Explore the vast range of titles available.

The question of integration has become an important concern as many societies are experiencing a growing influx of people from abroad. But what does integration really mean? What does it take for a person to be integrated in a society? Through a number of.

Cancer Entangled explores the shifts that took place in Denmark around the millennium, when health promoters set out to minimize delays in cancer diagnoses in hope of improving cancer survival. The authors suggest a temporal reframing of cancer control that emphasizes the importance of focusing on how people - potential patients as well as health care professionals - experience and anticipate cancer before a diagnosis or a prediction has been made. This argument compellingly challenges and augments anthropological work on cancer control that has privileged attention to the productive role of science and technology and to life with cancer or cancer risk. By offering rich ethnographic insights into the introduction of the first cancer vaccine, cancer signs and symptoms, public discourses on delays, social class and care seeking, cancer suspicion in the clinic, as well as the work on fast-track referral - the book convincingly situates cancer control in an ethical registrar involving attention to acceleration and time, showing how cancer waiting times become an index of the \"state of the nation\".

The Politics of Justification is an investigation of welfare retrenchment in Denmark and the Netherlands, 1982-1998. Welfare retrenchment is politically highly controversial, but still governments do retrench. This book argues that governments can implement retrenchment if they can achieve a party political consensus allowing them to frame retrenchment in a way that makes it seems justified to the electorate.

In Europe, a growing population of aging citizens have migrant background, and many have their origin in non-Western countries. Often, care arrangements in these families are different from those of the majority populations. In Denmark, a growing number of immigrant families utilise an option in the Social Service Act, under which municipalities can contract a family member to take care of an elderly citizen at home. Due to the special construct of the ‘self-appointed helper arrangement’, the caregiver is both a professional care worker, formally employed by the municipality, and a close relative. As such, the arrangement provides a unique opportunity to examine ideas and practices of care at the intersection of the immigrant family and the state.Based on data from interviews with and observations among both immigrant families and municipal care managers, we explore consequences of this care scheme for aging citizens and their self-appointed helpers. Drawing on the concept of ‘lenticular subject positions’, we show how both the self-appointed helpers and the care managers adopt two different, often contradictory, perspectives or subject positions simultaneously.In all, we argue that the self-appointed helper arrangement constitutes a grey zone in the Danish public health care system, since both care managers and helpers seem to neglect the national legislation and standard procedures, in relation to the elders and the general work environment. The consequences are most severe for the self-appointed helpers who end up in a particular precarious position at the margins of the Danish labor market.

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutable differences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions. Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected in the United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences when faced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades of exposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare support across the U.S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable.

National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This book deals with the impact of welfare states on immigrants' social rights, economic well-being and social inclusion, and it offers the first systematic comparison of immigrants' social rights across welfare states. To study immigrants' social rights the author develops an analytical framework that focuses on the interplay between 1) the type of welfare state regime, 2) forms of entry, or entry categories, and 3) the incorporation regime regulating the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants. The book maps out the development of immigrants' social rights from the early postwar period until around 2010 in six countries representing different welfare state regimes: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark. Part I addresses three major issues. The first is how inclusive or exclusionary welfare state policies are in relation to immigrants, and especially how the type of welfare state and incorporation regime affect their social rights. The second issue concerns changes in immigrant rights and the direction of the change: rights extension versus rights contraction. The third issue is how immigrants' social rights compare to those of citizens. Part II shifts from policies affecting immigrant rights to the politics of the policies. It examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the six countries, focusing on social rights extension and contraction and changes in the policy dimensions of the incorporation regime that impinge on immigrant rights.

Governments face a fundamental choice between in-house production and contracting out for the delivery of services to citizens. This article examines the importance of ideology, fiscal pressure, and size for contracting out in technical and social services. The analysis builds on a panel data set covering municipal spending on services in all 98 Danish municipalities. The authors find that contracting out is shaped by ideology in social services but not in technical services, which indicates that social services are the contemporary ideological battlefield of privatization. The analysis further reveals that economically prosperous municipalities are more likely to contract out social services, whereas contracting out of technical services is not influenced by economic affluence. Finally, larger municipalities contract out more in technical services but less in social services, demonstrating that the size effect is contingent on the transaction cost characteristics of the service.

Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social distancing measures as the Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the drive to large-scale digitalisation. This rapid digitalisation enhances the already ongoing process of datafication, namely turning ever-increasing aspects of our identities, practices, and societal structures into data. Through an analysis of empirical examples of datafication in three important areas of the welfare state – employment services, public service media, and the corrections sector – we draw attention to some of the inherent problems of datafication in the Nordic welfare states. The analysis throws critical light on automated decision-making processes and illustrates how the ideology of dataism has become increasingly entangled with welfare provision. We end the article with a call to develop specific measures and policies to enable the development of the data welfare state, with media and communication scholars playing a crucial role.

People with mental disorders evince excess mortality due to natural and unnatural deaths. The relative life expectancy of people with mental disorders is a proxy measure of effectiveness of social policy and health service provision. To evaluate trends in health outcomes of people with serious mental disorders. We examined nationwide 5-year consecutive cohorts of people admitted to hospital for mental disorders in Denmark, Finland and Sweden in 1987-2006. In each country the risk population was identified from hospital discharge registers and mortality data were retrieved from cause-of-death registers. The main outcome measure was life expectancy at age 15 years. People admitted to hospital for a mental disorder had a two- to threefold higher mortality than the general population in all three countries studied. This gap in life expectancy was more pronounced for men than for women. The gap decreased between 1987 and 2006 in these countries, especially for women. The notable exception was Swedish men with mental disorders. In spite of the positive general trend, men with mental disorders still live 20 years less, and women 15 years less, than the general population. During the era of deinstitutionalisation the life expectancy gap for people with mental disorders has somewhat diminished in the three Nordic countries. Our results support further development of the Nordic welfare state model, i.e. tax-funded community-based public services and social protection. Health promotion actions, improved access to healthcare and prevention of suicides and violence are needed to further reduce the life expectancy gap.