Prof. Johan De Deken (University of Amsterdam)

NASP/GSSPS International and Interdisciplinary Seminars on:

15th May 2015, h: 14.30

Room A - GSSPS

Via Pace 10, Milano

"Social investment and its critics. Conceptualising and measuring social investment using expenditure data"

Abstract:

The presentation will begin by developing a typology of social investment that seeks to go beyond a conceptualisation based on a mere dichotomy between 'compensation' and 'investment'. It proposes to differentiate social investment policies in terms of the kind of capital that is invested in, and the population at who the investment is targeted. This first part will be concluded by a critique of some of the underlying assumptions of the investment approach. The second part of the presentation will be dedicated to operationalise and measure the notion of social investment; first by looking at a series of output indicators, but focussing primarily on input indicators, in particular social expenditure data. It will discuss what can and what cannot be done with the OECD’s SOCX social expenditure. It concludes by discussing a series of methodological problems of interpreting cross-national and longitudinal variation in spending patterns to qualify the observed changes.

Short Curriculum Vitae:
Johan De Deken is an assistant professor in the sociology of labour and organisations at the Department of Sociology of the University of Amsterdam. He is affiliated to the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS). He studied sociology at the Free University of Brussels and at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He obtained a PhD in social and political sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Previously he taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His main current research interests include social expenditure analysis, unemployment compensation and activation policies, the public-private divide in pension systems, the interdependence between pensions and housing policies and issues of pension fund governance. At present he is coordinating the international comparative case studies in a research project of AIAS that explores the possibilities and possible consequences of increasing choice options in occupational pensions in the Netherlands.