors. We contribute to the understanding of how innovating hybrid organisations are able to creatively combine co-existing logics. Case study evidence from newly established social enterprise providers of health and wellbeing services in England is utilised to examine how innovations are shaped by (i) an incumbent state or public sector logic, and two 'challenger' logics relating to (ii) the market and increasing competition; and (iii) civil society, emphasising social value and democratic engagement with employees and service users. The analysis shows how a more fluid and creative interplay of logics can be observed in relation to specific strategies and practices. Within organisations, these strategies relate to the empowerment of staff to be creative, financial management, and knowledge sharing and protection. The interplay of logics shaping social innovation is also found in relationships with key stakeholders, notably public sector funders, service users and service delivery partners. Implications are drawn for innovation in public services and hybrid organisations more broadly.