Joining up children's services: safeguarding children in multi‐disciplinary teams

In this article we reflect on the complexity and the contested nature of the roles of multi‐disciplinary teams working with children. This is an increasingly important issue in the current UK child welfare policy environment. The article uses the theories of Etienne Wenger to understand data gathered from five multi‐disciplinary teams working with children. We explore key issues relating to location; information sharing; models of understanding; and professional identities. We hope to demonstrate that the teams addressed tensions creatively through their engagement with diversity while at the same time developing common team values. We argue that effective strategies for making multi‐disciplinary teams work will combine inter‐agency issues with internal team‐specific aspects. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Instrumental versus bounded rationality: a comparison of Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association

The professional team sports industry is characterized by an abundance of information, defined objectives, and clear consequences. Given these characteristics, researchers have generally assumed that economic actors follow the dictates of instrumental rationality. The purpose of this research is to present evidence that in professional baseball, where player statistics have historically been tabulated and utilized, information is employed efficiently. However, economic agents in professional basketball, where player statistics are less intuitive and not historically tabulated, fail to process information in a fashion consistent with the precepts of instrumental rationality.     

TEAM RACIAL COMPOSITION AND SPORTS ATTENDANCE

The premise that the racial composition of professional sports teams is a significant factor in explaining paid attendance variability is tested in this article. A model of the general determinants of sports attendance, including the percentage of black players on each team, is developed and applied to longitudinal samples of National Basketball Association teams from 1969 to 1983. This pooled cross-sectional panel model is analyzed within a generalized least-squares framework. While the empirical results are generally consistent with previous estimates for spectator attendance models, team racial composition has no discernible impact upon the level of attendance. Several interaction hypotheses are considered, but when these more complex propositions are evaluated, player race still has no noticeable effect upon attendance. Some implications of these results for race relations and for the structure of salary determination within professional basketball are discussed.     

Sensing the Bike: Creating a Collaborative Understanding of a Multi‐Sensorial Experience in MotoGP Racing

This article concerns the analysis of work interaction of a motorcycle racing team during pre‐season tests, drawing on ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis to explicate the ways in which the manager and the driver collaborate, through everyday gestures and language, to create a shared understanding of the bike's mechanical issues and disambiguate the driver's accounts of the bike's performance. We report on a set of video‐recorded encounters between the manger and the driver, examining how the multi‐sensorial experience of the driver is recollected and understood by team members, while overcoming interactional constraints imposed by the unique professional setting.     

Serious Leisure in the Home: Professional Quilters Negotiate Family Space

Although quilting has become more popular in the USA since its re‐emergence in 1976, with 15 per cent of households participating at the time of writing, quilting is still thought by many to be a frivolous, quaint or silly feminized activity. Those who quilt professionally, or for profit have difficulty legitimating their efforts as ‘real work’. Our focus is on one aspect of the quilting industry — professional quilters — and their negotiation of legitimacy for quilting work that is done in the home. We conduct secondary qualitative data analysis of 147 interviews of mostly women professional quilters from the Quilters' Save Our Stories Oral History Project. Professional quilters have more legitimacy and more claim to home‐based resources such as time and space than do amateur quilters but their work is still devalued as a gendered activity in the home. Despite achieving objective indicators of professional success (e.g., money, prizes and international recognition), professional quilters still have difficulty defending their home‐based employment activities and acquiring resources to carry it out.     

Social and family patterns on the colonial Louisiana frontier

As the pendulum of historical scholarship swings toward the close of another century, momentum has propelled it toward the re‐establishment of a traditional relationship severed by professional historians at the turn of the last century. History and genealogy were inseparable until early 20th‐century humanists elevated the serious pursuit of history from the armchair to the university chair. In the generations since, a chasm of disdain has separated “real” history from so‐called family history in which untrained amateurs dabble with abandon.

Yet the family is the heart of society. To study a people's history without understanding the family structure from which it evolved is to confront a robot and pretend that one feels a pulse. Tardily, professional history is shifting from the “subjects' of broad national interest” to a study of society in microcosm, that is, the family, at the same time that academically oriented genealogists are upgrading their standards to prove that family history can be a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry.

This reunion of history and genealogy has produced outstanding re‐evaluations of society; but in the United States the emphasis to date has been on Anglo‐American culture. This article provides pioneer exploration of the nation's Latin heritage and finds significant differences in patterns of migration and settlement, marriage and morality. Such a study of French and Spanish borderlands in America upsets traditional, stereotyped conceptions of mobility, fertility, and family structure in colonial America.     

Gendering the Eye of the Norm: Exploring Gendered Concertive Control Processes in Two Self‐Managing Teams

This article is the result of an ethnographic research project exploring the workplace interactions of two self‐managed teams of recruitment consultants. I use data from participant observation and recorded interviews to show the gendered nature of what Barker terms concertive control: the social processes by which team members regulate each others' conduct in line with negotiated team values. My analysis examines how team members negotiate core team values, translate these into specific actions and regulate these actions through concertive control interactions. I then set out three ways in which gender acts as a resource for these concertive control processes. These are: team members' assumptions about men's and women's relative skills and capacities, the ‘tough’ masculinity of the haulage industry in which one of the teams operates and the regulation of performances of heterosexuality during customer interactions. Building on research by others, I show gender to be not only embedded in the values and managerial style associated with teamwork but also integrated into the collaborative process of team‐working itself. I emphasize that social categories like gender become resources in the regulation of conduct at work and can reify hierarchies even in so‐called participative practices like self‐managed teamwork.     

And I Still Love Them: On Touching Loss

In this article, the author performs a re‐membering practice that incorporates a relational materialist theory. It traces the disturbances that follow in the wake of three deaths in her family. Written in an autoethnographic voice, the article is a polyphonic composition of the narrative therapy approach of re‐membering entangled with the spacetimematter of silence, speaking, sitting, staying, presence, absence, loss of momentum, dreams, trees, books, cardiac pace‐makers, writing, breath, ashes, murmuring, suffering. Thus, the dispersed agencies of bodies, human and non‐human, reinvigorate a linguistic practice and the author's personal and professional life.     

Promoting Children's Welfare by Inter‐professional Practice and Learning in Social Work and Primary Care

Social work in the United Kingdom is an activity that benefits from, and often requires, co‐operation between different staff and across different professions. How this is to be achieved has been a central dilemma for practice and policy for many years. Primary care health services often play a key role. New policy and practice developments are designed to promote inter‐professional working with children, where research has shown significant problems in the community‐based health care of looked after children, children leaving care, and children at serious risk. There is, however, little evidence from research that supports current developments in inter‐professional practice; analysis of the particular nature of the inter‐professional problems is lacking, as are therefore the relevant inter‐professional solutions. A framework for better analysis, linked to developments in practice‐based research, one that would yield significant improvements for children's welfare, is presented here.     

User‐oriented mental health reform in Sweden: featuring ‘professional friendship’

In developing new forms for society‐based support for mental health service users, authorities implemented a service in Sweden, called Personligt ombud (PO), with the assignment to support service users exercising their rights. The aim of this article is to describe what service users find to be significant features of their working relationships with their PO. Using a phenomenological approach, 23 users were interviewed sharing their experiences of their PO. The results show that service users describe their relationships with the PO as a ‘professional friendship’. The friendship‐like feature refers to reciprocity in sharing life experiences and forming a trustful relationship in which professional assistance can be offered, promoting well‐being and recovery. Conclusions are that the PO provides a service that calls for re‐interpretation of professional and user roles, where both give and receive.     

Opting Back In: The Influence of Time at Home on Professional Women's Career Redirection after Opting Out

Limited research on professional women's labour force re‐entry after a career break (so‐called ‘opting out’) finds that women redirect away from former careers. Little is known about why this occurs. Our study, based on in‐depth interviews with 54 at‐home mothers, extends prior research to address this question. We find that among women who intended to return to work (who constitute the majority), most planned to pursue alternative careers, typically in traditionally female‐dominated professions or were uncertain about their career direction; few planned to return to their former employers. The reasons for this redirection were women's negative experiences in family inflexible occupations, skill depreciation and perceived age discrimination. Equally or more important, however, was their adaptation to new constraints and opportunities at home (such as increased involvement in mothering and community work), which engendered an aspirational shift towards new, care‐oriented professions that were lower paid and had lower status. We discuss the policy implications of these findings.     

Sexual Abuse,Professional Boundaries,and the Rural World

ABSTRACT

Blurred boundaries and confused roles are underlying characteristics of sexual abuse in incestuous families and family-like systems. When the professionals responding to sexual abuse disclosures exhibit a parallel process of role confusion, inadequate communication, secrecy and denial, the victims and their families are further traumatized. The nature of rural communities has attributes that may contribute to these factors. Creating an effective multidisciplinary professional team, with a protocol that clearly defines roles and ensures that ongoing team meetings occur to keep communication open and boundaries clear, is essential to prevent incestuous families and others from being further victimized by the professional system.     

Report on the implementation and evaluation of an interprofessional learning programme for inter‐agency child protection teams

Effective collaborative working between the different professions and agencies working to safeguard children is essential. Lack of knowledge of others' roles, perceived differences in status and expertise, and negative stereotypes are examples of why this can be difficult to achieve. A facilitated interprofessional learning (IPL) programme was implemented to assess if such an intervention could overcome some of the barriers to effective interprofessional and inter‐agency team working. Six teams based in primary and secondary care trusts took part with participants from health, education, police and social services. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from individual participants using a pre‐validated team climate inventory and reflective statements. Findings from this study demonstrate statistically significant changes in five out of six categories in the inventory. Reflective statements suggested that overall the programme offered a positive learning experience at both an individual and team level. The importance of outside facilitation to maintain the team's momentum was acknowledged, as was the difficulty of maintaining a good level of activity once the programme had ended. Nevertheless, the IPL programme provided a timely opportunity to reflect upon the interprofessional and inter‐agency team working needed within Children's Trusts and the implications for staff involved with regard to skills development. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The team approach: Developing an experiential knowledge base for the treatment of the pathological gambler

It is not surprising that developing professional competence in treating the pathological gambler is a major problem today, given the scarcity of treatment programs for pathological gambling. This paper explores a learning model which weaves together the experiential knowledge of the recovering pathological gambler with the skills of professional mental health clinicians. An example of this model is the team approach originated at the Johns Hopkins Compulsive Gambling Counseling Center in 1979 and which was evolved into an interdisciplinary treatment model at Taylor Manor Hospital. An examination of this evolving treatment approach is analyzed, reviewed and updated with a focus first on the use of the team approach as a paradigm for developing an experiential knowledge base in the treatment of selected disorders, and second, its use as a model for newly developing treatment programs.     

IN‐SEASON HEAD‐COACH DISMISSALS AND THE PERFORMANCE OF PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL TEAMS

This paper studies the causes and consequences of in‐season changes of the head‐coach of association football teams. We exploit data from the highest level of Dutch professional football during 14 successive seasons. An in‐season change of the head‐coach depends on recent match results and the difference between actual results and expectations as measured using bookmaker data. We find that, after the head‐coach has been replaced, teams perform better than before. However, the performance is also better than before for a control group of coach replacements that did not occur. From this we conclude that replacement of head‐coaches does not improve team performance. (JEL J44, L83)     

The uses of stance in media production: A study in embodied sociolinguistics

While many conversation analysts and scholars in related fields have used video recordings to study interaction, this study is one of a small but growing number that investigates video recordings of the joint activities of media professionals working with, and on, video. It examines practices of media production that are, in their involvement with the visual and verbal qualities of video, both beyond talk and deeply shaped by talk. The article draws upon video recordings of the making of a feature‐length documentary. In particular, it analyses a complex course of action where an editing team are reviewing their interview of the subject of the documentary, their footage being intercut with existing reality TV footage of that same interviewee. The central contributions that the article makes are, firstly, to the sociolinguistics of mediatisation, through the identification of the workplace concerns of the members of the editing team; secondly, showing how editing is accomplished, moment by moment, through the use of particular forms of embodied action; and, finally, how the media themselves feature in the ordering of action. While this is professional work, it sheds light on the video‐mediated practices in contemporary culture, especially those found in social media where video makers carefully consider their editing of the perspective toward themselves and others.     

Toward the ideal professional master's degree program

This report summarizes the building blocks, process and working documents used by volunteer members of the integrative team assigned to develop a model curriculum for a professional master's degree program in public relations/communications management during the July, 1998 Summer Conference sponsored by the National Communication Association.Using a variety of previous studies, the extensive academic and professional experience of the team members, exercises in nominal group technique and creative brainstorming, the team put forth its recommendations for the “ideal” graduate program.     

Professionalization,Gender and Female‐dominated Professions: Dental Hygiene in Ontario*

Cet article explore L'influence des rapports sociaux entre les sexes et du féminisme sur les professions à majorité féminine au moyen d'une étude de cas en hygiène dentaire en Ontario. Le statut professionnel à part entière a échappéà plusieurs de ces professions, y compris L'hygiène dentaire. Historiquement, cette dernière était définie comme un travail pour les femmes, àêtre exécuté sous la stricte surveillance des dentistes hommes. Récemment, L'hygiène dentaire a poursuivi un projet de reconnaissance professionnelle et lutté pour une plus grande indépendance à L'endroit de la dentisterie. Les idées issues des rapports sociaux entre les sexes et particulièrement du féminisme y ont occupé une place centrale. This paper explores the influence of gender and feminism on the professional projects of female‐dominated professions, through a case study of dental hygiene in Ontario. Full professional status has eluded many female‐dominated professions, including dental hygiene. Historically, dental hygiene was defined as work for women, to be performed strictly under the control of male dentists. In recent years, dental hygiene has pursued a professional project and struggled for greater independence from dentistry. Ideas about gender and, particularly, feminism have been central to their professional project.