Whilst until the late 1980s most migration issues developed in a parallel manner but with national specifics, important differences showed up during the 1990s and at the beginning of this decade. Since the middle of the 1990s, there has been an obvious change in policy towards migrants and foreigners in the Netherlands, and those changes have been more or less “exported” to our neighbouring countries and even to the level of the EU. Integration into society with the maintenance of the immigrant’s own culture has been replaced by integration into the Dutch society after passing an integration examination. The focus of this article is to investigate those changes and to compare the implementation of those policies in the Netherlands/Limburg and Germany/NRW, where the official understanding of not being an immigration country was dominant until the end of the 1990s, and where integration has only recently become an important political issue. Both countries are now facing similar challenges for better integration into the society, especially into the educational system. Firstly, the autors describe migration definitions, types, the numbers of migrants and the backgrounds of migrant policies in Germany and the Netherlands up until the middle of the 1990s. Secondly they discuss the integration policies thereafter: the pathway to a new policy and the Action Plan Integration in Germany, and the central ideas of the Civic Integration of Newcomers Act (WIN) in the Netherlands. Integration policy in the Netherlands is highly centralised with little differentiation on the local governmental level when compared to South Limburg. Thirdly, the autors investigate the cross-border cooperation between professional organisations and educational institutions in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, and the involvement of social work institutions and social workers in their process of integration into the local society and the exchange of each others’ experiences (the ECSW and RECES projects).
This article explores the intersection between women and technology with an experimental research design that uses online search engine data and digital methods (Rogers 2002, 2004, 2013). We respond to Blagojevic’s (2016) call for online mapping of gender equality stakeholders by incorporating the practice of ‘issue mapping’, which Rogers et al. (2015) conceptualise as a series of techniques that can be used to map the network of actors around a public issue, and to understand the ways they associate with one another. Specifically, we apply the software tool IssueCrawler and its co-link analysis of relevant queries to study national Google search result pages for Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia. We ask, what types of stakeholders are prevalent around the topic of ‘women in technology’ in the local contexts (demarcated by the national Google result pages) of these three countries? Are they country-specific or do they cross national borders? To what extent do they associate with each other? Which actors are in the centre of the identified networks and which are on the periphery? The authors found that the issue networks of all three countries were heavily dominated by media and government actors, followed by business, entrepreneurial and nongovernmental sites, and websites containing information on EU grants. The national specificity, however, was mostly embedded in the groupings of these actors; whether they were densely or loosely interlinked with each other, and whether they were present or absent from the maps.
MULTIFILE
This article examines to what extent and how cannabis users in different countries, with different cannabis legislation and policies practice normalization and self-regulation of cannabis use in everyday life. Data were collected in a survey among a convenience sample of 1,225 last-year cannabis users aged 18–40 from seven European countries, with cannabis policies ranging from relatively liberal to more punitive. Participants were recruited in or in the vicinity of Dutch coffeeshops. We assessed whether cannabis users experience and interpret formal control and informal social norms differently across countries with different cannabis policies. The findings suggest that many cannabis users set boundaries to control their use. Irrespective of national cannabis policy, using cannabis in private settings and setting risk avoidance rules were equally predominant in all countries. This illustrates that many cannabis users are concerned with responsible use, demonstrating the importance that they attach to discretion. Overall, self-regulation was highest in the most liberal country (the Netherlands). This indicates that liberalization does not automatically lead to chaotic or otherwise problematic use as critics of the policy have predicted, as the diminishing of formal control (law enforcement) is accompanied by increased importance of informal norms and stronger self-regulation. In understanding risk-management, societal tolerance of cannabis use seems more important than cross-national differences in cannabis policy. The setting of cannabis use and self-regulation rules were strongly associated with frequency of use. Daily users were less selective in choosing settings of use and less strict in self-regulation rules. Further differences in age, gender, and household status underline the relevance of a differentiated, more nuanced understanding of cannabis normalization.
