Suchergebnisse

Public social services are increasingly being individualised in order to better meet the differentiated needs of competent and independent citizens and to promote the effectiveness of social interventions. This book addresses this development, focusing on a new type of social services that has become crucial in the 'modernisation' of welfare states: activation services. The book discusses and analyses the individualisation of activation services against the background of social policy reforms on the one hand, and the introduction of new forms of public governance on the other. Critically discussing the rise of individualised social services in the light of various theoretical points of view, it analyses the way in which activation and the 'active subject' are presented in EU discourse. It compares the introduction of individualised activation services in five EU welfare states: the UK, Germany, Italy, Finland and the Czech Republic, focusing on official policies as well as policy practices. The book provides original insights into the phenomenon of the individualised provision of activation services. It is useful reading for policy makers as well as for students and researchers of welfare states, social policies and public governance.

Increased longevity and better health are changing the nature of family life. In the context of changes in the world of work, increased divorce and a declining welfare state, multi-generation or 'beanpole families' are a potential resource for family support. Focusing on four-generation families and the two central careers of the life course - employment and care - Working and Caring Over the Twentieth Century explores this question. Based upon new research that employed biographical methods, it maps in detail from 1910 to the late 1990s the lives of men and women as great-grandparents, grandp

The article is based on original, contemporaneous data in the form of personal diaries from the perspective of a middle-class secondary schoolgirl living in North London in the 1920s. It first considers the use of personal diaries in social science. The article's particular contribution is to demonstrate the value of diaries to understanding everyday social practices in relation to family life, school and friends and to make sense of them through the intersecting lenses of gender, social class, time and place. The article's overall argument is that a focus on a particular case enables the researcher to set everyday social practices within a particular social context.

These reflections are based on my role as a family sociologist for over 40 years whose work has consistently included children in its gaze and has embraced families as wider social networks and intergenerational relations. It discusses the rise of childhood studies as a distinctive field and how it engages, and needs to engage, with other social domains and fields of research.