Transforming Social Work Curricula: Institutional Supports for Promoting Sustainability

Due to the centrality of human rights and social justice in the profession, social work must collectively take a stand on ecological degradation and the climate crisis. Overall, social work education's engagement with issues of sustainability and an expanded ecological justice perspective has been peripheral and piecemeal. It is crucial that social work education expand opportunities to prepare social workers to respond to the global environmental crisis. This conceptual paper considers strategies for integrating environmental content in social work curricula and addresses the essential role of institutional supports for curricular change and professional development focused on sustainability. The role of institutional supports to advance curricular change to respond to environmental crises and promote sustainability is highlighted, along with specific examples from the authors' home institution, including (1) institutional commitment and culture, (2) curricular supports and guidelines, and (3) interdisciplinary faculty development.     

Public health or public menace? The Rockefeller Foundation and public health in Mexico, 1920–1950

This article explores how the Rockefeller Foundation's hookworm campaigns, sponsorship of local sanitary units and involvement in public health education in Mexico shaped the conceptualisation and practice of public health during the decades following the Mexican Revolution. A 1923 hookworm agreement set the terms of the relationship, minimising the Foundation's financial commitment while maximising its administrative control. In establishing rural health units, the Foundation adapted to local conditions without compromising scientific public health by ingeniously incorporating midwives while shunning other traditional healers. When President Lázaro Cárdenas's socialist politics threatened the Rockefeller model of public health in the 1930s, delicate tactics enabled the Foundation to overcome these challenges. For the Mexican government, the overriding goals of modernisation and progress required an acceptance of Rockefeller pressure and scientific expertise. The special status granted the Rockefeller foundation, its political, administrative, educational and financial strategies, and its institutional flexibility enabled it to influence profoundly the development of the Mexican public health system.     

Facilitating the Transition from Student to Social Worker: Challenges of the Younger Student

Abstract

The transition from student to social worker is a process which social work educators cannot control but can facilitate. Through classroom and field instruction faculty assumer responsibility of preparing students' professional knowledge, skills, and values; however, our responsibilities should extend beyond curriculum delivery. Drawing on Schlossberg's (1984) model of transitions, this article discusses two primary factors which affect the younger student in transition—developmental needs and the external environment—and strategies for assisting in the transition through intervention in academic advising and teaching roles.     

I Believe… in What? Arvo Pärt's and Alfred Schnittke's Polystylistic Credos

Abstract

From the late 1960s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, numerous composers, especially those belonging to the generation born in the 1930s and commonly referred to as non-conformist, 'avant-garde' or 'unofficial', produced over 100 religious musical works. Some of these composers, such as Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) and Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) employed the controversially flamboyant polystylistic compositional idiom to express their faith in God. Because the merits of the employment of mimetic polystylism in the realm of sacred music have rarely been analysed, my aim is to demonstrate that, in the Soviet context, it was a very appropriate vehicle for conveying religious sentiments by musical means, as it enabled the composers to express their beliefs, but also to narrate related stories. I shall address this issue by analysing three pieces: Arvo Pärt's Credo for piano solo, chorus and orchestra (1968), and the Credo movements from Alfred Schnittke's Requie m (1975) for three sopranos, contralto, tenor, mixed choir and instrumental ensemble, and Second Symphony 'St Florian' (1979) for mixed chamber choir and large orchestra. The reason for choosing the Credo 'genre' is that by definition it is a manifesto of the composer's faith in God, and hence it bears exceptional moral and spiritual weight.     

Developing a program for social work with Latino populations: a case study

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case study of the development of a program in a large U.S. School of Social Work to train social work students to work with Latina/o populations entitled ‘Latino/a Initiatives for Service, Training, and Assessment’ (LISTA). Using a case study methodology, this work fills a current gap in the literature as it examines the programmatic and curricular dynamics associated with such an effort. The methods section details LISTA’s planning process and early implementation. This includes the demographic, theoretical, and professional context of the program along with the stages of curricular development. The results section examines LISTA’s current curriculum, including three courses, field placements and study abroad program, as well as its assessment processes. It further examines issues and challenges related to developing a new curricular emphasis in a graduate program, including funding, recruitment, and securing field placements. The discussion section provides a set of recommendations, including the institutionalization of mechanisms for community feedback and the recruitment of ethnic minority students and faculty. LISTA serves as a potential model for recruiting and training social workers to serve diverse ethnic minority populations.     

Ukrainian Symbolism and the Problem of Modernism

This article explores the role of children’s literature in the formation of Stalinist identity and assembles a list of moral principles developed in the most popular early works of Arkadii Gaidar. It is not in Marxist texts nor in Pioneer slogans, but in these simple stories that the essential narrative structures of Soviet morality were created. Gaidar’s books are representative of a whole group of Soviet children’s literary classics published in the late 1920s–early 1930s and written by young people whose coming of age coincided with the years of political and social turmoil. This study argues that Gaidar’s own personal experiences as a youthful Red Army commander during the Civil War underpinned the moral vision of these popular novels. A new military-like value system, with courage (not kindness or love) as its central value, originated in Gaidar’s books and moulded several generations of Soviet children.     

Knowing the social world through literature: Sociological reflections on Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The general thesis of this contribution is that 'literature' - which I very loosely define as any kind of imaginative and stylistically expressive presentation of experience through written language, typically with a narrative structure - offers a way of knowing the social world equal in cognitive value to the more scientific discourse of sociology. Just as scientific accounts of social life are not a priori superior to laypeople's accounts in terms of the claim to knowledge of phenomena - even though they may improve on laypeople's accounts by way of techniques of observation and methods of data analysis - so literary and scientific-sociological accounts of social reality differ only in the mode of linguistically communicating knowledge, not in the claim to knowledge itself. Literature may refer to fictional entities that do not exist, but it is no less capable of imparting knowledge and less no capable of being true. I defend this thesis first by way of some general remarks on the idea of literature as a medium of sociological knowledge and then turn to what I see as an exemplary instance of sociological insight to be gained through literary writing in Robert Musil's monumental novel of 1930-1942, The Man Without Qualities . I conclude with some further comments on the methodological issues raised by invoking literature as a vehicle of sociological communication, as well as on the context of Musil's writing in Austrian culture of the early twentieth century and his relationship to other sociologically significant writers of the modernist period.     

Social Work and Criminal Justice

SUMMARY

We shall begin with the principal, and complicated, conclusion: Regrettably, the social work profession has largely abandoned the criminal justice field. That is not to say that social workers are not employed in criminal justice settings. Certainly they are. Significant numbers of social workers earn their living as probation and parole officers, caseworkers in public defender offices, counselors in correctional institutions and halfway houses, and so on. As a profession, however, social work no longer has a major presence in the criminal justice field (Gibelman and Schervish, 1993). Relatively few social workers embark on their professional education with the aim of employment in the criminal justice field. Virtually no courses in social work education programs focus explicitly or comprehensively on criminal justice (Knox and Roberts, 2002; McNeece and Roberts, 1997). Workshops offered at professional conferences or continuing education seminars rarely focus on criminal justice issues per se. And, relatively little serious scholarship on criminal justice issues is authored by social workers.

Interestingly, this has not always been the state of affairs. Earlier in the profession's history, social workers were much more visible and vocal participants in dialogue, debate, research, and practice related to criminal justice. Ideally-in light of social work's unique perspectives on practice and social problems, and the profession's noble value base-the profession will reclaim its preoccupation with criminal justice. As Sarri (2001) concludes with respect to social workers' involvement in the juvenile justice system in particular:

Thirty years ago, social workers were in leadership positions in juvenile justice in the majority of states. In the 1980s, a gradual decline began in agencies and in social work education for practice in juvenile justice. Some have suggested that the decline was at least partially due to professional resistance to working in coercive settings with involuntary clients. However, given the millions of people now caught up in the criminal justice system who are not receiving the social services they desperately need, it is a priority that social work return to a more central role in criminal justice. (p. 453)     

Spirituality-Based Social Work Values for Empowering Human Service Organizations

Abstract

This paper is based on three premises: (1) Spirituality is seen as an asset from which the client system draws its innate strengths to empower itself, (2) Just as it is important for social work clients to build on individual spiritual strengths to overcome personal challenges, it is equally crucial for human service organizations to implement spirituality-based professional values in organizational contexts, and (3) Spirituality issues need to be examined from the perspective of macro social work education. Based on these premises, the goal of this paper is to construct a conceptual framework that links spirituality-based social work values to empowerment strategies that can be employed in macro social work practice. Adding to the existing dimensions of social work knowledge relating to spirituality, this paper examines spirituality as empowerment issues. Also, the author explores spirituality-centered social work skills, focusing on organizational management and leadership skills.     

Materials relating to East European Jewish history and culture in the archives of the former Soviet Union

The Kiev Institute of Jewish (from the early 1930s “Proletarian”) Culture (Institut Evreiskoi Proletarskoi Kul'tury, IEPK), based at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAS), was one of two such organisations in the inter-war period. This article discusses the fate of its archive, a rich source that included material from Leningrad and elsewhere, in the wake of two interventions; firstly, its sudden closure in 1936 by the Soviet authorities and, secondly, the Nazi occupation of Kiev in the Second World War. As a consequence, the archive was scattered to the winds, ending up in two continents.     

The ‘Old New Russian Town’: Modernization and Architectural Preservation in Russia’s Historic North West, 1961–1982

Abstract

The emergence of a Soviet preservationist movement, which gained institutional coherence in the mid-1960s, appears to stand at odds with the ideas of rationalization and standardization that informed the Khrushchev-era urban development programme. Yet, as I argue in this article, these two strands of post-Stalin era Soviet culture were not as antagonistic as they may first appear. In Khrushchev’s Russia, the preservation of architectural heritage was rationalized as a means of strengthening the foundations of Soviet society by rooting it in the national past. Rather than detracting from the goal of building communism, cultural heritage was made an integral part of that process, a focus of national pride and source of social solidarity.     

Private and Confidential? Handling Personal Information in the Social and Health Services

Abstract

The present article examines the strengths of small group teaching within the context of the professional and ethical requirements of social work education. It outlines some of the strategies adopted to ensure that reliance on this mode of educational delivery contributes to the excellence of practice knowledge and teaching standards to which universities commit and which professional associations and clients expect. Small group teaching continues to be perceived as an integral component in the preparation for professional social work practice and has important functions in the mentoring and socialisation of beginning practitioners. It would be valuable, in the light of developments in technology-assisted educational modes of delivery, to further research the relative impact of face-to-face teaching and its alternatives, given contemporary pressures upon both tertiary institutions and social work students.     

Homology and isomorphism: Bourdieu in conversation with New Institutionalism

Bourdieusian Field Theory (BFT) provided decisive inspiration for the early conceptual formulation of New Institutionalism (NI). This paper attempts to reinvigorate the stalled intellectual dialogue between NI and BFT by comparing NI's concept of isomorphism with BFT's notion of homology. I argue that Bourdieu's understanding of domination‐oriented social action, transposable habitus, and a non‐linear causality, embodied in his neglected concept of homology, provides an alternative theorization of field‐level convergence to New Institutionalism's central idea of institutional isomorphism. To showcase how BFT can be useful for organizational research, I postulate a habitus‐informed and field‐conditioned theory of transference to enrich NI's spin‐off thesis of ‘diffusion’. I propose that while NI can benefit from BFT's potential of bringing social structure back into organizational research, BFT can enrich its social analysis by borrowing from NI's elaboration of the symbolic system of organizations.     

Managing Meaning: the constitutive contradictions of institutional culture

Abstract

This essay seeks to defamiliarise the currently dominant sense of institutional culture in South Africa. It does so first by examining the history of the emergence of the term in U.S. business studies in the late 1970s, and second, its translation/transposition into higher educational discourse in the 1980s. A third section examines the developing scepticism around the term in the 1990s, and the essay as a whole argues that the idea of institutional culture is based on a constitutive contradiction between instrumental and constitutive understandings of social process. The essay frames the debate around the ways in which the creation of new vocabulary responds either openly or in concealed ways to larger social trends and tensions, and notes the ways in which the current emphasis on institutional culture in South Africa curiously works to marginalise the dominant elements in the neo-liberal transformation of higher education.     

The Representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Press, 1941–1945

Abstract

The article presents the first in-depth examination of the representation of the Holocaust in the Soviet press during the period of its perpetration, 1941–1945. The article illustrates that alongside growing anti-Semitism, both among the population and the regime, Soviet journalists, primarily Il'ya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman, reported on the suffering and murder of European Jewry. The article examines the Soviet presentation of Nazi racial theory and compares it to the representation of Nazi racial theory in the American and British press during the war. The article looks at the reasons behind Soviet press coverage of the Holocaust, such as the use of atrocities to motivate the people to fight. It also examines the way in which the Soviet press used the Nazi persecution of the Jewish population as a means of distinguishing the fascist and socialist systems and highlighting the equality of all peoples, which it claimed existed in the Soviet Union. The article examines the Soviet representation of the behaviour of the Jews under occupation, focusing on the three main attributes — resistance, dignity and the brotherhood of the peoples. In general, the article strives to illustrate that the Soviet press reported on the Holocaust during the war and recognized the racial nature of the Nazi persecution and extermination of European Jewry.     

Between the Ethos of Science and the Ethos of Ideology

Abstract

This paper attempts to explain the continuous friction between Marxist sociology and Marxist ideology in terms of the premises of the theory of scientific communism, which accords to proletarian ideology the status of scientific truth. The successive stages of the evolution of Soviet sociology are related to the parallel development of views on the scientific ethos. The notion of the “ethos of ideology” is introduced and applied to the analysis of the ideological turmoil Soviet sociology underwent in the course of its establishment as an academic discipline. “Value tolerance” is advocated as an alternative to the “value-partisan” and “value-neutral” orientations in social science.     

Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl: Politics,Propaganda and the Personal

Abstract

The circumstances that led Frank Capra to view Leni Riefenstahl's notorious documentary of the 1934 Nuremberg rallies, Triumph of the Will, is well-known. What is less known is the extent to which the themes inherent in Capra's filmmaking through the 1930s, and Riefenstahl's own interest in ideas of national identity, social commentary and romanticism in her fictional and documentary films, mapped out a set of cinematic coincidences between the two little discussed in the body of literature devoted to these directors. This article lays out a number of those coincidences and, in the process, compares the theoretical strain of political romanticism that winds its way through Capra and Riefenstahl's work. The iconic and symbolic imagery in their films suggests interesting and important comparative aspects to their canon, but also that a fascination in political romanticism led them to differing conclusions about the impact and threat of media and propaganda forces lined up in alliance with totalitarian powers during the 1930s and '40s.     

Integration through Distinction: German‐Jewish Immigrants,the Legal Profession and Patterns of Bourgeois Culture in British‐ruled Jewish Palestine1

Abstract This article examines the encounter of the German Jewish immigrants with the crystallizing of local Jewish community in British‐ruled Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that their accepted image as cultural aliens, based on their allegedly incompatible European‐like bourgeois life‐style, was propagated by both parties in this encounter, causing their marginalization and at the same time serving them as an important socio‐cultural resource. Focusing on the field of the legal profession, it analyses the 1930's and the already emerging and highly‐accepted patterns of a local middle‐class civic culture (despite its rejection by the political discourse), which facilitated the advancement of an elite group of German‐born lawyers in this field.     

Systemic Barriers to the Employment of Social Workers in Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Agencies

Abstract

Literature suggests a low number of social workers employed in the field of alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment. This study shows that social workers with undergraduate degrees (BSWs) have higher rates of employment in AOD than bachelor's degree holders from other disciplines. Master's level social workers (MSWs), however, have a much lower involvement than their counterparts with counseling degrees. Six factors are inferred to partially explain MSWs' low involvement in the field: (1) low education requirements; (2) low pay; (3) absence of “social worker” positions; (4) competition among different disciplines; (5) lack of MSW interns; and (6) state certification requirement. Suggestions to increase the employment of social workers in the AOD field are offered.     

Complicating Patriotism in the Elementary Grades: An Examination of Rugg and Krueger's Overlooked Textbooks

In the late 1930s several prominent self-described patriotic groups attacked social studies pioneer Harold Rugg as “un-American.” The largest instance of textbook censorship in American history unfolded. Yet little attention was given (and continues to be given by scholars) to Rugg's elementary textbooks that he wrote with Louise Krueger. This article examines Rugg and Krueger's complete “Elementary Series” in light of the un-American criticisms levied at Rugg. It documents how, despite critics’ claims, the books were immediately celebratory of the United States and its people, teaching a traditional patriotism that casts the nation as the supreme level of social analysis through an unquestioning, best-story approach. Furthermore, it shows how the books lack Rugg's justice-oriented philosophy of the “American Problem.” The article concludes by charging elementary social studies teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to consider critical questions related to the teaching of patriotism in the elementary grades.