Psychology, Punitive Activation and Welfare


Book Description

This book explores welfare politics, unemployment, and interventions in relation to the labour market from a critical psychological perspective. Using critical fieldwork and theory, the author explores the administration of the unemployed, and the drive to increase labour market participation through strategies of activation. There is a strong and coherent conceptual and theoretical framing for this work, with a critical perspective (essentially, question everything) taking centre stage. It will give an overall coherence in addressing the topic. The theoretical framing is cogent and, in combination with the critical perspective, works well for integrating the material and delivering a fresh approach to this topic. Psychology, Punitive Activation and Welfare will appeal to students engaging with critical psychology, unemployment or policy, by providing a distinct application of theoretical and methodological tools to think differently about the relationship between labour market non/participation, human misery, psychology, and frontline enactment of policy and research.




The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology


Book Description

Evolutionary psychology is an important and rapidly expanding area in the life, social, and behavioral sciences, and this Handbook represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference text in the field today. Chapters in this Handbook address real-world and practical applications of evolutionary psychology such as applications to medicine, psychiatry, law, and technology. The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is an essential resource for researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in all areas of psychology, and in related disciplines across the life, social, and behavioral sciences. Part 1: Applications to Health and Well-Being Part 2: Applications to Law and Order Part 3: Applications to Technology, Communications, and the Future




Recasting European Welfare States


Book Description

Presents recent research on the recasting of European welfare states resulting from the European Forum on Welfare States held at the European University Institute in Florence during 1998-99. Offers comparative analysis of topical issues, and in-depth studies of changes in the major European countries. Analyzes the impact of retrenchment and reform, and adds to ongoing debates about policy convergence, trade-offs of innovation, cost savings, and equity. Ferrera teaches public policy and administration at the University of Pavia and directs the Center for Comparative Political Research at Bocconi University, Italy. Rhodes teaches European public policy at the European University Institute, Italy. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR




Handbook of Labour Market Policy in Advanced Democracies


Book Description

Bringing together contributions from leading labour market policy scholars from across the globe, this state-of-the-art Handbook offers extensive and compelling analyses of labour market policy in advanced democracies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.




Clinical and Educational Child Psychology


Book Description

Clinical and Educational Child Psychology “There is no shortage of books on developmental psychopathology, but what is unique about this one is the effort to bridge clinical and educational practice with school practice. It is very well conceptualized, and the ecological and transactional approach is very appropriate to the subject matter. In fact, it is the only framework capable of providing a full picture of children’s mental health problems. This book is highly relevant for psychologists working with children and families, as well as for teachers and special education professionals.” Isaac Prilleltensky, PhD, Dean, School of Education and Human Development, Professor of Educational and Psychological Studies, University of Miami Clinical and Educational Child Psychology: An Ecological-fransactional Approach to Understanding Child Problems and Interventions examines developmental patterns in children aged 3 to 18 and the challenges that influence their developmental trajectory. Adopting a transactional-ecological perspective, Linda Wilmshurst explores the reasons why some children exposed to a variety of stressors may become vulnerable to a host of clinical, educational, and mental health problems. Initial chapters explore theoretical models and developmental milestones from early childhood through adolescence. Coverage also includes a variety of contemporary issues in the psychopathology of children and adolescents, with discussion of neurodevelopmental and disruptive behavior disorders, anxiety and mood disorders, attention and learning disorders, later onset disorders such as substance abuse and eating disorders, and issues of maltreatment that can result in trauma disorders. Through an innovative presentation that combines clinical and educational psychological approaches, Clinical and Educational Child Psychology offers unique insights into our understanding of behavioral issues during the transition from childhood to adolescence.




Brains, Media and Politics


Book Description

Following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, a number of prominent academics, journalists, and activists were quick to pronounce the demise of neoliberal capitalism and governance. This rather optimistic prediction, however, underestimated the extent to which neoliberalism has shaped the 21st-century world order and become entrenched in our sociopolitical and cognitive fabric. Indeed, 11 years after the crisis, and in spite of the significant levels of socioeconomic inequality, psychological distress, and environmental destruction generated by neoliberal policies and corresponding business and cultural practices, the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism has not been supplanted, nor has it really faced any serious unsettling. How, then, has neoliberalism inflected and shaped our “common-sense” understandings of what is politically, economically, and culturally viable? To help answer this question, this book combines leading theories from sociology, media-communication research, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, and draws on primary evidence from a unique mix of ethnographic, survey, and experimental studies – of young people’s leisure practices and educational experiences, of young adults’ political socialisation processes in relation to exposure to social networking sites, and of the effects of commercial media viewing on material values and support for social welfare. In doing so, it provides a nuanced and robustly empirically tested account of how the conscious and non-conscious cognitive dimensions of people’s subjectivities and everyday social practices become interpellated through and reproductive of neoliberal ideology. As such, this book will appeal to scholars across the social and behavioural sciences with interests in neoliberalism, political engagement, enculturation, social reproduction, and media effects.




Personalized Support in Youth Labor Market Policy


Book Description

In the face of increasing youth unemployment across Europe, innovative approaches to youth labor market policy are crucial. One such approach is the introduction of ‘one-stop shops’ for young people. Here, employment offices and other actors, such as youth social services, cooperate to offer young people coordinated advice from a single source. The impact of their introduction upon the young people that use them is, thus far, under-researched. This study begins to fill this gap by outlining the support approach of the German ‘youth career agencies’ that centers on gaining a more complete picture of the young person’s life situation in order to offer them a range of possible support programs. The study interrogates whether the youth career agencies do offer more personalized advice for young people during their transition to employment than classical job center teams. It argues that, if the cooperative relationships between the actors involved in the youth career agencies are of good quality, more personalized support is likely to be offered there. However, personalized support in youth career agencies is still limited by the diverse specifications and target figures demanded of job centers by the Federal Employment Agency and also influenced by the professional background of the individual caseworkers.







The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice


Book Description

The twentieth century witnessed not only the devastation of war, conflict, and injustice on a massive scale, but it also saw the emergence of social psychology as a discipline committed to addressing these and other social problems. In the 21st century, however, the promise of social psychology remains incomplete. We have witnessed the reprise of authoritarianism and the endurance of institutionalized forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, and heterosexism across the globe. Edited by Phillip L. Hammack, The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice reorients social psychology toward the study of social injustice in real-world settings. The volume's contributing authors effectively span the borders between cultures and disciplines to better highlight new and emerging critical paradigms that interrogate the very real consequences of social injustice. United in their belief in the possibility of liberation from oppression, with this Handbook, Hammack and his contributors offer a stirring blueprint for a new, important kind of social psychology today.




The Welfare Trait


Book Description

The welfare state has a problem: each generation living under its protection has lower work motivation than the previous one. In order to fix this problem we need to understand its causes, lest the welfare state ends up undermining its own economic and social foundations. In The Welfare Trait, award-winning personality researcher Dr Adam Perkins argues that welfare-induced personality mis-development is a significant part of the problem. In support of his theory, Dr Perkins presents data showing that the welfare state can boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households, and that childhood disadvantage promotes the development of an employment-resistant personality profile, characterised by aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking tendencies. The book concludes by recommending that policy should be altered so that the welfare state no longer increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households. It suggests that, without this change, the welfare state will erode the nation's work ethic by increasing the proportion of individuals in the population who possess an employment-resistant personality profile, due to exposure to the environmental influence of disadvantage in childhood.