This article examines how parents living in poverty in Finland describe their daily family life. Drawing on affect theory and Wetherell's concept of affective practices, the study explores how emotions are enacted, circulated and embedded in daily routines of care, survival and encounters with welfare institutions. The data consist of 38 written narratives provided by parents experiencing financial hardship. The article asks: What kinds of affective practices do parents develop, and how do these affects connect to their agency under conditions of structural constraint? Reflexive thematic analysis identifies three interrelated affective formations: embodied endurance, affective resistance and the temporal horizon of hope and despair. Endurance manifests as a bodily and relational effort to sustain life in conditions of scarcity, wherein exhaustion intertwines with care and responsibility. Resistance emerges through emotions such as anger and moral justification, revealing friction with institutional power and policy control. Finally, hope and despair form an ambivalent temporal field in which parents imagine the future amid ongoing uncertainty. By tracing these affective practices, the article shows how poverty is lived not only as material deprivation but also as an affective labour that both constrains and sustains agency. The analysis demonstrates that austerity reshapes affective conditions as well as material resources, illustrating why social policy must attend to the emotional and relational consequences of welfare state restructuring.
ABSTRACT High‐quality community elderly care services are widely expected as global aging has become a significant demographic shift. The elderly sense of gain has the potential to reflect the actual needs of the elderly and thus improve service quality. However, it lacks deep theoretical exploration based on emerging cases. Based on grounded‐theory analysis of five communities in City Q, China, the elderly sense of gain unfolds within each service cycle through three temporally linked dimensions: initial, actual and future sense of gain, while future sense of gain may shape service acceptance in the next cycle. Diminishing marginal effects, digital loneliness and negative spillovers may erode actual sense of gain, impede the formation of future sense of gain and reduce subsequent service acceptance. Conceptualizing sense of gain as a dynamic user‐level evaluative process clarifies how publicly enabled benefits are anticipated, experienced and prospectively assessed, and why objective service provision does not automatically become subjectively recognized value. Attention is thereby shifted from service volume to the conditions under which public provision generates and sustains value for older adults.
ABSTRACT This article examines how individual responsibility became the dominant narrative shaping Australia's childhood obesity policy response and why this framing has persisted. Using historical institutionalism and the concept of policy layering, the analysis examines how pre‐existing approaches to health and child welfare shaped the policy response when childhood obesity emerged on the policy agenda. A systematic analysis of Hansard parliamentary debates (1970–2022) traces how these inherited ideas became embedded and reinforced across health, education and sport and recreation portfolios. Three phases in the policy trajectory were identified: the origins of the narrative (1970–1989), its embedding through expanding policy activity (1990–2009) and its consolidation through continued layering (2010–2022). Across these phases, policy responses remained centred on individual and family health behaviours, despite increasing recognition of systemic and environmental determinants. The findings demonstrate how successive policy layers can expand government activity while reinforcing an established policy trajectory, constraining the capacity of alternative ideas to reshape the dominant response. This study contributes to understanding policy stability, institutional continuity, and the dynamics of incremental change in public health.
Activation-oriented social policy in the Netherlands assigns employers and employees a legally mandated, shared responsibility for facilitating the Return-To-Work (RTW) process of sick-listed workers. This study examines how employers perceive activation-oriented RTW responsibilities, focusing on the drivers shaping the employer's and employee's RTW efforts and the organisational actors supporting policy implementation. Data was collected through 25 semi-structured, retrospective interviews with employers, who had experienced a negative evaluation of their RTW efforts at least once. Interview transcripts were analysed using systematic, qualitative template analysis building on policy-implementation themes. Building on the employers' perspective, results showed several drivers of RTW effort of the employer (i.e., legal, financial and ethical drivers) and the sick-listed employee (i.e., ability-, motivation- and opportunity-related drivers). Furthermore, results highlighted how employers perceived the enactment of RTW efforts to be supported by an intraorganisational tripartite of the Human Resource (HR) department, supervisor and occupational health specialists. Concluding, this study sheds light on how employers perceive the drivers and (roles of) actors that play an important role in the policy implementation within the daily RTW practice of organisations. Our findings highlight tensions between the legal mandate of shared responsibility and employers' perceptions of accountability, underscoring the need for mutually reinforcing RTW practices that integrate employer drivers with employees' ability, motivation and opportunity. The Dutch case, with strong employer obligations and sanction mechanisms, offers lessons for other welfare states.
Research on active labour market programmes (ALMPs) suggests the existence of selection and access biases. This article addresses one potential source of such biases: frontline caseworkers' allocation decisions. To investigate how client attributes affect allocation of ALMPs to young clients with reduced work capability, we conducted a pre-registered factorial survey experiment among Norwegian caseworkers in the public employment service. We test hypotheses derived from the notion of positive and negative selection into ALMPs based on clients' perceived employment prospects and ability to successfully complete programmes. We find that caseworkers' selection of clients into ALMPs occurs primarily based on personal characteristics (i.e., competence, motivation and reliability) and that perceived employability substantially explains these effects. By contrast, clients' immigrant background and health-related characteristics had limited impact on caseworkers' allocation of ALMPs.
