1,721,001 research outputs found
The Peer-Review Meetings in the European Employment Strategy: Dynamics, Opportunities and Limits for Member States’ Learning
No full textThis paper fits in with those studies which, relying on a ‘Europeanization’ perspective, have tried to assess the influence that EU open coordination processes (Open method of coordination-OMC) can possibly produce on member states’ (MS) policies. Notably, this paper focuses on a single component of those processes: the Peer-review meetings (PR) which have been held since 1999 in the framework of the European Employment Strategy (EES). Being the aim of those meetings the promotion of dynamics of ‘mutual-learning’ and policy transfer among the participant countries, they have the potentiality for being a central venue through which EU OMC can exert an influence on MS’ policies. Nevertheless, the academic literature has seldom studied them. This paper tries to plug that gap. First of all, we will provide a description of those meetings: their organization, their evolution and the roles of participating actors. Second, mainly relying on the literature on policy and organizational learning, we will try to assess potentialities and the limits for MS’ learning arising from those meetings. Finally, we will advance some hypothesis about the path of the influence possibly exerted by those meetings on the national levels (identifying the relevant facilitating and constraining factors), thus providing some elements for sketching a ‘map’ that guides further empirical analysis
on national cases
The EU’s potential for promoting an ecosocial agenda
Full text linkReport prepared for the project “Sustainable welfare societies: Assessing linkages between social and environmental policies”, coordinated by NOVA Norwegian Social Research at Oslo Metropolitan University and funded by the Research Council of Norway (grant no. 236930/H20)
About the baby and the bathwater: assessing the European Platform against Poverty
No full textThis Working Paper provides a qualitative assessment of one of Europe 2020’s flagship initiatives: the ‘European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion’ (EPAP). It begins with a description of the Platform’s emergence and its place in the EU’s social policy toolkit. It then critically assesses the (modest) strengths and (multiple) weaknesses of the Platform, four years into its implementation, by looking at four dimensions. First, the capacity of the EPAP to promote synergies between EU-level actors and processes (horizontal integration); secondly, its linkages with the other tools of ‘Social Europe’ (policy coherence); thirdly, EU and domestic stakeholder involvement; and fourthly, its capacity to link EU and national levels of governance (vertical integration). While the Platform has prompted some positive developments (e.g. broadened consultation, enhanced coordination within the Commission), its impact has been severely constrained. Crucially, the Platform is rather static and lacks the procedures to feed into the European Semester; in addition, it remains unclear how the EPAP is connected to the Social OMC and the Social Investment Package. Nevertheless, we argue that a transformed EPAP could provide strong added value for the EU’s toolbox in the fight against poverty: rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the mid-term review of the Europe 2020 Strategy should be used as a window of opportunity to revamp this tool. We propose three complementary scenarios for boosting, step by step, the effectiveness of the Platform: it could serve as a hub for discussing the social dimension of Europe 2020, as a bridge with the European Semester, and even as Social Europe’s ‘watchdog’
The Socio-Ecological Dimension of the EU Recovery From the European Green Deal to the Recovery and Resilience Facility
Full text linkEurope 2020 and the Fight against Poverty: Searching for Coherence and Effectiveness in Multilevel Policy Arenas
No full textPoverty is on the rise in Europe and EU driven austerity measures risk to kill the sick patient. Is the EU social policy tool-kit effective in combating poverty thus counterbalancing the consequences of unfavourable economic developments and fiscal consolidation interventions? The fight against poverty and social exclusion has long been a fundamental brick of the European social dimension though resting on “soft” processes of policy coordination. The launch of EU2020 strategy in 2010, including quantitative poverty targets and the European Platform Against Poverty and Social Exclusion (EPAP), was welcomed by the literature as a relevant step forward. By contrast, more recent contributions have cast doubts on the effectiveness of both the new strategy and more generally the EU in combating poverty. The paper addresses this puzzle by first sketching the traditional EU tool-kit against poverty and social exclusion—the Social OMC—and especially, the peer review meetings which represent a relative unexplored component of the latter. Then the focus is posed on the novel multilevel arena represented by the Europe 2020 Anti-poverty & social exclusion strategy and the EPAP within the new EU framework for policy coordination and the European Semester. Relying on preliminary empirical evidences for the period 2008-2013 we suggest a nuanced view on the effectiveness of novel European anti-poverty tools which show both weaknesses and strengths. We argue, on the one hand, that the Europe 2020 social dimension suffers from ineffective design especially with respect to its integration with the Social OMC. On the other hand, within a still unfinished social governance architecture, a multilevel and highly visible anti-poverty arena is gradually emerging characterised by open stakeholder mobilisation and political pressure as well as innovative policy proposal on the side of EU bodies in order to achieve EU2020 poverty and social exclusion targets
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
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