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Brazilian Social Security System is based in intergeneracional solidarity. It means that today’s taxpayers maintain active pensions and need future taxpayers to sustain future pensions. There is no individual investment account and the actuarial health of the system depends on economic and populational growth to maintain itself. Economic crisis, socio- political context, gave rise to successive reforms intended to hinder access and reduce the amount of paid benefits. When the pandemic hit Brazil, and workers needed to activate social security to ganrantee income in the face of non-essential activities block, they found a bleack scenario in a dismantled protective system.
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Purpose – Private pension is an insurance system that enables participants to save for the future by directing their savings to long-term investments. The aim of this study is to reveal the knowledge level of adults about the private pension system and their perspectives in the covid-19 period. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected by questionnaire method. A 5-point Likert type scale was used in the study. The survey was conducted online with 329 participants. Percentage, frequency, arithmetic mean and one-way analysis of variance were used in the analysis of the data. Findings – According to the results of the analysis,there was a significant gender difference in the participants' perspectives on the private pension system during the covid-19 period. Discussion – The perspectives of individuals over the age of 18 on the private pension system are discussed. In this discussion, the gender, age, marital status, education level and income status of the individuals were taken into consideration.
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Rural development is often hindered by the lack of human and social capital. The LEADER program is one of the European Union's financial instruments destined to improve the rural areas governance by introducing a set of institutional changes including new local policies, practices and actors. These changes translate into the seven principles at the heart of the LEADER philosophy: partnership, integrated and multi-sectoral strategy, area-based approach, bottom-up approach, cooperation, networking and innovation. This article focuses on assessing the commitment of the Local Action Groups (LAGs) to the LEADER principles in a post-socialist country based on the perception of local actors. In this respect, we combined a quantitative (survey) with a qualitative approach (interview) for evaluating the degree of LEADER principles implementation. The study brings evidence on the specific principles which seem more difficult to integrate and provides a basis for future policy design.
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This paper examines the role of non-profit organizations (NPOs) in supporting welfare benefit claims by Romanian immigrants in vulnerable situations in Berlin. The study utilizes in-depth qualitative interviews with social counsellors, language mediators, and project leads to explore the function of social counselling offices in assisting these individuals. Social counselling is analysed as both an institutionalized policy intervention and a communicative practice focused on problem-solving. The paper highlights the power asymmetry between counsellor and advice-seeker stemming from the counsellor’s superior knowledge of the welfare system, and German society. Social counselling acts as a means of support for individuals to navigate complex institutional arrangements and manage risks in modern society. However, the counsellor’s authoritative role in shaping communication constitutes another dimension of power asymmetry. Faced with challenges such as complex legal regulations and limited resources, social counsellors emphasize the need for advice-seekers to gradually take responsibility for their own lives and interact with welfare institutions. This encouragement of self-sufficiency (orig. Ger. Selbstständigkeit) aligns with the principles of German workfare policies. Non-cooperation from advice-seekers in the context of social counselling can be therefore seen as a form of resistance against disciplinary power within the welfare state. The paper raises concerns about the long-term effectiveness and impact of social counselling, noting also the potential for burnout among social counsellors.
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Introduction to the special issue "Social Movements against Housing Financialization".
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It is of utmost importance that our country has appropriate mechanisms for control and regulation of the activities of foreign business entities registered under Bulgarian legislation on the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria in order to ensure that their activities contribute to a better handling of disasters, from which they themselves based on our territory are interested.
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The issue of homelessness exists in every county and even the wealthiest have not managed to eliminate it. Countries with a highly-developed system of homeless people assistance record the largest number of them in their statistics. At the beginning of 2023, the number of homeless people in Germany amounted to 372,000. The purpose of the research was to diagnose the functioning of homeless people in Germany and to show their individual life experiences. The method used was a narrative interview according to Mayring. The research was carried out within the territory of Westphalia, and in the institutional meaning, the research area was the Social and Educational Care Home. As a result of the research, it turned out that the causes of homelessness, among others, include: arrears in rent payments and related evictions, unemployment, as well as divorces, death of a partner and addictions. Homeless people are rather satisfied with the fact that they live in the Social and Educational Care Home, which provides homeless men with food, housing and all kinds of support services.
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Changes in social life have caused social work to evolve over recent years. Both the nature of work and the profile of a social welfare client have changed. Social workers are constantly faced with new challenges. They are expected to have a professional approach to the client. Increasingly, professionalism is evidenced not only by substantive knowledge, but also by the competences and personal resources of social work students. The aim of this study is to characterize the competences and resources of social workers in the context of challenges in helping others. The research problem is: What resources should characterize a social worker in the context of his/her work? The article was prepared based on the desk research method. The work of a social worker was placed in Znaniecki’s concept of social arrangements. The next parts of the article are a theoretical analysis of concepts related to human work, professional work and the professionalization of social work by paying particular attention to the competences and personal resources of people who want to pursue a professional career as a social worker. The values that should guide a social worker, developed by Kantowicz, were the basis for selecting the competences and personal resources of social workers described in the last part.
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The Korean government’s public health responses to the COVID-19 epidemic have achieved a remarkable outcome in terms of the measured number of infected patients and the overall mortality rate. Nonetheless, the public health authority’s various mitigation strategies and vaccination efforts have faced several challenges primarily posed by politically motivated Christian fundamentalists and ultraconservative media’s distorted news framing in Korea. This paper examines how these conservative forces – both religious and political – have undermined the Korean public health authority’s various mitigation efforts and discusses how to address the problems from a public policy point of view. The paper argues that a comprehensive legal reform including the introduction of effective punitive damages in the media market is a necessary minimum to address some of these problems.
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Vaccination concerns and motivations regarding this topic are increasingly discussed not only among specialists but also by the general public. In this paper I rely on the Eurobarometer 91.2/ 2019 survey and I classify European respondents in four attitudinal profiles, from the skeptical ones to the pro-vaccination type. This survey conducted by the European Commission is the most recent study in the field with a European coverage which allow us to compare and view nationally and regionally this sensible topic. This empirical classification captures statistical variability and helps build a more nuanced profile of European countries, in order to adapt national policies of awareness to vaccination and the current health risks.
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This article analyzes the scientific and public discourses regarding adolescent motherhood vehiculated since the ’50s until present times. If the dominant discourses are based on several common typifications of the adolescent motherhood “problem”, mainly as a socio-economic and moral issue, a new strand of novel, revisionist studies, several of constructionist inspiration, redefine our understanding of adolescent motherhood. These new studies bring enlightening and rich contributions regarding the difficulties of adolescent mothers, especially from vulnerable populations, and their social conditions. The new theoretical directions that emerged include mothers’ voices in research, rejecting a deficit and individualistic approach of the “problem” and pleading for paying much more attention in the scientific analysis to mothers’ social context, while also recognizing their fragile but existing agency. Overall, the new research directions identified in the revisionist studies facilitate a better understanding of the lives and needs of these mothers and their families, which can inform social policies and assistance, including socio-educational and awareness programs that aim to discourage early pregnancy, while also opening new avenues of research. Contextual constructionism and its approach to social problems offer us the theoretical premises needed to put social science at work for real life in the spirit of public sociology, meanwhile capitalizing on the constructionist approach, in the benefit of vulnerable populations.
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