Welfare Lobby Groups responding to Globalisation: A Comparison of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and the UK Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG)

The past decade has witnessed a period of intense economic globalisation. The growing significance of international trade, investment, production and financial flows appears to be curtailing the autonomy of individual nation states. In particular, globalisation appears to be encouraging, if not demanding, a decline in social spending and standards. However, many authors believe that this thesis ignores the continued impact of national political and ideological pressures and lobby groups on policy outcomes. In particular, it has been argued that national welfare consumer and provider groups remain influential defenders of the welfare state. For example, US aged care groups are considered to be particularly effective defenders of social security pensions. According to this argument, governments engaged in welfare retrenchment may experience considerable electoral backlash (Pierson 1996; Mishra 1999). Yet, it is also noted that governments can take action to reduce the impact of such groups by reducing their funding, and their access to policy-making and consultation processes. These actions are then justified on the basis of removing potential obstacles to economic competitiveness (Pierson 1994; Melville 1999).

Mothering Children or Soldiers: Advancing Paradigms of the Women's Movement in Former Yugoslavia

The transition of political power in former Yugoslavia and the wars that followed have led to the country's reassessment of the proper role of women in society, culture, nation, and family. Advocates of a new vision of nationalist womanhood assert that the continued existence of the entire country depends solely on women carrying out their reproductive and nurturing roles. This new envisioning clearly serves a political purpose, solely at the expense of the women's movement that has made significant strides in this nation. It is the purpose of this article to provide a brief historical overview of the development of the new idealized "mother of the nation" from a strengths-based social work perspective.

Want Amid Plenty: Developing and Testing a Cross-National Measure of Anomie

One of the biggest challenges facing researchers trying to empirically test structural or institutional anomie theories is the operationalization of the key concept of anomie. This challenge is heightened by the data constraints involved in cross-national research. As a result, researchers have been forced to rely on surrogate or proxy measures of anomie and indirect tests of the theories. The purpose of this study is to examine an innovative and more theoretically sound measure of anomie and to test its ability to make cross-national predictions of serious crime. Our results are supportive of the efficacy of this construct to explain cross-national variations in crime rates. Nations with the highest rates of structural anomie also have the highest predicted rates of homicide.