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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]

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]

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]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the similarities and differences in the development of psychological therapies in three European Union countries (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France) in the context of national policies about health services and public mental health. Design/methodology/approach – Three case studies are utilised for this purpose as historical descriptions. The latter are then discussed in the light of traditional approaches to the sociology of the professions. Findings – Whilst some similarities are identified across the three countries (for example the recent convergence of policy interest in "evidence-based practice") it is also clear that the particular national cultures have shaped developments and their different forms of healthcare organisation have been reflected in national legislative and regulatory arrangements. Research limitations/implications – These case studies draw attention to the need to explore national variations in policy formation about the same matter (in this case the professionalization of psychological therapies) and to extend discussions within the sociology of the professions to ones of healthcare organizational contexts. In addition, the contested nature of applied psychology may require special attention relative to other forms of health work practice. Originality/value – This paper provides a particular form of understanding about psychological practices within modern healthcare and public health policies, in the light of the peculiar and contextualised aspects of the case studies provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares trends and case studies of individual and collective employment conflicts in France and the UK. Its focus is on the extent to which conciliation, mediation and mediation are used within the two different industrial relations systems. In both, third-party intervention is associated with the legitimacy conveyed by the involvement of both employers and trade unions, or by the presence of an impartial judge. The research finds extensive use of alternative dispute resolution is taking place in both countries, with dispute resolution taking place commonly in the justice system in France, while in the UK there is extensive use made of the arms-length independent government agency, Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service. However, the research concludes that the most effective third-party interventions take place when they are combined with mobilisation, rather than merely being the sole form of dispute resolution. [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]

This paper compares recent developments in the recruitment and training practices of retail banks in Germany, Britain and France. It examines how common competitive pressures have resulted in companies adopting significantly different solutions to these challenges. This is largely due to the constraints and opportunities created by national as well as particular sectoral institutional arrangements in each country. As a result of the behaviour of individual banks, sectoral training providers and state-guided training institutions, the creation of a pool of highly skilled labour with higher levels of individual motivation varies between the countries. This research shows how by cooperating at both the sectoral and the national level companies can reduce the problem of free riders and benefit from a general improvement in the quality of available labour. However, this problem has been more successfully managed in France and Germany than in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative study of the labour market and social policy measures introduced in light of the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom between March 2020 and January 2021. Its main aim is to understand whether the crisis response has changed the structures of the welfare states concerned. Focusing in particular on the differences regarding the crisis measures taken for individuals in 'standard employment' and 'non-standard workers' in each country, it argues that, although extensive temporary protection instruments were introduced for both groups during the crisis, these did not lead to an immediate convergence as regards these groups' social protection. Rather than changing the underlying structures of welfare systems, many of the measures in fact highlighted the specific vulnerabilities of large segments of Europe's labour markets. States have, however, granted social compensation at unprecedented levels, which could result in improved infrastructures and a clearer understanding of the responsibility of the welfare state in future emergencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the process aimed at achieving a shared European energy policy, various problems related to land use conflicts in agricultural contexts affected by large-scale green energy power plants have emerged within European countries as a major topic of national and local public debate. The examination and comparison of the relationships between current energy policies and the transformational processes of contemporary rural landscapes in two European regional contexts—the Beauce Plateau in France and the Alta Murgia region in Italy—suggests that a more transversal conception of both green energy and landscape policy may be needed. A hypothesis of working toward a new integrated approach to green energy and landscape policies emerges from the study, in addition to the potential to serve as the foundation for a set of landscape acceptability criteria for managing energy projects.Environmental Practice 15:5–18 (2013) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have long been aware of the need to improve our ability to predict the effect of divergent preference orderings on policy choices made by coalitions. More recently scholars have demonstrated the crucial role of differing assumptions about risk-taking preferences for predicting foreign policy choice. In this paper a theoretical approach for analyzing collective choice in the presence of risk and conflicting preferences is presented and then applied to a series of policy choices in Britain, France, and Germany in two historical periods: one, the three decades before World War I; the other, the decades after World War II. Although the specific cases examined all involve foreign and defense policy options that were embroiled in domestic disputes over extraction, the assumptions and hypotheses presented are designed to be applicable to collective decisionmaking in a wide variety of substantive areas. Indeed, they appear to provide a theoretically grounded interpretation for some characteristic patterns of policy choice that have long intrigued students of comparative foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature addressing attitudes about social policy and the welfare state has been telling us for decades that welfare interventions are supported by those individuals who benefit from a specific measure. The diffusion of ‘demanding’ active labour market policies (ALMPs), however, challenges this relationship. Using a novel dataset, I analyse which individual- and country-level factors explain public support for demanding ALMPs in five Western European countries. The results show that labour market risk and ideological orientation influence public attitudes towards these ALMPs. Thereby, unemployed individuals sympathising with the political right are more strongly opposed to demanding measures than employed individuals with the same political preferences. Moreover, aggregate support is found to be correlated with the country's ALMP legacy, varying from high levels in Germany and the UK to low levels in Denmark and France. The findings suggest that most ALMPs are in fact implemented despite the opposition of their beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we explore systematically the different conceptions of health equity in key national health policy documents in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. We find substantial differences across the three countries in the characterization of group differences (by SES, race/ethnicity, or territory), and the theorized causes of health inequalities (socioeconomic structures versus health care system features). In all three countries, reports throughout the period alluded at least minimally to inequalities in social determinants as the underlying cause of health inequalities. However, even in the reports with the strongest attachment to this causal model, the authors stop well short of advocating the redistribution of power and resources that would likely be necessary to redress these inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Unemployment emerged as a specific social issue in the late-19th century, but the nature of the threat it posed and the governing instruments available to address it varied widely. Using Britain and France as strongly contrasting cases, this article demonstrates the variable and historically contingent constructions of unemployment as a problem, and demonstrates how policy to address it was developed using administrative agencies that embodied specific, normative visions of how society and employment should operate. The different governing trajectories through which the issue was tackled is analyzed in terms of the context within which the problem of unemployment originally emerged. The article demonstrates the socio-political nature of unemployment's construction and, with reference to recent labour market change, questions its utility as a means of assessing economic or social well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White certificate schemes mandate energy companies to promote energy efficiency with flexibility mechanisms, including the trading of energy savings. A unified framework is used to estimate the costs and benefits of the schemes implemented in Great Britain in 2002, in Italy in 2005 and in France in 2006. 'Negawatt-hour cost' estimates reach 0.009€/kWh saved in Great Britain and 0.037€/kWh saved in France, which compares favourably to energy prices in those countries. Moreover, the benefits of reduced energy bills and CO emissions saved exceed the costs; thus, white certificate schemes pay for themselves. Overall, the policy instrument is cost-effective and economically efficient. A closer look at the differences amongst countries provides general insights about the conceptualization of the instrument: (a) Compared to utility demand-side management, to which they are related, white certificate schemes provide more transparency about energy savings, but less transparency around costs; (b) the substantial efficiency discrepancy between the British scheme and its French counterpart can be explained by differences in technological potentials, coexisting policies and supply-side systems in these countries and (c) the nature and amount of costs influence compliance strategies. Notably, if energy suppliers are allowed to set their retail price freely, they tend to grant subsidies to end-use consumers for energy efficient investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significance of ideas to foreign policy analysis remains contested, despite a plethora of empirical studies applying ideational frameworks. Drawing on social constructivism, this article proposes a causal understanding where ideas derived from tradition define the political space for contemporary debates and effect foreign policy behaviour. This ideational approach is substantiated by a historical study of guiding principles in British and French foreign policy, which establish a set of baseline expectations for the analysis of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac's speeches on Iraq. The empirical study shows that whereas Chirac largely stayed within a French ideational framework, Blair applied a more complex combination of ideas from both traditions. Conceptualising Blair as an aspiring (but ultimately unsuccessful) norm entrepreneur is a fruitful interpretation of this role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

British colonial authorities adhered to a philosophy of racial segregation while their French counterparts subscribed to one that segregates along socioeconomic and cultural lines. This article interrogates the rationale for these two colonial philosophies and addresses the following questions: How were these philosophies given physical expression in colonial urban space? Why did the two seemingly opposing philosophies produce identical racially segregated urban space? It is argued that although the two colonial powers had different racial philosophies, they shared common cultural, psychological, political, social, and ideological objectives that were best accomplished through racially segregated space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the influence of sectoral policy networks on national mobilization strategies in the context of international, particularly European Union (EU), negotiations. It argues that stable structures, characterized by frequent interactions and common values among a limited set of organizations, best ensure the active participation of sectoral actors in a non-conflictual environment, thus facilitating the exploitation of all resources available domestically and the aggregation of public and societal interests. However, the comparison of British and French mobilization patterns in the sector of financial services places particular stress on a further specification: the distribution of power within the network, and the ensuing degree of flexibility. Because they allow for the emergence of autonomous organizations, horizontally integrated networks would in some respects be better suited to the representation of domestic stances be they public or private in the multipolar and competitive decision-making system of the EU than vertical, state-dominated ones. Although other items need to be considered at national and EU levels, the article concludes that sectoral policy networks can be regarded as significant intervening variables in the study of interstate bargaining and interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years both Britain and France have initiated major reforms of the organization of urban policy which have followed the introduction of new mechanisms for the allocation of resources to urban regeneration schemes. In the case of City Challenge, local partnerships were invited to engage in a competitive bidding exercise while the Contrat de Ville was based on a process of negotiation between the state and the different tiers of local government. The perceived success of these approaches led them to become central features of new national policies. Against the background of specific political and administrative traditions of the two countries, the article compares the rationale for each approach, the developments leading up to their introduction, the form and content of the programmes, and the mechanisms by which they were prepared and implemented. The underlying differences in philosophy are outlined through a series of comparative themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the empirical validity of 'new' or 'historical' explanations of policy-making by looking at regulatory reform, and in particular the effects of differing organizational structures in Britain and France on the extension of competition in the telecommunications sector during the 1980s and 1990s. It argues that the nature of the widening of competition differed between the two countries, in terms of the processes of policy formation, the speed of change and the conditions applied to suppliers. These contrasts are linked to the dissimilar organizational structures that have existed in the telecommunications sector in both countries. Nevertheless, the article shows that in the two countries competition was extended. It thus concludes that while national organizational structures are important in explaining differences in policy in telecommunications between Britain and France, other factors need inclusion, notably the effects of European Union legislation, new ideas concerning competition, and transnational technological and economic factors, to account for the similarity in the direction of change towards greater competition in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares and contrasts the economic planning policies of Great Britain and France as of October 1966. According to the author, there were many similarities between Great Britain and France concerning economic difficulties and the means by which both countries dealt with them. The article discusses the philosophy of economic planning, the governmental arrangements for economic planning, and how economic policies were implemented by Great Britain and France. It also discusses how both countries relied on market mechanisms and market competition, the British National Economic Development Council (NEDC), and the French Commissions de Développement Economique Régional (CODER). The article also discusses the role of the British Department of Economic Affairs (DEA).

The article focuses on government policy to provide subsidies to electric vehicle industry and also discusses its practicality. It informs that subsidies provided to the purchasers of electric vehicles are 5,000 pounds in Great Britain and 5,000 euros in France. According to the author, more political and administrative effort is needed to encourage people for buying electric vehicle as it is useful in the prevention of climatic changes.

The article focuses on the British government's goal to cut greenhouse gases by 60 percent by 2050. It states that the goal is the most ambitious after France's similar goal to reduce greenhouse gases by 75 percent. A new package of climate change legislation will be made within a few weeks. It further reports that the British government will establish an independent "carbon committee,"to advise the government on measures and monitor and report arrangements on the measures taken. It will also "create enabling powers" to cut down on emissions.