Understanding the Growth in Welfare Benefit Receipt in Britain: A Review of the Evidence

This paper summarises the conclusions from a more extensive report commissioned by the Treasury and the Ministry of Social Policy to provide an explanation of growth in welfare benefit receipt in Britain in the period 1971 to 1997. The study is structured around a simple heuristic model of four sets of influences, 'drivers', the interaction of which helps to explain trends in claimant caseloads: the economy, demography, welfare institutions and belief systems. Four sets of claimants are considered: unemployed people, disabled people, retirement pensioners and children and families. It assembles a widely dispersed literature, in the first comprehensive review of the evidence on this issue. The conclusions reported here are supported in the full report by a wide range of data and analyses. The full report has been extensively edited, updated, reformatted and published in September 2000 by the Policy Press at the University of Bristol, under the title The Making of A Welfare Class? Benefit receipt in Britain, by Robert Walker with Marilyn Howard. Details of this publication may be obtained through the link to the Policy Press website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Publications/TPP/catalog.htm The study concludes that, while caseloads increased across the four domains, they did so for very different reasons. While the process of de-industrialisation provided an important back-cloth to all the changes, it was only directly implicated as a major influence in the growth of unemployment related benefits. The upward trends in disability benefits were principally a reflection of the greater social awareness of the personal costs of disability, while the growth in benefits pertaining to the family was very largely a response to changing social attitudes and sexual behaviour. Demography, notably increased longevity, explains the observed growth in pensioner caseloads although the balance between contributory and means-tested pensions was the result of foresighted policy decisions made between the 1940s and 1970s.

Should Australian courts give more witnesses the right to Skype?

Millions of people use Skype, a common form of social media that permitspeople to talk to each other over the internet. Courts in Australia havepermitted witnesses in at least a few instances to testify by Skype to date. Thisarticle examines whether Australian courts should permit witnesses to testifyby Skype more often. The article considers using videoconferencing, asopposed to Skype, and security issues associated with Skype. It alsoconsiders the impact that Skype may have upon considering witness credibility.Ultimately, it argues that Australian judicial officers may want to considerpermitting witnesses to testify by Skype if testifying by videoconference is notpossible, on a case by case basis. The authors believe that this is the firstscholarly article in Australia to focus on the issue of witnesses testifying bySkype

A Non-Traditional Assessment of Learning: The School for New Learning\u27s Unified Approach to Learning and Life. Final Report submitted to the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Institutions

For the last two years, DePaul University\u27s School for New Learning has been funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to articulate, refine and evaluate a competency-based framework for adult learners. The result--an unusual GENERALIST approach to competence--provides the conceptual underpinnings for the now fully realized school. Rather than dwell on a demographic evaluation report (although statistical information is available), the Project Directors have chosen to present the philosophy, principles and processes which shape this new definition of a B.A. degree. Central to the School\u27s design is that it provide an environment which is learner-centered. Thus, it has been exciting to discover in the course of this project an historical foundation for key ideas in this program--the roots of the School\u27s nontraditional approach to unifying learning and life. These ideas will be presented in the following paper. Documents produced for the development of the entire program (which was never seen as distinct from the funded project) are appended

Engaging community service or learning? Benchmarking community service in teacher education

The focus in this project has been on the extent of explicit commitment of teacher educators in universities to community service and community partnerships that find expression in the content and processes of programs. Such program expression reflects the reciprocity and mutual benefit of engagement with community in teacher education, albeit at a range of levels from superficial and isolated to complex and integrated. In teacher education, the focus is on community as a context for learning and in that sense the community provides significant benefit to the university and its students

The Influences of Entrepreneurial Motivation and New Business Acquisition on Strategic Decision Making

Strategic management is the domain of upper-level corporate management. The ability to make corporate decisions based on the company's internal strengths and externalities in the macro-environment is a key duty of top management. In small businesses, the business owner or founder generally operates the business and is in a leadership role as the CEO. Are the strategic management and decision-making processes similar for small entrepreneurial businesses? Is the strategic or long-term decision making the same for all entrepreneurs who start their own companies? Does the involvement of top managers in entrepreneurial companies vary in their day-to-day versus their long-term decision making? Small businesses may be inherited from family, started from scratch by an entrepreneur, or purchased as an existing entity. Is the involvement by the small business owner in decision making influenced by the way the business was founded or acquired? The purpose of this exploratory paper is to investigate the decision-making tactics of the small business owner or entrepreneur and to determine the influence, if any, of the means of business acquisition. Discussion and ideas for further research are presented