From Policy to Practice: The Implementation and Negotiation of Technologies in Everyday Child Welfare

A central element of the Every Child Matters reforms in England are measures which aim at improving information sharing. Amongst these are the children’s database and the Common Assessment Framework, both representing technological solutions to long‐standing concerns about information sharing in child welfare. This article reports some findings from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)‐funded study which examined their introduction and use in everyday professional practice. Substantial differences in policy implementation, access to and use of the technologies, draw attention to the importance of the localised and situated contexts into which these technologies are being introduced, raising serious questions about their future development as national standard systems.     

Shifting Worlds of Strangers: Medium Theory and Changes in “Them” Versus “Us”*

Macrolevel analyses of the influence of different communication technologies are more difficult to test and apply than the results of focused studies of particular media messages. Nevertheless, “medium theory” is of potentially great significance because it outlines how media, rather than functioning simply as channels for conveying information between two or more social environments, are themselves social contexts that foster certain forms of interaction and social identities. This article uses a medium-theory perspective to address one variable related to “technological communities”—the changing boundaries between “them” and “us.” The ways in which oral, print, and electronic modes of communication each foster a different balance between strangers and “familiars” are outlined.     

HAVE YOU BEEN IDENTIFIED? Hidden boundary work in emergency services classifications

Information technologies, such as the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, have fundamentally changed workplace protocols. This paper examines the impacts that the standardized processes associated with the CAD system have on the labour of 9-1-1/police call-takers. Through an analysis of the labour of 9-1-1/police call-takers and their processes for classifying emergency call(er)s, we are able to uncover the negotiated labour between human and machine. It is argued throughout the paper that the standardized processes of the CAD system do not remove the social from call-taking but instead emphasize the use of the social as a resource for classifying call(er)s. The present analysis illustrates how emergency classification is not a standardized process but instead an actively constructed virtual image performed in real space and time by call-takers. It is the call-takers' tacit knowledge and ability to work across the virtual, abstract and material worlds that makes them essential players in emergency response.     

Crime, policing and social order: on the expressive nature of public confidence in policing

Public confidence in policing is receiving increasing attention from UK social scientists and policy-makers. The criminal justice system relies on legitimacy and consent to an extent unlike other public services: public support is vital if the police and other criminal justice agencies are to function both effectively and in accordance with democratic norms. Yet we know little about the forms of social perception that stand prior to public confidence and police legitimacy. Drawing on data from the 2003/2004 British Crime Survey and the 2006/2007 London Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhoods Survey, this paper suggests that people think about their local police in ways less to do with the risk of victimization (instrumental concerns about personal safety) and more to do with judgments of social cohesion and moral consensus (expressive concerns about neighbourhood stability, cohesion and loss of collective authority). Across England and Wales the police may not primarily be seen as providers of a narrow sense of personal security, held responsible for crime and safety. Instead the police may stand as symbolic 'moral guardians' of social stability and order, held responsible for community values and informal social controls. We also present evidence that public confidence in the London Metropolitan Police Service expresses broader social anxieties about long-term social change. We finish our paper with some thoughts on a sociological analysis of the cultural place of policing: confidence (and perhaps ultimately the legitimacy of the police) might just be wrapped up in broader public concerns about social order and moral consensus.     

Social Work Students' Pre-placement Anxiety: An International Comparison

This paper compares the degree and nature of anxiety experienced by American and Israeli social work students as they anticipate beginning field placement. Despite having greater prior exposure to social work through relevant coursework and experience, American students were significantly more anxious than Israeli ones. Overall, Americans reported a slightly higher sense of preparedness, but this difference was not statistically significant. While there were some shared worries, notably regarding the quantity and quality of field instruction, and their capacity to meet both field and academic obligations, specific concerns regarding field agencies, clients, and social work education differed between the groups, likely reflecting the distinct social, cultural, historical and educational contexts. Implications for social work education and future research are discussed.     

Kooperative Resilienz – ein soziotechnischer Ansatz durch Kooperationstechnologien im KrisenmanagementCooperative resilience – a sociotechnical approach through cooperation technologies in crisis management

Whilst the concept of resilience in engineering is mainly focussed on the availability of technical systems, we rather see resilience as socio-technical construct and show opportunities to encourage cooperative resilience with the help of cooperation technologies. After a general definition of resilience in our application field of emergency management and in the context of cooperative structures, we present our methodology and the developed cooperation technologies. They address the collaboration of diverse players (such as police, fire department, and citizen) in major emergencies. Finally we discuss the input of this technology for cooperative resilience to overcome crises of cooperation with the help of adaptability to modified realities by means of cooperation technology.     

Ethics and defense agency funding: some considerations

The author, an anthropologist working in a military defense science and technology funding agency, offers four guidelines for social scientists for evaluating the ethical problems in defense funding opportunities. These guidelines address what social scientists need to know in order to evaluate the ethical risks involved in accepting defense funding: (1) the need to understand the code of ethics of social science organizations and their limits in dealing with ethical problems of new technologies; (2) the need to understand the implications of working in “classified” contexts; (3) the need to understand the funding program's goals and objectives; (4) the need to develop an ethical imagination about technological advances and research and develop an appropriately supportive environment for promoting ethical behavior in the scientific community.     

Context and Surrogate Parenting Among Contemporary Grandparents

This paper provides a conceptual discussion of the relationship between the surrogate parenting role of contemporary American grandparents and temporal, developmental, and ethnic/ra- cial contexts of the life course. Grandparents who are surrogate par- ents, either operate as co-parents by assisting their adult children in the rearing of their offspring, or they assume total responsibility for providing the necessary care and socialization their grandchildren re- quire when their parents cannot. The surrogate parenting responsibili- ties of grandparents are hypothesized to be affected by: (1) temporal context, which concerns the sequencing and synchronization of the assumption of surrogate parenting responsibilities by grandparents relative to their age, peer relationships, and other social role responsibilities; (2) developmental context, which focuses on how grand- parents personal development is hindered or facilitated by the as- sumption of the surrogate parenting role; and (3) ethnic/racial context, which refers to the cultural influences grandparents bring to the surrogate parenting role. The implications of these contexts for the surrogate parenting role of grandparents relative to research, policy, programs, and education are discussed.     

Key misconceptions when assessing digital technology for municipal youth social work

ABSTRACT

Municipal youth protection work has become infused with digital technology, and yet there is still limited research on how to assess the impact of digital technology on municipal youth social work. This article reviews a range of misconceptions regarding the assessment of digital technology for youth social work in municipal contexts. This review was generated in connection with the development of an app system for communication between young clients and their municipal social workers in Denmark. The misconceptions relate to: variations in technologies and contexts; the impact of digital technologies on the relationship; social justice; differentiating between the user and the digital technology; digitalization and standardization; stakeholder and functional models of municipal social work. The paper concludes that the relationship between municipal social work and digital technology is complex and that thus complex comprehensions of municipal social work practice are needed if the relationship between technologies and practice is to be grasped adequately. The paper argues that given the complexity of the field and the speed of technological and legal changes, external support with regard to assessing how to use, develop and incorporate digital technology needs to be made available to municipalities and social workers.     

A 'Technological Idiot'? Raymond Williams and Communications Technology

Raymond Williams was a prolific cultural commentator and historian and his writing on communications technology provides a particularly relevant framework for understanding contemporary information-society innovations. Williams sought to distinguish questions of technique and technical invention from their realization in the fundamentally social organization of technologies themselves and emphasized the importance of agency and intention in structuring the uses to which technologies are put. Far from technology having an inescapable internal logic of development, innovation takes place within specific social and economic contexts. For Williams, this meant that there was no pre-determined outcome to the evolution of communications innovations but a series of complex interactions between innovations and the world into which they emerge. This article will provide an assessment of Williams' work on technological innovation, his critique of determinism and his commitment to democratic communications. Williams helps us to challenge the simplistic proposition that 'the Internet has changed our world' and enables us to understand instead the ways in which contemporary social relations set limits on the development of the Internet as a democratic medium.     

Corruptus interruptus: the limits of transactional imaginaries in Moi’s Kenya

This article attempts to unsettle treatments of sovereignty that assume an intrinsic relationship between violence and the law even while critiquing the capacity of the law to ground social order through violence. In such discussions, the police become the embodiment of the force of law without content, especially in totalitarian contexts. In contrast, this article explores other conceptions of the police and by extension, sovereignty, at work in Kenya through an examination of police/citizen interactions at a marked political moment – the end of the 24-year rule of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi in 2002. Through a particular example of the complicated conviviality that pervades state/society relations in many patrimonial political contexts – in this case between a policeman, a bus driver, and the bus diver’s wife – I attempt to reframe normative conceptions about the police and of enforcement in the context of Kenya’s failing patrimonial economy of circulation and capture in the early 2000s.     

Implementation of a Mental Health Task Force in a collegiate-based emergency medical services organization

Abstract

Objective: A Mental Health Task Force (MHTF) was implemented in 2016 by a collegiate-based emergency medical services (CBEMS) organization to (1) improve mental health emergency response and to (2) address concerns for the mental health of CBEMS providers. Participants: Skidmore College EMS is a Basic Life Support First Response service staffed by volunteer undergraduate students. Methods: In coordination with faculty and staff, students in the MHTF developed trainings, peer support structures, community events, policies, and informational resources. Results: Sixteen students joined the MHTF within 1 year. Over 35 Skidmore College EMS members received training on mental health emergency response, peer-support, and self-care. Debriefing programs, mindfulness-based events, shift-length limitations, and access to informational resources promoted the mental health of Skidmore College EMS members. Conclusions: Implementing an MHTF is an innovative, student-led approach to coupling education on emergency response with programming that supports the mental health of CBEMS providers.     

Awakenings: Autobiography,Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery

Taking a formal, sociocognitive approach to narrative analysis, I explore autobiographical stories about discovering “truth” in political, psychological, religious, and sexual realms of social life. Despite (1) significant differences in subject matter and (2) conflicting or oppositional notions of truth, individuals in different social environments tell stories that follow the same awakening formula. Analyzing accounts from a wide variety of social and historical contexts, I show how individuals and communities use these autobiographical stories to define salient moral and political concerns and weigh in on cultural and epistemic disputes. Awakening narratives are important mechanisms of mnemonic and autobiographical revision that individuals use to redefine their past experiences and relationships and plot future courses of action while explaining major transformations of worldview. Awakeners use two ideal‐typical vocabularies of liminality to justify traversing the social divide between contentious autobiographical communities. Further, awakeners divide their lives into discrete autobiographical periods and convey a figurative interaction between the split personas of a temporally divided self. Individuals use this autobiographical formula to reject the cognitive and mnemonic norms of one community and embrace those of another. Advancing a “social geometry” of awakening narratives, I illuminate the social logic behind our seemingly personal discoveries of “truth.”     

Policing Disaster: An Analytical Review of the Literature on Policing,Disaster, and Post‐traumatic Stress Disorder

A large body of research findings suggests that law‐enforcement officers are confronted with erratic, periodic, and unpredictable high‐stress experiences in the line of duty. There is also an increasing amount of research on police as first responders to disasters and their mental health. Recent high‐stress events, like the social disorder generated by Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and the violence at Newtown, created a unique matrix for stressors on police officers who may not have had much training to deal with the associated disorder or much social support to draw upon when confronting the residual emotional and mental traumas that they experienced as a result. In this context, we conduct an analytical review of the literature on police stress in instances in which officers have responded to disasters. Moreover we discuss the extant research related to rates of post‐traumatic stress disorder, the effects of PTSD and related diagnoses on the personal and professional lives of officers, and the sources of social support available to them in the aftermath of trauma‐inducing events. We conclude with a summary of current research and a critique of what is missing in the literature including attention to subclinical PTSD, proper training, the lack of attention to institutional screening for PTSD vulnerability, and the dearth of evaluation research on “what works” in disaster preparedness for police officers.     

Institutional Bases of Identity Construction and Reproduction: The Case of Underground Coal Mining

In this article I use institutional theory to illustrate the process of identity formation and reproduction in the context of a male‐dominated work environment. Based on a case study of an underground colliery in Nova Scotia, Canada, I will illustrate the functioning of powerful institutions in two distinct senses. First, social obligations rooted in a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1989) dictated appropriate behaviours for miners in their roles as underground miners and patriarchs. Second, internalized understandings of reality rooted in a ‘logic of orthodoxy’ (Scott, 1995) formed a set of constitutive rules to which miners adhered because it was inconceivable to do otherwise. I use a microinstitutional perspective (Zucker, 1991) that highlights the constraints embedded in many work contexts that serve to tacitly yet powerfully regularize behaviours in problematic ways. Social and historical conditions are therefore incorporated into this analysis as constitutive forces that are a product of human action. This manner of theorizing gender is consistent with Connell’s (1987) ‘theory of practice’ that seeks to understand social structure by focusing on what people actually do, the way human agency shapes history, and how practice itself is necessary for institutions to maintain their hegemony and resist change.     

Policing “the Risky”: Technology and Surveillance in Everyday Patrol Work

While numerous surveillance and policing scholars argue that the rise of the surveillance society has normalized technological surveillance by police, the lack of empirical research makes it difficult to discern the true impact of risk management, security, and surveillance on police work. The present study uses in‐depth interviews and participant observation with two Canadian police agencies to explore the impact that police technologies have on police‐public interaction. From this analysis, we argue that the organizational shift toward risk‐oriented, intelligence‐led policing is not carried out on the ground. Instead, patrol officers often utilize technologies to legitimize the policing of the “usual suspects.”     

Return Migration Intentions Driven by Parental Concerns and the Value of Children

Using an integrated qualitative approach and semi-structured interviews with 32 second-generation Turkish parents in Germany, this study examines the parental concerns formed by assessing the value of children, which, in turn, influence return migration intentions. This study proposes that parents develop three main concerns in an attempt to maximize the value of their children: (1) socioeconomic, (2) assimilation, and (3) marriage concerns. Return migration intention itself turns into a parental investment by designating the home country as the final destination where these concerns can be resolved, and thus their children may reach their full potential for themselves and their families. This study suggests that in the context of migrant families, the value of children can be a potential predictor of return migration since it is subject to changes during the life course in response to the cultural, social, and economic contexts of the host and home countries.     

The Social Construction of Local School Violence Threats by the News Media and Professional Organizations

The research presented here examines the social construction of local school violence threats in the context of national claims-making about school violence, particularly school shootings. In light of the news media glare surrounding other school shootings, school and police officials in Burlington, Wisconsin assessed the threat posed by five high-school youth who allegedly plotted to carry out a school attack in November 1998. Social constructionist scholarship has shown that claims made about a problem and the way it is framed in the news media and other informational contexts shape an audience's perception of a social problem's seriousness, prevalence, setting, and causes. But as William Gamson and others have pointed out, "readers" are not passive recipients of media messages; rather, they actively interact with those messages to construct meaning. This research project involved two components: (1) content analysis of the print media (in two periods 1992–1993 and 1997–1998) and law enforcement and school administrator publications and conference materials; and (2) in-depth, semistructured interviews with 13 respondents, including the 11 Burlington school and police officials who assessed and acted on this case. In this paper, I examine how the (Racine) Journal Times and professional organizations constructed (and reconstructed) school violence and how local decision-makers interpreted their own school violence threat in the context of the news media's and professional organizations' constructions.     

Social Aspects of Genetic Testing Technologies

Since the early days of the Human Genome Project, there has been increasing social scientific research that promises to elucidate the social implications, aspects or dimensions of research on human, animal and plant genetics. This paper discusses the literature on the social aspects of different types of genetic testing technologies and their applications in the contexts of clinical medicine, biomedical research, personal and family genealogy, and criminal justice. Although there are many differences in the practices, purposes and organization of these technologies across such contexts, this paper shows that social scientists’ understandings of their social aspects centers on individual and collective experiences of how genetic testing technologies operate in practice.     

Ontological Insecurity,Racial Tension,and Confidence in the Police in the Shadow of Urban Unrest

According to the theory of “ontological insecurity,” people who worry that society is in a state of decline or upheaval will also support punitive social control of deviants. I test the relationship between several measures of people's anxiety about the state of society, their perception of racial tension, and their confidence in the police (as enforcers of social control) during the period of social unrest following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I use ordinary least squares regression to analyze data from a nationally representative public opinion poll gathered for the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press during August, 2014. I find that pessimism about the state of the economy, pessimism about race relations, and the experience of personal hardship are related to decreased confidence in the police, while pessimism about the state of morals in society is related to increased confidence. I conclude that public confidence in the police is intertwined with public confidence in the stability of the country, more generally. This study supports a “neo‐Durkheimian” model of policing. The opposite findings of economic versus moral insecurity also call for refinement of the ontological insecurity theory.