Suchergebnisse

The article presents four critical observations that it is argued characterize the Danish welfare discourse on the role of civil society and the voluntary sector. The first observation is the tendency to ascribe only positive outcomes to the increase in mutual cooperation and partnerships between public and private welfare providers. The second observation reflects on the claim that the voluntary sector is more innovative than the public sector. The third deals with the contradictory roles of the volunteer as either democratic member of an association or cheap labor. Finally, the tendency to overlook failures within the voluntary sector and focus on government failure is discussed. The aim of the article is to raise awareness of some fundamental contradictions in the current political discussion, and hopefully place them on the research agenda for future critical and empirical scrutiny.

This article presents and explains differences in governmental implementation strategies of volunteer centers in Norway and Denmark. In the first part, we describe the emergence of centers, focusing on shifting policies and governmental initiatives. The second part aims at explaining the observed variations. First, we found that the functions of the centers were strongly affected by centralistic trends in Danish social policy in contrast to a broader acceptance of local welfare variations in Norway. Second, we found that Danish centers managed to establish a national umbrella organization, while the Norwegian centers lacked a national coordinating unit. Third, an independent legal form in which local associations are members may have helped Danish centers bring about a sense of local ownership. In Norway, volunteer centers had weak ties to other local voluntary associations and were at times perceived as a threat to them.

A Social problems' approach to the conceptualization of the normal/deviant child

Interest in children, childhood and child welfare seems to have increased during the last 10-15 years in Denmark. One example of this interest is the various governmental child commissions that have been set up. The general pur-pose of this commission work has been to put children's rights and children's needs on the political agenda. This work has in part been guided by concern for the skills and competences needed for participation in a late modern and highly differentiated society. In this article we analyze the evolution of political communication about children from the beginning of the 20th century until today. The distinc-tion between the normal and the deviant child seems to be a primary code for the political construction of the child as well as for decision making about children. This is a code that produces new categories of deviant children. We argue that increasing complexity in society pushes the differentiation of problem compensating systems forward. The result is an increasing internal (political) contingency which can only be dealt with by locating (a social) problem within the generalized individual child. We suggest how-ever that problems related to the child should also be conceptualized and dealt with as social problems.

Since the 1990's, a number of studies have documented a remarkable high and stable amount of popular engagement in civic organizations in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Often these countries have been considered deviant cases against the proliferating decline of social capital studies. However, despite great international interest in the Scandinavian region, the volume argues that the civil societies and the civic engagement of these countries remain poorly understood. Most interest in the Scandinavian welfare models addresses the balance between state and market, but under communicates the role played by civil society and popular engagement in associations and voluntary organizations. The contributions offer a coherent portrait of stability and change in formal and informal forms of civic engagement over the past 25 years as well as offering contextualized knowledge of the history and institutional design in which Scandinavian civil societies are embedded.--

Due to severe societal, economic and political changes, of which the financial crisis counts prominently, welfare states all over the world are under stress. In our comparative analysis, we will concentrate on specific segments of welfare state activity in Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Specifically, we will investigate whether and to what extent social services and health care in these three countries are affected by current changes. With a special focus on nonprofit organizations, we will particularly address the question whether a trend towards convergence of the very different welfare state regimes of Denmark, Germany, and the United States exists.