Social Workers’ Conflict of Loyalty in the Context of Social Activism: The Case of the 2011 Social Protests in Israel

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study examined the experiences of social workers who participated in the 2011 Israeli social protests. Data were collected through 1 focus group interview. The sample included 11 social workers employed in 11 social welfare departments throughout the country. Findings highlight the complexities and dilemmas experienced by social workers who protested against the system that employs them. Research findings contribute to the discourse regarding the conflict of loyalty experienced by public social workers engaged in social activism that targets the system that employs them.     

The Role of Women in Social Development

WOMEN, a powerful force accounting for some 50 percent of world's total population, are deeply involved in social development and are actively joining their male counterparts in promoting the progress of mankind. Nonetheless, people seem to be paying increasingly less attention to the aforementioned facts. Therefore, the following question is meant to call people's attention to the matter. What would happen if women withdraw from economic, political, cultural and family activities? In terms of the economy, it would mean that about one billion people would go on strike due to the fact that some 897 million women across the world are engaged in paid economic activities. The worldwide grain output     

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.     

Social work students’ perceptions of obesity

Research indicates that mental health and medical professionals often hold negative views of overweight or obese people. Little is known about weight prejudice among social work students. In order to address this gap in the literature, this study examines the attitudes of Bachelor of social work and Master of social work students (n = 250) toward persons who are overweight and/or obese. Consistent with the literature, findings indicate generally those with higher body mass index scores are more likely to believe that obesity is beyond their control. Further, although age was correlated with Beliefs About Obese People scores, it was not a significant predictor. Implications for social work social justice and cultural competency curriculum are discussed.     

Research Note—Is Social Work Education a Form of Social Work Practice?

ABSTRACT

The inclusion of social work education as a form of practice has been missing from the debates on the need for a unified definition of social work practice. This Research Note reports the findings from interviews with 20 social work educators who were asked whether social work education is a form of social work practice and were encouraged to elaborate on their response. The qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis and revealed five themes. The findings contribute to the debate on the need for clarification among social work authorities in shaping the definition of social work practice and the need to provide a clear stance on the extent to which social work education is a form of social work practice.     

Can Social Media Use Produce Enduring Social Ties? Affordances and the Case of Katrina Bloggers

Can previously unacquainted, grieving individuals who use social media to organize and participate in decentralized mobilizations build strong, lasting social ties? If so, how? What is it about particular social media technologies and platforms that might explain the strength and longevity of their social ties? Drawing on a case study of New Orleans bloggers who took part in a variety of contentious and non-contentious mobilizations after hurricane Katrina, we find that people who mobilize through social media like blogs can form strong and lasting social ties. We argue that this is partly because of the types of communication and interaction that blogs afford. We identify two types of affordances, mechanical and cultural, as distinct qualities of social media like blogs, and illustrate how they enable the building of strong, digitally mediated social ties among grieving people.     

Teaching Note—Infusing Social Justice Into Doctoral Programs of Social Welfare: An Incremental Approach

This article describes an effort to further infuse social justice education into doctoral programs in social welfare. It articulates the rationale and tactical approaches for aligning mission statements with the operational realities of university contexts. Within 1 school of social work, doctoral students with diverse orientations to social justice came together to articulate a vision for social justice education that expanded the educational contract between students and the institution by enhancing their respective opportunities and responsibilities in the areas of scholarship, teaching, and service. This article shares 30 learning objectives emergent from an incremental change process for enhancing social justice education at the doctoral level and reflects on the strengths and limitations of this approach to advancing social justice priorities.     

Social Workers’ Observations of the Needs of the Total Military Community

Researchers surveyed licensed social workers from 5 Mid-Atlantic states to explore their perspectives on the current state of mental health and service delivery for military service workers, families, and contractors. Social workers identified needs in the following areas: mental health, physical health and wellness, social and environmental, interpersonal and family, and military-specific needs. The majority of needs were most critical during the postdeployment stage. Education related to the observed needs was reported; social workers were most interested in learning about military culture and how to coordinate resources within the community to support the total military community. Suggestions for social work education and future research are discussed.     

Experiences of Post‐Qualifying Study in Social Work

This article is based on a research project to explore the experiences of past and current candidates for post‐qualifying awards in social work in England. Also included in the study are the Leads of the post‐qualifying consortia in England. The study used questionnaire survey and nominal group techniques to gather data, which were coded and categorised into themes. The main findings relate to the perceived purposes of post‐qualifying study, motivations for undertaking post‐qualifying study, the factors that sustain and hinder study, the advice that those who have or who are experiencing post‐qualifying study would give to those about to start and future plans and hopes in this area.

Post‐qualifying study is generally valued, especially in relation to the opportunities it provides for professional development. The support of a mentor who has direct experience of the candidate's programme is highly prized, as are clear and consistent guidance from the programme and meaningful study time and workload relief from employers. There are also frustrations for some candidates who do not feel that their post‐qualifying study has stretched them beyond qualifying standards or who experience the teaching as divorced from the realities of daily practice. The appetite for a wider choice of post‐qualifying modules suggests that providers of post‐qualifying study will need to collaborate within and across regions in order to achieve a critical mass of candidates for more specialist or focused learning. The study suggests a need for further research to understand the impact of post‐qualifying study on candidates' social work practice.

The article concludes with two checklists of questions, one for individual candidates and another for agencies and programmes. These questions arise from the findings in the research.     

Social epigenetics: a science of social science?

Epigenetics has considerable potential to transform social science by embedding mutually regulative reciprocal connections between biological and social processes within the human activities it studies. This paper highlights common epigenetic methods and outlines practical considerations in the design of ‘social epigenetics’ research addressing the identification of biomolecular pathways, statistical inference of causality, conceptualization of the environment as a biochemical event, heritability of epigenetic alterations and intergenerational accountability, and concept of time implied by attempts to capture complex, non-linear gene-environment interactions. Finally, we reflect on the social epigenome as a conceptual space and try to identify barriers to translation, and practical and ethical issues raised by epigenetics research. In order for social epigenetics and social science to contribute to the emergence of this putative ‘science of social science’ and to capture meaningful human experience they will both need to change significantly.     

Comments on “Social Origins of Civil Society”

Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier's Social Origins of Civil Society: Explaining the Nonprofit Sector Cross-Nationally offers a thorough cross-national quantitative analysis of the correlates of nonprofit-sector size, composition, and sources of funding. The first study of its kind, it is remarkable in both its theoretical ambition and empirical scope. Still, this research is plagued by problems that affect almost all research of this type: small numbers, poor measures, vague theories, a preponderance of cross-sectional data, and so on. Suggestions for improving the research include: (1) disaggregating the definition of the nonprofit sector to address criticisms from both the right and the left; (2) adopting a multidimensional approach to assessment of the nonprofit sector, to deal with its great heterogeneity; (3) devoting more attention to possible nonlinear relationships; and (4) casting a wider theoretical net in the effort to build a convincing social origins perspective. In the end, Salamon and Anheier may be forced to devote more effort to qualitative analysis of specific sectors to demonstrate the explanatory power of the social origins perspective.     

关于Social

概念的表达形式是语词,语词运用得妥当与否,对于正确理解概念关系甚大。尤其在社会学领域,外来概念特别多,这使我们在选择汉语对译时颇费斟酌。social一词即是一例。在社会学中,最基本的概念莫过于“社会”,社会的英语形式是society。笔者注意到,许多社会学的教科书,大都围绕society进行社会一词的考证,并不很重视social一词。这恐怕是由     

‘It's About People and Their Environment’: Student Social Workers' Definitions of Social Work Research

This article considers constructions of social work research from the perspectives of student social workers in New Zealand. There have been many academic discussions of the unique epistemology that can be called social work research but little is known of students and/or practitioner views. Are they interested in social work research? Do they even care about debates on epistemology? Forty-three student social workers considered two questions while attending a social work research methods course: ‘What is social work research?’ and ‘What kind of social work researcher might I be?’. A subset of 18 distance students explored a third question: ‘Should social work research be part of everyday practice or not?’. To answer these questions students provided comments in a short survey, material from their written student assignments and comments from online discussion board activities. The results suggest that student social workers have a preference for social work research that is compatible with their clearly articulated social work value base, and that social work research primarily should benefit the client group with which a social worker is closely linked. Student social workers also recognise the importance of research for their everyday practice, yet at the same time feel there are organisational constraints to this happening.     

Self‐Reported Likelihood of Whistleblowing by Social Work Students

This article presents a first study on the professional–ethical dilemma of whistleblowing in social work, and suggests some lines for further research on this topic as well as ways for integrating it in the social work curriculum. The study examines the self‐reported readiness of social work students to blow the whistle, whether internally or externally. Internal disclosure entails reporting the wrongdoing to an authority within the organization. External disclosure entails reporting the offense to an outside agency, such as the police, professional organization, or press. The findings indicate that the students view the acts that are detrimental or cause injustice to the client in a very serious light. In dilemma situations such as these, the students reported a willingness to act. The students also report considerably greater likelihood of whistleblowing internally than externally.     

Evaluating the Impact of Post‐Qualifying Social Work Education

Post‐qualifying awards in social work are well established within the continuing professional development agenda for qualified social workers in the UK. The evaluation of education and training should be an integral part of this agenda because it is important to ensure that programmes continue to meet standards of delivery, are successful in meeting their aims and objectives and are making an impact on practice. However, there is a limited amount of published work on the evaluation of post‐qualifying social work education, with studies often focusing on programme delivery rather than on their impact on practice.

This paper explores evaluative work within the current post‐qualifying social work framework and discusses the results of an evaluation of the Vulnerable Adults and Community Care Practice programme, a specialist post‐qualifying social work education programme run by a UK university, as an example of an evaluation of the impact on practice. The results indicate positive evidence of impact on practice and demonstrate examples of how the programme has had a direct effect on individuals, teams, organisations and on people who use services.     

Social software and internal communicators’ gatekeeping sense of self

Social software creates opportunities for internal communication. Public relations literature suggests it affords more two-way internal communication that can meet the ideal of symmetry as promoted in the excellence theory (Grunig, 1992). This study involved in-depth interviews with internal communication professionals at 54 companies. Our findings indicate that these professionals tend to view social software positively, often stimulating its use among employees. Additionally, we found that they appropriate social software in such ways as to maintain and even strengthen their gatekeeping role identity. More specifically, our data reveal that traditional gatekeeping, which characterizes mass media systems based on the centralized production and distribution of information, is complemented with networked forms of gatekeeping in decentralized digital media environments. Furthermore, our data suggest that an underlying management ideology hampers the symmetric potential of social software.     

Avoiding Aging? Social Psychology’s Treatment of Age

Population aging, in conjunction with social and cultural transformations of the life course, has profound implications for social systems—from large-scale structures to micro-level processes. However, much of sociology remains fairly quiet on issues of age and aging, including the subfield of social psychology that could illuminate the impact of these broader social forces on individual lives. This study examines the scope of research on age, aging, and the life course in the leading social psychological journal in sociology (Social Psychology Quarterly) and compares it with coverage in the primary social psychology journal in psychology (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) and two sociology journals (American Sociological Review and Journal of Health and Social Behavior). An analysis of articles published between 1977 and 2006 shows that approximately 7 percent in Social Psychology Quarterly or Journal of Personality and Social Psychology seriously considered age. In contrast, 11 % of articles in American Sociological Review and 25 % in Journal of Health and Social Behavior did so. Across the journals, examinations of age increased over time. However, studies reflect a limited range of methodological and theoretical approaches with few employing qualitative methods or a symbolic interactionist perspective. We discuss several under-explored sites for research on age, aging, and the life course that would enrich social psychological and sociological scholarship more broadly.     

Must Schools of Social Work be Freestanding? Yes!

Abstract

Point/Counterpoint is a regular feature of the Journal of Social Work Education. Its purpose is to provide a vehicle for the expression of contrasting views on controversial topics in social work education. Our goal is to illuminate important debates and explore the diverse perspectives that are shaping social work education.

In each issue of the Journal, social work educators are invited to comment on a topic about which they have differing viewpoints. Each commentator is given an opportunity to make a brief rebuttal. In this issue, Barbara Shank (Chair, Department of Social Work, University of St. Thomas and the College of St. Catherine), Irving Piliavin (Director, School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Marsha Seltzer (Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison) address the question: Must schools of social work be freestanding?