The Importance of Family in Latin America

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This is the story of our times, the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families’. Read more

Dipping into the Political Economy of Adult Learning Systems

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I’m guessing that most people who read this blog will be familiar with Esping-Andersen’s typology of welfare regimes. The distinction between liberal, conservative and social democratic welfare regimes has provided more than one generation of researchers with a tool for investigating the ways in which structural differences in the relations between market and state affect various outcomes of interest – such as loneliness or social exclusion or active ageing. Although the typology has been widely used in multi-level analyses that try to tease apart the influence of important characteristics of individuals and features of the society in which they live, there is one major policy area that seems to have fallen by the wayside, and that is education. Read more