30 research outputs found
Implementation of a workplace smoking ban in bars: The limits of local discretion
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In January 1998, the California state legislature extended a workplace smoking ban to bars. The purpose of this study was to explore the conditions that facilitate or hinder compliance with a smoking ban in bars.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We studied the implementation of the smoking ban in bars by interviewing three sets of policy participants: bar employers responsible for complying with the law; local government officials responsible for enforcing the law; and tobacco control activists who facilitated implementation. We transcribed the interviews and did a qualitative analysis of the text.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The conditions that facilitated bar owners' compliance with a smoking ban in bars included: if the cost to comply was minimal; if the bars with which they were in competition were in compliance with the smoking ban; and if there was authoritative, consistent, coordinated, and uniform enforcement. Conversely, the conditions that hindered compliance included: if the law had minimal sanctions; if competing bars in the area allowed smoking; and if enforcement was delayed or inadequate.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Many local enforcers wished to forfeit their local discretion and believed the workplace smoking ban in bars would be best implemented by a state agency. The potential implication of this study is that, given the complex nature of local politics, smoking bans in bars are best implemented at a broader provincial or national level.</p
Academic Advising, Remedial Courses, and Legislative Mandates: An Exploration of Academic Advising in Florida Community Colleges with Optional Developmental Education
Welfare Transformation and Social Work: A Learning-by-Doing Process Looking for New Balances
The chapter studies the effects of the welfare crisis and the transformations that have occurred in social work, applying a street-level perspective. The decision-making process of caseworkers is analysed by examining field research conducted in a north-eastern region of Italy on the recent implementation of the minimum income measure. The research involved around 200 social service caseworkers. It highlights how they are dealing with the changes, interpreting and reinterpreting the space they have for discretion. Specifically, they are providing their own interpretations of some new and rather undefined key concepts, such as personalisation, activation, social support, and pacts with beneficiaries, introducing needed flexibility and learning by doing to absorb the change
The constitutive effects of evaluation systems: Lessons from the policymaking process of Danish Active Labour Market Policies
The Aesthetics of Work-Readiness: Aesthetic Judgements and Pedagogies for Conditional Welfare and Post-Fordist Labour Markets
Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that ‘obstruct employment’ by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemployed as well as formally employed populations; (3) welfare clients are expected to give an aesthetic performance of work-readiness and adaptability; and (4) case managers use aesthetics as a pedagogy to achieve this readiness and adaptability. Aesthetic labour, it is then argued, is best conceptualized as a continuous, everyday, backstage labour for labour: a daily calibration for work contexts in flux