No abstract

Facebook offers the possibility of increased social contact via a process known as 'friending', whereby users create personal profiles and accumulate 'friends' on a reciprocal basis. The making and maintaining of friendships has been shown to be particularly important to young adults, but there is a strong debate in the literature on computer-mediated communication about the value of the often weak ties that are created. Relatively little is known about the kind of contact that is made on Facebook in the UK context. This study interviewed 16 secondand third-year undergraduates who all joined Facebook soon after it was launched in UK universities in October 2005. This article explores the extent to which the nature of the Facebook site fosters particular kinds of social interaction, and how students seek to manage their Facebook 'friendships'. It finds that Facebook promotes mainly weak, low-commitment ties.

Education is crucially important for later outcomes but has received limited attention in comparative research on welfare states. In light of this, we present an exploratory analysis of education systems across fourteen EU countries and the US. This builds on existing work on educational institutions, educational outcomes and welfare regimes. We focus on institutional features associated with inequality of educational opportunity, including academic selection, tracking and public/private provision; on educational outcomes; and on education expenditure. Our quantitative analysis identifies four clusters of countries: the Nordic, Continental, Mediterranean and English-speaking, which bear similarities to those identified in the welfare states literature. Each 'education regime' is associated with particular institutional features, educational outcomes and levels of public expenditure. Our analysis suggests that further comparative research on education, viewed as a key component of the welfare state, is warranted.

The first part of the paper argues that the care relationship is crucial to securing care quality, which has implications for the way in which quality is achieved and measured. However, for more than twenty years, governments have emphasised the part that increasing market competition and, more recently, user choice of services can play in driving up the quality of care. The second part of the paper analyses the development of social care services for older people, from the reform of 1990 to the changes following the general election of 2010. The paper goes on to examine whether competition and choice are in any case enough to result in 'good care', given the evidence of limitations both in the amount of choice available and in how far older people are able or willing to choose. It is argued that if 'good care' depends disproportionately on the quality of the care relationship, then more attention should be paid to the care workforce, which has received relatively little comment in recent government documents.

This article examines secondary school admissions criteria in England. The analysis revealed that in a signi®cant minority of schools, notably those responsible for their own admissionsÐvoluntary-aided and foundation schoolsÐa variety of criteria were used which appear to be designed to select certain groups of pupils and so exclude others. Specialist schools were more likely than nonspecialist schools to report selecting a proportion of pupils on the basis of aptitude/ability in a particular subject area but voluntary-aided/foundation schools were far more likely to select on this basis than community/voluntary-controlled schools. Criteria giving priority to children with medical/social needs were given for nearly three-quarters of schools; however, community/ voluntary-controlled schools were more likely to include this as a criterion than were voluntaryaided/foundation schools. Nearly two-®fths of schools mentioned as an oversubscription criterion, pupils with special educational needs; these were predominantly community/voluntary-controlled schools as opposed to voluntary-aided/foundation schools. The evidence reported here reveals that despite attempts by the Labour Government to reform school admissions, considerable`selection' takes place. Implications for policy are addressed.