Job search assistance does not boost employment: New evidence

a column by Lionel Cottier, Yves Flückiger, Pierre Kempeneers and Rafael Lalive for VOX: CEPR&rsquo's Policy Portal

In contrast to other labour market interventions, job search assistance appears to be effective in helping job seekers to find jobs.

This column examines the effects of such a programme targeting the long-term unemployed in Geneva. Those participating in the programme experience a short-term increase in employment compared to other job seekers, but this gain evaporates in the second year after assignment.

These results suggest that the programme places job seekers in lower-quality jobs.

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and discover what I found out a long time ago but, of course, for governments to listen there has to be a study!
There was one fellow I helped into work nine times in about 18 months. Easy peasy. At the same time I was moving heaven and earth to get a job for someone who had been out of work caring for family. Mr Bell stopped me in the street some time later and said "You won't remember me but you helped me find a job a couple of years ago. I'm still there."
That was, of course, in the days when employment advisers advised and supported.

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Street-level practice and the co-production of third sector-led employability services

an article by Colin Lindsay (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK) and Sarah Pearson, Elaine Batty and Will Eadson (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) and Anne Marie Cullen (affiliation unknown) published in Policy & Politics Volume 46 Number 4 (October 2018)

Abstract

Policymakers have promised a personalised approach to improving the employability of disadvantaged groups. The evidence suggests that contracted-out activation programmes in the UK and some other welfare states have instead sometimes delivered a standardised 'work-first' model.

An alternative approach is exemplified in local employability services targeting lone parents in Scotland, led by third sector–public sector partnerships.

Our research on these services suggests a link between programme governance (defined by flexible funding and collaborative partnership working) and effective street-level practice (where caseworkers and users co-produce services to empower parents).

The article concludes by identifying lessons for the coproduction of future employability services.

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We Need a More Cohesive Definition of "Recovery"

a post by Olivia Pennelle for the World of Psychology blog

Our time would be better spent trying to help people recover in whatever way is most effective for them rather than pushing and shaming everyone into one particular recovery pathway.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say that a person might be sober, but that they’re not in recovery, or describe them as a “dry drunk,” because the person doesn’t attend some defined program of recovery. I find that attitude divisive, dogmatic, and unhelpful, particularly because it shames others to believe in only one gold standard of recovery.

This simply isn’t true. And it’s harmful; we have too many people dying of substance use disorder. Our time would be better spent trying to help people recover in whatever way is most effective for them rather than pushing and shaming everyone into one particular recovery pathway.

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How Doing Less Can Help You Have More of What Matters

a post by Carl Phillips for the Tiny Buddha blog


“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.” ~Cal Newport

Our culture celebrates the image of being able to get it all done. Having it all. Juggling work and life, while being a massive success at both. Having the big house, the shiny new car, the wife or husband, kids, and pets waiting for us with big smiles at the end of each and every day. Always being happy. Feeling constantly fulfilled. Living a life packed full of sunshine, light, and adventure in every single moment.

It’s a nice image. It’s pretty intoxicating. It’s also largely a myth. A myth that can lead us down a dangerous path. In response to the message that we can have it all, many of us try to do it all.

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Voice, silence and social class on television

an article by Peter Jakobsson and Fredrik Stiernstedt (Södertörn University, Sweden) published in European Journal of Communication Volume 33 Issue 5 (October 2018)

Abstract

The question of voice is a central and timeless political issue. Who gets to speak? Who is silenced? Who is listening? One of the main arenas for voice in modern, advanced democracies is the media.

Media infrastructures, technologies, institutions and organizations are a precondition for political voice in large-scale societies, but are also an important factor in distributing the possibilities for voice among different groups and sectors of the population.

In this article, we take on the question of voice in relation to social class and aim to analyse how the medium of television gives voice to people from different social classes.

This study operationalizes the theoretical notion of voice by asking the following questions:

• who has the opportunity to appear and speak on television,
• to whom do they speak and
• under what circumstances does this communication occur?

Based on a content analysis of television in Sweden, the results from this study show that voice is distributed in a highly unequal manner. It also shows that the relations enacted by television appearances conform to the social hierarchy. Whereas people from the ruling class frequently speak to people from the working and middle classes, they are rarely spoken to by members of a class that is positioned below their own.

Television thus constructs a social hierarchy of voice and authority that reproduces and legitimizes already existing social hierarchies.

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Timescapes of urban change: The temporalities of regenerated streets

an article by Mónica Degen (Brunel University London, UK) published in 

The Sociological Review 

Volume 66 Issue 5 (September 2018)
Abstract

Urban regeneration strategies since the 1980s have been framed around a recovery and extension of the urban realm by focusing on the redevelopment of streets as loci for public life and social interaction. Research has tended to analyse these changes through an exclusive focus on the effect spatial transformations have in reshaping social life.

This article seeks to extend engagement with the concept of the regenerated street by examining its temporal dimensions. Bringing together Lefebvre’s trialectic of the conceived, the perceived and the lived with Adam’s notion of timescapes, the article argues that we need to attend more closely to the multiple temporalities that underpin interventions of urban change. In particular, this article explores how temporalities of planning, the environment and everyday life interact to create unique timescapes of urban change.

By drawing on a longitudinal study of the regeneration of the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona, the article explores the multiple, at times interdependent, at times divergent temporalities that are tangled up in the making and experiencing of this street.

The article suggests to approach urban regeneration as a long-term process and place making as a temporal practice where a diversity of temporal modalities interact to produce a diverse and dynamic sense of place.

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Situationism and the recuperation of an ideology in the era of Trump, fake news and post-truth politics

an article by Paul Bleakley (University of New England, Australia) published in Capital & Class Volume 42 Issue 3 (October 2018)

Abstract

As a variant ideology based on libertarian Marxism, the philosophy of situationism failed to achieve widespread popularity beyond a relatively brief time frame between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Despite this short-lived period of ascendency, the impact of Situationist concepts such as psychogeography, recuperation and the Spectacle have continued to play a role in the ongoing study of how reality is constructed in a system of advanced capitalism.

Situationism’s concern with the perception of reality as shaped by the mass media is of particular significance in the context of contemporary politics that has been dubbed the ‘post-truth era’. The disavowal of the mass media by US President Donald Trump may give the impression of a Situationist approach that rejects the impact of such reality-shaping tools, yet a closer inspection of his actions suggests that Trump himself is responsible for the construction of a neo-Spectacle in which the recuperation of anti-establishment sentiment provides the basis for the reconsolidation of the position held by the capitalist elite within American society.

I thought I was beginning to understand this but realised that I am going to have to do a lot of study to being myself up to speed. Is it worth it? Maybe not.

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