1,720,970 research outputs found
Social Security Reform and the Surveillance State: exploring the operation of ‘hidden conditionality’ in the reform of disability benefits since 2010
Full text linkThe application of formal conditionality to address ‘dependence’ on social security has been an important trend since the 1990s. Reforms between 2010 and 2015 saw a renewed interest in this approach. This article will focus on conditionality in disability benefits in that period. It will present findings from a qualitative study of twenty-three disabled people living in the central-belt of Scotland exploring the operation of surveillance as a form of ‘hidden conditionality’. It will find that this had a significant impact on participants’ daily lives, affecting who they interacted with, and what activities they felt they could take part in. The implications of this for disabled people’s ability to realise equal citizenship will be examined
'It was clear from the start that [SDS] was about a cost cutting agenda.' Exploring disabled people's early experiences of the introduction of Self-Directed Support in Scotland
Full text linkThe adoption of personalisation represents a global paradigm shift in the organisation of social care. However, such approaches have been criticised for failing to bring about transformative change. The passage of the Self-Directed Support (Scotland) Act (2013) was intended to bring about a significant change in the organisation of social care in Scotland, giving increased choice and control to new user groups. The implementation of the policy at a time of significant financial constraint for local government has cast doubt on this potential. This paper presents findings reflecting disabled peoples’ lived experience of this change during the early stages of implementation. Drawing on one-to-one qualitative interviews with disabled people living across the central belt of Scotland, this early snapshot suggests that the policy had not significantly increased choice and control for service users, and that austerity was leading to an erosion of gains made by existing Direct Payments users
Conditionality, surveillance, and citizenship: examining the impacts of the 2010–2015 Coalition Government’s welfare reform program on disabled people living in Scotland
Full text linkThis thesis examines the impact of reforms to disability benefits enacted by the Coalition Government of 2010-2015 on disabled people living in Scotland. Situating the Coalition’s reform agenda in the context of disability policies since the late Victorian era, it is apparent that the evolution of disability policy has not been a smooth, coherent, or strategic process. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three trends that have been apparent since 2010. The first relates to the primacy given to participation in employment as the basis for ‘active’ citizenship, underpinned by a conditional approach to the receipt of benefits. The second relates to the conception of disability as an administrative category which is inherently expansive and therefore prone to crisis. Finally, the way in which reforms have been justified with reference to concepts such as ‘independent living’ is identified as a significant divergence from previous approaches to disability policy.
Based on semi-structured depth interviews with twenty-three working-age disabled people, this thesis explores the impact of the Coalition’s reform agenda on disabled people living in Scotland across three dimensions. Firstly, it examines the extent to which behavioural responses to perceived ‘welfare dependency’ are based on a restrictive conception of agency that fails to capture the many and varied ways in which those in receipt of benefits act. Secondly, it explores the reforms as characteristic of a ‘crisis’ in the disability category, and considers the impacts of attempts to contain this crisis through increased reliance on medical testing. Finally, it considers the use of policy language derived from the disabled people’s movement to ascertain whether these changes are reflective of a citizenship agenda in disability policy.
Key findings include that while the Coalition’s approach emphasized participation in the labour market, and drew disabled people increasingly into conditionality, this had not resulted in a rise in labour market involvement for those in this study. Nevertheless, this study also demonstrated that disabled people can and do make a range of contributions to society whether they are in work or not. The findings presented here therefore stand in contrast to narratives that portray those in receipt of benefits as feckless and work-shy. They also serve to challenge some of the dominant assumptions about the agency of those in receipt of disability benefits, and highlight that structural barriers continue to shape individuals lives in many ways.
Furthermore, this work serves to illustrate the challenges of negotiating an increasingly complex process of accessing and being assessed for disability benefits. An important insight related to the way in which tighter eligibility criteria combined with a ‘climate of fear’ brought about by media reporting of the reforms to generate a form of ‘hidden conditionality’. Participants described being under surveillance by authorities and their own communities. Dominant narratives had served to foster feelings of resentment and indeed vindictiveness against a group who were seen to be receiving favourable treatment at a time of austerity. This was reflected in an increase in incidents of hate crime and violence against disabled people.
Finally, this thesis provides an evaluation of the extent to which the Coalition’s linguistic support for independent living was reflected in the lived reality of their reforms. It finds that while the Coalition explicitly drew on the language of the disabled people’s movement in the framing of policies, this discursive support had not been reflected in the experience of these policies. New approaches to the organization of social care in Scotland have also sought to advance the citizenship of disabled people living here. While the introduction of Self-directed Support (SDS) demonstrated considerable potential for a citizenship approach, the overall trend during this period was towards a reduction in the amount of choice and control disabled people were able to exercise.
This work is among the first substantive pieces of research to examine the impacts of the Coalition’s reforms on disabled people living in Scotland. It contributes to knowledge in this area across four dimensions: firstly to debates around the agency and assumed agency of those in receipt of disability benefits; secondly to the understanding of disability as an administrative category, and the implications of this for policy; thirdly in connecting literatures concerning the narrative trends around reform to those concerning surveillance, vindictiveness, and resentment; and finally to the literature on ‘personalization’ in health and social care, and the emerging body of work on the impact of SDS in Scotland
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
