Eds T. Brandsen,T. Steen and B. Vershuere: Co-production and Co-creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henry Lefebvre

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a comparative analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R. James, both key contributors to the emergence of a humanist form of Marxism in the twentieth century. Independently of each other, both writers, I show, developed a mode of critique which emphasised capitalism’s dehumanizing social effects, and which rejected a merely instrumental or utilitarian political response. Consequently, both writers placed critical emphasis on those longings and demands made evident in the insurgent politics of everyday life and popular culture; in what both conceptualised as a search for ‘happiness‘. But at the same time, the comparison is important because it makes evident the extent of the divisive intellectual legacies of empire within European Marxism. Lefebvre’s work bears in itself the marks of a racialised understanding of human relations; the ’human’ of which he speaks is limited in ways that James challenged consistently.     

Generation Gap: Student Social Worker and the A.A.S.W.

INTRODUCTION

WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS AND SOCIAL WORK IN ENGLAND AND THE U.S.A. With the new wave of feminism of the mid-sixties in England and North America and a little later in Australia, where it is generally expressed through the Women's Liberation Movement or the Women's Electoral Lobby, many professional women's groups have begun to criticize what they believe is unfair discrimination against women within their professions.     

Ownership patterns and centralization: A China and U.S. comparison

The paper examines the relationships between ownership and decision-making patterns in small business organizations in China and the United States. We also consider organizational size and the culture-free/culture-bound argument. The U.S. data (a sample of 540 enterprises) were collected by questionnaire in 1988; the Chinese data (a sample of 53 enterprises) by a converted and translated questionnaire based on the U.S. version and interviews in 1989. Findings indicate that the Chinese organizations with various forms of ownerships are more centralized than their U.S. counterparts, which is consistent with the culture-bound perspective. On the other side of the coin, findings suggest that in both China and United States, organizational centralization of decision making decreases with increasing size, although to different degree, which appears to support the culture-free argument.     

U.K. statistics on immigration: development and limitations

This article discusses the data on international migration to the UK, their limitations, and their origins. No 1 source gives a demographically satisfactory account of net migration, and different sources of data are not compatible with each other. Their present form can only be understood in the context of a reluctant acceptance, in the face of domestic political pressure, of the need to impose the same controls on the entry of Commonwealth citizens from 1962-1971 as had been imposed on the entry of aliens since 1920. Coleman asserts that UK migration statistics suffer 1 major omission and several systematic deficiencies. The omission is the absence of any information, either from the International Passenger Survey (IPS) or from the Home Office, on gross or net migration flows to the UK from the Republic of Ireland. Neither the IPS nor the Home Office data provide a very satisfactory form of measurement of other migration streams. Neither has much time depth, the former not existing before 1963, the latter being affected by changes in rules and procedures. As a voluntary sample with only relatively few interviews per year on intended migrants, the IPS can only provide a crude overall estimate of the general demographic import of migration flows, incapable for statistical reasons of any refined sub-division or analysis, and prove both to error and bias. The Home Office statistics do not treat immigration in a demographically useful way. They measure flows only in 1 direction, provide no demographic or socioeconomic characteristics on those accepted for settlement, and are not compatible with the IPS in most ways. For political reasons, no action to resolve the Irish anomaly is likely, especially when the trend is for less, not more, control and counting on the entry of European Community citizens.     

Chinese adoption: practices and challenges.

The majority of children in China who are the subject of protective services are either abandoned or disabled. Recent reform efforts in China's child welfare practices have focused on the importance of providing safe, permanent families for children in lieu of long-term institutional care. Although challenges still exist, adoption and foster care are increasingly being seen as viable alternatives for these children.     

News and political consensus: C.B.C. television and the 1983 British election

Cet essai propose une analyse structurelle des elections britanniques de 1983 dans les téléjournaux anglophones de Radio-Canada. Nous voulons circonscrire la relation entre les éléments présents et exclus du discours. Ceci, de trois façons: par l'interprétation de sondages d'opinion, par la representation des partis politiques, et par le traitement de la chose économique dans la compagne électorale. Le discours opère idéologiquement de façon à recréer le consensus autour du leader conservateur, Margaret Thatcher, et ignore comment l'émergence d'un troisième parti important incarnè la fragmentation du spectre politique. C'est ainsi que la perspective du consensus perd sa légitimité.
This paper provides a structural analysis of English-language CBC television coverage of the 1983 British election. It focuses on the relationship between the significant presences and absences in the discourse in three ways: the interpretation of the opinion polls, the representation of the political parties, and the assessment of the economic issues in the campaign. It argues that the discourse functioned ideologically to re-consensualise the political situation around the Conservatives and their leader, Margaret Thatcher. In this respect, it overlooked the ways in which the emergence of a major third party pointed to the fragmentation of the political spectrum, and thereby put into question the legitimacy of such a consensual perspective.