Michael White as Teacher,Mentor Friend: Considering Claims of Guru‐ism

A reflection written on the 20th anniversary of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy and around the first anniversary of the death of its first editor and respected Narrative therapist, author and theorist Michael White. This article reviews the influence of Michael White on the work and life of the author. In this reflection, it reviews some of the significant features of Michael White's teaching, which allows a consideration of claims of ‘guru‐ism’ occasionally related to Michael White's work.     

Missing Michael White: Understanding His Influence in One Person's Life and Work

This is a personal reflection that describes and seeks to understand the significance of Michael White's contribution to my life and work. It offers a personal history of the ways in which these ideas were incorporated over time, and the way in which Michael's teaching made this possible. It looks at how this influence is taken forward and continues to be lived out. It reflects the knowledge and skills, the intentions and the hopes, the purposes and plans held that have been shaped through learning experiences with Michael White and the people and ideas that this introduced me to. The legacy of this learning is a hopefulness for future skill development and teaching, nurtured through these communities of people.     

Some Reflections on the Legacies of Michael White: An Australian Perspective

This article, which appears in a special 30‐year anniversary edition of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, reflects on the legacies of the work of Michael White. It begins by looking back on Michael's time as editor of the Australian Journal of Family Therapy. Of the many themes that were discussed in the Editorials and Letters to the Editor section of this journal in the early 1980s, this article focuses on three in particular to explore the legacies of the work of Michael White. The author describes how Michael has bequeathed not only a profound body of work, but also a distinctive spirit of originating, and ways of working that consider the effects of social issues and that examine the politics of experience. It is the author's hope that this approach to considering Michael White's legacies honours his work and also honours the contributions of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy in its 30th year.     

The Multiple Relationships Between the Discipline of Social Work and the Contributions of Michael White

Abstract

Michael White, the Australian narrative practitioner, died in April this year. Given White trained in social work and has had a large impact on many social workers, it is timely to investigate the opaque relationships linking White and his work with his discipline-of-origin. The present examination proceeds in three steps. First, a schematic outline of White's intellectual influences and achievements is set out; second, the alignments, as well as tensions, between White's work and his discipline-of-origin are considered; and, third, it is argued that White was informed by, and went on to produce a body of work that further informed, the contesting spirit that is the wellspring of the discipline of social work. This conclusion is reached mindful of the fact that White remained antagonistic to the role played by the professions in general and that he did not identify with the title ‘social worker’ in particular.     

The Narrative Dance — A Practice Map For White's Therapy*

Michael White's and David Epston's Narrative Therapy Approach, has stimulated a great deal of interest amongst practitioners both in Australia and overseas. While creative use of language is a cornerstone of the approach, this can also act as a barrier to therapists' attempts to understand and apply the model This paper focuses on the essential aspects and core dimensions underlying White's Narrative Approach. Utilising the analogy of a dance, a practice grid will be described to highlight key therapy steps.     

In Praise of Sneaky Poo: A Case,Four Whites,and a Missing Narrative

Sneaky Poo (1984) announced Michael White, the second order cyberneticist, to the world. But there were several versions of both Sneaky Poo and White. This paper pays homage to Sneaky and critiques White's contribution to family therapy. A recent case is reported.     

First Episode Psychosis: A Magical Realist Guide Through Liminal Terrain

This paper presents a narrative of a client, ‘Eva’, who experienced what is termed by psychiatry a first episode psychosis. As a family and relationship counsellor practicing narrative therapy with its backdrop of post‐structuralism and curiosity of exploring new entry points for narratives of identity, I tentatively sought new ways to engage with Eva's story. My endeavour in meeting with ‘First Episode Psychosis’ is described through adopting a listening position from a reading of magical realist literature. This extends Michael White's political exploration of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep's liminal spaces (in the rites of passage metaphor) to understand units of experience, units of meaning, and the fluidity of identity in psychosis, which is contextualised as a response to events in the client's story.     

Ethical–aesthetic critique of moral organization: Inspirations from Michael Haneke's cinematic work

This paper looks at the work of the Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke as an inspiration for developing an ethical–aesthetic critique of organization. Haneke's practice of film-making is located in the tradition of an ‘ethical parrhesia’, the courageous and often dangerous ‘truth-telling’, which aims at the transformation of being. Haneke's approach is then illustrated with an analysis of his film The White Ribbon. This example is taken to illustrate an ethical critique of moral organization and for analysing strategies that seek to instigate the open-ended moral reflection. By discussing implications of this form of critique, the paper contributes to the development of a critical aesthetics of organization that seeks to open a reflexive space on how we are formed in social and organizational life, and at what costs.     

‘Sitting on the Mourning Bench’: Mental Health Workers and an Elderly Client

Abstract

The present article documents the experience of a first year social work student on fieldwork placement in an Aged Persons Mental Health Service. The student was part of a team providing service to a long-term client of the service when he was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The student's compassionate response to the client raises questions about grief and professionalism, which she explored through a journal and in discussion with her supervisor and other team members working with the client. As part of their reflective practice, the student, her supervisor and the client's mental health workers formed a collective to document their experience and present a staff education session. This article is the outcome of these processes and explores important grief issues in Aged Psychiatry and demonstrates the valuable contribution made by a student to the work of the team in the rich learning environment of a fieldwork placement in aged psychiatry. It is published with the kind permission of the client's next of kin.     

Collective Memory Anchors: Collective Identity and Continuity in Social Movements

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic data from two social movement organizations, this article highlights the way that remembrances of the past are inserted into present interactions to help maintain a sense of movement continuity. Seeing collective identity and collective memory as intertwined dynamic processes, the article argues that the continuity of a social movement is maintained, in part, when movement members insert narrative commemorations that constrain current collective identity development. The process examined is that of “collective memory anchoring,” in which participants instrumentally and/or contextually bring forward the past during interactions in such a way that the formulation of elements in a movement's collective identity appears to mirror past formulations. The common constraints of preexisting networks, participants' shared cultural backgrounds, and a movement's collective action frames are explored.     

Survivors of Woman Abuse

Abstract

The feminist social work and related literature on abused women has focused on women's processes of empowerment but has overlooked the question of women's movement from individual survival to collective resistance. In this feminist qualitative study, I explore the processes through which survivors of abuse by male partners become involved in collective action for social change. Using story telling as a research method, I interviewed 11 women about the processes, factors, insights, and events that prompted them to act collectively to address violence against women. I found that women's movement from individual survival to collective action entails significant changes in consciousness and subjectivity. Women's processes of conscientization are complex, contradictory and often painful because they involve political and psychic dimensions of subjectivity, protracted struggles with contradictions and conflict, and resistance to knowledge that threatens to unsettle relatively stable notions of identity. I suggest that feminist social work theory and practice must take into account three interrelated elements of women's transformative journeys: the discursive and material conditions that facilitate women's movement to collective action; the social, material and psychic costs of women's growth; and the multifaceted and difficult nature of women's journey in recognizing and naming abuse, making sense of their experiences, and acting on this knowledge to work for change. I recommend that feminist social work practice with survivors recognize that survivors can and do contribute to social change, and develop new, more inclusive liberatory models of working with survivors of abuse.     

Complexities of discretion in social services in the third sector

Policy analysts have devoted considerable time to examining the problem of the policy implementation gap, with one important strand in the literature following Michael Lipsky's work on street-level bureaucracy and discretion. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the literature concerning shifts in government/third sector organisation contractual arrangements and whether they constitute a significant (post-neoliberal) development in policy implementation. Using a case study of contracted government services in Australia, we revisit the conception of discretion to reflect on the impact of these changes and document their implications for the use of discretion in management and front-line worker practices.     

Teaching Critical Reflection: A Tool for Transformative Learning in Social Work?

In an Australian Bachelor of Social Work degree, critical reflection is a process explicitly taught in a fourth year subject to students who have returned from their first field placement experience in agencies delivering social work programmes. The purpose of teaching critical reflection is to enable social work students to become autonomous and critical thinkers who can reflect on society, the role of social work and social work practices. The way critical reflection is taught in this fourth year social work unit relates closely to the aims of transformative learning. Transformative learning aims to assist students to become autonomous thinkers. Specifically, the critical reflection process taught in this subject aims to assist students to recognise their own and other people's frames of reference, to identify the dominant discourses circulating in making sense of their experience, to problematise their taken-for -granted ‘lived experience’, to reconceptualise identity categories, disrupt assumed causal relations and to reflect on how power relations are operating. Critical reflection often draws on many theoretical frameworks to enable the recognition of current modes of thinking and doing. In this paper, we will draw primarily on how post-structural theories, specifically Foucault's theorising, disrupt several taken-for-granted concepts in social work.     

The Combined Effect of Women's Neighborhood Resources and Collective Efficacy on IPV

This study integrates gender stratification and social disorganization theories to examine neighborhood effects on intimate partner violence (IPV). Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, multilevel models assessed the influences of women's neighborhood‐level socioeconomic resources relative to men's and collective efficacy on a woman's risk of IPV victimization by her spouse or cohabiting partner. The findings indicate that women's relative neighborhood resources protect against IPV victimization only in neighborhoods with sufficiently high collective efficacy. Likewise, the results show that collective efficacy protects against IPV victimization only when women have at least a modicum of control over neighborhood resources compared to men. The findings emphasize the importance of considering group resources along with neighborhood social organization to better understand IPV. More broadly, this study demonstrates how a group's position in a neighborhood social hierarchy helps determine the extent to which its members benefit from neighborhood social control.     

Women's entrepreneurship,neoliberalism and economic justice in the postfeminist era: A discourse analysis of policy change in Sweden

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘postfeminist’ subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.     

HERBERT BLUMER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGY

Herbert Blumer's work has had considerable impact on the growth of twentieth-century sociology. He kept alive an interest in George Mead at a time when Pragmatism floundered. Although it is unlikely that Mead's work would have been overlooked, there can be no question that Blumer's forceful advocacy helped bring it to the forefront of modern social thought. Park first organized the subfield of collective behavior, but it was Blumer who kept it going in the face of opposition from structural-functionalism. Whether or not collective behavior endures as a separate area of specialization, sociologists will have to concern themselves with the manner in which human beings adapt to problematic situations. Although his views on methodology have been controversial, some of his positions will probably prevail. His insistence on the direct observation of people in their indigenous settings and his contention that human agency must be taken into account in explanations of social processes are difficult to counter.     

The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity

The purpose of this article is to document the collective nature of gender performance and sexual pursuit, activities typically associated with individual rather than group behavior. Drawing on narrative accounts, I analyze how young heterosexual male students employ the power of collective rituals of homosociality to perform sexual competence and masculine identity by “girl hunting” in the context of urban nightlife. These rituals are designed to reinforce dominant sexual myths and expectations of masculine behavior, boost confidence in one's performance of masculinity and heterosexual power, and assist in the performance of masculinity in the presence of women. This analysis illustrates how contemporary courtship rituals operate as collective strategies of impression management that men perform not only for women but for other men. In doing so, interaction rituals associated with the girl hunt reproduce structures of inequality within as well as across the socially constructed gender divide between women and men.     

Reflective Teaching in Social Work Education: Findings from a Participatory Action Research Study

This article describes a feminist-informed reflective teaching project enacted by a group of social work faculty at Texas State University–San Marcos. Utilizing Schon's notion of reflection-in-action, faculty formed a participatory action research group to implement reflective techniques to further their professional development as new teachers and better prepare social work students for practice in the social work profession. This project guided the participants in establishing academic identity through the creation of a supportive academic setting and peer collegiality. The group met monthly to share reflective teaching journals (RTJs), participate in intergroup dialogue, and engage in contemplative practices, such as meditation and visualization. Methods of data collection and analysis included content analysis of the intergroup dialogue sessions. Findings from the project reinforced Kolb's experiential learning cycle, in which new insights gained from reflection were integrated back into the classroom. This article presents these important insights and suggests replication of this project to promote reflective teaching in social work education and to help prepare new social work faculty for success in academia.     

The Social Dynamics Channelling Latina College Graduates into the Teaching Profession

Sociologists examine the persistence of occupational sex segregation in two primary ways, vertically (within occupations) and horizontally (across occupations). Feminist scholars analysing gender and race inequality within work organizations have used ‘glass escalator’ and ‘glass barriers’ to document men's experiences in occupations where women concentrate, falling under the vertical epistemology. These race and gender theories are crucial to our understanding of workplace inequities, but they only address privilege or discrimination once women have entered or try climbing the work organization. Based on interviews with 40 Latina teachers in Southern California, this paper examines the point of occupational entry, and explains why college‐educated Latinas, the daughters of working‐class Latino immigrants, are disproportionately entering the teaching profession in the United States. We suggest that Latinas are socially channelled into the teaching occupation, and show how collective family considerations inform agency and occupational decision‐making for these women, resulting in a type of glass ceiling shaped by family and social class. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of collective‐informed agency for future studies of upwardly mobile Latinas in the professions.     

PARTICIPANT NARRATIVES AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN A METAPHYSICAL MOVEMENT

In this article we explore social movement solidarity through an examination of narratives offered by participants in a metaphysical movement. Drawing from contemporary social movement theory, we focus on how members develop a carefully built collective identity that perpetuates movement goals and ideology. Data for this project are drawn from in-depth interviews with local psychics, participant observation in various metaphysical fairs, and document analysis. We find that the movement's collective identity is centered around several narratives that help establish boundaries, identify antagonists, and create a collective consciousness. Together these narratives form a web of belief that binds members to the movement. The data we present in this article have implications for understanding other expressive movements, as well as for social movement theory in general.