In Japan, measures are underway to realise “Community Symbiotic Society” or “Dynamic Engagement of All Citizens Society”. Since 2000, local governments have taken the initiative in promoting life support measures. As a result, the personal support service called “Accompanied Support” and the comprehensive consultation service for local life support are being established.

This paper focuses on the role of these services in connecting counsellors to consultation desks and support providers. In addition to the problems of social isolation and hikikomori, there is a problem of the increasing number of people who may have lost strong ties with their families due to being a single and to living in a single-person household. Welfare commissioners, whose activities are centred on face-to-face outreach, have been forced to suspend their activities due to the COVID-19 outbreak and required to urgently review their activities. Based on the results of interviews with welfare commissioners, it suggests that regional differences in the attempts to utilize local resources and the regional characteristics including resources originally available are related to the success of social inclusion. It became clear that the core of the activity was face-to-face outreach, and concrete suggestions were obtained for the fact-finding of previous research.

This paper reports the results of interviews with eight service providers of “support for continuous employment” （type B） for persons with disabilities which were conducted to explore the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on their services. Support for continuous employment performs multiple manifest and latent functions including disability welfare, production activities and provision of a place to stay in the daytime for the users. First, production activities, especially those which were closely connected with people’s transfer, gathering, contact etc., were considerably affected by the “anti-interactionist feature” of the COVID-19, and such businesses abounded in the service type. Second, as a welfare service, the service providers were largely unaffected owing to the “remote support” provision, although they had difficulty introducing remote work. Third, harmful effects of stay-at-home on users were concerned, and the quick resumption of users’ commuting after a short period of time indicated the need of the users or users’ families for a place to stay outside the home. The last point indicates a situation where social isolation caused by stay-at-home was mitigated in the presence of the function of employment support, while also implying the significance of securing the “Second Place” apart from the place of residence at night.

It has been said that the policy of “Keeping physical distance” to prevent the spread of COVID-19 may lead people to “social isolation”. In this study, we assessed the degree of social isolation among older adults in Japan and analyzed what the factors related to it by using survey data of general people via internet, conducted by the Cabinet Office in May 2020. The results revealed the increase in ratio of older adults with a reduced chance to talk with others to that of ratio of older adults less satisfied with social relationship and the possible existence of a two-layer structure of social isolation among them. Thus those less satisfied with social relationships live （at least superficially） without caring about their deeper social isolation by themselves or being by themselves use video calls instead. Based on the previous studies indicating the negative effect of social isolation, a policy against social isolation of older adults should be considered, based upon diversity among them as we have indicated.

This paper refers to the overall elucidation issues, pre-existing research, analytic framework, data/methods, and some points of discussion as the introduction of the entire small edition. The tentative answers to the major questions of this edition are as follows. ⑴ Clients of Toyonaka City are having difficulty achieving well-being owning to any reason, at least from an objective viewpoint, need to reorganize their awareness of the self and society, the values they should have, and the way they live their lives. ⑵ When the services provided by Toyonaka City are perceived as “appropriate, equitable and respectful encounters” ［Lipsky, 2010, 193］, even if the problem is not necessarily resolved, ⒜ the client may experience “modest well-being.” This finding means that it proves the importance of “accompanied support” ［Okuda and Harada eds., 2021］ from the client side. ⒝ The services may be an experience for clients to obtain “institutional weak ties,” which is important because it means possessing “public （administrative） assets” ［Miyamoto, 2021］.

This paper analyzes the characteristics of clients, their support needs, and their evaluation of support services, using data from a questionnaire survey and an interview survey targeting clients of the Toyonaka City Self-Reliance Support for Needy Persons. The analysis revealed the following two points. First, the clients had diverse backgrounds and were impoverished during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they relied on “government and local counseling agencies and support staff” instead of family and friends. Second, the clients with complex problems perceived the experience of acquiring a “dependable person” other than family and friends （“institutional weak ties”） as a “safety net”. Additionally, this experience encouraged the clients to keep moving forward, even if their problems were not resolved. This result indicates that “accompanied support” is practiced at the counter of the Toyonaka City Self-Reliance Support for Needy Persons, and that this leads to clients’ high evaluation of support services.

The study aims to clarify how the sense of trust in the city’s services is fostered by analyzing interviews with clients of Toyonaka City. Robert K. Merton refers to “depersonalization of relationships” as characteristics of bureaucratic organizations, however, such voices were not often heard in the interviews, indicating a high level of trust in the city’s services. In the interviews, we are able to catch a glimpse of closely-accompanied support whose relationships are personalized. However, simultaneously, some interviewees questioned the institutional systems and policies themselves. What is the meaning of this seemingly conflicting notions between “trust in staff they meet and distrust in the systems and policies” ? I analyze the achievement of closely-accompanied support to the clients at the micro level, and also discuss its limitations at the macro level―the ambivalence of “street-level bureaucracy” （Michael Lipsky）. This is the pitfall of institutional assessment and policy evaluation in the postmodern society.

This paper focuses on the measures which German social state has taken under the crises with the concern about mass unemployment ; namely the world economic crisis in 2008/09 and Covid-19 crisis. In the past West Germany responded to recession through labor force reduction by means of early retirement. However, this framework was not sustainable due to pension finance and activation paradigm which pursues longer working life. The alternative way for the following crises was mainly ‘short-time work allowance,’ which has been designed to maintain employment and to lighten the burden of employers, whereby they temporally reduce working time of their employees （up to 100％） instead of laying them off. The Federal Employment Agency compensates partially for the missing net wage with social insurance or with federal budget. The scheme was adopted extensively by the German federal government under the world economic crisis in 2008/09 and enabled them to be held in high repute of ‘employment miracle.’ This has encouraged them to mitigate conditions for the allowance further during Covid-19. The measures for the non-insured persons such as low-wage workers, non-employed or self-employed were to be considered however are currently already realised. Promotion of vocational training during short-time work should be still facilitated.

This study analyzed career paths of general clerical executives who had served for designated city A at director-general level or relevant level from the perspective of specific job contents and gender comparison.

Though the examination of the female director-general level executives in the last 50 years regardless of job types, it was confirmed that there was no female director-general level executive whose job type was “general clerical “ in designated city A.

Thereafter, by conducting the interview survey for the 11 executives through semi-structured interviews, it was analyzed that the female executives were assigned to job descriptions that made it difficult for them to acquire enough “Decision making skills” in the first half of their careers, while male executives were assigned to appropriate positions in their career paths. It was confirmed that there was a clear gap between male and female executives at the initial stage of their careers.

In addition, it was also recognized that when the female executives suddenly got transferred to the posts that required them to make decisions of the local government 20 to 25 years after they started their careers at the city government, they managed to use human network mainly to compensate for their lack of experience.

This paper analyzes the changes in the relationship between the government and disability organizations over the recent LSS reform in Sweden, with the aim of making suggestions about the nature of the state-civil society relationship under neoliberalism. Swedish LSS, which was designed to be thoroughly client-centered, was once the result of collaboration and dialogue between the government and disability organizations. However, the 2018 LSS Investigation Report showed blatant austerity measures, plunging relations between the two sides into an unprecedented crisis. There have been signs of compromise since 2020. As a lesson to be learned from the relationship between them, this paper pointed to the power of resilience that can overcome conflicts and restore collaborative relationships even under neoliberalism. In addition, We emphasized the importance of creating a mechanism for constant and public dialogue between the government and disability organizations, which is also the source of such power.

In this paper, I have addressed the issues surrounding single mothers’ participation in public pensions, keeping in mind the current state of poverty among single elderly women in Japan. To this end, I analyzed changes in pension enrollment before and after becoming a single mother from the results of a living survey （questionnaire survey, interview survey） targeting single mothers. From the analysis, low pensions in old age are predicted, and as a factor, the movement of pension enrollment is forced at the same time as divorce and bereavement, resulting in fragmented and unstable enrollment. They also seemed to prioritize their current parenting life over their future pension. Furthermore, it became clear that there was their low awareness of pension participation. Finally, regarding the evaluation of the so-called Category3 insured persons, I pointed out that the advantages of full-time housewives before divorce turned into disadvantages after divorce, resulting in difficulty in stable pension enrollment.