Claire Wallace

This conference will be the second of two major CINEFOGO arrangements in the first half of 2009, winding-up central issues addressed by the Network. The first of these conferen-ces will address Social Rights, Active Citizenship and Governance in the European Union.

Objectives

To organise a conference on the quality of life taking into account a range of themes in CINEFOGO: The quality of life is a research topic within social and political research on the one hand but it is also an instrument of European social policy, an alternative to economistic ways of measuring policy outcomes and goals. It utilises a range of subjective and objective measures of social cohesion more generally. Social quality is a more multifarious policy-oriented way of approaching the quality of life. There are a number of themes implied within the quality of life and these include:

• Social capital
• Social cohesion
• Participation and empowerment
• Work and the economic environment
• Social exclusion

These themes have important implications for governance and citizenship since they are an outcome and a goal of new governance approaches. They raise many questions about the cultural and social variations across Europe, including whether different elements are of equal importance in different locations and how they can best be understood or measured. Does quality of life mean the same thing everywhere, or does it have different meanings? How meaningful is it to adopt this as a general policy goal?

The theme of the conference is sufficiently broad to include many different CINEFOGO presentations.

Description of work

The conference would bring together a range of themes within CINEFOGO to look at the Social Quality in comparative perspective. This resonates with policy priorities in the European Union and in some member states (including countries as diverse as the UK and Romania).

The quality of life perspective puts together a range of subjective and objectives perspectives to get an overall picture of the quality of life in a given society. It is based upon an established body of knowledge, but the aim of this conferences is to pull these different aspects of the quality of life together and bring new theoretical impetus to make it into a significant policy tool as well as a sociological political and economic instrument.

Conference budget to be elaborated separately. The person-months are intended to enable the preparation of the conference, the execution of the conference and the follow up publication.

Participating Institutions

Organization of the conference (WP 45) is lead by University of Aberdeen, School of Social Science, Aberdeen (UK) [UNIABDN-47]. – A series of other CINE-FOGO partner institutions will contribute to the preparation of the conference. (CINEFOGO partner institution identification is indicated in [ ] ).

• Institut für interdisziplinäre Nonprofit Forschung an der Wirtschaftuniversität, Wien (Austria), [NPO-FI-55]
• Roskilde University, Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde (Denmark), [RUC-1]
• New Europe Centre for Regional Studies, Plovdiv (Bulgaria), [NEC-7]
• Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Center for Social and Economic Strategies, Prague (Czech Republic), [CESES-CUNI-10]
• University of Jyväskylä, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Jyväskylä (Finland), [JYU-15]
• University of Tampere, Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, Tampere, [UTA-16]
• Justus Liebig University, Institute for Political Sciences, Giessen (Germany), [Uni-Giessen-19]
• Institute for the Development of Non Profit Organisations, Trento (Italy), [ISSAN-22]
• Vytautas Magnus University (VMU), Department of Sociology, Kaunas (Lithuania), [VDU-26]
• Socio-Political Analysts / Analistas Socio-Politicos, Madrid (Spain), [ASP-36]
• University of Gothenburg, School of Public Administration (SPAGU) & Centre for Public Sector Research, Gothenburg (Sweden), [UGOT-40]
  
• Örebro University (Örebro (Sweden), [Örebro-50] - from 2007

The conference will take place in June 2009.

Read More: http://www.cinefogo.org/workpackages/wp45