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Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats from different agencies and sectors of the Finnish welfare state, namely municipal social workers, diaconal workers of the Lutheran church, benefit officials of the Social Security Institution and officials of private unemployment funds.Design/methodology/approach– The authors are interested in the following questions: What are the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats towards the labour market allowance? What is the impact of individual characteristics? The study utilised the unique national survey data of different groups of street-level bureaucrats from the year 2011 (totalN=2,313). The dependent variables focus on legitimacy of the basic level of labour market allowance and sanction policies. Analyses are built around five independent variables which measure professional, personal interest and ideological factors.Findings– There are differences both between and within groups of Finnish street-level bureaucrats with regard to their attitudes concerning the labour market allowance. Social and diaconal workers believe more often than officials that the level of labour market allowance is too low, and offer less support for the idea that an unemployed person should take any job that is offered or have their unemployment security reduced. The results show that the attitudes of bureaucrats are explained by length of work history, economic situation and ideological factors.Originality/value– There have been very few analyses comparing attitudes among different groups of bureaucrats. The present study is intended to fill this gap in the literature.

AbstractPerceptions of deservingness are crucial when we attempt to explain public support for welfare policies or try to understand the development of modern welfare states. These perceptions also reveal the status of a particular population group in society and the social cohesion between marginalized groups and the general public. In this article, we are concerned about whether perceptions of the deservingness of social assistance recipients vary between different street‐level bureaucrat groups, citizens and those individuals who have received social assistance or whose family members have been recipients of social assistance at some stage of their life. We focus on the nature of the impact of various individual level factors in these perceptions. The studied street‐level bureaucrats are social workers in municipalities, deacons of the Church of Finland and benefit officials of the Social Security Institution of Finland. Two nationwide surveys among street‐level bureaucrats (N = 2,124) and citizens (N = 1,883) are used. Descriptive statistics and rank ordered logistic regression are utilized. According to the results, street‐level bureaucrats and the general public perceive social assistance recipients in quite a positive way. However, there are clear differences between and within these groups. Street‐level bureaucrats' attitudes towards social assistance recipients are more positive than those among the public. However, benefit officials have a more critical stance on the deservingness of social assistance recipients than social workers and deacons. Those who have received social assistance are more positive than those who have not had these experiences. Age, education and political identification further explain the attitudes of bureaucrats and citizens.

The intergenerational transmission of education and social position is a widely studied topic, but measurement of the significance of gender in this subject has received less attention. We study gender differences in the effect of parental disadvantage on the probability of a child completing upper secondary education in Finland. We use high-quality register data, collected by Statistics Finland. The data are clustered according to families that includes information on both children and their parents. The data consist of a 25 per cent sample of persons born in Finland between 1980 and 1986 (n=157,135). The data are analysed using sibling methods using random-effects linear probability models. The analyses are run separately for daughters and sons. With the exception of parental unemployment, all the indicators measuring disadvantaged parental background are significantly more strongly connected to the probability of sons than the probability of daughters completing upper secondary education. Father's unemployment is a stronger predictor of the child's probability of completing upper secondary education than unemployment of the mother. The mother's educational level predicts a child's probability of completing upper secondary education more strongly than the educational level of the father. Both mothers' and fathers' educational levels have a significantly stronger correlation with sons' than daughters' completion of upper secondary education. Equality of opportunity seems to be achieved better among girls than among boys. It might be the case, that the educational system, as one of the most important paths for achieving superior social status to one's parents, does not treat girls and boys equally. Were this so, it would be especially important to pay more attention to boys' school readiness and school wellbeing, especially in socioeconomically disadvantageous areas.

Drawing from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme's data for 22 countries, this article analyses the variation in attitudes toward single parents and the determinants of those attitudes from a cross-national perspective. Findings indicated that the most positive attitudes toward single parents were in Nordic countries, except Finland. The attitudes were the most negative in Eastern European countries. At the individual level, women, younger people, people voting on the political left, Protestants, and people with low religiosity evidenced more approval than their counterparts. At the country level, attitudes were more positive toward single parents in countries where the proportion of single parents were high or where egalitarianism (regarding gender roles) was more evident.

Frontline workers often use discretion when implementing rules. Thus, their own views can be expected to influence client treatment and decisions. We investigate how different groups of frontline workers, with different degrees and types of professional training and within different institutional settings, perceive social assistance and social assistance recipients, focusing on workers' (N=2124) views on overuse, laziness, shame and underuse. The results from the Finnish case investigated, where social assistance has recently been transferred from the municipal social services to a national social security institution, highlight the complex interplay between policy goals, institutional logics and the group of frontline workers.

In this article, we focus on shame among the recipients of charity food aid in Finland. We are interested in whether shame is explained by sociodemographic factors, frequent use of food aid or the persons for whom the charity food is obtained. Our analysis is based on survey data collected in 2012–2013 (N = 3474). Shame is measured using two indicators that are related to social and personal shame. Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression are utilised. Nearly three of four respondents do not perceive receiving food aid as humiliating or socially harmful. Feelings of social shame are more common when charity food aid is needed to support an entire family rather than an individual recipient, and feelings of personal shame are more common when there are two or more children in the family. The highly educated, the elderly and those with the most insufficient perceived incomes are more socially and personally ashamed than others are. Women receiving charity food aid consider it more socially shameful than men do.

Summary European welfare states have been subject to significant restructuring including a general trend towards downsizing the role of the state, and to a greater extent engaging other actors in social policy and social services. While comparative welfare research often overlooks the distinction between for-profit and non-profit actors, third sector research emphasizes the different logics underlying these two types of non-state actors. The purpose of this article was to analyse Nordic and Italian social workers' attitudes towards a greater involvement of for-profit and non-profit actors in social work. The empirical base for the study is nation-wide surveys among social workers in four Nordic countries and in Italy answered by a total of 8,272 social workers. Findings In general, social workers perceived privatization in terms of for-profit organizations more critically than privatization through voluntary sector actors. Their attitudes towards privatization were only partly connected to which welfare model they worked within. Age and working sector of the respondents were other factors of significance. An important finding was that there are different explanatory factors behind positive attitudes towards for-profit and non-profit privatization, which indicate that social workers do not interpret the role of for-profit and non-profit organizations in the same way. Application The article shows that reforms involving subsidiarization, privatization and marketization of social welfare services should take account of the different logics underlying for-profit and non-profit actors and the different levels of trust that these actors enjoy among practitioners.

Kallio J, Blomberg H, Kroll C. Social workers' attitudes towards the unemployed in the Nordic countriesIn recent decades, municipal social workers have become the implementers of new types of social policy measures aimed at activating the unemployed. These policies put a greater emphasis on the individual's own responsibility for being unemployed. Little is known, however, about how social workers view the unemployed – one factor that might influence how policies are in fact implemented. Therefore, our purpose was to analyse Nordic social workers' attitudes towards the unemployed and their determinants: Do social workers' attitudes correspond with a more individualistic view on unemployment? We utilised the data from surveys of professional social workers in four Nordic countries. Our analyses showed that individualistic attitudes towards the unemployed appeared to be rather rare among Nordic social workers. However, attitudinal differences were found between and within countries.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate public opinions towards elderly care. The authors analysed respondents' opinions towards financial support, practical help and care for elderly people.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used nationally representative data collected in Finland in 2012. Respondents represent an older generation (born between 1945 and 1950,n=1,959) and their adult children (born between 1962 and 1993,n=1,652).FindingsFirst, the authors compared the opinions of older and younger Finns but did not find that older adults were more likely than younger adults support the state responsibility, or vice versa. It was also when only actual parent-child dyads (n=779) from same families were included. Next, the authors found that several socioeconomic and family-related variables were associated with public opinions of elderly care in both generations. For instance, in both generations lower-income individuals supported the state's responsibility more compared to their better-off counterparts.Originality/valueThe study provides important knowledge on attitudes towards elderly care using unique two-generational data of younger and older adults.

Decision-makers in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry lack knowledge about the implementation of digitalisation to generate value. We applied a scenario planning method developed by Schoemaker and Mavaddat to provide decision-makers with information for using digital data and technologies to create value for customers. We aim to theoretically understand how the scenario planning process helps AEC decision-makers to make sense of the future. Our findings show that boundary spanners are needed for steering the discussions among industry actors toward shared knowledge about the technological, social, economic and political changes needed at the industry level to optimise the benefits of digitalisation. Our findings also show that boundary spanners apply scenario figures as boundary objects to cross knowledge boundaries. Based on our findings, we theoretically conceptualise scenario planning as a boundary-spanning activity that enables AEC decision-makers from different fields to sharetacit knowledge and to cross knowledge boundaries. The practical implication is that scenario planning provides a method for AEC decision-makers to make sense of the changes needed to realise the preferred future for the industry. ; Peer reviewed

The study analysed views on poverty among Finnish frontline workers in three welfare sector institutions. Two different institutional logics, universal and selective, and two sectors, the public and the voluntary, were represented. A nationwide survey among social security officials, municipal social workers and diaconal workers was utilised (N = 2,124). The methods applied included factor analysis, the examination of means and multivariate analysis of variance. Frontline workers were found to support structural reasons for poverty regardless of institutional affiliation. Analyses, however, also revealed significant differences between the institutions, but not of the kind expected. Social security officials, working in a universal institution, were less likely to endorse structural factors and more likely to endorse individualistic poverty explanations than were social and diaconal workers. Type of education and personal political ideology, respectively, were also found to be of significant importance for poverty perceptions, independent of institutional logic.