How big of a role have national cultures-the collection of values, beliefs, attitudes and preferences-played in the formation of social and economic identities? If substantial, can these identities impact work related attitudes and impact personal decision as specific as the preferred type of job or even the choice of seeking employment at all? At a time when Millennials and Generation Z'ers are facing prodigious employment challenges, it is more timely than ever to examine the ways culture, especially cultural transmission from older to younger generations facilitate (hinder) influence labor force attachment and even the work ethic itself. Caught in the Cultural Preference Net examines work-related beliefs, attitudes and preferences that characterize the value orientations of three generational families in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, India and the United States. These six countries have developed significantly different forms of capitalism ranging from the social democratic form in Sweden to the relatively unfettered, free market capitalism in the United States. Michael J. Camasso and Radha Jagannathan investigate whether these cultural and economic contexts have resulted in enduring attitude and preference structures or if these values and preferences have been changing as economic conditions in a nation have changed. These two experts focus a great deal of their attention on the roles that parents and grandparents have in socializing Millennials into the world of work and if this influence trumps the often competing influences of education, labor market and peers. The book is organized around three lines of inquiry: (1) Do some national cultures possess value orientations that are more successful than others in promoting economic opportunity? (2) Does the transmission of these value orientations demonstrate a persistence irrespective of economic conditions or are they simply the results of these conditions? (3) If a nation's value orientation does indeed impact economic opportunity, does it do so by influencing an individual's preferences? To answer this third question, Camasso and Jagannathan conduct a cross-national, multi-generational stated preference experiment-one of the very few ever attempted. The resulting book reveals substantial cultural stability across generations in some of the six capitalist democracies and substantial intergenerational change in others. The implications of this differential impact for national employment strategies are explored as are the implications for a global economy distinguished by abundant, well-paying service jobs for youth.

One of the central features of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant is promoting work and job preparation for parents (mostly single mothers) in families that receive cash assistance. TANF was created in the 1996 welfare law, which was the culmination of a decades-long evolution from providing single mothers "pensions" to permit them to stay home and raise children to a program focused on work. State TANF programs were influenced by research conducted during a period of much experimentation on welfare-to-work initiatives in the 1980s and early 1990s, which found that mandatory work requirements could reduce welfare receipt and increase employment among single mothers. This book examines the TANF program with a focus on welfare waivers, and new research on welfare dependency and welfare-to-work efforts.

Employment and Development brings together the contributions of 2014 IZA Prize in Labor Economics award winner Gary S. Fields to address global employment and poverty problems. Most of the poor in developing countries live in households in which people work, but still they are poor because the best available work pays so little. Employment and Development: How Work Can Lead From and Into Poverty questions how economic growth affects standards of living, how labor markets work in developing countries, and how different labor market policies affect well-being. Through a collection of essays, this book tackles major questions in development and labor economics. Who benefits from economic growth and who is hurt by economic decline? Why are distributional factors and labor market conditions improving in some countries but not in others? How do developing countries' labor markets work? How would labor market conditions change if different policies were to be put into effect? What are the welfare consequences of these changes? Through distributional analysis, Fields examines inequality, poverty, income mobility, and economic well-being, and through analysis of changing labor market conditions he examines employment and unemployment, employment composition, and labor earnings. By concentrating on the poor and understanding how the labor markets work for them and how their labor market earnings might be raised in response to different policy interventions, Fields addresses questions of first-order importance for human well-being.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. All over the world, economic inclusion has risen to the top of the development discourse. A well-performing education system is central to achieving inclusive development - but the challenge of improving educational outcomes has proven to be unexpectedly difficult. Access to education has increased, but quality remains low, with weaknesses in governance comprising an important part of the explanation. The Politics and Governance of Basic Education explores the balance between hierarchical and horizontal institutional arrangements for the public provision of basic education. Using the vivid example of South Africa, a country that had ambitious goals at the outset of its transition from apartheid to democracy, it explores how the interaction of politics and institutions affects educational outcomes. By examining lessons learned from how South Africa failed to achieve many of its goals, it constructs an innovative alternative strategy for making process, combining practical steps to achieve incremental gains to re-orient the system towards learning.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. India is a country of great diversity. The commonly used indicators of 'quality of life' (such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy) vary tremendously between the different states, rivalling international contrasts between very low performing countries and very high achieving ones. This volume of essays reflects an attempt to draw lessons from the disparate experiences within India, rather than from contrasts with the experiences of other countries. It supplements Dreze and Sen's India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, which studies what we can learn from international comparisons of policies, actions, and achievements.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This volume is the first of three addressing a wide range of policy issues relating to the role of public action in combating hunger and deprivation in the modern world. It deals with the background nutritional, economic, social, and political aspects of the problem of world hunger. Topics covered include the characteristics and causal antecedents of famines and endemic deprivation, the interconnections between economic and political factors, the role of social relations and the family, the special problems of women's deprivation, the connection between food consumption and other indicators of living standards, and the medical aspects of undernourishment and its consequences. Several contributions also address the political background of public policy, in particular the connection between the government and the public, including the role of newspapers and the media, and the part played by political commitment and by adversarial politics and pressures. Taken together, these essays provide a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the problem of hunger and deprivation, and an important guide for action.

In one of the most provocative books ever published on America's social welfare system, economist Janet Currie argues that the modern social safety net is under attack.

Unlike most books about antipoverty programs, Currie trains her focus not on cash welfare, which accounts for a small and shrinking share of federal expenditures on poor families with children, but on the staples of today's American welfare system: Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start, WIC, and public housing. These programs, Currie maintains, form an effective, if largely invisible and haphazard safety net, and yet they are the very programs most vulnerable to political attack and misunderstanding.

This book highlights both the importance and the fragility of this safety net, arguing that, while not perfect, it is essential to fighting poverty. Currie demonstrates how America's safety net is threatened by growing budget deficits and by an erroneous public belief that antipoverty programs for children do not work and are riddled with fraud.

By unearthing new empirical data, Currie makes the case that social programs for families with children are actually remarkably effective. She takes her argument one step further by offering specific reforms--detailed in each chapter--for improving these programs even more. The book concludes with an overview of an integrated safety net that would fight poverty more effectively and prevent children from slipping through holes in the net. (For example, Currie recommends the implementation of a benefit "debit card" that would provide benefits with less administrative burden on the recipient.)

A complement to books such as Barbara Ehrenreich's bestselling "Nickel and Dimed," which document the personal struggles of the working poor, "The Invisible Safety Net" provides a big-picture look at the kind of programs and solutions that would help ease those struggles. Comprehensive and authoritative, it will prompt a major reexamination of the current thinking on improving the lives of needy Americans.

The Social Security Handbook: Overview of Social Security Programs, 2022 provides information about Social Security programs and services, and identifies rights and obligations under the Social Security laws.The completely updated Handbook, organized by section number, is a readable, easy-to-understand reference for comprehending complex Social Security programs and services and contains information on several topics relevant to Social Security policies: How Social Security programs are administered Who is and isn't covered under retirement, survivors, disability, and hospital insurance programs Who is responsible for submitting the necessary evidence to support a claim How claims are processed by the Social Security office What Social Security benefits are owed to you How to obtain information about your rights under Social Security policy The Handbook is designed to help users understand the gray areas of the Social Security Act, and to provide critical information about rights and obligations under Social Security laws. The Handbook outlines how to: Protect your benefits and avoid benefit loss; Monitor government agencies and get information about policy changes that will affect your benefits; Make the most of hospital and Medicare coverage; Determine the amount of benefits that are subject to federal income taxes; Check Social Security earnings and benefits; and Get up-to-date news about future Social Security programs and services.

Despite the commonly held perception that most northern citizens embraced racial equality, As Long As They Don't Move Next Door graphically demonstrates the variety of methods including violence and intimidation, unjust laws, restrictive covenants, discrimination by realtors and mortgage lenders, and white flight to suburban enclaves used by whites to thwart the racial integration of their neighborhoods. Author Stephen Meyer offers the first full length national history of American race relations examined through the lens of housing discrimination, and he forces readers to confront and re-evaluate the deep and enduring division between the races. Although this is a discomforting analysis, which concludes that housing discrimination still exists, it is only a clearer understanding of our shared racial past that will enable Americans to create a successful prescription for fighting intolerance. An original and captivating study that illuminates overlooked groups and individuals committed to the national struggle for civil rights, this is important reading for anyone interested in African-American history."

Arguing that people of color are most often the casualties in the governments' desire to roll back the welfare state, this analysis delves into the current myths and stereotypes about racial difference. In exploring such myths in conjunction with the enforcement of welfare fraud policies, this study shows how people of color are constructed as potential "cheaters" and "abusers" of the system, and how this has allowed for the stigmatizing and discriminatory treatment of certain races to persist unchallenged. With an analysis of the criminalization and penalization of poverty--including the increased surveillance and control of welfare recipients--this argument sheds new light on the perspectives of poverty advocates.

Social Enterprise is a worldwide movement of alternative organisational and business models, but it is sometimes difficult to know precisely the meaning of the term. In Essential Social Enterprise, Freer Spreckley traces the origin and development of social enterprise and shows how, over time, both the term and values have been altered and sometimes misinterpreted. The book praises the growth of supplementary and essential initiatives that widen the support for social enterprise influencing traditional business infrastructure mechanisms. The best known is the triple bottom line of Profit, People and Planet that has become the default criteria for corporate social responsibility. The book's central thesis is that it is excellent to see the growth of complementary social tools and different social enterprise applications, but questions whether these are displacement activities avoiding essential system change to corporate ownership and control. The book argues that the original ideas of social enterprise are urgently needed now. We should go beyond the pleasantries of putting the word 'social' in the title and assuming that means change. Freer puts forward a convincing, clear and radical interpretation in defining Social Enterprise and argues that it is a powerful solution to some of today's problems. These, he suggests, are inequality, environmental degradation, poverty and the fetish of exclusivity and puts forward the solutions of a common ownership entity, governed democratically, with integrated financial, social and ecological guiding principles and combined performance measurement indicators and a planning and evaluation method. The book suggests these changes are of our time and urgently need to be applied by organisations and businesses to create system change and avert a social and environmental decline. Furthermore, Freer argues that organisations need to be regenerative, going beyond sustainability and reversing the tread of societal inequality and ecological catastrophe in how they are owned and controlled, operate and behave. The book proposes that governments worldwide enact legislation to create a 'Social Enterprise Act' to define and hasten new organisations and enterprises to help regenerate society and the environment.