The aim of this study is to investigate Dutch citizens’ care attitudes by looking at care-giving norms and citizens’ welfare state orientation and to explore to what extent these attitudes can be explained by combinations of diversity characteristics. We combined two datasets (2016 and 2018, N = 5,293) containing citizens’ opinions regarding society and conducted multivariate linear and ordered probit regression analyses. An intersectional perspective was adopted to explore the influence of combinations of diversity characteristics. Results show that citizens’ care-giving norms are relatively strong, meaning they believe persons in need of care should receive help from their families or social networks. However, citizens consider the government responsible for care as well. Men, younger people, people in good health and people of non-Western origin have stronger care-giving norms than others, and younger people assign relatively more responsibility to the family than the government. Level of education and religiosity are also associated with care attitudes. Primary diversity dimensions are more related to care attitudes than secondary, circumstantial dimensions. Some of the secondary dimensions interact with primary dimensions. These insights offer policy makers, social workers and (allied) health professionals the opportunity to align with citizens’ care attitudes, as results show that people vary to a large extent in their care-giving norms and welfare state orientation.
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This paper reveals how the automatising of protocols ignited a public conflict between Dutch banks and their Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) clients in the years after the Global Financial Crisis. The bank’s “infirmary departments” for Financial Restructuring and Recovery (FR&R) were accused of (mal)treating SMEs. The conflict resulted in no formal regulatory or legal change despite public support. Instead, the banks created self-regulation to improve communication with SMEs, leading to shifts in governing FR&R for SMEs. This way, the banks mitigated significant negative symptoms of automation and solved the conflict with the SMEs while keeping FR&R and ongoing automation intact. The research uses an interdisciplinary analytical framework to understand national financial conflicts in a digitalised (business) world. It contributes to the theory of institutionalising values in discursive contests between action fields. The paper highlights the material and causes of normative conflicts of interest among critical actors in established public-private networks through discourse analysis and process tracing.
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With employer branding (EB), businesses aim to align their organizational norms with the norms of their current and prospective employees, and they explicitly communicate about the firm’s norms. Communication, however, carries different meanings depending on the context in which one operates. Also, the organizational norms may vary depending on the context, i.e., industry, different countries, and geographical context in which a firm operates. As such, the process of EB may be context-dependent, too. This study explores if and how EB is applied differently in different country and industry contexts. The analysis draws on a quantitative content analysis of 226 job vacancies targeted at highly educated graduates and professionals in IT, energy, and healthcare from the North of the Netherlands and comparable regions from Germany and Bulgaria. Our findings show that EB, as manifested in core values and distinctive characteristics, is not widely adopted in the vacancies we included in our analysis. When adopted, different values are emphasized depending on the context. General information and job-specific information are most frequent among all industries and countries. EB is a multidimensional concept with different dimensions used according to the context. The study’s main implication is that companies need to be mindful of the context in which an EB strategy is used. A one-size-fits-all approach in EB is likely not the most effective. This is particularly relevant for multinationals that adopt a worldwide organizational brand.
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