What Adolescents Can Tell Us: Technology and the Future of Social Work Education

The use and usefulness of Information Technology (IT) is rapidly growing around the world, especially among the youth. IT has been shown to impact learning styles, communication, and social relationships in many ways. Recently, significant discussion has arisen around the importance of IT in higher education and more specifically, social work education. This study qualitatively assesses 128 youth aged 13–14 years to understand their access to and use of IT as well as the way it impacts their psychosocial development to provide clues that will help inform the design of social work education for the future. Youth in four school districts reported unanimous access to computers and television and a majority of students used other technologies. Adolescents reported increased ease of communication and ability to get information as well as enhanced social relationships connected to their use of IT. Discussion and implications suggest that in the future, social work education will have to implement IT into its curriculum in order to attract students and provide the best possible learning environment for the next generation, which has included technology in every aspect of their lives.     

Managerialism in social welfare: Proposals for a humanitarian alternative–an australian perspective

In Australia, New Zealand, and Europe over the past twenty years, control over social work has been nurtured by deregulatory economic policies and by alleged efficient management. A particular form of management practice, called managerialism, has involved doing more with less and treating public-sector agencies as though they were no different from private for-profit corporations. This practice has incurred huge social costs in terms of cutbacks in services, scapegoating of vulnerable people, lowering of staff morale, and contributing to stress-related illness. A humanitarian alternative to managerialism requires a social work practice in which relationships are characterized by openness and humour, by a workplace culture which is free of fear, and values are agreed in consultation with the users of services. This alternative ideology and practice promotes the treatment of people as citizens rather than clients or consumers.     

Working with the enemy? Social work education and men who use intimate partner violence

This article examines service user involvement in social work education. It discusses the challenges and ethical considerations of involving populations who may previously have been excluded from user involvement initiatives, raising questions about the benefits and challenges of their involvement. The article then provides discussion of an approach to service user involvement in social work education with one of these populations, men who use violence in their intimate relationships, and concludes by considering the implications of their involvement for the social work academy.     

The politics of joking: narratives of humour and joking among adults with Asperger’s syndrome

The purpose of this article is to analyse how humour and narratives about humour are used in a natural group of adults with Asperger’s syndrome. Narratives about humour and use of humour in the group are analysed from a discursive psychological perspective, informed by insights from both disability studies and critical autism studies. The setting of the research is ethnographic fieldwork in an educational setting in Sweden. In the paper, I show the use of three storylines among a natural group of people with autism (PWA) when talking about humour: the storyline of humourless PWA that dominates within Swedish society; and two alternatives, a storyline of alternative humour among PWA and another storyline in line with the social model of disability, of neurotypical humour or disabling humour. When invoking these two alternative storylines, PWA challenge both the humourlessness storyline and the lack of social accessibility within mainstream neurotypical settings.     

民族社会工作与民族地区社会经济问题研究

民族地区社会工作的特点是：社会工作人才队伍规模小、专业化程度低.社区工作者与服务对象的沟通和服务能力不足;民族社会工作表现为文化敏感性对多民族地区社会工作的影响很大,族群优势对社会工作的帮助功不可没.但是民族地区社会经济发展存在许多问题,文章针对存在的问题,提出了解决的方法.     

Promises and Pitfalls: Involving Service Users and Carers in Social Work Manager Education

Partnership working occupies an increasing amount of social work managers' time and budget, requiring skills and abilities not always developed previously within social work programmes. Much discussion around partnership working centres on building collaborative inter-agency and inter-professional relationships with less emphasis on the need to ensure good working relationships with service users and carers, despite their being the ultimate recipients of the process. This article explores efforts to develop a focus on service users and carers within a module for social work managers as part of post-qualifying (PQ) social work education. It documents a process where, initially, service users and carers provided personal testimonies of being recipients of services and then subsequently occupied more authoritative roles within teaching, to the current position when they are again less actively involved.

In describing these developments it explores possible reasons why involving service users and carers within this module has proved challenging. The article acknowledges that there is relatively limited literature about the involvement of service users and carers in PQ education. It suggests that lessons learned from involving service users and carers in qualifying social work training cannot directly be transposed to the post-qualifying context.     

Hearts and Minds: Aspects of Empathy and Wellbeing in Social Work Students

Although empathy is critical to social work practice, the extent to which it can be measured, nurtured or taught is hotly debated. Furthermore, definitions of empathy are typically one-dimensional referring to the ability to adopt the perspective of others in order to understand their feelings, thoughts or actions. Such definitions do not adequately reflect the realities of empathy in the social work context or recognise its potential to lead to distress. This study utilises data from 359 social work students to examine relationships between several dimensions of empathy (i.e. perspective taking, concern and distress), reflective ability and wellbeing with a view to using the findings to develop evidence-based interventions to help staff develop appropriate empathic responses to service users' experiences. Whilst students reported fairly high levels of empathic concern, they also disclosed considerable empathic distress. Some evidence was found that reflective ability might protect social work students from empathic distress. Findings suggest that students require support to develop their empathic and reflective skills to effectively manage the emotional demands of practice. The use of techniques such as mindfulness and experiential learning for enhancing such skills is explored.     

Laughing matters: humour as advocacy in education for the disabled

Humour is an advocacy tool used by women organisers in Sāmoa, an Independent State in the Pacific. Examining the use of humour (jokes, sarcasm, banter, and clowning) in social action research reveal creative ways that advocates and activists can challenge systems of normalcy. This paper examines humour as an informal conversational and non-confrontational strategy used by (non)disabled Indigenous women to support the creation of schools for disabled students. Thematic analysis of the data shows that the women’s use of humour supports their agenda of transforming exclusive structures in education and policy. Using humour as an organising strategy also shifts mainstream thinking about disabled people as easy targets of offensive and degrading humour. The paper explores humour as an organising strategy that provides new supports into inclusive spaces for the education of disabled people in the global South.     

Survival and Abuse: What We Can Learn From It

This article is about a journey involving survival, abuse and learning. It is written by two people who have considerable experience of being involved with mental health services; both are currently making an active contribution to social work education. It describes the way in which, in situations of survival and abuse, service users can use their experience and knowledge to learn how to support and advocate for each other. It suggests that the relationships that are built between service users as a result of these experiences can be used to address some of the gaps in service provision. At the same time these relationships can provide mutual learning which can be used to improve the education and training of social workers and other professionals.     

Inside the Locker Room: Male Homosociability in the Advertising Industry

The use of the term homosociability by male employers and employees has been a key issue in the construction and maintenance of the gendered labour market, especially in senior‐level jobs. Male homosociability encompasses the formal old boys' networks and informal clubs or meetings, as well as humour and banter, referred to metaphorically in this article as the locker room. This article examines the locker room and its resulting forms of socializing, socialization, communication and rituals found in the advertising industry. To gain a clearer understanding of how the locker room constructs workplace opportunities, this article draws upon qualitative research and analysis and examines major service occupations in the advertising industry and the executives who inhabit them. Studying the relationship between the locker room and the production process provides additional perspectives on service work in the corporate sector, occupations and gender inequality.     

Working Together for Better Social Work Education

This article looks at the development of user involvement in social work education at national policy level. It is written by a group of service users who are involved in Shaping Our Lives, the national independent user controlled organisation and network. The article looks at the background of user involvement in social work education and the work that Shaping Our Lives has done in the past. The new social work qualification requires user involvement in all its aspects and stages. The results so far have been patchy. Service users have made it increasingly clear that they want to be more directly involved in developing this policy alongside other stakeholders. They are particularly keen that some of the funding available goes to user controlled organisations to help develop service users' capacity to get involved and to ensure diverse involvement. The article looks at problems there have been in taking this goal forward and a positive initiative that has developed to help make it happen, led by service users, working collaboratively with other stakeholders.     

You Must Be Joking: The Sociological Critique of Humour and Comic Media

Recent work in the sociological critique of humour and comic media has challenged the notion that humour is an absolute good. In this article, we review some of the most interesting work that takes humour seriously and addresses the difficult topic of whether there are ethical limits to humour and media comedy. We outline three main reasons for taking humour seriously and review some of the ways in which humour has been studied sociologically through a consideration of how British 'alternative' comedy directed the work of those interested in the limits of humour in relation to gender, race and ethnicity. We also summarise some of the most controversial examples of contemporary media comedy – the comedic performances and personae of Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G and Borat) and the Danish cartoons of the Holy Prophet Muhammad – in order to illustrate the importance of the critical analysis of humour and how the ethics of humour can be applied to comic media.     

Only joking? Online humour in the 2005 UK general election

Humour has long been a part of election campaigns but rarely has election humour been subject to scholarly analysis. The increasing popularity of new forms of Internet-based humour has, however, raised questions about the significance of humour in campaigning and whether online humour can be used as means of stimulating political engagement. This article assesses online humour in the context of the 2005 UK election, exploring both the motivations of the different actors who distributed web-based political humour and the nature of the texts themselves. We find that whilst the official party campaigns use humour very cautiously, there has been an upsurge in humour based campaigns from net activists as well as more traditional broadcasters. Yet, overall, the way that humour is used is paradoxical, since it often attempts to encourage participation but portrays politics as a cynical game, leaving the rationale for political participation unclear.     

Teaching and Providing Recovery-oriented Care Through Problem-posing Dialogue

As the recovery paradigm proliferates throughout systems of mental health care, social workers are being required to provide recovery-oriented services. Yet there has been little discussion about what changes need to be made in social work education to produce recovery-oriented social workers. This article uses Paulo Freire's theory of pedagogy to help social work educators understand how they can develop problem-posing relationships with their students in order to teach students about the relationships that social workers ought to have with people in recovery.     

The feminization of social services: Implications for black male youth

Throughout the institution of social services attention to the needs of black male youth has been subjugated relative to the needs of women and girls. Despite the educational failures and hyper-incarceration of black male youth they remain aloof from social services. In the aftermath is an invisible crisis not irrelevant to the feminization of social services. Such feminization is evident in the social work databases and social service help models where it has dominated. If social service agencies are to balance the influences of feminization, it is imperative to de-feminize social services by systematically addressing the needs of black male youths. The outcome will contribute to their academic successes and reduction in rates of hyper-incarceration. Only then will it be possible to sustain alternatives to the feminization of social services and the potency of the social work profession at-large.     

Parent-worker relationships in child welfare social work: a Belgian case study

The involvement of parents within child and family social work has become an important research topic during the past few decades. Within this research, a lot of attention is paid to partnership, which is recognised as a dominant concept in current thinking about the parent–worker relationship in present-day practice. The debate on parent–worker relationships, however, seems to be mainly focussed on the individual relationship between the parent and the social worker. Based on a historical analysis of policy documents on a Belgian child and family welfare service, this article offers a historical and sociopolitical contextualisation of the current debate on the parent–worker relationship. The analysis reveals that sociopolitical ideas about the responsibilities of the state, the community and the private family have induced a continuous reflection on which children and parents should be seen as the most appropriate clients for a particular service, as well as an ongoing development of diagnostic instruments to legitimise inclusion and exclusion of families within child and family social work. Consequences for parent–worker relationships in child and family social work are discussed, as well as some implications for future research on child and family social work practices.     

Computer-based Information Systems and Human Service Organisations: Emerging Problems and Future Possibilities

Abstract

Standardised case management systems were designed to address poor outcomes for abused or neglected children. Their introduction has been controversial, with some social workers identifying them as undermining the social worker–service user relationship, and professionalism. This paper reports on a qualitative study of service users of two widely used systems in Australia: “Looking After Children” (LAC) and “Supporting Children and Responding to Families” (SCARF) (both based on adaptations of United Kingdom systems). There has been relatively little evaluation of the long-term use of these systems relevant to Australian social work. The experiences of service users can contribute to debate because they provided lived experiences of these systems and family members' inclusion is a central goal. Children, young people, and parents reported positive experiences of case-managed interventions: the goals of the intervention were usually clear, processes productive, and relationships with social workers possible. However, service users did identify barriers to participation, limitations in assessment, and described diverse experiences of interventions. While these findings challenge critics, they also suggest that LAC and SCARF could be further developed to better meet expectations of families.     

The Impact of Hopelessness and Hope on the Social Work Profession

Abstract

Burnout and turnover are detrimental to social service organizations, social service providers and clients. Very often organizational characteristics are part of the cause for burnout. Burnout in a job can lead to hopelessness for social service providers and begin a vicious cycle of continued burnout and increased hopelessness. Knowing the characteristics of hopelessness can help social welfare institutions nurture their employee's level of hope thus impacting the way the social service providers work with their clients.