Welfare reform and the subject of the working mother: “Get a job,a better job,then a career”

Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althussers concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of womens welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed.     

‘Acapulco in the Atlantic’: Revisiting Sosúa,a Jewish Refugee Colony in the Caribbean

This article examines the foundation objectives, settlement history and ethnic relations of the tiny but idyllic Sosúa in the Dominican Republic. Sosúa was established in 1940 as the first and only Jewish agricultural colony resulting from discussions at the 1938 Evian conference in France, which unsuccessfully addressed the growing refugee displacement produced by Nazi Germany's relentless persecution of Jews and other minorities. Fleeing from the grasp of one dictator to the ostensible embrace of Hitler's Caribbean counterpart, Rafael Trujillo, Jews in the tropical settlement were celebrated as the solution to this underdeveloped, peasant-populated, mainly agricultural northern region. Yet, the lack of international, institutional and financial commitment, settler apathy for intensive labour, and feelings of cultural displacement meant that the colony never reached Trujillo's desired yet wildly unrealistic projection of 100,000 settlers. Instead, no more than 500 settlers passed through Sosúa from 1940 to 1947. Today, the town thrives as a transnational site of displaced settlers, sex tourism and itinerant labour, with its markers of Jewish ethnic and settlement history barely visible.     

Zhang Fang—a Student at the BBI

UNIVERSITY student Zhang Fang looks gentle and refined, but she is also frank and quick-witted. She was born in Chongqing of Sichuan Province. Her father is a comic dialogue performer and her mother was once a ballerina. Zhang Fang was imperceptibly influenced by     

Challenges for the school in a migration society – a critical incidents analysis

The large number of newly arrived people from other countries, particularly children and youth, represents a major challenge for schools and school systems in the EU-28. The present study, conducted in Germany, investigated this situation using the critical incident technique. Critical incidents were collected in group discussions with teachers and principals about challenging events in the context of growing migration. The incidents, including their perceived causes and consequences, were categorised using qualitative content analysis. Events that were frequently present in teachers’ everyday work included various types of conflicts concerning pupils, difficult cooperation between teachers and parents and parents banning their children from taking part in particular school activities. The identified causes for such events were diverse, including misunderstandings, diverging cultural and religious concepts, language barriers, structural constraints and some pupils’ traumatic experiences influencing the school community. The described incidents had far-reaching consequences, especially for parent–school cooperation and for pupils’ integration in the classroom community and academic and personal development. The final part of this article discusses and illustrates how the results can contribute to developing ideas and measures to deal with the identified challenges.     

Conflicts and empowerment – a processual perspective on the development of a partnership

Partnership working involving providers and users of social services is highly valued as a means to inform research and practice, yet its effectiveness is debated. Frameworks for measuring and evaluating partnerships are developed, but still there is a need to shed light on micro-practices to gain insight in how partnerships succeed or fail to reach their goals. The context for this qualitative study is a Norwegian governmental funded program, where one goal was promotion of structures for equal collaboration between social work education, research, social service providers and users. The study investigates one local partnership project and how conflicts influenced processes and outcomes. Conflicts were related to the leadership of the group. With a particular look at users’ participation, the findings indicate how emergence and negotiations of conflicts were related to their empowering processes as the project developed. The study underscores the importance of acknowledging conflicts and how these may be complex and interwoven with empowering processes when users are involved, as well as the need to critically examine issues on leadership. The study supports the importance of ethnographic studies in order to understand how a partnership might deliver, as this approach enables enhanced understanding of micro-practices and internal power dynamics.     

Meeting the Needs of the Social Care and Health Care Workforce: Can a Duck Sleep with a Hippopotamus?

In a period when recruitment and retention are crucial issues in health and social care the focus of this paper is:

? Who are the workforce of health and social care?

? What are the needs of that workforce?

? How safe is it for the much smaller partner, social care, to work together with the much larger health care?

The latter point heads us back to the sub‐title of the paper: can a duck sleep with a hippopotamus?

This question comes from an advert used in the UK for a bed manufacturer, where our British sensitivities and fear of sex prevents us from showing a man and a woman in a double bed, what the Spanish charmingly call a ‘cama de matrimonio’, a marriage bed, and instead we show a hippopotamus and a duck sleeping, safely, in the same bed.

To follow this analogy, we have to show:

? that health and social care are in the same bed;

? that one is as large as a hippopotamus, and the other as small as a duck;

? what the dangers are of this;

and ask the question:

? What is there in the place of ‘spring technology’ which would permit both to sleep together, and for the duck not to end up flat?

In doing so, I hope to answer the first three questions I posed.     

From the Mountains to the Plain, Sichuan Offers Travelers a Rare Treat

IT is almost impossible to understand the traffic problems of the Sichuan Basin during ancient times, especially when you are in an airplane landing at Shuangliu Airport in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan. With the construction of a modem infrastructure, the Sichuan Basin, surrounded by the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, Qinling-Dabashan Hilly Area and Xiang'exi Hilly Area, has become a popular stop for tourists. Sichuan is also called "Shu." It is said that in ancient times a people known as the Shu once lived here. One of China's most historic cities, Chengdu, the provincial capital, offers     

More than a method? Organisational ethnography as a way of imagining the social

The authors – two anthropologists and an organisational theorist, all organisational ethnographers – discuss their understanding and practices of organisational ethnography (OE) as a way of imagining and reflect on how similar this understanding may be for young organisational researchers and students in particular. The discussion leads to the conclusion that OE may be regarded as a methodology but that it has a much greater potential when it is reclaiming its roots: to become a mode of doing social science on the meso-level. The discussion is based on an analysis of both historical material and the contemporary learning experiences of teaching OE as more than a method to our students.     

Communicate over a network: the blog as a ‘new’ social space

The contribution analyzes from a sociological perspective the development of the blog, passing through the different typologies, to define the relationship that develops in today's society between the network and the individual, through a theoretical comparison of the major scholars who have dealt with the issue of network. From Sherry Turkle to Manuel Castells up to the studies of Barry Wellman, we will define the development of the network as a new social space. The work incorporates some classical theories of Simmel, some by Goffman and Thompson about interaction, of community-society by Töennies and the action-system of Luhmann. The central part of the article focuses on how the space of the network can become, in some cases, a ‘place’ of sharing not only of entertainment topics but also of those that have some importance for public opinion. Then the blog becomes a ‘showcase’ in which to expose the peculiar characteristics of one's identity, but also a point of listening for those who do not have easy access to traditional media. Through the testimony of two young people, we will highlight those aspects that characterize the blog as a communication tool, from the diary to the letter, as well as the role played by these documentary sources in the past in sociology's field. In this way, some salient points arise about the use of the network space, compared to traditional media. The last part of the contribution proposes a comparison between America and Japan about the use of blogs and social networks, no longer in numerical terms, but proposing a reflection that brings out an individual who, as a sociable being, exploits all the possible ways to communicate, feeling in such situations freer to express his emotions, and able build a dialogue that turns out to be an added value to his person and in relationship with others outside.     

ping-mechanism as a new attempt to resolve the problem

new way of the reformation of agriculture extension system, it is also a beneficial trial to construct the agriculture extension system with Chinese characteristics.agriculture extension; Nanping-mechanism; technology specialists国家软科学资助项目(2003DGQ3D111)0科技和产业Science Technology and Industry91-95F327J14938J;J14     

Picking Up the Pieces After the Sudden Death of a Therapist: Issues for the Client and the “Inheriting Therapist”

The death of one's therapist can be considered a traumatic event for the patient. The closeness of the relationship between therapist and patient, especially if the relationship is long-term, makes the loss analogous to losing an intimate attachment. This article will explore the complexity of issues involved for the patient who loses a therapist due to sudden death and examines the issues for the inheriting therapist as well. Case examples will be used to highlight some of the more stressful areas of practice in this difficult transition.     

Listening in a Way that Recognizes/Realizes the World of ‘the Other’

Freshmen in an orientation course at a state university answered questionnaires about their peer mentors' listening and how well their peer mentors help them balance dialectical tensions of socialization. Results showed that perceived directive and emotional listening help the protégé manage these tensions. Perceived emotional listening discriminated between high and low levels of liking and relational closeness but was only a slightly better predictor of reducing the protégé's socialization tensions. Both types of perceived listening responses are important to effective mentoring: emotional listening helps protégés form positive relationships with their mentors and directive listening meets protégés' expectations.     

Does the Borda rule provide more than a ranking?

Consider the following problem: a set of candidates {x, y, z} has to be ranked from best to worse by a committee. Each member of the committee provides his own ranking of the three candidates and you decide to use the Borda method to aggregate the rankings. The resulting scores are as follows: 107 for x, 106 for y and 51 for z. Would you conclude that x is better than y? Probably not, because the difference between the scores of x and y is small. The only conclusion you would draw is that z definitely is the worst candidate. But, is it meaningful to consider differences of Borda scores? We characterize the Borda method in this new framework and find conditions that are very close to those characterizing the classical Borda method. Throughout our paper, we consider a generalization of the Borda method designed to aggregate fuzzy relations. Received: 2 March 1998/Accepted: 5 May 1999     

Civil Society Organizations: the Site of Legitimizing the Common Good—a Literature Review

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The concept of legitimacy—i.e., being regarded as “lawful, admissible, and justified” (Edwards in NGO...     

“Rather a manager and networker than a researcher”: converging technologies in the clinic

Technological developments brought about new approaches to and new insight into the functioning of the brain and neurological disorders. More specifically, advancement in the areas of neuroimaging, genomic technologies and molecular biology is conceived as a pathway to more differentiated diagnosis and appropriate treatment. In this regard, the convergence of technologies in the area of health care and medical research has significantly increased during the past two decades. The aim of this article is to better understand how the convergence of technologies in the field of neuroscience takes place at the micro-level of knowledge production, namely the clinic. It is based on the results of an ethnographic study conducted at an Epilepsy Monitoring Unit in Vienna. I start from the assumption that the convergence of technologies in the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy anticipates a specific means of knowledge production that impacts on the understanding and definition of neurological conditions and the identity of patients and medical doctors simultaneously. One important result concerns the scientization of the way that people with epilepsy perceive, explain and understand epilepsy and the brain. On the one hand respective narratives seem to support the scientific definition of epilepsy; on the other, the failure of seizure control tends to induce a specific understanding of the brain as having unpredictable and uncontrollable mastery over body, memory and soul.     

Aid for the Poor and a Return to Maternal Love

Shouldering the burden of raising children and farmingin the field,poor mothers long to be beffer—off.Small aid funds extend directly to individuals,helping poormothers start making bamboo products.The investment of their small aid funds generally brings]Door families a healthy return inone or two years,generating an income greater than that of their average neighbor.The familial and social statusof mothers rises after theyhave been lifted out ofpoverty,and as a result thestate of their healt…     

Is the Concept of Parental Alienation a Meaningful One?

Many members of the judiciary do not yet accept the concept of parental alienation (PA) or parental alienation syndrome (PAS). It has not as yet been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–5 or International Classification of Diseases–11. This article discusses the concept of PA as meaningful and resulting from serious conflict before, during, and after separation of parents. It results in a child failing to have good contact with the now absent parent, despite the fact that the child previously had a good relationship with that parent. The concept of PA is defined and is differentiated into types. The behavior of the alienator and the alienated parent is described. The incidence, symptoms, and diagnosis of PA is also delineated, as are the long-term effects and treatment of PA.