Social impact bonds are payment by results contracts that leverage private social investment to cover the up-front expenditure associated with welfare services. The introduction of private principles and actors through outcome-based commissioning has received a great deal of attention in social policy research. However, there has been much less attention given to the introduction of private capital and its relation to more established forms of quasimarketisation. This paper examines what effect private social investment has on outcomebased commissioning and whether the alternative forms of performance measurement and management, that social impact bonds bring to bear on service operations, demonstrate the capacity to engender: innovation in service delivery; improved social outcomes; future cost savings; and additionality. This paper draws on an in-depth study of four social impact bonds in the UK context, as the welfare regime at the vanguard of this policy development. The findings suggest that the introduction of private capital in outcome-based commissioning has had a number of unique and unintended effects on service providers, operations and outcomes. The paper concludes by considering whether social impact bonds represent a risk or an opportunity for public service reform both in the UK and further afield.
Most existing recursive neural network (RvNN) architectures utilize only the structure of parse trees, ignoring syntactic tags which are provided as by-products of parsing. We present a novel RvNN architecture that can provide dynamic compositionality by considering comprehensive syntactic information derived from both the structure and linguistic tags. Specifically, we introduce a structure-aware tag representation constructed by a separate tag-level tree-LSTM. With this, we can control the composition function of the existing wordlevel tree-LSTM by augmenting the representation as a supplementary input to the gate functions of the tree-LSTM. In extensive experiments, we show that models built upon the proposed architecture obtain superior or competitive performance on several sentence-level tasks such as sentiment analysis and natural language inference when compared against previous tree-structured models and other sophisticated neural models.
This paper demonstrates that the capabilities approach offers a number of conceptual and evaluative benefits for understanding social innovation and -in particular, its capacity to tackle marginalisation. Focusing on the substantive freedoms and achieved functionings of individuals introduces a multidimensional, plural appreciation of disadvantage, but also of the strategies to overcome it. In light of this, and the institutional embeddedness of marginalisation, effective social innovation capable of tackling marginalisation depends on a) the participation of marginalized individuals in b) a process that addresses the social structuration of their disadvantage. In spite of the high-level ideals endorsed by the European Union, social innovation tends to be supported through EU policy instruments as a means towards the maintenance of prevailing institutions, networks and cognitive ends. This belies the transformative potential of social innovation emphasised in EU policy documentation and neglects the social structuration processes from which social needs and societal challenges arise. One strategy of displacing institutional dominance is to incorporate groups marginalised from multiple institutional and cognitive centres into the policy design and implementation process. This incorporates multiple value sets into the policymaking process to promote social innovation that is grounded in the doings and beings that all individuals have reason to value.
Quantitative research has tended to explain attitudinal divergence towards welfare and redistribution through self-interested rationalities.However, such an approach risks abstracting individuals from the structural determinants of resource allocation and biographical experience. With that in mind, this article draws on a qualitative study of 50 individuals experiencing relative deprivation and affluence in the United Kingdom and New Zealand to examine how lived experiences of inequality affect attitude formation towards welfare and redistribution. Scenario-driven vignettes were used to stimulate an applied discussion of abstract principles pertaining to welfare and inequality. Use of this methodological device proffered novel insight into the phenomenological effects of material position on public attitudes and policy preferences in a comparative context. The findings suggest that affluent individuals are less likely to acknowledge systemic features shaping socioeconomic life. As a result, they exhibit a poor sociological imagination that is deployed in distinct and patterned ways to make sense of, and at times justify, economic restructuring. By contrast, those living in relative deprivation are more likely to advance accounts of intergroup relations and social location that emphasize the structuration of (dis-)advantage. Based on the findings, policy and political implications are considered for welfare and redistribution amidst rising structural inequality.
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