Gendered,Invisible Work in Non‐profit Social Service Organizations: Implications for Worker Health and Safety

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) play an important role in the provision of health and social services. In Canada the nonprofit sector includes 7.5 million volunteers and employs over 1.6 million paid workers. The sector is overwhelmingly female‐dominated — women make up over 80 per cent of workers in these nonprofit services. Work performed by women has traditionally been undervalued and invisible. It has often been considered safe by researchers, employers, policymakers and sometimes even workers themselves. Although there is some indication that jobs in the restructuring social services sector can be characterized by constant demand, high stress and violence, research into the working conditions and health hazards of these types of jobs has not been a priority. Using data from a qualitative study examining work in NPOs, we trace the ways that work performed in these workplaces is both gendered and invisible. We identify three types of invisible labour. ‘Background work’ facilitates and supports more visible and recognized organizational activities. Certain organizational language obscures the full spectrum of work that takes place in the organizations and the risks it may involve. ‘Empathy work’ includes the relationship building, counselling and crisis intervention that comprise key components of social service delivery. ‘Emotional labour’ involves the management of client emotions and workers' own emotions in the process of working with clients and delivering care under conditions of scarcity and contraction. The invisibility of these activities means that much of the day‐to‐day work done in the organizations, while particularly important in the context of social service restructuring, is taken‐for‐granted and undervalued by organizational outsiders. As a result, many of the hazards present in the jobs are hidden from view and workers' health may be compromised. We argue that the invisibility and taken‐for‐grantedness of certain types of work in NPOs is reflected in, and constitutive of, particular exclusions and shortcomings of current occupational health and safety systems designed to protect the health of workers.     

Understanding Men's Health and Illness: A Gender-relations Approach to Policy,Research, and Practice

Abstract

Men's health has emerged as an important public concern that may require new kinds of healthcare interventions and increased resources. Considerable uncertainty and confusion surround prevailing understandings of men's health, particularly those generated by media debate and public policy, and health research has often operated on oversimplified assumptions about men and masculinity. A more useful way of understanding men's health is to adopt a gender-relations approach. This means examining health concerns in the context of men's and women's interactions with each other, and their positions in the larger, multidimensional structure of gender relations. Such an approach raises the issue of differences among men, which is a key issue in recent research on masculinity and an important health issue. The gender-relations approach offers new ways of addressing practical issues of healthcare for men in college environments.     

A study of disabled children and child protection in Scotland — A hidden group?

This paper is based on analysis of data collected for a study, commissioned by the Scottish Government, which examined child protection work with disabled children. At a conceptual level, the paper draws on Goffman's frame analysis and on different models of disability. Focus groups were conducted with five Child Protection Committees (40 individuals) and semi-structured interviews with a further 21 practitioners from social work, education, health services, third sector organisations and the police. The findings show that, for various reasons, abuse of disabled children may go undetected. Where it is suspected, effective action does not always follow, for example, where practitioners over-empathise with parents. When child protection work is undertaken, disabled children may remain relatively invisible in terms of participation and professional focus. It is suggested that the ways in which practitioners and managers “frame” disabled children has implications for how abuse is responded to and how well these children are protected. Participants also “framed” disability in different ways, and it is suggested that a social relational model seems particularly applicable. In conclusion, in many respects disabled children experiencing abuse may remain absent from or to some extent hidden within child protection services in Scotland. While some creative work is taking place, considerable changes are required to make child protection services accessible to all disabled children, sensitive to their needs and respectful of their rights.     

Anticipatory Accounts

C. Wright Mills called for a truly sociological analysis of actors' “motive talk,” which decouples the commonsense link between the reasons actors give for their actions and their mental state prior to those actions. Subsequent theoretical and empirical work has focused almost entirely on actors' retrospective accounting for untoward conduct that has already taken place. The other aspect of Mills's program, the reasons actors give for potentially untoward future conduct and in particular the empirical investigation of the link between the availability of an acceptable vocabulary of motives for anticipated conduct and the eventual enactment of that conduct, has been largely ignored. This article seeks to rehabilitate these lost dimensions using data from a longitudinal study of mothers' infant feeding choices and practices. It examines how mothers account, in advance, for the possibility that they may eventually feed their babies in ways they consider suboptimal. Thirty of the thirty‐six women interviewed indicated that they intended to breastfeed, emphasizing the benefits of this practice to their babies. However, seventeen of these women also anticipated that they might abandon breastfeeding and presented elaborate accounts of the motives that could lead them to do so. The findings support Mills's claim that the availability of an acceptable vocabulary of motives for untoward conduct increases the probability that one will engage in such conduct. Mothers who had offered elaborate anticipatory accounts for abandoning breastfeeding were much more likely to do so than those who did not.     

Power and Child Protection: The Need for a Child Welfare Service Users' Union or Association

Abstract

This paper reports a study in which parents who had received child protection intervention set out to develop a “Service Users' Guide” to help parents newly receiving intervention better understand and cope with the process. The study took place in Ontario, Canada between 2004–2009. Ninety-five parents took part in 13 focus groups and 20 individual interviews. A mix of Participatory Action and grounded theory methods were used to enable parents to develop their service uses guide. As the study progressed it quickly became evident that the biggest issue parents face when receiving intervention is an imbalance in power between themselves and workers. This paper describes the problems this power imbalance causes for parents and presents a potential solution suggested by parents themselves – the development of a child welfare service users' association or union. Parent's ideas about why this association is needed, how it could function, and the benefits it might bring, are discussed. The paper concludes by reviewing the benefits a service users' association might bring not only for those receiving child welfare intervention, but all social work services.     

Premature Return to School following a Psychotic Episode

Abstract

A college mental health service professional often finds that a student who has had an episode of psychiatric illness is eager to return to fulltime status before he or she seems ready for this undertaking. The mental health professional may advise that the student stay out of school for a longer period, but often this advice is rejected.

Approaches to dealing with the problem of return to school following an academic leave prompted by a psychotic episode include the requirement that the student maintain a minimum time out of school and be in treatment during the attempt to return to academic life. The assessment of a student's psychological status at the time of a proposed return often raises the problem of dual agency. Although the college mental health professional is apt to place a high value on maximizing the student's chances of having things work out to his or her liking, the administrator to whom the mental health professional is ultimately responsible is probably inclined to place the needs and well-being of the campus community above those of the student seeking to return.

While the proposed return of a student to academic work following a psychotic episode poses many difficult questions, considerable experience is available to aid in the task of those charged with making this decision. The authors propose two helpful approaches.     

Activist Leadership in the New Israeli Labour Unions — The Histadrut. Bringing about Privatisation,Downsizing, and Goal Transformation: An Israeli Case Study

Abstract

With the rapid and decisive impact electronic communication has had on our lives in general, and the work place in particular, notably e-mail as the preferred communication medium, this literature review paper examines the available evidence of its potential negative effects. Even though the benefits of e-mail communication for individuals and organisations are well noted, it is argued that the particular characteristics of electronic mail and communication may have an adverse impact upon well-being, stress and productivity. E-mail may act as a stress conduit but is also in itself a potential stressor. It may impair productivity too due to its communication characteristics, affecting key operational aspects such a decision making and team cohesion; it may escalate disputes, facilitate harassment and encourage litigation. We present a framework delineating antecedents and potential personal and organisational outcomes and conclude with an outline agenda for further research as a first step in developing strategies to overcome e-mail's potential negative consequences.     

Social Work,Spirituality, and Diasporic Communities

Abstract

The discourse surrounding the role of spirituality in social work practice has been expanding exponentially in recent years. Similarly, the discourse surrounding the role of spirituality among diasporic communities has expanded in recent times as well. In this paper, we will consider the linkages between social work, spirituality, and diaspora. We will focus our discussion on a particular diasporic spiritual community, the Sathya Sai Baba movement and its social service activities. We will then consider the implications of such spiritual movements for the social work profession. Among the key issues explored in this paper are the change in the social construction of populations that have moved between two countries as 'immigrant communities' to 'diasporic communities' and the implications of these changes for social work. Another critical issue we discuss is how working with spiritual movements may help address the 'spiritual deficit' concern that some social work academics have referred to, and indirectly at least, we begin to address 'the social work crisis' issue that has negatively affected the social work profession over the last few years.     

Translating messages from research on child development into social work training and practice

Social work training should equip students with both the knowledge and the skills required for good practice. Although research messages are available through books and papers, they may more easily be conveyed through the repeated use of practice tools which have been developed from research findings. The Looking After Children Assessment and Action Records have been used in formal social work training to help students develop competencies, but their value as a means of conveying a knowledge basis of key issues in child development has yet to be exploited. The Children and Families Assessment Programme has a similar potential, to help practitioners set child protection issues within a developmental framework and further their understanding of those factors that impede children's satisfactory progress. New requirements to provide routine data on children's progress for aggregation and analysis can both improve practitioners' skills and understanding of the purpose of management information, as well as providing evidence of the effectiveness of services.     

The rights of the child enabling community development to contribute to a valid social work practice with children at risk

This paper presents a way of thinking about and doing child protection work using community development (CD) principles to guide practice. It suggests that a useful addition to CD can be found within the rights of the child provisions in Human Rights conventions. Using examples from the authors' three countries to illustrate the work that practitioners do in their work with children at risk, we argue that social work practice can be enhanced by the inclusion of these principles and practices which are essentially core generic social work practice. However, much of social work with the protection of children is bound by ‘risk’ perceptions which result in investigatory approaches being used as a first action, often to the exclusion of preventive approaches. This article demonstrates that in very different situations from different environments, CD in concert with the principles of the rights of the child can assist good outcomes with children at risk. A model is presented for unifying the worldview of human/children's rights with social work's core concern, the protection of children, using generic social work skills.     

Father involvement,child health and maternal health behavior

This paper uses data from the baseline Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study to examine the level and effects of father-involvement on child's birth weight and mother's health behavior during pregnancy (prenatal care, drinking, drug use and smoking). The findings indicate that most fathers, including unwed fathers, are involved with their children at birth and have intentions to remain involved. The effects of father involvement on health and health behavior depend, however, on how the construct is measured. When measured as parent's relationship status (married, cohabiting, romantic or non-romantic), the effects of marriage are beneficial for all but one outcome, the effects of cohabitation are positive for prenatal care only, and the effects of romantic involvement are negative for child's birth weight. When measured as paternity acknowledgement, contributions during pregnancy and intentions to contribute, unmarried father involvement has no effect on child's birth weight, a strong effect on early prenatal care and a variable but overall positive effect on mother's health behaviors. Furthermore, the effects of father involvement do not vary systematically by fathers' earnings potential and psychosocial attributes. While these results support the notion that fathers can influence mothers to maintain or adopt healthy pregnancy behaviors, they do not indicate that father-involvement improves birth outcomes.     

INTIMACY,QUEERNESS, RACE

‘What do we see when we look at ourselves?’ asked South African visual activist/artist Zanele Muholi in her 2006 photographic collection Only Half the Picture. The question, a deeply challenging introspection, required black women in particular to reflect on the ways in which history has made us not look at ourselves, but be looked at. The images Muholi presented were viewed as both troubling and liberating. This article, using a queer framework, is concerned with recoding the ways in which black women's bodies and female sexuality have been represented in post-colonial contexts. Using Zanele Muholi's photography, the article opens possibilities for claiming an erotic position for the black female's ‘queer’ body. This is further complicated by racial dynamics. The article argues that such representations work against painful colonial histories of black female torture while also desexualizing the black female.     

Working together,or keeping apart? A critical discourse analysis of the revised working together guidance (2013)

This article gives an account of a discourse analysis in which a section of revised Government policy, Working Together to Safeguard and Promote the Welfare of Children, was subjected to critical discourse analysis (CDA). Setting out the context in which the policy was published, this article outlines the recent policy context and articulates the chosen method of CDA to undertake a small-scale study in relation to the revised Working Together and discusses the findings of the analysis. It offers an insight into how the issue of child protection is understood, managed and made tolerable, through the policy's discourse. It concludes that the revised documentation, a result of Munro's review of child protection (2011), fails to adequately acknowledge the complexity involved in protecting and safeguarding children.     

Inequality,continuity and change: Andy Furlong's legacy for youth studies

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of Youth Studies, dedicated to Professor Andy Furlong, the Journal's founding Editor. The central questions that drove Andy Furlong's scholarship were the relationship between continuity and change in young people's lives and about the place of youth in the reproduction of inequality across generations. These questions have been central to the wider field of Youth Studies that he helped to build. His work provided a powerful example of how to engage with these questions with a strong sense of social justice but the answers he gave, as with all such answers in sociology, are necessarily provisional. The articles collected in this issue bring empirical research and new concepts that build on this legacy, suggesting new ways to capture the experiences of young people across the multiple spheres of their lives and how disadvantage and inequality are made in the context of processes across time.     

Children as domestic employees: Problems and promises

While children's domestic work is widely seen as acceptable in a child's own home, there has been growing attention to the vulnerability of children employed in domestic service; some people have argued that this work should be banned outside children's homes. This article considers both the potential harm as well as the benefits accruing to children in such environments, and has inquired into the opinions of children who themselves are involved in this kind of situation. This exploration has encountered obstacles: for example, institutions for fostering children and extended-family scenarios frequently blur the boundaries between work within the home and for outside employment. While support for child domestic workers should be a matter of urgency, stopping children from working outside their homes is not necessarily an effective way of protecting them, and, further, this approach removes possible material resources from some disadvantaged children. It is, instead, better to focus on positive ways of improving children's opportunities.     

Working systemically following abuse: exploring safe uncertainty

This paper explores systemic practice and ‘safe uncertainty’ in work with parents who do not accept responsibility following child abuse. The prevailing view has been that little positive work can be carried out with families where responsibility is denied. Our work is offered to add to the small yet growing number of publications which challenge the dominant discourse relating to child protection work. A case study is illustrated within which the issue of assessment versus therapy emerges. The Legal Department of the Local Authority Social Services requested an assessment from child and family psychiatry. Concern developed regarding the point at which assessment ended and therapy began. The authors offer a systemic model in exploring the importance of a safe multi‐disciplinary framework within which uncertainty can be tolerated and therapy/change work can be affected. A framework within which parents can be supported in developing skills to meet the needs of children is presented. These issues are central to the professional and legal systems relating to child protection in the UK. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Women,work and family’: Educated women's employment decisions and social policies in Egypt

Despite increased access to education, women's conspicuous absence from the labour market in Egypt, and the Arab world in general, has been a key issue. Building on the stock of evidence on women's employment, this study provides a qualitative analysis of the torrent of challenges that educated married and unmarried women face as they venture into the labour market in Egypt. Single women highlight constrained opportunities due to job scarcity and compromised job quality. Issues of low pay, long hours, informality and workplace suitability to gender propriety norms come to the fore in the interview data. Among married working women, the conditions of the work domain are compounded by challenges of time deprivation and weak family and social support. The article highlights women's calculated and aptly negotiated decisions to work or opt out of the labour market in the face of such challenges. The analysis takes issue with the culturalist view that reduces women's employment decisions to ideology. It brings to the context of Arab countries three global arguments pertaining to the inseparability of work and family for women; the role of social policies and labour market conditions in defining women's employment decisions; and the potential disconnect between employment and empowerment. By looking at women as jobseekers and workers, the analysis particularly highlights the intersectionality of different forms of inequality in defining employment opportunities.     

Gender,Spousal Caregiving,and Depression: Does Paid Work Matter?

Studies have shown that spousal caregiving leads to psychological distress, but few have analyzed the moderating effect of paid work. Using the 2000 to 2012 Health and Retirement Study and two‐stage least squares regression models, this study found that caregiving increased women's and men's depressive symptoms. Ordinary least squares models showed that caregiving had more adverse effects on women's mental health than on men's, but these differences were eliminated in two‐stage least squares models that accounted for the bidirectional effects of depression and caregiving. The current study also found that for women, part‐time work attenuated the depressive effect of spousal caregiving, whereas for men, part‐time work exacerbated it. These gender differences persisted even for intensive spousal caregivers. The authors suggest that caregiving women who work part‐time may benefit from work‐related resources. Caregiving men who work part‐time, however, may feel distressed, as their work–family experiences conflict with traditional gender norms.     

Out of the wilderness and into the fold: the school nurse and child protection

This paper argues that there has been a major change since the mid‐1980s in the extent to which other workers involved in child protection recognize the value of the contribution of school nurses. Evidence for this is drawn from a longitudinal study in an English shire county using a vignette approach to explore workers' perceptions of the handling of child protection issues. While in part the greater recognition of the role of the school nurse can be attributed to the adoption of child protection procedures, this provides only a partial explanation. School nurses in the 1990s were better qualified and more experienced, while other workers such as school heads and social workers recognized the need to work with others, such as the school nurse, in order to meet their own objectives. The paper concludes that there is a case for more formal recognition of school nurses in child protection because, like health visitors, with whom they have a follow‐on colleague relationship, they are often the most significant health workers for children who may be neglected or abused. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.