This article reports an analysis of European Community Household Panel (ECHP) data to test the hypothesis suggested by Kemeny (1981) and Castles (1998) of a trade-off between the extent of home-ownership and the generosity of old-age pensions. To this end, we evaluate the impact of a range of both pensions arrangements and housing policies on the risk of poverty in old age. The most important analytical innovation is the inclusion of social housing provision as an important policy alternative to the encouragement of home-ownership. Although we found substantial empirical support for the trade-off hypothesis, the findings raise several issues for discussion and further research. Firstly, we found that neither generous pensions nor high ownership rates had the strongest poverty-reducing potential, for this was most strongly associated with the provision of social housing for older people. Furthermore, the analysis identified a group of older people who are faced with a double disadvantage, in the sense that in high home-ownership countries, those who did not possess their own homes also tended to receive low pension benefits. Although this effect arises at least partly as a result of selection – the larger the ownership sector, the more selective the group of people who do not own their homes – the high poverty risk among ‘non-owners’ was apparently not countered by the pension system.
Social work practise is increasingly confronted with the dilemma of specialisation versus generalism. This article embraces the idea of a network that combines the strengths of specialist and generalist service organisations. We focus on the role of generalist service providers in a network of specialist organisations. We conduct 25 interviews with social workers in a network of service organisations in a single district in Antwerp, Belgium. Social workers (n ¼ 15) from specialist service organisations are interviewed to determine how they perceive collaboration with social workers from generalist service organisations. We also include the perspectives of 10 respondents affiliated with generalist service agencies.Findings: The results show that generalists facilitate interactions between specialists and their clients. Their holistic perspective on the complex problems of very vulnerable clients allows them to fulfil critical functions such as brokering information and mediating when conflicts arise.Application: Our analysis provides a better understanding of the role of generalist organisations in a network of specialist service organisations. This article concludes that further research on the importance of collaboration, networks and generalist practise is necessary to further develop a research agenda that focuses on how social work is able to address the complex problems of vulnerable target groups.
In this article, we evaluate the effect of both formal and informal childcare support systems on the post-divorce labour supply of divorced mothers. To this end, we model the change in working hours before and after divorce by using a multilevel approach, estimating the impact of both microand macro-level determinants. Although we find empirical evidence for the hypothesis that a country's institutional environment plays an important role in facilitating employment as a strategy for mothers to cope with their financial losses following partnership dissolution, our conclusion is that the change in labour supply is more responsive to the whole of a country's family policies rather than to so-called 'domain-specific' indicators of formal and informal childcare provision. Furthermore, our empirical evidence suggests that at the micro-level, formal and informal childcare strategies are connected. The complementary role of informal support systems, facilitating the use of formal childcare, is an important finding from a policy point of view. However, further research will have to make clear which conditions have to be fulfilled in order to help divorced mothers to combine work and care, thus enabling them to mitigate the economic consequences of partnership dissolution.
We investigate how networks among service organizations are integrated through a shared participant type of governance. Shared participant governance is a non-brokered type of network coordination where a network is governed by its members without a separate governance entity. We study the integrative capacity of this type of governance by measuring the effect of participation in a shared participant governance on tie formation in networks among service organizations. We analyze three networks of service organizations in three districts of Antwerp, Belgium. In each of these districts, the networks are governed by welfare meetings, defined as a shared participant type of governance. We use Exponential Random Graph models. The results show that a shared participant type of governance has a positive effect on tie formation. We also find that the
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