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Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Dominant discourses on telecare technologies often celebrate the erasure of distance and place. This paper provides a critical intervention into these discourses by investigating how spaces still matter, despite the move from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients. I argue that science and technology studies (STS) research on telecare, as well as other technologies, can be enriched by including a focus on place to understand the dynamic interactions between people and things. Adopting insights of human geographers, I show how places in which technologies are used affect how technologies enable or constrain human actions and identities. Whereas some spaces may facilitate the incorporation of technologies, others may resist technologies. A focus on how places matter is important for understanding how telecare technologies reorder and redefine healthcare. Although other healthcare technologies are also important actors in transforming healthcare, telecare technologies do this in a very specific way: they redefine the spatial dimensions of healthcare. To capture and further explore this changing spatial configuration of healthcare, I introduce the notion of technogeography of care. This concept provides a useful heuristic to study how places matter in healthcare. Although telecare technologies introduce virtual encounters between healthcare providers and patients, the use of telecare devices still largely depends on locally grounded, situated care acts. Based on interviews with users of several cardiac telecare applications, including healthcare professionals and patients in Germany and the Netherlands, the paper shows how patients’ homes and public spaces are important for shaping the implementation and use of telecare technologies, and vice versa. Last, but not least, telecare devices are implicated as well. The paper emphasizes the place-dependency of the use and meaning of technical devices by showing how the same technological device can do and mean different things in different places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Proceeding from an historical-analytical reconstruction of the development of collectively negotiated benefits in Germany and the Netherlands, this paper investigates the role and function of industrial relations as a provider and financial supporter of welfare. It argues that social policy based on collective agreements strongly influences contemporary retrenchment policies. Reviewing the literature on retrenchment policies, the paper argues that unions and employers should be regarded as collective actors supporting retrenchment by offering financial and organizational resources to governments in their attempts at welfare delegation. The implication is that the study of comparative welfare retrenchment should move beyond its focus on analysing the political behaviour of the actors involved, to include industrial relations systematically in its frame of reference. Research should take into account patterns of institutionalization of labour relations at company level, traditions of government support for collectively negotiated benefits, and differences in the relative development of public and collectively negotiated benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to determine whether mobile Union citizens have a right to social assistance? Research has shown how Western European Member States have made efforts to restrict Union citizens' access to their welfare systems over the past decade, whereby lawful residence has increasingly become the linchpin for entitlement. Member States have responded strikingly differently, however, to the complex administrative puzzle of dealing with open borders, the ability to verify lawful residence and the right to social assistance over time. This article makes an analytical and empirical contribution to existing literature by asking how Member States adjust their welfare/migration administrations to fit the Union's free movement regime and what implications this has for Union citizens. Based upon comparative case studies into the administration of social assistance rights in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, the article develops a typology of three different models of administering Union citizens' access to the welfare state: the form, signal and delegation models. Demonstrating how bureaucratic design impacts the stratification of social rights in the Member States in different ways, the article concludes that studying alternative administrative models offers important insights into the functioning of territorial welfare states in open border regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article analyses how the programmatic structure of welfare schemes in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany shape public perceptions of and preferences for migrants' entitlement to social benefits and services. First, the article finds that despite high complexity and the presence of some severe misconceptions, the entitlement criteria of migrants within existing social benefits and services do shape public perceptions of reality. Second, the article finds that these institutional shaped perceptions of reality strongly influence preferences for how migrants' entitlement criteria should be. This status quo effect is more moderate among populist right-wing voters, in general, and in the critical case of attitudes to non-EU migrants' entitlement to social assistance in Denmark. However, in all segments, one finds strong correlations between 'are' and 'should be', which is taken as indications of clear and sizeable institutional effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts contemporary debates about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state in historical perspective. Relying on new historical data, the article examines the relationship between immigration policy and social policy in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the modern welfare state emerged. Germany already had comparably strict immigration policies when the German Empire introduced the world's first national social insurances in the 1880s. Denmark, another early social-policy adopter, also pursued restrictive immigration policies early on. Almost all other countries in Western Europe started out with more liberal immigration policies than Germany's and Denmark's, but then adopted more restrictive immigration policies and more generous social policies concurrently. There are two exceptions, Belgium and Italy, which are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Employment Strategy (EES) has opened up new dynamics of Europeanization in the area of social policy. This article proposes to pay more attention to national core executives and their strategic use of the EES when considering its impact. Through core executives, the EES may not only affect domestic policy agendas, but also decision-making on reform. A comparative case study of activating employment policy reforms in the Netherlands and Germany evaluates expectations about how these agents upload and download ideas to and from the EU level. The findings indicate that uploading is facilitated by holding the EU presidency and a good fit with EES prescriptions, while downloading does not seem to depend on prior uploading and degree of fit but on other domestic factors. True strategic use of the EES by core executives following a sequence of uploading and downloading appears to be contingent on several contextual factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Popular music has apparently gained much in status and artistic legitimacy. Some have argued that popular music criticism has assimilated the evaluative criteria traditionally associated with high art aesthetics to legitimate pop music as a serious art form, while others have claimed that popular music discourse opposes the evaluative principles of high art worlds in favor of a ‘popular aesthetic’. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Lamont, DiMaggio and Bourdieu, we compare the critical discourse on popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands and expect that the presence of ‘high art’ and ‘popular’ aesthetic criteria in popular music reviews published in elite newspapers varies cross-nationally due to differences in the hierarchy, universality and boundary strength of their respective cultural classification systems. We compare the prevalence of various high art and popular evaluative criteria in popular music album reviews in American, Dutch, and German newspapers. In the US, the boundary between high art and popular aesthetics appears to be weakest, German reviewers take the most high art approach to popular music, while Dutch reviews clearly favor the popular aesthetic over high art criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, discussions of a purportedly ‘clean Wehrmacht’ — and its counterpart, the ‘barbarization of warfare’ concept — have centered upon developments in wartime Poland and the western reaches of the Soviet Union. However, the situation in Western Europe merits further analysis, if only because the notion of an apolitical, upright Wehrmacht existed in the Netherlands, too. Drawing upon situation reports generated by the Netherlands’ military occupiers, this article examines both the Wehrmacht’s attempts to avoid the ideological excesses of its civilian counterparts and the progressive deterioration of the army’s situation in this western corner of the nazi New Order. Ultimately, mounting physical privations, growing popular hostility, and the nazi regime’s demand for co-operation in enforcing anti-Jewish measures would undo the military’s attempt to remain out of the fray of politics. As in Eastern Europe, the idea of a ‘clean Wehrmacht’ in the Netherlands would prove more myth than reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The negative effect of childbirth on mothers' labour supply is well documented, though most studies examine only the short-term effects. This study uses retrospective life history data for Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain to investigate the long-term effects of childbirth on mothers' labour supply for successive birth cohorts. Probit estimates with correction for selection into motherhood and the number of births show strong drops in participation before first childbirths and strong recovery after the birth of the last child, especially in Great Britain. Younger cohorts display a less sharp decline in participation around childbirth and a faster increase in participation in the 20 years after childbirth, especially in the Netherlands. However, mothers' participation rates do not return to pre-birth levels in any of the countries studied here. Labour market conditions and institutional public support seem to contribute to explaining the cross-country variation in participation after childbirth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationships between financial participation and other forms of participation drawing on data collected from listed companies in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The authors provide evidence on two questions. First, does the presence of either direct or indirect participation predict the use of profit sharing and employee equity plans? Second, to what extent is employee participation in profit sharing and equity plans influenced by the presence of other forms of participation? Overall, the results provide little evidence of complementarity between financial participation and other forms of participation. There are also clear differences between types of financial participation. It is found that indirect participation has a weak relationship with use of profit sharing and participation in profit sharing plans. Direct participation is not associated with the use of equity plans or profit sharing but with participation in stock acquisition plans. Employee participation in plan design is strongly associated with participation in profit sharing and stock acquisition plans but not stock options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several European countries have considered introducing choice of public or private health insurance — usually by allowing people to 'opt out' of the statutory scheme — under the assumption that enhancing consumer choice and stimulating competition between insurers will be beneficial. This article examines the impact of opting out on equity and efficiency in European health systems. Focusing on Germany and the Netherlands — the only European countries where this type of choice has been available to significant population groups for a prolonged period (from 1970 to the present day in Germany, and from 1941 to 1986 in the Netherlands) — the analysis suggests that current policy debates may overstate the potential benefits of opting out. Due to market failures in health insurance and differences in the regulatory frameworks governing public and private insurers, choice of public or private coverage creates strong incentives for private insurers to select risks and leads to risk segmentation, thereby breaching equity in funding health care, heightening the financial risk borne by public insurers and lowering incentives for private insurers to operate efficiently. Measures can be taken to correct these negative effects, but some forms of regulation may be politically and technically difficult to implement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a strong effect of childbirth on female labour supply. This effect, however, is changing over time. This article uses panel data on the last two decades on three European countries (the Netherlands, Germany, the UK) to study changes in female labour force behaviour around childbirth and tries to find an explanation for these changes by looking at differences between the three countries. We conclude that there are substantial differences in participation patterns between the three countries in our study and that policy measures and institutions such as childcare that make the costs of combining work and family lower relative to being a full-time mother seem to increase female participation rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the relationship of European fascism embodied in the Dutch Nationaal Socialistische Beweging (NSB) party and Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1940. Perceptions of the NSB on Italian and German fascism; Leadership of Adriaan Anton Mussert; Parallelism of NSB and the German Nazi party; Institutions and programs copied by the NSB from the German Nazi party.