Doing The Right Thing: Labour's Attempt to Forge a New Welfare Deal Between the Individual and the State

This paper explores the rhetoric behind the Labour Government's welfare reforms. Recent publications and statements emanating from the new administration indicate the extent to which Labour feels comfortable with notions of communitarianism and stakeholding. The influence and (potential) impact of these two concepts upon welfare policy is explored through the works of Macmurray, Etzioni, Hutton and, in spite of his departure from Government, Field. The paper argues that in attempting to create a welfare system based largely on conditions of work, set firmly within a framework of self-help and individual responsibility, Labour's reform agenda is concerned with the establishment of a new moral order for welfare in which individuals are urged to "do the right thing": that is, to take control of their own welfare and ultimately to be responsible for meeting their own needs whenever possible. The Government presents this attempt to forge a welfare settlement between the individual and the state as both new and inclusive. However, it is concluded that such claims are contentious as the Government's "new" approach echoes old individualistic ideas about the causes and solutions to poverty, and may also result in the exclusion of some citizens from publicly financed welfare.     

Safety and Comfort,Content and Process: Facilitating Open Group Work with Men Who Batter

Based on the open group format of the McGill Domestic Violence Clinic this paper discusses four important concepts in treatment group work with men who batter: safety, comfort, content and process. This paper explores why men who batter might wish to avoid treatment groups as well as what might encourage them to attend these groups regularly. Interventive techniques such as "the comfort/discomfort level." "empathic projection," use of humor and the "process statement" are defined and highlighted by case examples. The paper concludes by suggesting what benefits the treatment group client takes with him when he moves on from the group.     

SOCIAL GROUP WORK EDUCATORS

This study reports a survey of selected characteristics of social work educators who reach social work with groups, and the content of what they teach. Findings indicate that the "social goals" model appear to be decreasing in utilization, c1inical or treatment orientations appear to be increasing in importance, and the DSW/PhD appears to be replacing many years of practice experience as the primary credential for teaching.     

Why We Need a Biopsychosocial Perspective with Vulnerable,Oppressed, and At-Risk Clients

This article considers why we need to take a biopsychosocial perspective in assessment and treatment of individuals. Using psychological concepts drawn from drive theory, ego psychology, object relations, attachment theory, self psychology and relational theory, the author makes explicit the need to connect these ideas with social and biological contexts. Arguing that psychodynamic theories contain the social as well as the psychological, the author traces Freud's social commitments, the role of critical race theory, the importance of social contexts in shaping development while also considering the effects of neglect, trauma and abuse on the developing brain. Holding in mind all of these positions, is what makes clinical social work truly the impossible profession.     

What is a person‐centred approach? Familiarity and understanding of individualised funding amongst carers in New South Wales

Person‐centred approaches place individuals with a disability at the centre of decision making, with their carers and family invited to be partners in the process. Rather than being required to fit within existing service programs, person‐centred approaches enable individuals to choose the support options that best meet their needs. In order to facilitate this, person‐centred approaches will be accompanied by the introduction of individualised funding. This means the individual will be provided with funding to purchase services of their choosing. Given these significant changes occurring in the disability sector, Carers NSW surveyed informal carers of people with a disability to identify what they knew about person‐centred approaches and how they felt about their introduction. Survey results indicate that there is a need to increase the capacity and willingness of carers significantly in order to engage with person‐centred approaches and individualised funding. Carers require targeted and comprehensive information about these concepts in order to understand fully the changes occurring within the disability sector. These findings also indicate specific areas that need to be addressed in order to increase carers' awareness of these concepts and also to address existing negativity and confusion.     

Where Does it Begin? A Comparative Perspective on the Professional Preferences of First-year Social Work Students

Correspondence to Dr John Gal, Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, The Hebrew University, Mt Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. Summary The goal of this paper is to contribute to a better understandingof international social work by examining the professional preferencesof students at the beginning of the social work training processin the United States, Great Britain and Israel. The study, uponwhich the paper is based, examined the preferences of the studentswith regard client groups, social services, types of sectorsand of practices, and sought to identify the similarities andthe differences between these preferences in different countries.The findings indicate that the students from the United Statesand Israeli universities prefer to work with social groups andto be employed in services, that can be defined as "less stigmatic",while these trends were not identifiable in the case of theBritish students. They expressed a greater readiness to workwith more needy social groups and to find employment in thestate sector. By contrast, the students in all the universitiesstudied expressed a similar unwillingness to work the unemployed,the chronically ill and to find employment in old-aged homes.In addition, casework with individuals was the most preferredtype of social work practice. Clearly, the findings indicatethat the preferences of students in different countries reflectvariations in the nature of social work in each of the specificnational settings.     

Ethics of care and social policy

Care work is to a high degree equivalent with female work and has not, to any great extent, been of interest to traditional social sciences. Women's studies has however changed this, and today there is a broad academic discussion about care work as well as about the concept of care itself. This article reviews this discussion; the concepts of care and ethics are linked and given feminine content. With reference to studies within the authors' research programme: "Care for the elderly: conditions and everyday realities", results are then reviewed that show how organizational, political and ideological relationships affect the content and quality of care. Finally, European social policy trends and the consequences of new systems of paying for care are discussed from a gender perspective. The authors warn against a context-free coupling between women and an ethic of care, and show how neoliberal politics can use feminist "struggle concepts" to put women "back in their place".     

透视市场经济中的非信用关系

信用危机愈演愈烈,非信用现象腐蚀经济链条,对我国市场经济发展会造成灾难性的影响。非信用关系的产生不但有观念、传统文化方面的原因,更为重要的原因是经济法制不健全、不完善。应转变信用观念,建立对社会集团、企业及个人等的信用评级机构,并加快信用法制化进程。     

The Ethical and Clinical Implications of Utilizing Cybercommunication in Face-to-Face Therapy

Information and communication technology has created a new way for individuals to communicate and has entered a number of professional practices, including clinical social work. This article explores the potential ethical and clinical implications when cybercommunication is used in conjunction with traditional face-to-face clinical social work practice. Specific challenges addressed include confidentiality, professional boundaries, effective and competent practice, and unanticipated contact. The authors discuss how information and communication technology is emerging as an inevitable component of the therapeutic exchange, influencing in-person social work practice and the ways that practitioners interact with their clients.     

GROW WORK WITH WORK GROUPS

Group work with work groups was an important part of social group work. Work in and with these groups has fallen into neglect. Several reasons for this neglect may be found in conceptual definitions which have been part of group work. Yet perspectives which derive from work with work groups are essential. What has happened is that these perspectives have been rediscovered by others as they have been abandoned by social work. Often new terms are employed for old concepts. Reclaiming group work with work groups requires attention from the points of view of practice, education, and research.     

Gatekeepers,Gatecrashers, and Gateways in Group Work with Kids: A Mystery Story

This article is framed as a group work mystery story and presents obstacles and opportunities for working with children and adolescents in groups. The reader is left guessing about how a student intern can overcome what she experiences as an unsympathetic supervisor who is thwarting her attempts to form an activity group composed of teenaged moms. The article interweaves group work concepts and additional practice illustrations around the unfolding mystery. The concept of teaching-on-the-go is issued as challenge for all group workers that wish to be itinerant educators and missionaries for the method.     

Flipping the Equation: The Need for Context-Focused Group Work Education

For many students of social work, traditional group work curriculum promotes the development of mutual aid as the criterion for success in a group. However, a dichotomy exists between a reduction in agency-sanctioned mutual aid–focused groups and the expanded use of groups to deliver services. The contrast between MSW students' expectations and the practice realities they face is particularly challenging for classroom instruction. This article proposes a context-focused approach to teaching an elective in social group work, which links theories and skills to organizationally specific practice contexts. This approach encourages students to engage in critical reflection of practice through consistent interaction between foundational concepts and practice realities.     

SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS IN THE GENERIC BASE OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Social work with groups in generic practice requires more integration of group process theory and group work methodology in relation to two questions: What is important for all social workers to know about groups and group work and when is the group the most appropriate method-of-choice in generic practice? Important premises and knowledge for this practice are the relationship of the individual to the group; the small group as a microcostic social system; and especially, the stages of group development. This knowledge base and the understanding of the "curative factors" or "change mechanisms" in groups is suggestive of the selective use of groups for providing services in generic social work practice.     

Sex worker and mother: managing dual and threatened identities

This paper draws on a qualitative study that sought to understand and develop theory based upon 24 women's subjective accounts of their childhood and adult experiences and involvement in sex work in the UK. It specifically examines the management of dual and threatened identities for the 17 women who were also mothers. To ensure the centrality of the women's voices in the analysis and theory generation, a grounded theory approach was taken using a psychosocial framework that drew on concepts of resilience to explore how the meanings of those experiences were reflectively appraised by participants. The findings indicate that there is a need to cope with the threat to identity inherent in society's diametrically opposed perceptions of sex worker and ‘good mother’ and simultaneously to manage the coexistence of the roles and identities of mother and sex worker. What appear significant in determining how these tensions are managed are the accumulated risk factors of early childhood, and the resources available to individuals in adulthood to manage both identities. Services must recognize not only individual but wider environmental and familial factors impacting on women with the dual identity of sex worker and mother in order to promote their resilience as mothers, whether living with or apart from their children.     

THE GROPE FOR GROUP

There has been an apparent increase in the use of social work groups for clinical purposes. This trend has neglected the more traditional and important use of groups for community change goals. Even when working with clinical groups, community goals can be impacted. This article suggests a specific methodology for integrating group treatment goals with community action. It suggests that group workers view their role as instigators in broadening community support and action around clinical group work issues; that agencies need to make time to do this; that how group workers connect group work to community action needs to be empirically demonstrated with each service act.     

Individual and group decision making under risk: An experimental study of Bayesian updating and violations of first-order stochastic dominance

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to test whether individuals and groups abide by monotonicity with respect to first-order stochastic dominance and Bayesian updating when making decisions under risk. The results indicate a significant number of violations of both principles. The violation rate when groups make decisions is substantially lower, and decreasing with group size, suggesting that social interaction improves the decision-making process. Greater transparency of the decision task reduces the violation rate, suggesting that these violations are due to judgment errors rather than the preference structure. In one treatment, however, less complex decisions result in a higher error rates.

Social Group Work in Community Life

This paper focuses on social group work practice with adult community groups, highlighting the importance of these groups to the achievement of increased citizen participation in current social concerns, and identifying characteristics of these groups which require some different conceptualizations of social group work practice. This paper characterizes our current social context as deficient in the necessary social arrangements for a just and humane society. Thus it argues for a major shift of professional skill to assisting adult community groups to deal with environmental deficiencies, whether these be social policy, resource allocation, or program administration. It suggests that many problems which are identified as "personal inadequacy" may, in fact result from environmental deficiencies, and may be better served through the active efforts of citizens in their own behalf. The paper assumes an interaction between person, group and context, and posits that more effective use is made of professional knowledge and skill through work with those groups which seek to address the environmental context of human affairs.     

Interests and the Growth of Uncertainty

The sociology of knowledge and related work in social psychology have been biased towards overvaluing shared perspectives and the attainment of certainty. This paper moves to fill a theoretical gap created by relative inattention to the roles of nonshared perspectives and uncertainty by outlining a middle-range theory of the connections between human interests and uncertainty. It is proposed that individuals and groups find instrumental uses for uncertainty, just as they do for other states of mind, and that these uses arise from particular interests which characteristically belong to certain types of individuals or groups.     

Teaching Social Work with Groups: Integrating Didactic,Experiential and Reflective Learning

Social work with groups can be taught in many ways, with literature identifying the use of didactic and experiential methods to encourage knowledge and skill development, and reflective learning that identifies group concepts as they emerge within the classroom dynamic. This teaching model rather than focusing on one of these methods integrates all three, ensuring that the course is structured and learning is layered in a way that allows the development of the class as a group to create a space of safety from which students can risk new behaviors, integrate knowledge, develop skills, and grow in confidence.     

Citizenship Consciousness,Nonbounded Solidarity,and Social Justice

This article analyzes the concepts of bounded and nonbounded solidarity. It first reviews some fundamental propositions from the sociological literature and then looks at Amnesty International's conception of solidarity. A third part discusses solidarity as it applies to social work with groups. The conclusion raises five questions social workers need to address to make social justice a standard part of social group work theory and practice.