Reducing turnover is not enough: The need for proficient organizational cultures to support positive youth outcomes in child welfare

Objective

High caseworker turnover has been identified as a factor in the poor outcomes of child welfare services. However, almost no empirical research has examined the relationship between caseworker turnover and youth outcomes in child welfare systems and there is an important knowledge gap regarding whether, and how, caseworker turnover relates to outcomes for youth. We hypothesized that the effects of caseworker turnover are moderated by organizational culture such that reduced caseworker turnover is only associated with improved youth outcomes in organizations with proficient cultures.

Methods

The study applied hierarchical linear models (HLM) analysis to the second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being (NSCAW II) with a U.S. nationwide sample of 2346 youth aged 1.5- to 18-years-old and 1544 caseworkers in 73 child welfare agencies. Proficient organizational culture was measured by caseworkers' responses to the Organizational Social Context (OSC) measure; staff turnover was reported by the agencies' directors; and youth outcomes were measured as total problems in psychosocial functioning with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) completed by the youths' caregivers at intake and at 18-month follow-up.

Results

The association between caseworker turnover and youth outcomes was moderated by organizational culture. Youth outcomes were improved with lower staff turnover in proficient organizational cultures and the best outcomes occurred in organizations with low turnover and high proficiency.

Conclusions

To be successful, efforts to improve child welfare services by lowering staff turnover must also create proficient cultures that expect caseworkers to be competent and responsive to the needs of the youth and families they serve.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

Exploring Definitions of Financial Abuse in Elderly Korean Immigrants: The Contribution of Traditional Cultural Values

The purpose of this study is to explore the cultural definitions of financial abuse from the perspective of 124 elderly Korean immigrants and to examine the role of traditional cultural values in their definitions by using a mixed methods approach. The qualitative analysis generated four themes relevant to definition of financial abuse. A binary logistic regression indicated that those with stronger cultural adherence to traditional values had higher odds of providing culture-based definitions of financial abuse. Education is needed for health professionals, social service providers, and adult protective workers to increase their understanding of culture-specific experiences of financial abuse among ethnic minority elders.     

Everyday tragedy and creation: Translated from the French by Karen Isabel Ocaña

In this essay, Michel Maffesoli exalts the poetry of the everyday, and a way of being that, paradoxically, opens one up to life through rituals that smack of a quest for divine nothingness. ‘Everyday Tragedy and Creation’ traces a series of connections: between Benjamin’s particular form of empirical mysticism and the notion of messianic time, the vitalism of Nietzsche (and tangentially his rediscovery of the Greek notion of tragedy and destiny), that of Bergson with his concept of duration, as well as the sociological hermeneutics of Dilthey. In the course of his discussion, Maffesoli invokes Verlaine, Rimbaud, street theatre and Eliot, and proposes a Zen-like approach to everyday happiness. More generally, Maffesoli rejects the temporality of modernism and drama and celebrates instead the ‘non-time’ of the tragedy of living in the present within a medium of communal images and practices.     

Collective Self-Esteem and Coping Strategies among Vietnamese American Adolescents

This article reports on the “social empathy attitudes” results that were part of a larger study on empathy in college students at a large research university in the Southwest. Two hundred ninety-four students completed the Social Empathy Assessment Index (SEAI). The research hypothesis was that students of color would have higher levels of social empathy attitudes than Caucasian students. The statistically significant SEAI items suggested that Latino students identify as more collectivist and more optimistic and have higher levels of social empathy attitudes. Latinos may be more willing to help a stranger than either Caucasians or members of other racial groups.     

East‐End Warehouse: a case study of ‘organisational capture’ and cultural conflicts

This case study is about a warehouse in London’s Dockland with predominantly local staff. It stored and distributed food and drink for contractors. Its market was expanding; the site well positioned. Nonetheless, since takeover by a large shipping company, contracts went unrenewed, ‘stock shrinkage’ mounted, losses increased. The author, part of a small team of consultants, was hired ‘to study and advise’. Customer intrusions are normal in service organisations. But here conflicting and group‐based short‐term interests inhibited staff co‐ordination: serial crises involved ad hoc responses. Fieldwork entailed charting work flows, administering an attitude survey, conducting a census and assessing both the workforce’s collective East‐End culture and top management’s culture: their values conflicted. In Dockland, kinship and neighbourly obligations were strong. Obtaining and distributing pilfered goods reflected this; they celebrated group enterprise, collective support and autonomy – values evident in the warehouse that we made integral to proposals for reorganisation. This paper thus addresses intrusions: from customers – evident in disruptive work flows; two externally derived and opposed cultures and the culture of consultants.     

The Politics and Poetics of Spaces and Places: Mapping the Multiple Geographies of Identity in a Cultural Posthuman Era

As transcendent technologies, information communication technologies (ICTs) exist beyond the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as race, gender, and class, as well as operating outside traditional binary oppositions such as good/bad, love/hate, and rational/irrational. While a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains a necessary prerequisite of interaction with virtual systems, a vast collection of technological applications now exhibit some degree of agency as they interact with humans and their environment. This development has enormous consequences for human life, human flourishing, and social organisation, raising significant ethical concerns relevant to public and policy debates. It is, therefore, pertinent to explore key epistemological questions relating to the radical and accelerated remapping of the limits of what it now means to be human. While this article does not purport to offer a pragmatic solution, it constitutes an interdisciplinary conceptual platform from which to consider the nature of the evolving human-nonhuman-machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity, civilisation, and other forms of social organisation in the modern hypermediated world. It is suggested that, by reflecting on the various representations of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology from the perspective of the arts and humanities, it may be possible to isolate those important questions which relate to subjectivity, ethics, community, and social transformation in order to prepare the groundwork for a comprehensive and critical theory of technology.     

Authenticity as a form of worth

Scholarly engagement with authenticity has been revitalized by recent efforts to theorize the value-ladenness of authenticity claims. Yet, these approaches are restricted by the lack of available conceptual tools necessary to explain variations in the meaning of authenticity between different cultural forms and social groups. In this paper, I draw from Boltanski and Thevenot’s pragmatic hermeneutics to develop an approach to authenticity in popular culture that conceptualizes it as a form of worth. I apply this new model to an analysis of the meanings of authenticity found in the discourse of fans of indie music and country music. I find that in the indie genre, authenticity involves an inspirational form of worth; in the country genre, it involves a domestic form of worth. I trace these differences back to the matched relationship between the primary groups of fans of each genre and the genres themselves that led both sides to find an interest in these types of authenticity. I conclude by sketching the relevance of this approach for explaining overarching concerns for authenticity in late modern societies.     

学校教育中传承民族文化存在的问题及对策——以北川羌族自治县的学校教育为例

The Qiang are one of the most ancient ethnic groups in China, and their rich cul-ture is an important part of Chinese culture. Bei-chuan Qiang Autonomous County, in Sichuan province, is a unique Qiang Autonomous County in China, which has an exceptional foundation for transmitting Qiang ethnic culture through school education. However, the county’s transmission of Qiang ethnic culture through school education still faces some problems, such as lack of educational investment, poor teacher resources, lack of ethnic cultural inheritors, and students’ lack of ethnic self-confidence. In view of series dilemmas faced by Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County in trans-mitting Qiang ethnic culture through school educa-tion, this article proposes the following suggestions based on our investigations:1 . Increase the investment in school educa-tion In view of the lack of educational investment, we suggest the following measure be adopted: 1 ) increase educational investment from various levels of the government, especially increasing special in-vestment in transmitting Qiang ethnic culture through school education;2 ) raise funds from the public;3 ) have the schools engage in their own fundraising, and 5 ) make efforts to get foreign aid. 2 . Strengthen the investment in improving teacher resources In view of the problem of poor teacher re-sources, we suggest the following measures: 1 ) strengthen policy support from the national level, and solve the problem of poor teacher resources through training teachers in universities for nation-alities. 2 ) invite Qiang cultural inheritors to be teachers; 3 ) strengthen the technical training of the school teachers, and improve the teachers’ skills;4) add more teacher positions, and improve the treatment of teachers;5 ) encourage teachers to devote their life to the education and inheritance of Qiang culture. 3 . To promote the motivation for studying eth-nic culture In view of the students’ lack of motivation for studying ethnic culture, and the lack of people who go on to inherit the ethnic cultural heritage, we suggest the following: 1 ) Beichuan Autonomous County should help the young Qiang people to be locally employed through developing ethnic econo-mies, and to inherit ethnic culture via developing tourism with ethnic characteristics. 2) Family edu-cation should be closely connected with school edu-cation;3 ) to include an exam on Qiang ethic cul-ture in school entrance examinations in order to re-flect the importance of ethnic culture study;4 ) to add some ethnic culture courses in schools for na-tionalities. 4 . To strengthen the ethnic pride and confi-dence of Qiang students In view of the issue of Qiang students’ lack of ethnic confidence and pride, we suggest the follow-ing:1 ) open Qiang language courses in schools in Qiang areas; 2 ) enlarge the usage range of the Qiang language; 3 ) help students to understand the charm of Qiang culture, and let them feel eth-nic pride. 5 . To standardize and promote a common Qiang language In view of the issue that Qiang have no written language, their spoken language is too complicat-ed, and there are too many dialects, we suggest that the National Languages and Scripts Work Committee should work with Qiang scholars and ex-perts to create a basic dialect of the Qiang-a com-mon Qiang language, which should be promoted in school education, just like mandarin Chinese in school education.     

红色文化增进铸牢中华民族共同体意识的多维向度解析

红色文化是中国革命建设征程的历史凝结,补钙壮骨,通今溯源,与中华民族共同体意识有着严密的耦合逻辑。在政治上,红色文化有利于坚定中国共产党的领导,明晰铸牢中华民族共同体意识的政治前提;在经济上,红色文化彰显社会主义市场经济的民族互惠指向,夯实铸牢中华民族共同体意识的经济基础;在文化上,红色文化标注社会主义先进文化建设的中国底色,聚合中华民族共同体建设的文化动力;在社会上,红色文化促进各民族交往交流交融,提升铸牢中华民族共同体意识的社会认知;在生态上,红色文化有助于建立人与自然交响协奏的生命共同体,筑牢中华民族共同家园的生态底线。