The state and voluntary social work in Sweden

If Sweden has been considered at all within the voluntary research tradition, it is mainly in terms of providing a state-dominated contrast to countries where the sector is said to flourish. This article questions this rather one-sided picture of Sweden, which seems to rest on weak empirical grounds, especially if the voluntary sector as a whole is analysed. The main focus of the article is, however, on social services. It is shown that, from a historical perspective, co-operation between the state and the voluntary sector seems to be a distinctive feature of Sweden, even during periods of government take-over of voluntary activities. Today the relations between the voluntary sector and the state appear to be changing to a situation in which associations are taking part in the production of welfare services to a larger extent than heretofore.     

Involuntary vs. voluntary flexible work: insights for scholars and stakeholders

ABSTRACT

Building on insights from the early stages of our research partnership with a U.S. Fortune 500 organization, we came to differentiate between voluntary and involuntary schedule variability and remote work. This differentiation underscores the complexity behind flexible schedules and remote work, especially among white-collar, salaried professionals. We collected survey data among the partner firm's information technology (IT) workforce to evaluate whether these forms of flexibility had different implications for workers, as part of the larger Work, Family, and Health Network Study. We find that a significant minority of these employees report working variable schedules and working at home involuntarily. Involuntary variable schedules are associated with greater work-to-family conflict, stress, burnout, turnover intentions, and lower job satisfaction in models that adjust for personal characteristics, job, work hours, family demands, and other factors. Voluntary remote work, in contrast, is protective and more common in this professional sample. Employees working at least 20% of their hours at home and reporting moderate or high choice over where they work have lower stress and intentions to leave the firm. These findings point to the importance of both stakeholders and scholars distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary forms of flexibility, even in a relatively advantaged workforce.     

Social capital exchanges in voluntary associations and work organizations: A network perspective

Organizations have been an important setting in which social capital exchanges (SCEs) occur, but little work has been done to distinguish two predominant species of organizations in the social network literature: voluntary associations and formal work organizations. Addressing this lacuna, this article comparatively examines how the two organizational species differ in (1) how two prominent types of SCEs operate (restricted and generalized exchange), as well as (2) the analytical approaches and methodological tools for studying SCEs (boundary-specification, sampling, network designs, tie-recording methods) and their adherent implications for network structure (networking conditions and homophily). This article concludes by identifying methodological and theoretical challenges for studying SCEs in organizations (conceptualizing organizations as units, underappreciating meaning-making and methodological triangulation, and examining contagion in organizational networks in an age of digitalization) and developing recommendations for overcoming them.     

Social policy and social work in the voluntary sector: the case of Ukraine

Over a decade has passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This major political change has had profound effects on how social welfare is delivered in countries in transition from communism. Using material derived from the author's involvement in social work education projects in Ukraine, this article examines the changing relationship between statutory social welfare provider agencies and the burgeoning voluntary sector. A confusing and rapidly changing picture has emerged. Some prominent themes likely to shape future directions are identified, particularly the imperative to ensure that social work education continues to be sensitive to local political and cultural contexts, rather than relying on importing Western solutions.     

Rethinking non-traditional resistance at work: The case of the Indian Diaspora in Mauritius

Resistance at work can take many forms and be theorised in multiple ways. In this paper, I use postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha's concepts of mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity to explore non-traditional forms of resistance among Indo-Mauritians working in the hotel industry. I employ a two-stage qualitative research approach by conducting focus groups in eight hotels in Mauritius followed by focused ethnography with 20 Indo-Mauritians. The findings reveal that the Indian diasporic community is actively engaging with its past (India) through the materiality of its home, its sacred space and its use of Bhojpuri to communicate. By unfolding and maintaining its difference, it is constantly demarcating its personal space from that of the Other. As this behaviour extends to the workplace, salient forms of non-traditional resistance surface in rural regions.     

Rethinking industrial citizenship: the role and meaning of work in an age of austerity

T. H. Marshall in his famous tract Citizenship and Social Class wrote briefly about what he called ‘industrial citizenship’, a type of belonging rooted in the workplace. Here Marshall's ideas are developed alongside a consideration of Durkheim's Professional Ethics and Civic Morals together with research material from the Guinness Company. It shows the way the Company actively sought to create ‘Guinness citizenship’ within its London brewery. The article draws out the ways in which the significance and potential of work based citizenship for ameliorating the ills of industrial society are clearly articulated in mid‐twentieth century Britain and echo earlier neglected Durkheimian sociological ideas on work. These ideas have real potential to inform contemporary academic and policy debates about the nature of capitalism and the form and content of work now and in the future.     

New maps of struggle for gender justice: Rethinking feminist research on organizations and work

The 2018 Gender, Work and Organization conference was held in Sydney. That fact is relevant to the issues now facing feminist organization research. The journal was launched in 1994 in the global North, in the wake of the women's liberation movement but after a first wave of neoliberal politics. Gender studies has changed since then, especially with growing recognition of feminist thought and activism in the global South. There have been changes in the object of knowledge ‐ that is, work and organization ‐ especially managerial transformation of organizations and global economic restructuring. There are related changes in the political arena, most recently the rise of an authoritarian populism with new patterns of masculinity politics. Proposals are made for an agenda of feminist research in this field, relevant to the new circumstances and the continuing struggles for gender equality.     

An examination of student and provider perceptions of voluntary sector social work placements in Northern Ireland

Practice based learning in Northern Ireland is a core element of social work education and comprising 50% of the degree programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This article presents evidence about the perceptions of practice learning from voluntary sector/non-government organisation (NGO) placement providers and final year social work students on social work degree programmes in Northern Ireland in 2011. It draws on data from 121 respondents from189 final year students and focus group interviews with voluntary sector providers offering 16% (85) of the total placements available to students. The agencies who participated in the research study provide a total of 55 PLOs to social work students, and are therefore fairly representative in terms of voluntary sector (NGO) provision. The article locates these data in the context of practice learning pedagogy and the changes introduced by the Regional Strategy for Practice Learning Provision in Northern Ireland 2010–2015. Several themes emerged including; induction, support and guidance, practice educator/student relationship, professional identity and confidence in risk assessment and decision-making. Social work educators, placement providers and employers must be cognisant of newly qualified social workers’ needs in terms of consolidating knowledge within the formative stages of their professional development.     

Rethinking Empowerment

Empowerment is one of the most frequently invoked concepts in social work theory and practice of the 1980s. In the United States, social workers representing diverse practice methods and working with highly varied populations articulate a commitment to empowerment, one that they have inherited from both the political movements of the 1960s and the much older mutual aid tradition. Though the concept of empowerment succeeds in constituting a mission for social work congruent with the historic and contemporary values of the profession, re-examination and clarification of this important notion is necessary to prevent conceptual confusion and an unintended paternalism from intruding on the relationship of social workers and their clients.     

Rethinking craft administration: Managerial position,work autonomy,and employment security in the building trades

The organization of work in the construction industry often has been presented as the exemplar of craft administration wherein managerial positions are of relatively low significance. Occupational control of employment and work structure in this context presumably is manifest through the craft union. On the other hand, research on other industries has shown the managerial position in the firm to be a source of extrinsic and intrinsic reward. This results from the manager's pivotal position in the bureaucratized labor process. This paper seeks to reconcile these perspectives. Data from a survey of 246 unionized construction workers and 14 local union officers from nine building trades are used to assess the impact of the managerial position and union involvement on work autonomy (self-direction and freedom from supervision) and employment security (unemployment and trade agreement infringements). In general, the results indicate that managerial affiliations to employers' firms are associated with greater autonomy and more employment security. Union involvement has contradictory consequences for individual tradespeople.     

Rethinking work-health models for the new global economy: a qualitative analysis of emerging dimensions of work

Technology change, rising international trade and investment, and increased competition are changing the organization, distribution and nature of work in industrialized countries. To enhance productivity, employers are striving to increase innovation while minimizing costs. This is leading to an intensification of work demands on core employees and the outsourcing or casualization of more marginal tasks, often to contingent workers. The two prevailing models of work and health - demand-control and effort-reward imbalance - may not capture the full range of experiences of workers in today's increasingly flexible and competitive economies. To explore this proposition, we conducted a secondary qualitative analysis of interviews with 120 American workers [6]. Our analysis identifies aspects of work affecting the quality of workers' experiences that are largely overlooked by popular work-health models: the nature of social interactions with customers and clients; workers' belief in, and perception of, the importance of the product of their work. We suggest that the quality of work experiences is partly determined by the objective characteristics of the work environment, but also by the fit of the work environment with the worker's needs, interests, desires and personality, something not adequately captured in current models.     

Rethinking reification

Conclusion By now this essay has accumulated over twenty alleged meanings, senses, or aspects of reification; there seems not much point in listing them. Some of them are mutually consistent, almost overlapping; others are incompatible. Some are in accord with the dictionary definition, others not. With some, the sense in which some entity is being converted into a res is evident; with others, try as I might, I cannot find such a sense. The dictionary entry itself is rather slipshod, and interpreters have expanded the term's meaning almost indefinitely beyond it. The main ways in which Lukács and Berger and Luckmann use the word do not fit into the dictionary definition at all. They make the meaning of reification dependent on concepts like can and could that are themselves heavily dependent on the particular context of their use. Lukács's and Berger and Luckmann's discussions are confusing and very probably confused. The whole thing is a swamp.Can this concept be saved? And should it?Within the limits of the dictionary definition, the concept does its work well enough. When Stephen Gould, say, criticizes psychologists for reifying intelligence by assuming that the I.Q. test must be testing something, he and the concept perform a clear and useful function. But if the main concerns are those of Lukács and Berger and Luckmann, in my opinion the term mystifies more than it reveals. Their concerns could be accommodated within the dictionary definition as reification of persons, in the sense of denying people's capacity for agency. But although Lukács and Berger and Luckmann do occasionally use the word this way, for the most part they do not. So articulating their concerns within this sense of the word would require extensive rewriting of their arguments. Would political theorists who share those concerns not do better to abandon the concept?I would unhesitatingly advise it, except for one, crucial consideration. There really is something going on among us that we urgently need to think and talk about, and that Lukács's and Berger and Luckmann's conceptions of reification were meant to address. People do feel trapped, in a way that makes Kafka's little fable so perfectly emblematic for our experience. Despite the prevalence in modern society of all of Berger and Luckmann's social circumstances that favor dereification, very many people do feel helpless to influence the conditions that constrain their lives. Millions of Americans turn their backs on politics, judging that engagement in it would make no significant difference. Millions of members of the underclass feel worthless - though also filled with diffuse rage - because society seems to have no use for them. Almost all of us function in large organizational systems, whether as parts of the machinery or materials being processed, and have learned to take that condition for granted. We function within an economy that depends on a system of international banking and finance that everyone knows to be in constant danger of collapse. Almost all of us submit without question to the technological imperative that daily exhausts our resources, destroys our health, and poisons the earth. And we march like sleepwalkers down the road marked deterrence and nonproliferation, toward nuclear doom. Experts and critics offer various diagnoses of our condition, but whatever measures are actually taken to treat it seem only to make it worse.This familiar litany of troubles suggests a malaise far too extensive and too grave for the powers of political prudence. When a society, or an entire civilization, or even the whole human species seems bent on self-destruction, one suspects systematic, pervasive, fundamental derangement in people's patterns of both thought and conduct. Calling on political prudence here is almost bound to mean calling for more of the same. Here what is needed is a more basic realignment of assumptions, of the sort that has traditionally been associated with great political theory.Wading through the dismal swamp of reification theory, as this essay does, can leave one feeling that such concepts, and political theory itself, are hopelessly abstracted from reality and of no practical use in relation to our urgent political problems, so that political prudence is the only hope. But political reality itself, and the prudence by which gifted actors know how to move within it, always presuppose and depend on theoretical frameworks - if not self-conscious, deliberate theorizing, then unexamined, inherited theory or, more likely, fragments of theories that may well be outdated or mutually inconsistent. So if we seem today bereft of political prudence and judgment, close to our wits' end, that may be because our wits are operating out of such incoherent fragments of inherited assumptions.The message to be derived from the familiar litany of our troubles and our sleepwalking, then, is not the familiar exhortation to, For God's sake, do something before it is too late! For while we may feel inert, we are already doing something - a lot of things - and they are the source of our troubles. Like Kafka's mouse, we run and run. Berger and Luckmann's and Lukács's concept of reification was meant to address precisely those troubles that are the large-scale outcome of our myriad activities, sustained and enlarged by nothing more than what we do. The problem is how to stop, how to do something else, what else to do.That is a problem as much for thought as for action, a problem for action informed and empowered by new thought. Part of the value of Berger and Luckmann's - and even more of Lukács's - discussion of reification is that they tried to provide a general theory of the nature and roots of our condition, orienting us to likely avenues for action, feasible ways and means, probable allies and opponents. Their efforts, this essay has argued, were confused and deeply flawed. The concept of reification is probably not a good tool for the job, and bad tools mean sloppy work. But better sloppy work with a bad tool than no work at all. Those of us who persist in reaching for the word reification as a tool should probably employ greater care. We should require ourselves to specify in each case precisely what we mean, and attend to whether and how our various meanings in various contexts are interrelated. But whether we revise the concept of reification, or abandon it, or just let it continue to slop along in its present state of dishevelment doesn't much matter. What matters is that we continue to think - hard and critically, theoretically and politically - about the conditions that Lukács and Berger and Luckmann were trying to address.Our thinking here must be simultaneously theoretical and political: theoretical in the sense of radical, cutting through conventions and cliches to the real roots of our troubles, seeing social arrangements large-scale and long-range, as if from the outside, which may be what Lukács meant by intending totality. Yet the thinking must also be political, in the sense of oriented to action, practical, speaking in a meaningful way to those capable of making the necessary changes, those Lukács called the we of genesis. For Lukács, of course, that meant the proletariat. But one need not be a Marxist to see the need for locating such a we, and the point of seeking it among those with an objective interest in the right sort of change and the potential power to bring it about. The aim is not some new doctrine to save us from ourselves, but a transformed way of seeing what we already tacitly know and do, which restores us to our real world - the concrete here and now, as Lukács puts it - and our real, living selves, including our capacities for action. That would mean not some access to mysterious, infinite powers, but the appropriation of our actual powers, recognizing the present moment as the moment of decision, the moment of the birth of the new, as Lukács says, out of which we jointly make the future. That is no return to Hegelian idealism, but a recovery of the practical, political Marx.Thinking both theoretically and politically in this way is no easy task; indeed, it is almost a contradiction in terms. Yet it may well be our best hope, and the world is in a hurry. Despite all of the political and philosophical difficulties, unless we undertake this task we may well guarantee our own entrapment, assuring that we will end up like Kafka's mouse, rather than human and free.

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Rethinking Theory

‘Capitalist racist patriarchy’ is how Zillah Eisenstein (1998 Eisenstein, Z. R. 1998. Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, New York: New York Press.  [Google Scholar]) characterizes global inequalities and the hierarchies of ‘difference’ they constitute. This article assumes that feminist theory aims not only to ‘empower women’ but to advance critical analyses of intersecting structural hierarchies; that this entails not only a critique of patriarchy but its complex conjunction with capitalism and racism; and that such critique requires rethinking theory. Through a critical lens on devalued (‘feminized’) informal work worldwide, the article explores how positivist, modernist and masculinist commitments variously operate in prevailing theories of informality – including those of feminists – with the effect of impeding both intersectional analyses and more adequate critiques of capitalist racist patriarchy.     

Problems and possibilities of development work among tribals: a participatory evaluation of a voluntary agency in India

Mandal, a church-related non-governmental voluntary agency operating in north-west India's Nasik district since 1966 was evaluated for performance in promoting self-sustaining economic growth and socio- political awareness in its beneficiaries. The research design incorporated 2 questions, the extent to which Mandal had used the integrated approach, and the extent to which it promoted structural change in the village. 2 levels of analysis were used: random samples of 315 individuals (163 beneficiaries and 152 non-beneficiaries) and data from the takatu's office for 20 involved villages and 8 control villages. Quantitative data were sought by examining files and doing closed interviews, and qualitative data were collected by observation and open-ended interviews. The variables used in the analysis were educational level, class category, caste, agricultural investment, family net income, individual consciousness and social participation. It was concluded that on the individual level some positive impact was discernible in terms of family income and agricultural investment. At the village level no quantitative improvement was measurable, but the effect of Mandal was symbolic in that it sets an example for social change. The Mandal has acquired a health, non-partisan secular image for social action.