Trouble in Direct Payment Personal Assistance Relationships

Personal assistance (PA) is a model of support where disabled people take control of recruiting, training and managing their support staff. Direct payment relationships and symbolism borrowed from the corporate world frame PA relationships as instrumentally focused and largely free from emotional entanglements. Yet complicating this picture is research showing that PA often involves moral dilemmas and interpersonal conflict. We report on data from 58 qualitative interviews with disabled people and PAs. Findings reveal PA to be an embedded form of work, which entails convergent interpretive schemes informed by the world of work and also by indeterminate social relations. Applying Emerson and Messinger’s micro-politics of trouble, we outline how trouble comes to be framed in either conflict-resonant or deviant-resonant ways. This focus upon the moral dimensions of trouble sheds light on the relational dynamics of this prevailing model of care and embedded work more broadly.

Do Funerals Funds by Informal Institution Comply with Microtakaful Principles?

Research on funeral funds on a homeowner association has never been performed before. Meanwhile, previous studies on the funeral fund in insurance companies, 'rukun kematian,' and mosques are used as a reference. The research aims to analyze whether the funeral funds managed by informal institutions correspond with the micro takaful principle. Method is a descriptive analysis is used by comparing the survey in two groups, namely residential and village areas, of 31 communities spread across Java Island. The research variables developed include calculation, collection method, and amount of funeral fund contribution, alongside the calculation and amount of benefits. Although the funeral funds' variables have not fulfilled the micro takaful principle, there are interesting findings. These include that the calculation of contribution for the two groups, namely the residential and village areas, is performed by mutual agreement through community deliberations. In the village, the collection method is by direct payment from members of the public to the officers, which is different from the residential areas, where it is picked up by the officers. Furthermore, the amount of funding contributions to the community in the villages is around Rp. 3.001 and Rp. 5,000, while the total is over Rp. 10,000 in residential areas. The informal funeral funding scheme (IFFS) has become a mutually beneficial culture of Indonesian society, which fosters strong humanity and brotherhood. This scheme can be formulated in micro-takaful cooperatives to ensure that the benefits trickle down for every member of the community, including Muslims and non-Muslims.

The End Comes to Byzantium

This chapter examines how the Byzantine Empire crested and began to fade under the rule of Basil II. When Byzantium lost wars, the emperor had to find some other way to pay for military and governmental expenses. Basil's innovation was to give the nobles tax relief rather than direct payment. He also got them to fight “for free” by letting them take land from smaller peasants. Increasing the size of nobles' estates increased the power of regional aristocrats. This gave them independent power bases, which increased their capacity to hold back resources from future wars — or to try to take over the empire for themselves. Civil wars and regional uprisings flourished. A particularly nasty civil war between 1341 and 1354 gutted Byzantium's military strength and led to gains by the Serbs, the Venetians, and the Genoese. While Constantinople did not disappear entirely, Byzantium did. Byzantium went from being a center of power, wealth, and culture to being a subordinate outpost of an Atlantic economy.

Regional differentiation of direct support for farmers in Poland as exemplified by selected regions

The objective of this study was to measure the dispersion of the unit level of support, paid under the direct payment scheme, among voivodeships with a similar average agricultural holding size, and to identify the reasons for this dispersion. It begins with a description of the shape of the direct payments scheme in Poland. The paper further presents and analyses the results of the measurement of dispersion of support as part of the direct payment scheme between voivodeships with no significant differences in the sizes of agricultural holdings. It has been shown that this dispersion is a result of the differences in the structure of support absorbed by farmers in individual regions. The measurement of the support level is the average aid amount per unit of agricultural area and the average aid amount per one beneficiary. The source material used in this paper was the data from the Polish paying agency responsible for direct payments made to farmers, i.e. the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture. The reference period of the study is 2018. As three voivodeships with the most similar average farm size were selected, the study covered Łódzkie, Śląskie and Lubelskie Voivodeships. The analysis was performed with the use of descriptive statistics methods. The data was visualised with the use of pie and bar charts, and a choropleth map. It was found that the instrument with a particularly strong potential for the impact on support level in absolute terms (per one holding) and relative terms (per 1 hectare of agricultural land in a holding) is the so called voluntary coupled support. With this instrument, European Union Member States can adjust the distribution of funds between individual regions, reducing the strength of a relationship between the volume of support absorbed by individual regions and their abundance in agricultural land. The intention of such actions may be to compensate for social inequalities or to stimulate growth in peripheral areas.