The aim of this study is to investigate Dutch citizens’ care attitudes by looking at care-giving norms and citizens’ welfare state orientation and to explore to what extent these attitudes can be explained by combinations of diversity characteristics. We combined two datasets (2016 and 2018, N = 5,293) containing citizens’ opinions regarding society and conducted multivariate linear and ordered probit regression analyses. An intersectional perspective was adopted to explore the influence of combinations of diversity characteristics. Results show that citizens’ care-giving norms are relatively strong, meaning they believe persons in need of care should receive help from their families or social networks. However, citizens consider the government responsible for care as well. Men, younger people, people in good health and people of non-Western origin have stronger care-giving norms than others, and younger people assign relatively more responsibility to the family than the government. Level of education and religiosity are also associated with care attitudes. Primary diversity dimensions are more related to care attitudes than secondary, circumstantial dimensions. Some of the secondary dimensions interact with primary dimensions. These insights offer policy makers, social workers and (allied) health professionals the opportunity to align with citizens’ care attitudes, as results show that people vary to a large extent in their care-giving norms and welfare state orientation.
In this chapter, it is argued that corporate communication is not an arbitrary affair, but an activity with its own intrinsic normativity. Communication is part of a creation order, which means that one has to obey specific norms and rules in order to present oneself in a convincing way. First of all, organisations need to have a clear sense of self and have to be accountable for their actions. They have to know ‘who’ they are, and to which principles they stick (directional dimension). Secondly, organisations must have a clear sense of the intrinsic good that is at stake in their professional field. They need to have a clear understanding of ‘what’ they are doing (structural dimension). Thirdly organisations must have a clear understanding of what is required in their specific context. They must have a sense of ‘why’ they exist in a particular time and place (contextual dimension). All three normative dimensions are important. If they lose sight of any one of these dimensions, organizations risk losing their credibility.
This paper reveals how the automatising of protocols ignited a public conflict between Dutch banks and their Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) clients in the years after the Global Financial Crisis. The bank’s “infirmary departments” for Financial Restructuring and Recovery (FR&R) were accused of (mal)treating SMEs. The conflict resulted in no formal regulatory or legal change despite public support. Instead, the banks created self-regulation to improve communication with SMEs, leading to shifts in governing FR&R for SMEs. This way, the banks mitigated significant negative symptoms of automation and solved the conflict with the SMEs while keeping FR&R and ongoing automation intact. The research uses an interdisciplinary analytical framework to understand national financial conflicts in a digitalised (business) world. It contributes to the theory of institutionalising values in discursive contests between action fields. The paper highlights the material and causes of normative conflicts of interest among critical actors in established public-private networks through discourse analysis and process tracing.
