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Currently, deregulation of social welfare provision is underway throughout Western Europe. The major tendency is for disorganisation, together with the emergence of welfare markets. This is also changing the way elderly people are provided with personal and socio-medical services. Focusing on domiciliary eldercare, the paper explores if this is accompanied by a change in what Kohli has termed the moral economy of old age welfare. Departing from a general reflection on the organisation of social services in modern welfare capitalism the paper sketches evolutions in the eldercare system of three major European countries, with a special focus on the role of civic rationales and professional norms in the organisational field under consideration. It is argued that the moral economy of eldercare has become fluid, thus implying a broader transformation in the societal treatment of old age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a quantitative examination of how newspaper articles in the UK, France and Italy most commonly frame immigration and migrants. A developing literature on the securitisation of policy and discourse related to migration suggests the prominence of this narrative, but the prevalence of this particular portrayal of migration has not been placed into comparative context through cross-country analysis of the relative prominence of various immigration-related issues. To test the securitisation thesis I tabulate not only security narratives in the press, but also economic ones, comparing the relative frequency of these two broader narratives. The results indicate that it would be premature to speak of a pre-eminent securitised meta-narrative within the European press. I find that overt references to physical threat or crime occur relatively infrequently, with only the mention of the border being more common. Instead, issues with economic implications, such as the labour market, asylum and fiscal costs, exhibit at least equal salience, though the degree to which the press grants attention to specific economic or security issues varies substantially between countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within the context of global competition for human talent, two policy shifts in favour of the promotion of high-skilled immigration (HSI) were observed in the UK and France during the 2000s. In light of similar policy inputs, this article compares the development and implementation of the British Highly Skilled Immigration Programme between 2002 and 2008 and the French Carte de Competences et Talents (Card of Competences and Talents) from 2006 to 2009. This research explores whether there was an overall convergence across these two European countries' policies towards HSI and if they have conformed to a similar client politics model. Whereas this politics model was identified in the UK, a policy gap was observed in France. This article relates the identified divergences with the political agency of the British and French policymakers, while the conclusions argue that politics trumped policy in the two selected cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration changed the ethnic composition of Western European societies. The new populations brought a series of culturally determined practices that challenged the liberal framework of values of the receiving states. Despite the existence of important variations between the official discourses and the actual policies finally implemented, the responses to those challenges varied with the models of integration defined by each country to deal with ethnic diversity. In this article, we study the policies designed and implemented by the United Kingdom and France against "female genital mutilation" practices, analyzing how both British and French policies affected these types of practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in — though an insufficient understanding of — changes in the governance of welfare and related governance regimes, with the latter being conceptualized as systems of multifaceted inter-agency relations and associated modes of coordination. Referring to evidence from France, Britain and Germany, the article explores these changes with an eye on the role of voluntary organizations within these regimes. It challenges widespread typologies of 'welfare mixes' as well as general assumptions about international variation. It argues that, throughout Western Europe, similar governance regimes emerged in the postwar settlement, materializing in an 'organized welfare mix'. It then illustrates how these regimes currently undergo a process of permanent dis- and reorganization, again irrespective of international differences. Long- established patterns of a system-wide coordination via negotiated public-private partnerships turn into volatile configurations, with a growing albeit varying influence of the market rationale. Moreover, there is an increasing distance between voluntary provider organizations and both the welfare state and civil society, with this entailing precarious, but also more dynamic interrelations. Finally, civic action becomes more fluid, sporadic, dispersed but also more creative in many places. Hence, there is the paradox of the new welfare mixes exhibiting innovative dynamics and systematic organizational failure at the same time, with (more) output heterogeneity as an inevitable consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]