The Social Worker as Transdisciplinary Professional: A Reflective Account

The transdisciplinary key worker model requires early childhood intervention professionals to make radical adjustment in their respective scopes of knowledge and practice. Focused on the author’s brief experience in a key worker role, the article highlights challenges and contradictions that arise when health and welfare professionals are expected not only to exchange knowledge, skills, and expertise, but also to perform each other’s work. Two contextual, reflective accounts of the reasons why social workers should be cautious in task transfers in transdisciplinary teams are given. The article renews support for social workers playing professionally appropriate roles in early childhood intervention teams in ways that can protect best service delivery to children with disability and their families.     

The Impacts of Gaming Expansion on Economic Growth: A Theoretical Reconsideration

This paper employs a general equilibrium framework to analyze the effects on economic growth of global expansions in casino gaming, which exports gambling services largely to non-residents. Both domestic and foreign investments in the gaming sector bring in not only substantial revenues but also positive spillover effects on related sectors and even on the entire local economy. However, an over-expansion of commercial gambling may lead to deterioration in the terms of trade with an adverse impact on real income. If this situation persists, it would not be impossible for immiserizing growth to occur. As a highly profitable sector, casino gaming may enable its operators to diversify out of this risk if they invest retained profits in non-gaming sectors to cash in on the spillover effects it has created. The gaming-dominant economy can then be directed on a more balanced and sustainable growth path, and will become less susceptible to business cycles. Indeed, economic experiences in the world’s major casino resorts are consistent basically with this argument for diversification. We believe that after the current global crisis fades away, economic growth and resulting surges in global demand for gambling services can provide further opportunities for the expansion of existing casino resorts and the development of new gaming markets.     

The Role of the School Social Worker

The aims of our education system are no longer only to impart knowledge on the “3 Rs”. The formal educative process in the school has been slowly broadened and includes not only academic pursuits, but plays a large part in the overall socialization of a child to become a functioning member of society. The school has taken on functions once the prerogative of the family (for example, use of leisure time, vocational guidance, sex and health education) and provides other cultural learning experiences. It has come to be expected of the school that it take responsibility for part of the child's emotional and social development as well as the formal educative aspects of a school's curriculum.¹     

The Evolution of Worker Connect: A Case Study of a System of Systems

We discuss the rationale, development, deployment, and evolution of Worker Connect, a federation of agency systems that is used by authorized health and human services workers in New York City. We show how Worker Connect evolved with HHS-Connect, the organization that enables the integration and synergy of interagency health and human services systems. We show how the system of systems framework provides a way to understand issues encountered and lessons learned in developing and deploying Worker Connect and similar interagency human services systems. The first part of this article provides a history of the Worker Connect project in the context of a case study on achieving interoperability. The second part of this article introduces the framework of system of systems, and describes Worker Connect and HHS-Connect within this framework. The third part of the article describes future work, and offers some lessons for others wanting to implement a system of systems project for human services.     

The Contractor in the House-Building Industry: Worker or Businessman?*

Sil'on tient compte de leur occupation et de leur position sociable, les entrepreneurs en construction not un statut qui les place entre les ouvriers et les hommes d'affaires. L'organisation de l'industrie du bâtiment est en grande partie responsable de cet état de choses. L'image que l'entrepreneur se crée de sa position constitue aussi un facteur important. Issus en général des classes laborieuses, les entrepreneurs ont tendance áévaluer leurs activités á partir de la perspective propre á l'ouvrier. Cest surtout dans la mesure où il réussit á se libérer de ce point de vue, qu'un entrepreneur réussira á s'accommoder des contingences du monde des affaires.     

Decoding Worker “Reliability”: Modern Agrarian Values and Immigrant Labor on New York Dairy Farms

This article examines the reasons offered by New York dairy farmers for hiring undocumented immigrant workers in their milking parlors, and connects those discourses to broader economic and cultural change in U.S. agrarian society. Based on interviews with 25 dairy farmers on 22 farms, this article examines farmers’ assessments of the Amish, white non‐Amish, Puerto Rican, and undocumented Latino labor pool. The analysis shows that farmers consider undocumented immigrants the most “reliable” workforce, and that their reliability stems from their deportability and from their separation from their families, which drives them to work long hours. I argue that farmer discourses about immigrant “reliability” must be understood in the context of economic pressure to adopt a more commercial orientation to dairying, and of modern agrarian values that prize urban middle‐class lifestyles. Ultimately, worker “reliability” is a euphemism for the transnational separation of workers from their families, and one that is operationalized by farmers to justify the pursuit of economic success and more leisure time off the farm.     

Irmgard Wessel: The Making of a Clinical Social Worker

Irmgard Wessel is a unique woman whose quiet, hard-working way generates ideals that are inspirational. With little fanfare, Irm's work has had a major impact in the field of clinical social work and clinical social work education. As each of us is inspired and encouraged by the knowledge of such exceptional social work clinicians, the discipline, as a whole, is enhanced. This paper describes not only Irmgard Wessel's career, but also adds a biographical understanding of her development from childhood to clinician, educator, and activist. It is about the making of an extraordinary clinical social worker.     

Employment Conditions in the Senegalese Horticultural Export Industry: A Worker Perspective

The rapid transformation of the agri‐food sector in developing countries has created rural off‐farm employment opportunities, especially for women. There is growing concern about worker welfare and employment conditions in agri‐food and export sectors, but empirical evidence on this issue is scant. We analyse contractual preferences of female workers in the horticultural export sector in Senegal. We use a discrete choice experiment to assess women's preferences for a labour contract and employ a latent class model to capture preference heterogeneity. We find that women have a high willingness to accept a labour contract in the horticultural export industry, and that differences in preferences for contract attributes can be explained by women's empowerment status.     

Knowledge and Opinions About the Iranian Crisis: A Reconsideration of Three Models

This paper tests Gamson and Modigliani's enlightenment, mainstream,and cognitive consistency models of the linkage between knowledgeand foreign policy opinions. Data from a survey of Lexington,Kentucky residents shortly after the seizure of the Americanembassy in Teheran, Iran in late 1979 indicate that althoughthe mainstream model performs somewhat better than its two competitors,none of the Gamson-Modigliani models adequately explains publicopinion concerning American policy options. Concluding discussioncenters on the possible reasons for the weak showing of themodels.     

Social Worker Shame in Child and Family Social Work: Inadequacy,Failure, and the Struggle to Practise Humanely

Social workers operate within a complex environment where the failure to live up to expectations can lead to negative self-judgements or negative judgements from others, a sense of inadequacy and not feeling ‘good enough’. This paper conceptualises such issues through the lens of ‘social worker shame’ defined through a psychosociocultural understanding of the emotion. The effect of social worker shame on social workers' well-being and practise is considered and begins to conceptualise how an organisation can become shame-sensitive and practitioners shame-resilient with the aim of reducing the potential impact of social worker shame on practise.     

Diversity Regimes in Worker Cooperatives: Workplace Inequality under Conditions of Worker Control

Two major shifts in contemporary work organizations—“employee participation” and “diversity management”—have typically been studied in isolation from one another. Building on theoretical work by Acker (2006a,b), we ask how the interaction of these two constructs has affected the pursuit of workplace democracy at two worker cooperatives in Northern California. Using qualitative methods, we find that distinct “diversity regimes” have emerged at these establishments, substantially affecting the configurations of inequality that evolved. We distinguish two types of diversity regimes—“utilitarian” and “communitarian”—which operate either to obscure the workings of inequality or to foster attention to their presence. Our results suggest that how sociodemographic differences are managed has material consequences for the development of egalitarian structures at work.     

Ethnicity and Status Attainment: The Case of the Roman Catholic Clergy*

This paper examines the influence of ethnic background on organizational status attainment. The data are taken from a national sample of 2,755 Roman Catholic diocesan priests and bishops. The sample is divided into seven ethnic categories: Irish, German, French, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, Polish, and other. Controlling for the overall distribution of status positions within the diocese and the individual's age/seniority, a “non-preferential” model of status attainment is constructed. Average expected status on the basis of this non-preferential model for these ethnic groups in seven different regions of the country is compared to average actual status. Although we found three isolated cases of particular ethnic groups in specific regions doing significantly poorer in status attainment than predicted by the non-preferential model, the only consistent effect of ethnicity found across the entire sample is a slight advantage enjoyed by Irish clergy. No significant effect was associated with belonging to the largest ethnic group in a diocese. The very small advantage enjoyed by the Irish suggests that Irish domination of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States is maintained less by selective promotion within the ranks of the clergy and more by a disproportionate recruitment of Irish priests at the entrance levels of the organization. Disproportionate recruitment and preferential promotion are discussed as alternative mechanisms of domination within organizations.