Suchergebnisse

Within the institution of family welfare in the People's Republic of China, the role of the child as future caregiver is so deeply institutionalized as to be almost invisible to policy makers and family members. This article explores institutional responses to the death of a child after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake to demonstrate how this taken-for-grantedness of the child caregiver role has opened up bereaved parents to social risk, and how actors must perform institutional work to "repair the breach" of the loss of a child in a family. Findings show that after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, policy actors took steps to manipulate entrenched family welfare resources, including the population and family planning regulations, to enable bereaved parents to have another child. In so doing, they sought to patch and restore meaning to the family welfare institution, enabling it to continue autopoiesis and resist institutional change in the face of exogenous shock. Use of policy and the positive representation of the policy outcomes in the state-led media enabled sensegiving to be imbued into an otherwise emotionally conflicted decision to try to conceive again soon after the loss of a child. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

There have been various attempts to capture the direction of welfare provision in Japan and the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a regionally coherent welfare regime, following on from attempts by the welfare regime literature to categorize nation-states by the characteristics of
their welfare provision in the West. However, stark differences between the PRC and Japan as regional neighbours, and even within the regions of each country, pose a challenge to this kind of macro-level theorizing. This special issue seeks to supplement macro perspectives on welfare regimes
by exploring a range of welfare policies across both states from an ethnographic, bottom-up perspective, which captures the dynamic nature of welfare and highlights the importance of understanding how local actors request, interpret, and implement risk management strategies. The management
of social risks is shown not to have one clear direction determined by, for example, market logic: instead, this special issue highlights the ways in which the burden of risk shifts between family, market, state, and communities unevenly over time, reflecting underlying institutional norms
which are always up for negotiation. In doing so, this special issue emphasizes the importance of local, contextualized understandings of welfare, and suggests that the comparative welfare regimes literature should seek the micro-institutional foundations of welfare provision as the basis
for comparison.

There have been various attempts to capture the direction of welfare provision in Japan and the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a regionally coherent welfare regime, following on from attempts by the welfare regime literature to categorize nation-states by the characteristics of their welfare provision in the West. However, stark differences between the PRC and Japan as regional neighbours, and even within the regions of each country, pose a challenge to this kind of macro-level theorizing. This special issue seeks to supplement macro perspectives on welfare regimes by exploring a range of welfare policies across both states from an ethnographic, bottom-up perspective, which captures the dynamic nature of welfare and highlights the importance of understanding how local actors request, interpret, and implement risk management strategies. The management of social risks is shown not to have one clear direction determined by, for example, market logic: instead, this special issue highlights the ways in which the burden of risk shifts between family, market, state, and communities unevenly over time, reflecting underlying institutional norms which are always up for negotiation. In doing so, this special issue emphasizes the importance of local, contextualized understandings of welfare, and suggests that the comparative welfare regimes literature should seek the micro-institutional foundations of welfare provision as the basis for comparison.(Pac Aff/GIGA)

For 50 years, researchers at UCL's Thomas Coram Research Unit have been undertaking ground-breaking policy-relevant social research. Their main focus has been social issues affecting children, young people and families, and the services provided for them. Social Research for our Times brings together different generations of researchers from the Unit to share some of the most important results of their studies. Two sections focus on the main findings and conclusions from research into children and children services, and on family life, minoritised groups and gender. A third is then devoted to the innovative methods that have been developed and used to undertake research in these complex areas. Running through the book is a key strategic question: what should be the relationship between research and policy? Or put another way, what does 'policy relevant research' mean? This perennial question has gained new importance in the post-Covid, post-Brexit world that we have entered, making this text a timely intervention for sharing decades of experience. Taking a unique opportunity to reflect on research context as well as research findings, this book will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students and those involved in policy making both in and beyond dedicated research units, and can be read as a whole or sampled for individual standalone chapters.