The Myth of Global Social Work: Double Standards and the Local-Global Divide

The push towards “global standards” in social work is part of a movement to generate uniformity, quality control, and benchmarking for professional education programs. It acts as a powerful vestige of modern institutions and professional associations to prescribe through processes of standardization, formalization, and technical specificity. In social work “global standards” attempt to create a fixed set of minimal requirements to which all professional programs should adhere. Standards are viewed along two dimensions: (i) as a necessity due to the changes and scale of complexity in social work; and (ii) as a vehicle for importing dominant forms of knowledge, values, and skills. Those parties who enthusiastically underwrite attempts to construct “global standards” in fact create a powerful network of allies that undermine local or cultural differences and fail to reconcile them. Global standards in social work undercut indigenous skills and values and negate the expertise of professional judgement. They constitute an unnecessary and politically motivated intrusion in the world of social workers. Ultimately, standards such as these are an illegitimate, impersonal, and voluntary means of regulation. As such, global standards are inherently political because their construction and application formally regulates the local practices in which they become embedded. Over time, they modify the position of social work practitioners and alter relations of accountability to the standards themselves.     

The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn: Towards a Discourse on the Impact of Art’s Use of Social Forms Upon the Social

The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, it looks at art in which an artist undertakes another person’s professional work. Considering the effects of this on those whose practices are appropriated, I propose a consultative approach, involving ethnographic and empathetic modes of address. Consequently, this article does not present an answer to the question it poses, “how do professionals in the social realm see art’s appropriations of their practices?” but rather, a framework for approaching that.     

Preservation of self in the nursing home: Contradictory practices within two models of care

Researchers have identified several aspects of nursing home care that interfere with residents' preservation of self. This paper examines how different models of care shape residents' opportunities for preserving a sense of self, adult identity, and agency. Using ethnographic data, I analyze staff practices in two facilities that reflect the contrast between the home and hospital models of long-term care. Previous research on long-term care suggests that an informal, “home-like” approach to care creates more opportunities for residents to preserve a sense of self-identity, whereas a formal, “institutional” approach fosters depersonalizing practices that interfere with residents' psychosocial well-being. My research suggests, however, that both approaches can have contradictory effects on residents' preservation of self. I analyzed patterns of objectification and infantilization that emerged in the social interactions between residents and staff members, as well as practices that mitigated these patterns. This study highlights how a larger culture of ageism and stigma surrounding dependency can become embedded in micro-level practices and underscores the challenges of defining and implementing “good” care.     

Time Is of the Essence: An Analytic Autoethnography of Family,Work, and Serious Leisure

While leisure is often represented in public discourse as a realm of freedom and self‐actualization, for most adults the pursuit of serious leisure activities involves negotiating familial and professional constraints. Based on the author's autoethnographic experiences with sport skydiving, this article examines the familial and professional constraints that he has experienced, as well as the challenges to recreational skydivers posed by current trends in the sport. The author describes various only partly successful strategies he has used to manage the tensions between his skydiving pursuits, work, and family. Proposing his analysis as an example of “analytic autoethnography” the author concludes by considering the implications of his research for better understanding serious leisure pursuits more generally, as well as for answering the personal question, should I continue to jump out of planes?     

Colonialism,Disability, and Possible Lives: The Residential Treatment of Children Whose Parents Survived Indian Residential Schools

This article performs an institutional autoethnography of working in a residential treatment center, proposing a moral economy in which the exaltation of white nondisabled professionals is tethered to the denigration of disabled Aboriginal children. It describes how resident and staff resistance, respectively, can be taken up so as to facilitate the smooth continuity of the status quo. And it raises questions about everyday institutional practices such as physical restraints, behavior modification, and life-skills curricula, suggesting they may not do what they are intended to do and may instead wither away knowledge and skills that residents had cultivated before their “intake.”     

Postmodern Swing Dance and Secondary Adjustment: Identity as Process

In this article, the author describes activities of strategic consumption that members of a postmodern swing dance scene utilized to construct identity. He deploys Goffman's category of “contained secondary adjustment” for describing social interactions that are moments of purposeful resistance designed to usurp (while also being lodged within) organizational and/or institutional claims and constraints for identity and self. Specifically, the article describes swing dancers' presentations of unique selves, thrift store shopping, tavern socializing, and swing dancing. Swing dancers utilized these secondary adjustments to resist the dictates of corporate‐driven and mass‐mediated claims and constraints for “mainstream” consumer identities. These secondary adjustments add up to an “identity distancing,” which is the individual's and/or group's purposeful distancing and separation from other identities or groups associated with popular culture. Describing the swing dancers' secondary adjustments reaffirms the symbolic interactionist stance that identity construction is a durable social interactional process.     

Introduction: Self in South Asia

The so called western, rational, individual, autonomous, self marked by freedom, potential and choice and deemed essential for modernity has predominantly been juxtaposed with the presumed collective, static, bounded, “identity” of the “non-west” and its inhabitants. Anthropological scholarship has thus been marked by its focus on the “identity” of its subjects (drawn from a collective and shared with others) instead of a self. Nowhere has this theorisation between the self and the collective been so fraughtly interrogated as in the Anthropology of South Asia. A common place occurrence in academic, policy and everyday discussions, South Asian personhood has been comprehended only through various collective categories like gender, kinship, religion, caste, community following the Dumontian holism that there are no individuals and only caste and hierarchy in India. The discussions of self have also remained understudied in historiography inspite of being intrinsic to the Indian post-colonial public life. Recently, historians have turned to individual sensibilities and life stories while others have argued that the self is a product of history transformed in a public debate. It is important to reflect on the methodological connotations of using such person-centred self-representations – narratives, novels, biographies and memoirs – which are often deemed to be inadequate sources of anthropological and ethnographic value. Theoretically and methodologically these articles on self in South Asia distinctly depart from the existing anthropological and historical literature by bringing together at the same juncture both synchronic and diachronic accounts in conjunction with psychic and social histories. In this volume we are interested in the practices and conceptual tools behind the self than a definition. The focus here is on the ethnographic examination of the self and personal experience, of the minutae of the interactions of daily life, on the dialogical characters of the self in South Asia rather than a “South Asian” self. The idea of the self becomes particularly pertinent within the shifting contexts of economic liberalization, migration, violent conflicts, consumerism, new media and the role of transnationally affiliated groups in challenging/reifying static, orientalised and essentialising accounts of the self.     

An institutional approach to research on public procurement of innovation

The role of public procurement as a means to stimulate innovation has been increasingly emphasized during the last few years. The general argument is that, by applying intelligent demand, public agencies can stimulate private sector innovation that will eventually sustain competitive advantage in a global economy. The emphasis on public procurement used as an innovation policy instrument challenges current institutional practices and skills. The article is based on the assumption that the innovation research community could inform this policy discourse, in particular by drawing on institutional theory, but in order to fully utilize this potential, further revision of the research perspectives seen is needed. The article therefore discusses an institutional approach based on three modes: “multilevel institutional analysis”, “endogenous and exogenous institutions” and “institutions as rationalities”, arguing that such an approach would help to increase innovation research quality and policy relevance.     

Democratizing Rural Economy: Institutional Friction,Sustainable Struggle and the Cooperative Movement*

Abstract Sustainable development demands institutions manage the conflicts and struggles that inevitably arise over material and ideal interests. While current cooperative theory privileges the economic element, a political economy of cooperation emphasizes cooperatives' tentative bridging of economic and political spheres with a democratic ethos. The cooperatives' democratic political structure exists in tension with a capitalist economic structure and other sites of friction. These contradictions are: in the realm of social relations, between production and consumption; in the realm of spatial relations, between the local and the global; and in the realm of collective action, between cooperatives as both traditional as well as new social movements. Where neo‐classical economic models seek to eliminate or reduce these tensions, political economy views these tensions as functional to sustainability by creating an “institutional friction” that facilitates innovation, flexibility and long‐term adaptability. This political economy of cooperation is intended as a step toward the development of a multidimensional sociology of cooperation.     

Are You Truly a Recovering Dope Fiend? Local Interpretive Practices at a Therapeutic Community Drug Treatment Program

Previous qualitative research on treatment programs for drug addiction/alcoholism has primarily focused on those processes whereby participants are expected to construct a new sense of self according to institutional parameters. The present article builds on that research and explores how contemporary programs attempt to resolve the problem that it is almost impossible to tell if someone has engaged in this self‐construction process. Informed by five months of ethnographic fieldwork at an adult residential drug treatment facility, the article asks: under what circumstances do program members call into doubt a client's efforts to create an institutional self, and how do they express this skepticism? The article reveals that staff and clients employ a set of local interpretive practices about community and emotions to assess whether clients are constructing the institutional self of a “recovering dope fiend.” It specifically considers how they interpret a client's emotional displays to represent that client's current self under construction. That is, a client's ability to control anger appropriately or to handle anxiety demonstrates s/he is effectively “doing the program” of self‐construction.     

A Different Kind of Discipline: Social Reproduction and the Transmission of Non‐cognitive Skills at an Urban Charter School

A key component of recent school reform policies has been the authorization of public charter schools. A subset of public charter schools, often termed “no excuses” schools, have received national attention for their students’ academic success; however, scholars have recently begun to question the role of the schools’ authoritarian discipline systems in the process of social reproduction. This study examines the extent to which authoritarian discipline systems are necessary for success at “no excuses” schools, drawing upon qualitative research at a strategic site: a school that adopts many of the practices of “no excuses” schools while also pursuing a relational approach to discipline. Qualitative analysis of classroom observation and interview data finds that a relational approach to discipline cultivates non‐cognitive skills more closely aligned with the evaluative standards of middle‐class institutions, such as skills in self‐expression, self‐regulation, problem‐solving, and conflict resolution. A comparison of academic achievement data also suggests that “no excuses” schools may be able to implement relational discipline approaches without sacrificing academic success on a key predictor of future academic performance.     

“A Feeling of Absence from Old England:” The Colonial Bungalow

This article explores how the colonial bungalow provided a setting for attempting to bridge perceived distances between English home life and its corollary in colonial India. At the same time, the article suggests that the bungalow gave presence to a kind of “Indian-ness,” a social and material presence that produced anxiety in its European occupants. On the one hand, as the primary realm of English domesticity in India the bungalow provided a setting for the cultivation of habits of self-control thought necessary for comporting the self with authority. On the other hand, the material qualities of the bungalow's construction, along with the social practices it had to accommodate, continually worked against these goals, something discussed in British memoirs, travel accounts, and guides to household management written throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. What tied these two disparate discourses together was the bungalow itself, as a material artifact with distinctive qualities.     

Managing Risk in Community Care of Older People: Perspectives from the Frontline

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, Australian governments have focused on expanding community and home-based services for older people. This has led to increased levels of dependency, vulnerability, and complexity to be managed in the community. Consequently, aged care services have had to develop mechanisms for regulating and managing these increased risks, and risk management has become more central to the practices of professional workers in this field. This paper reports on some findings from a large-scale study that explores the way risk management policies have been translated into practice by community-based services in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on interviews with 18 frontline and management professionals employed in community aged care, we found that these workers were wrestling with a diverse and new range of institutional risks beyond those encountered in the actual delivery of frontline care. We found that these workers experienced “risk” in four different contexts, which often created demands for contradictory or conflicting responses. Here we examine these “contexts of risk practice”: professional workers' relationships with their clients, relationships with other service providers, the unregulated nature of the home as a work environment, and community expectations about the management of risk. Despite tensions that frequently arose, workers expressed strong professional commitments to their clients and were motivated to find positive resolutions amid competing interests. We conclude that tensions experienced by workers were embedded in the structural dimensions of institutional relationships and the systematic absence of shared understandings of “acceptable” risks in the community care of older people, rather than in the failure of professional agency.     

Special Adoption in Japan: Its Problems and Prospects

About 400 children in need in Japan are placed in a “special adoption” each year. The modest numbers are partly the result of a cultural predisposition to think of adoption in terms of family lineage, which discourages the adoption of nonrelatives or children of “bad blood.” Special adoption is also limited by concerns over the confidentiality of family registers, by a heavy reliance on institutional care, and by a narrowly defined concept of an “ideal child.” The limited professional organization of adoption services in Japan makes national reform difficult. However, some adoption agencies have made local efforts to increase placements by avoiding institutional care or assisting in maintaining confidentiality. Potential parents have also been encouraged to extend their idea of an acceptable child in trial placements, and some children have been placed with mixed couples and foreign residents.     

The “diseased” activist's body as the site of trauma: Anti-racist struggles and the postrace academy

This paper is an autoethnographic account of the “racialized activist body” in the White academy and in tandem the bio-politics and bio-ethics of its right to be an affective body or to possess its senses against the trauma of anti-racist struggles in higher education institutions. The paper argues that in the postrace university, the “activist body” birthed through trauma becomes a conduit for the pain of others enacting it as a site for the deposition and transmutation of trauma in the quest for racial and social justice. It employs Bracha Ettinger’s notion of “matrixial borderspace” to examine the interplay of social relations between of the activist body and other traumatized subjects in the provision of care as an activist. Two narratives unfold in the paper fusing the articulations of the main text with the paratext to unleash the tumultuous psyche of the activist and her journey of voicing resistance in her anti-racist struggles. In the process, the activist body emerges as a “diseased site,” overloaded with the trauma of others, yet numbed in its inability to reconnect with its own corporeality and professional identity in its interface with White governmentality. The paper asserts that anti-racist struggles reassemble the activist body, tightly welding it with exhaustion which manifests in the pervasiveness of racial battle fatigue in the ivory tower.     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

Public Accounts: Defending Contested Practices

Little attention has been paid to how actors account for controversial institutional conduct or contested practices. Relying on a content analysis of letters to the editor, I explore how actors operating in the Habermasian “public sphere” justify the contested practice of linking Native American symbols with sports teams, and suggest that in their rejection of challengers to their definitions of the situation, authors create public accounts. Consisting primarily of justifications rather than excuses, these accounts are of four types: “denial of injury,” “assertion of benefit,” “claim of authority,” and “rejection of challenge.” For those who wish to conduct comparative analyses of contested practices, these concepts may prove useful.     

School Discipline,Race, and the Discursive Construction of the “Deficient” Student

Abstract

Research has demonstrated how, in the current era of mass incarceration, the punitive arm of the state now extends beyond traditional criminal justice structures into institutions typically associated with providing care or a social good. The negative effects of this shift have disproportionately impacted marginalized populations, particularly low-income black and Latino communities. This article examines one way that this extension has manifested in the realm of public education. Based on ethnographic data from a public Grade 6–12 Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas, this article scrutinizes the program’s behavioral rules and disciplinary procedures. The analysis focuses on students’ introductory experience to the DAEP as a “strategic research site” to illuminate the program’s formal objectives, methods to achieve their institutional goals, and their intended effects on students. I find that the practices and procedures in place at the DAEP operate through racializing surveillance to constitute “disciplinary technologies” devoted to the transformation of “culturally deficient” students—a racialized and gendered classification—into docile bodies. Students are disciplined through punitive and rehabilitative methods premised on the discursive construction of “deficient” students and families.     

Coming Out of the Coffin: Life‐Self and Death‐Self in Six Feet Under

This article discusses how the dominant approach to life and death as binary structures in American society influences the social construction of the self. Through the analysis of the television series Six Feet Under, we identify two types of selves: a “life‐self” and a “death‐self.” Questioning this binary, we offer the concept of “transitory movements” to suggest instead that a “waltzing” movement between life and death endows the self with meaning and stands at the core of the self‐work of agents. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis for scholarship on the self and on the sociology of death.     

Media Framing of Body Burdens: Precautionary Consumption and the Individualization of Risk*

The accumulation of chemicals in human bodies and ecosystems represents a universal environmental and technological risk. As yet, little attention has been paid to media coverage of “body burdens,” the internal contaminant load carried by most organisms in the industrialized world. Using a sociology of risk perspective, this article analyzes the framing of chemical bioaccumulation in Canadian newspaper articles from 1986 to 2006. In later years, articles employ frames that reinforce an individualization of risk, where individuals are encouraged to avoid contaminants through “precautionary consumption” of green consumer goods. This shift in media discourse suggests that self‐protection is emerging as a key frame in the discourse of risk, one that provides a sense of individual control over chemical exposure and shifts the focus away from collective forms of protection from universal risks.