Title:	Promoting Active Citizenship
Authors:	Karl Henrik Sivesind Jo Saglie
Keywords:	Citizenship
Issue Date:	2017
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	Who should operate our social services, and how are service contracts to be distributed and managed? These are among the most important social issues today. In Scandinavia, there is little disagreement that the public should pay for the most important services in education, health, and social services. However, there is considerable variation in how welfare is delivered and managed among the Scandinavian countries. Sweden has gone further in terms of the introduction of user choice and vouchers, reducing barriers to establishment of new service institutions, and allowing distribution of profits. This has created a strong growth incentive in the profit-oriented enterprises offering welfare services. Denmark, and to some extent Norway, have by comparison a stronger element of nonprofit providers. In our opinion, the welfare mix is too important to be left to chance. The public, nonprofit and for-profit welfare providers each have advantages as well as disadvantages. The composition of the welfare mix should, therefore, be deliberately designed in order to maximise these advantages. There may be political disagreement about the goals of welfare policies, but we nevertheless need knowledge about the consequences of the welfare mix to get a fruitful political discussion. This was the starting point for our research project Outsourcing of Scandinavian Welfare Societies? Consequences of Private and Nonprofit Service Provision for Active Citizenship—which led to the publication of this book. The project was funded by the Research Council of Norway’s programme on Welfare, Working Life and Migration (VAM) and directed by Karl Henrik Sivesind at the Institute for Social Research (ISF) in Oslo, Norway. However, the project has been a truly Scandinavian comparative effort. An extensive data collection has been carried out in selected case municipalities in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. We would like to thank Malene Thøgersen (Denmark), Håkon Solbu Trætteberg (Norway), and David Feltenius (Sweden) for their work with data collection and documentation. This work also constitutes the basis for Trætteberg’s Ph.D. dissertation, Does Welfare Mix Matter? Active Citizenship in Public, For-Profit and Nonprofit Schools and Nursing Homes in Scandinavia (2016).
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/55144
ISBN:	978-3-319-55381-8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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