The humanitarian crisis of migration versus the crisis of humanitarianism: current dimensions and challenges for social work practice*

People who comprise today’s mass migrations are the embodiment of an increasingly hurtful planetary interconnectedness between towering inequalities and hegemonies and human lives. The humanitarian crisis has turned into a fundamental crisis of humanitarianism. The crisis of humanitarianism builds up by the state borders increasingly militarized, equipped with one manner or the other of securitization, seeking to externalize the migrating people. Further, the governments seek to institutionalize and spatially segregate the people, whilst the resident population is subjected to programmatic inciting of racism and xenophobia. Racist eurocentrism pictures the West as democratic, and migrant people as non-democratic; it does not distinguish between individuals and political regimes; does not take into consideration the emergency situations from which they flee: it is thus a form of armed humanitarianism. The Balkan countries which were part of the Balkan Refugee route have become prison countries, custodians of the EU border. They conserve the image of the dangerous Balkans and consolidate Balkanism. A complex social work response includes individual, institutional, curricular, and research levels of reflection and intervention.     

Intergenerational Mobility in Relative Educational Attainment and Health-Related Behaviours

Social Indicators Research - Research on intergenerational social mobility and health-related behaviours yields mixed findings. Depending on the direction of mobility and the type of mechanisms...     

Am I a leader? Examining leader identity development over time

The extent to which someone thinks of him- or herself as a leader (i.e., leader identity) is subject to change in a dynamic manner because of experience and structured intervention, but is rarely studied as such. In this study, we map the trajectories of leader identity development over a course of a seven-week leader development program. Drawing upon identity theory (Kegan, 1983) and self-perception theory (Bem, 1972), we propose that changes in self-perceived leadership skills are associated with changes in leader identity. Using latent growth curve modeling and latent change score analyses as our primary analytical approaches, we analyzed longitudinal data across seven measurement points (N = 98). We find leader identity to develop in a J-shaped pattern. As hypothesized, we find that these changes in leader identity are associated with, and potentially shaped by, changes in leadership skills across time.     

Pictures and silences: memories of sexual abuse of disabled people

The article de–individualises the debate about sexual abuse of disabled people, especially women, by showing that both the sexual and asexual identity of impaired persons are invariably fashioned within the institutional arrangement of domination and subjugation. It shows that if disabled persons are seen as asexual or if they are sexualised, they cannot escape sexual violence, which is not an aberration, but is intrinsic to the social construction of disability. The article includes personal testimonies of women with different disabilities from Slovenia, who were abused either at home or in public care and shows some responses of the professionals and caregivers who minimise the importance of abuse. It claims that ignoring the memories of sexual abuse is part of a subtle and unintentional discrimination, which reflects a continuity of prejudices and hatred toward disabled children and adults in the private realm as well as in public care. People from ethnic minorities, such as Roma, are still today more often diagnosed as mentally disabled, which shows that the disability diagnosis has to be seen as part of cultural responses towards an economically and socially marginalised group. The author uses different perspectives: historical, social work theories, cultural studies and feminist analysis.     

Modeling Unemployment Duration in Slovenia using Cox Regression Models

This paper applies the semi-parametric Cox regression approach to model unemployment duration in Slovenia. The empirical analysis is based on a comprehensive dataset that consists of all unemployment spells in Slovenia from 2002 to 2005. The impact of the variables age, gender, level of education, and region on the hazard ratio is discussed. It takes longer for female and older unemployed persons to find a job and on average the duration of unemployment decreases with increasing level of education. Surprisingly, unemployed persons with a professional college degree or a bachelor’s degree are better off than unemployed persons with a master’s degree. A comparison of the Cox proportional hazards model and the Cox regression model with a time-dependent covariate reveals that the more appropriate model with a time-dependent covariate places greater emphasis on higher levels of education.

Am I a leader or a friend? How leaders deal with pre-existing friendships

We studied employees who were promoted into a leadership role from within their workgroup and explored how they dealt, psychologically, with being both a leader and a friend of their subordinates. In an inductive, qualitative study of 33 individuals from across three organizations (two mining companies and one childcare organization) we found that these people experienced psychological conflict that resulted in them feeling vulnerable to being exploited or being afraid to use their power over subordinate-friends. We identified five strategies that were used, namely abdicating responsibility, ending the friendship, establishing the divide, overlapping the roles, and using friendship to lead. We developed a model whereby the type of psychological conflict and the person's leader identity (either “the boss”, just a role, or a weak or non-existent leader identity) leads to the choice of resolution strategy. This exploration into understanding pre-existing friendships demonstrates the ongoing need to consider those in a leadership role as “people” and not just “leaders”.     

Dimensions of Internet use: amount,variety, and types

We examine the dimensions of Internet use based on a representative sample of the population of the UK, making three important contributions. First, we clarify theoretical dimensions of Internet use that have been conflated in prior work. We argue that the property space of Internet use has three main dimensions: amount of use, variety of different uses, and types of use. Second, the Oxford Internet Survey 2011 data set contains a comprehensive set of 48 activities ranging from email to online banking to gambling. Using the principal components analysis, we identify 10 distinctive types of Internet activities. This is the first typology of Internet uses to be based on such a comprehensive set of activities. We use regression analyses to validate the three dimensions and to identify the characteristics of the users of each type. Each type has a distinctive and different kind of user. The Internet is an extremely diverse medium. We cannot discuss ‘Internet use’ as a general phenomenon; instead, researchers must specify what kind of use they examine.