Suchergebnisse

Paid work promises pathways to financial security and wellbeing for families, yet variable scheduling and low pay can interfere with the routines and rhythms of family life, and contribute to caregiving challenges and stress. Using qualitative data from a survey of retail workers, this article shows how Australian employment policies have enabled flexibility practices to be strongly oriented around the needs of employers, reducing employees' resources for care. We develop the concept of 'care theft' from employees' accounts of the ways flexible scheduling and low pay converge to transform and deplete their temporal, financial and ethical resources for care. As an extension of 'time theft' and alternative to individualised notions of 'work-family balance', care theft helps make visible the ways employment practices strip resources for care from working people, and shift risk to low-income families and communities.

This special issue explores the social policy challenges faced by China as it navigates a period of rapid social and economic change. While China has benefited from significant growth and new wealth in recent years, there are many sections of Chinese society that continue to live in poverty. The authors in this special issue provide thoughtful and creative responses to difficult policy questions with the aim of reducing poverty and expanding and improving social and community services.

This paper presents findings of a qualitative study investigating the assets, the risks and shocks, and the anti‐risk mechanisms of the households of a poor village in rural northern China. The paper explores the vulnerability of the rural households to becoming impoverished and presents some implications for Chinese social policy. The research shows that income sources and assets of the households were considerably varied, and that this, in turn, affected the kinds of strategies they could implement to manage risk. Poorer households had fewer assets, smaller social networks, and less capacity to manage risk than better‐off households, despite all living in the same poor village. Moreover, poorer households were much more likely to have family members with chronic ill‐health or disability. These findings point to a need to ensure better access for all rural households to social support, health and care services, and opportunities to find new sources of income within their village.

This review article discusses findings from current Chinese social policy literature about the dilemmas facing the Chinese government to reform China's residual social policies, from historic, socio-economic and political perspectives. It explores how human rights based policies and transparent management are beginning to be reflected in recent literature as the policy changes emerge from current social and political development in China. China is emerging as a new important international force, both economically and socially. Its social policies are at a turning point as it shifts to a middle developed country and as the world witnesses the emergence of a new welfare state.

This paper describes major Australian Government policies which affected families in the years from 1992 to 2006. In 1996 there was a transition from a Labor to a Liberal/National Australian Government, a change which allows this review to examine the policy trends under the two different authorities. The review focuses on policy in the areas of child care, family assistance, income support, industrial relations and maternity leave. The review aims to provide background material for subsequent analysis of changes in men and women's time use from 1992 to 2006.

This review article discusses findings from current Chinese social policy literature about the dilemmas facing the Chinese government to reform China's residual social policies, from historic, socio-economic and political perspectives. It explores how human rights based policies and transparent management are beginning to be reflected in recent literature as the policy changes emerge from current social and political development in China. China is emerging as a new important international force, both economically and socially. Its social policies are at a turning point as it shifts to a middle developed country and as the world witnesses the emergence of a new welfare state.

China is at a turning point in the reform of its social welfare system due to new opportunities and pressures. First, China is in transition to a middle developed country. Fast economic growth has created more wealth for the government and society that could be invested in the social welfare of its citizens. Second, social problems and conflicts have accumulated, partly as a result of past social policies, which were residual only, as was common in Asia (Aspalter, 2006). These residual policies had the primary purpose of securing the economic and political interests of the nation, which were regarded as superior to the interests of individual citizens. The social costs of economic growth at the expense of human rights are widespread and often hidden. In this unsustainable situation, the Chinese public has called for fundamental reforms to China's social policies – not only policies aimed at resolving individual problems, but also reform of the basic principles of the social welfare system as a whole.

China adopted neoliberal approaches to improve the supply of quality social services in the early 2000s. How did the Chinese government manage the financial and quality risks of increasing the provision via government purchasing and how did it differ from other countries? The article examines the policy trajectory of early childhood education and care in China and Australia on this question. Policy analysis of the effect of purchasing on the cost to government and quality of services shows how both countries used subsidy arrangements to engage non-profit and private providers to expand supply. When faced with market risks, they both tightened regulations, but China differed in the speed and strength of their response, restricting the proportion of private providers. The findings have implications for understanding the risks of relying on market forces in other social service sectors, and how policy can effectively respond.

When young women who have grown up in contact with child protection become mothers, they shift from being regarded as a child 'at risk' by the child protection system, to posing 'a risk' to their baby. In contrast to their peers, young care leavers transition to adulthood with very few resources and little support; they typically continue to experience the economic and related adversities of their childhoods. This article draws on biographical narrative interviews with young Australian mothers to understand how they navigate child protection as new mothers. We argue that, while inequalities endure, new understandings of the system can be acquired and dispositions can adapt to function more effectively in the field of child protection. We draw on Bourdieu's notions of capital, habitus and field to analyse young mothers' adaptations, with additional insights from Hester's analogy of separate planets to explore their experiences of the field of child protection.