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This article examines young people's experiences of open access youth work in settings in the UK, Finland, Estonia, Italy and France. It analyses 844 individual narratives from young people, which communicate the impact of youthwork on their lives. These accounts are then analysed in the light of the European youth work policy goals. It concludes that it is encouraging that what young people identify as the positive impact of youth work are broadly consistent with many of these goals. There are however some disparities which require attention. These include the importance young people place on the social context of youth work, such as friendship, which is largely absent in EU youth work policy; as well as the importance placed on experiential learning. The paper also highlights a tension between 'top down' policy formulation and the 'youth centric' practices of youth work. It concludes with a reminder to policy makers that for youth work to remain successful the spaces and places for young people must remain meaningful to them 'on their terms'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Research on ideological attitudes has identified two main dimensions that refer to two fundamental features of group organization: social solidarity and social control. In response to prior research that has studied their relationship mainly from a correlational perspective, this paper introduces a social reality model based on psychological functionality of ideological attitudes. Social position variables (education, income and material vulnerability) and insecurity variables (fear of crime and distrust) are used to predict the interplay between ideological attitudes towards social solidarity and social control. Using K-means cluster analysis, a typology with four patterns of support for solidarity and control ('socials', 'repressives', 'minimalists' and 'social-repressives') was created, on the basis of representative survey data for the UK, France and Germany ( N = 7034). Results from logistic regression analyses show that the proposed social reality model explains membership in typology categories, with similar results across the three countries. Overall, the model underscores the social origins of ideological attitudes as functional responses to perceived social reality. The paper illustrates how the social psychological study of ideological attitudes may be enriched by a typological approach that examines patterns of attitudes rather than single dimensions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the reasons behind the absence of central Government funding for enterprise and innovation at Further Education Colleges (FECs). Enterprise and innovation are, according to conventional wisdom, crucial in rebuilding the UK's economy and providing jobs. In pursuit of this, the Government has provided central funding for enterprise promotion and education for both Universities and Secondary Schools, but not for FECs. The review starts by looking at recent Government policy papers on enterprise and innovation, then briefly considers the current economic characteristics that lay behind the need for enterprise education and innovation. The efficacy of the current proposals is questioned, looking at the concepts concerning the type and level of intelligence entrepreneurs need, also touching on what types of innovations can be expected to increase employment. The paper concludes by asking if elitist or class bias plays a part in the exclusion of Vocational Education & Training students at FECs from central funding for innovation and enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy making and agenda setting often are analyzed either in terms of how policy problems are defined, or in terms of the structural setting producing stability or opportunities for change. Building on different fields of scholarly work, this paper aims at an integration of structural and substantive elements in studying agenda setting. We analyze how particular frames of immigrant issues emerge in the interaction between policy makers and experts within this immigrant policy domain. By comparing this key element of agenda setting in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, we show how different types of interaction produce different substantive policy frames. If immigrant integration is shaped primarily as a policy issue in broader political arenas and the media, a different frame emerges than when venues such as advisory bodies, think tanks and bureaucracies with limited access and less public exposure are involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the conditions under which commissions succeed in influencing policy change. The paper tackles three questions: What do governments gain by establishing a commission? What are the tools employed by commissions in order to make their recommendations and ensure that their output will have political significance? And how do commissions influence policy outcomes? Five different types of influence are introduced and tested by focusing on the role of pension commissions in France, Sweden, and the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The invention of the medium of photography and its commercialization as a cheap multiple during the 1850s and 1860s led to challenges to extant copyright laws in France and Great Britain. This paper traces the ways that debates over photographic copyright confronted current understandings of originality and mechanization and repeated arguments that had already been raised by laws governing prints and casts. The British Fine Arts Copyright Act of 1862, which extended statutory protection to all photographs, is contrasted with French cases, which struggled to accommodate photographs within the fine arts as defined by the copyright law of 1793. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church-State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims' religious needs in each country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal turn in economic policy involved an attack on the welfare state in some countries but not in others. This article provides an institutionalist explanation of the causes of this variation through a comparative analysis of the transformation of British and French economic policy from the end of the Second World War through the end of the 1980s. The author shows that in both nations the transition to neoliberalism accompanied the economic crisis that took place in the 1970s. However, consistent with the differences in the way the two countries came to diagnose the nature of their respective crises; the policy manifestations of neoliberalism remained different in each. In Britain, where the crisis was diagnosed as one of Keynesianism, neoliberalism emerged as a radical anti-Keynesian movement that sought to dismantle major Keynesian institutions and policies. In this context, the welfare state, a fundamental Keynesian institution, was identified as a part of the 'problem,' and became subject to the neoliberal 'solution.' On the other hand, in France, where the crisis was perceived to reside in the declining competitiveness of the dirigiste policies, the neoliberal reorganization of the economy focused on industrial policy. The welfare state was not associated with the problems of dirigisme, and remained largely resilient. Through this analysis, the author attempts to develop a general theory of the relationship between neoliberalism and national policies and provide insights into the process through which paradigmatic ideas such as neoliberalism translate into concrete policy preferences in different national contexts. Data for this study come from a combination of content analysis of major government documents concerning the economy and social policy, political party election manifestos, opinion papers, OECD statistics and secondary literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]