Eternal work place change: Chaplains' response

A detailed chronology of a unique response to organizational change is explored and discussed through the example of the Chaplaincy Staff Support Service at Hamilton Health Sciences. Highlighted are the corporate and staff benefits of using chaplains' skills, training and existing roles in hospital life. A summary of the specific methodologies are provided to clarify the theoretical discussion. It is concluded that this is a fiscally efficient means of supporting staff to live out the highest organizational principles in difficult times.     

Women's work, cohort change, and health

Rapid changes in women's labor force participation, access to good jobs, and changing work-family pressures have altered the landscape of work and family life. We use logit negative binomial hurdle models to examine whether these countervailing trends have affected the physical health of women across four birth cohorts. Longitudinal data are used to compare successive cohorts of U.S. women when they are between the ages 44 and 50. While the health of women overall did not change across cohorts, we find an increase in health problems among employed women, explained by increases in the ability of women with physical limitations to become and remain employed. Health problems among housewives decline across cohorts, resulting in better health among housewives than among employed women in the most recent cohort. These findings provide further evidence of the importance of selection processes in understanding health effects of roles, and they highlight the need for greater attention to the health effects of unpaid work.     

Supervisors in ergonomic change of meat cutting work

Being a supervisor is an important and lonely occupation. The aim of this study was to identify barriers and opportunities in working conditions for supervisors, being facilitators and implementers of change for meat cutters. Nine supervisors of meat cutters in one large company were interviewed. The semi-structured interviews covered their roles as supervisors, performance of the change process and their own working conditions. Notes were taken and structured in themes. Similarities, differences, plus and minus were identified. There was a nuanced view on the change processes and their effects. The change processes and the decisions were anchored in a democratic process with groups of employees and the union. All were clear on what demands the company had on them. They were secure in a functioning network of peers and their immediate superior. On their own education, most were as a whole satisfied, but in need of more training and talked of lifelong learning. They considered their work demanding and lonely, with a need both to be manager and leader. A shared leadership could mean doing a better job. There is a need for education and training as a manager and leader as well as the opportunity to discuss with peers.     

Survival and change: Social work with angry men

Abstract

This paper discusses the risk elements in encounters with six angry male clients of a social services neighbourhood team. Their preoccupation with basic survival needs produced an identification of the worker with an elusive “stolen object”; this leads to a discussion of how we also felt we had become identified with an image of persecuting parent, rooted in their childhood experience. The key notion of our “struggle” with them is linked to that of “boundary-setting” and the therapeutic value of the characteristic escalation of client/worker conflict is examined. The worker's survival is seen as a confirmation of the client's personal integrity. The process of disengagement is then analysed with particular attention to the material transactions between client and worker that served to mark the end of the engagement. We acknowledge the minimalist nature of our strategy with these men, and attempt to examine outcomes.     

Assessing readiness to work from a stages of change perspective: implications for return to work

The Lam Assessment on Stages of Employment Readiness (LASER) was developed to assess welfare recipients' employment readiness. The LASER consists of 14 items corresponding to Prochaska's stages of change model (Prochaska, DiClemente and Norcross, 1992). A sample of 149 welfare recipients from a work training program participated in the study. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) supported the three factors structure corresponding to Prochaska's Pre-Contemplation, Contemplation, and Action stages. A cluster analysis classified the sample into three groups according to their LASER scores. A six months follow-up on employment outcomes showed that those who were in Pre-contemplation stage had the poorest employment outcome (25%), those who were in the Action stage had the best outcome (56%) and those in the Contemplation stage were in between (38%). Implications for work rehabilitation and treatment matching were discussed.     

Family roles and work values: Processes of selection and change

This study focuses on whether marriage and parenthood influence work values after taking into account the influence of work values on family formation. In a recent panel of young adults (N= 709), stronger extrinsic and weaker intrinsic work values during adolescence predicted marriage and parenthood 9 years out of high school. Controlling these relationships, wives, but not husbands, came to attach less importance to extrinsic rewards, and both husbands and wives attached less importance to intrinsic rewards, compared to single men and women. Fathers came to place greater importance on extrinsic rewards than men who had not become parents. The effect of motherhood on extrinsic values depended upon marital status, with positive effects only evident among single mothers. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of work‐family relationships and understanding the meaning of contemporary family roles, especially motherhood and fatherhood.     

Role enactment: A social work method for inducing behavior change

Conclusion This paper has gathered empirical evidence in favor of a notion that our prepsychoanalytic predecessors knew intuitively: role enactment is a germinal social work means for producing behavioral change. In another paper the writer (Borenzweig, 1971) analyzes why the profession joined the exclusive psychoanalytic bandwagon and forsook its social psychological birthirght. The social workers of the social psychiatry era were concerned about issues contemporary social workers and psychiatrists are readdressing: how does the disturbed person perform pathological and socially requisite roles? How much more therapeutic leverage is obtained by encouraging the patient to enact roles in a milieu approximating the normal, in his normal milieu, or in both? The social psychiatry psychiatrists recognized their predominantly physico-psychic interest in the patient, depended on social workers for those aspects of diagnosis which entailed social functioning, and held the social worker responsible for the patient's post-discharge role performance. It is largely social work's influence upon psychiatry which concerns the latter profession with role. Recent psychiatric, diagnostic, and post-treatment evaluative instruments (Spitzer, 1963; Katz and Lyerly, 1963) incorporate the evaluation of role performance as asine qua non for psychic measurement.Social work has been the traditional ombudsman between society and its deviants. If Mead was correct when he said the psyche reflects the meaning the institutions of society have for a particular individual, then social work has always been grounded in the social psychological interstice between self and society. Role enactment, a social psychological construct, traditionally yet implicitly an almost unique social work technique for inducing behavior change, deserves to be explicitly canonized as one of social work's core behavior change techniques.     

Assessing change using psychoanalytic theory in children and families social work

ABSTRACT

This article focusses on psychoanalytic theory of change and how this can be used by Children and Families Social Workers. It firstly summarises change theory from a psychoanalytic perspective and provides a theoretical overview. The article then discusses the author’s experience of working with a family where domestic abuse and substance abuse were the presenting issues and where assessment work focussed on the child’s father. The article seeks to demonstrate how psychoanalytic theories of change can be utilised by Social Workers to understand and affect change when working with complex family dynamics.     

Canadian part-time work into the Millennium: On the cusp of change

This paper examines the general evolution of part-time work in the Canadian context and the related scholarship on insecure employment. We analyse the major factors implicated in the expansion of part-time employment and speculate on the further evolution of this form of peripheral employment and its likely implications in particular for women, youth, and older workers. Finally, we discuss the challenge to unions and the state in addressing the question of workers' insecurity and marginalized work. Cet article examine l'evolution generale du travail a temps partiel et ce, dans un contexte canadien, ainsi que les etudes et la recherche sous-jacentes sur l'incertitude marquant le travail. Nous analyserons les pricipaux facteurs accompagnant la croissance du travail a temps partiel et reflechirons sur l'evolution a long terme de cette forme de travail peripherique et ses ramifications aupres des femmes, de la jeunesse et des travailleurs du troisieme age. En dernier lieu, nous aborderons les defis que doivent relever les syndicats et determinerons ou nous en sommes concernant l'insecurite des travailleurs et la precarite du travail.     

Disabled people's access to social work education--ways and means of promoting environmental change

Disabled people are under-represented among social workers. It is argued that this results in lack of diversity in the workforce and in reduced opportunities to make service delivery more inclusive. An audit tool is outlined which can be used to identify barriers and strengths at DipSW programme, university site, agency site and individual student level to disabled people entering social work education. Completed audits could then form the basis of DipSW Programme Development Plans or curriculum plans for individual students, as required. Review mechanisms at the different levels would help ensure that attention to planning and action does not get lost. Assessment issues and aspects of the practice teacher/student/tutor relationships are also discussed. Disability equality training is seen as a central component of audit and provision. The need for proactive, not reactive, policies is made clear.     

Service users’ involvement in social work education: focus on social change projects

ABSTRACT

This article presents and analyzes four projects focusing on diverse forms of service users’ involvement in social work training and research in different countries (Israel, Italy, Slovenia and UK). It highlights the value of service user involvement (SUI) to specific social change objectives and to social work education. The conceptual framework focused on the Standpoint Theory, while methodologically participatory action research was applied, and evaluation measures were developed. Key findings, facilitators and limitations to the involvement, students’ views of it and similarities and differences among the four projects are outlined. The challenges embedded in introducing and sustaining social change objectives in a co-production framework within social work education are identified, alongside the added value of meeting them. The differentiated impact the projects had on students is highlighted as well as their significance for health and social care providers were relevant. It is encouraging that in each project SUI was positively valued. The projects indicate the wide range of SUI in the content and format of social work education, as well as its applicability cross-culturally to a range of key issues pertaining to both training and research in social work.