FEMALE SEX WORK,NON-WORK SEX AND HIV IN PERTH

This study is based on repeated interviews with twelve heterosexual female commercial sex workers (SWs) in Perth. These informants deploy, with various degrees of success, strategies to demarcate ‘work-sex’, with its socially ascribed stigma, from ‘non-work sex’. Such strategies inhibit the spread of HIV at work but, ironically, increase the risk of HIV transmission during non-work sex. SWs recognise this risk and construct a variety of rationales to reduce their fear of contracting HIV and justify their strategies of demarcating work-sex from non-work sex. Efforts to reduce the risk of HIV infection among Perth SWs would seem to depend upon addressing not only these strategies of demarcation but these rationales in a supportive environment that recognises the creative complexities of their lives.     

Organizational factors and child participation in decision‐making: differences between two child welfare organizations

Children in residential care tend to be less content with the quality of care arrangements and participation opportunities compared to children in foster care. This study explored possible differences in social workers' views about child participation and service quality. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test if any differences may be explained by collaboration between professionals' and social workers' work engagement. We found that social workers from residential care services seem more prudent in letting children participate in case planning compared to social workers planning for foster care. Social workers' judgements of service quality were also highly affected by their organizational affiliation, but personal factors such as work engagement may also play a part. The differences we found regarding social workers' attitudes towards participation and their rating of service quality are associated with organizational culture. Understanding how organizations shape social workers' decisions to include or exclude children in care planning may help gain a more comprehensive understanding of what is needed to take the participation agenda forward.     

It's frustrating! Managing emotional dissonance in aged care work

Performing paid care work requires workers to simultaneously negotiate care and waged relationships. Mediating contradictions between the two often causes workers to experience frustration, a form of emotional dissonance. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 100 workers in Australian aged care organisations, this research identifies aspects of the work environment that enable care workers to successfully juggle or synthesise the emotional demands of their work. The research demonstrates that employers have an important role in alleviating frustration, and can do this by creating work environments which: give care workers relative autonomy; allow care workers to construct themselves as professional carers providing quality care; provide workers with support to manage their emotions and develop emotional resilience; and promote client recognition of workers' roles. Providing such work environments has the potential to not only alleviate workers' frustration, but also to increase job satisfaction and retain workers in aged care.     

Social Workers' Perceptions of Training Preparedness and Social Justice Norms on Workplace Empowerment

This study examined the relationship between (a) social workers' perceptions of preparedness to perform in their professional roles and perceived social justice behaviors at work and (b) workers' sense of workplace empowerment. A sample of 152 currently licensed social workers responded to web or mailed surveys. Respondents were more likely to perceive having workplace empowerment related to meaning in their work if they reported their social work program training prepared them for their professional roles. Perceived social justice behaviors at work were associated with workers' experiencing empowerment related to the impact they had at work. Social workers' sense of training preparedness and experiencing social justice at work can positively influence workers' perceived empowerment. Enforcing the importance of engaging in social justice with clients in social work education, both in class and in field placements, has the potential for long-lasting effects on empowerment in students' future workplaces. Agency-level management should ensure continuity in social justice activities to enhance feelings of workplace empowerment, which may help social workers connect with clients. Future research should examine elements of social work programs that promote feelings of empowerment in order to understand how the same approach can be used in models of continuing education and organizational management.     

Social workers' attitudes towards the unemployed in the Nordic countries

Kallio J, Blomberg H, Kroll C. Social workers' attitudes towards the unemployed in the Nordic countries In recent decades, municipal social workers have become the implementers of new types of social policy measures aimed at activating the unemployed. These policies put a greater emphasis on the individual's own responsibility for being unemployed. Little is known, however, about how social workers view the unemployed – one factor that might influence how policies are in fact implemented. Therefore, our purpose was to analyse Nordic social workers' attitudes towards the unemployed and their determinants: Do social workers' attitudes correspond with a more individualistic view on unemployment? We utilised the data from surveys of professional social workers in four Nordic countries. Our analyses showed that individualistic attitudes towards the unemployed appeared to be rather rare among Nordic social workers. However, attitudinal differences were found between and within countries.     

Social workers' attitudes towards female victims of domestic violence: A study in one English local authority

This paper aims to explore childcare social workers' attitudes towards female victims of domestic violence in England. The study discusses the concept of “mothering” and the processes through which mothers are potentially denigrated rather than empowered. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with social workers in a single child protection agency to investigate their perceptions of domestic violence, its gendered nature, and the implications for their practice. Participants' responses were coded using thematic analysis. The results demonstrated social workers' cognisance of the challenges domestic violence poses for abused mothers in terms of the ability to safely parent their children. Although the study is not without its limitations, it nevertheless indicates the need for a more holistic approach to safeguarding children within domestic violence settings. Moreover, it underscores the necessity for improving awareness about the prevalence and importance of domestic violence as a child safeguarding concern within social work training. Indeed, improved training would help to develop social workers' knowledge and understanding of service provisions and partner agencies, thus potentially improving practice in this critically important area.     

The challenges of establishing basic pension insurance for migrant workers in urban China

Since the late 1990s, migrant workers in China have exhibited little enthusiasm to participate in the basic pension insurance schemes that have been promoted by the central and local governments in China. Previous research found that socioeconomic and family factors might have influenced migrant workers' decision to participate in the basic pension schemes. This article explores the impact of institutional factors on migrant workers' willingness to participate in the scheme, such as the work place, the nature of the enterprise, workers' labour contract status, workers' knowledge of the scheme, as well as their personal contribution rate.     

Social workers' attitudes to the law: an Israeli perspective

Doron I, Karpel M, Or‐Chen K. Social workers' attitudes to the law: an Israeli perspective
Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 95–103 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. In recent years, there has been a general shift towards integration and cooperation between lawyers and social workers, both professionally and ideologically. The goal of this study was to explore the general attitudes of social workers toward the law. The hypothesis was that, due to the recent legal and professional changes in Israel, social workers would express positive attitudes towards the law. For the purpose of this study, a closed questionnaire containing 25 statements regarding the law and its relationship to social work was used. The research population consisted of 202 social workers from Haifa and the Northern region of Israel. The findings of this study support the hypothesis that there is indeed a tendency to closer ideological and professional proximity between social work and the law in Israel. However, especially regarding courts and the litigation process, their attitudes in response to the statements were relatively less favourable.     

‘Disability is not a word we use’: Social workers' professional judgements about support for disabled young people leaving care

Disabled young people leaving care often experience a more complex transition to adulthood than other youths. Still, policy and services can fail to recognize the intersection between a young person's care experiences and disability. Drawing on data from a qualitative interview study with 14 social workers who work with aftercare in the Norwegian child welfare services, we investigate social workers' professional judgements about support for this subgroup of the leaving care population. Our analysis uses the theoretical construct of institutional logics and shows that social workers did not include concepts of disability in their judgements about support for these young people. Instead, the social workers' considerations were guided by three other organizing principles: a ‘medical logic’, an ‘activation logic’ and an ‘aftercare logic’. We discuss these findings in light of critical disability studies and argue for a more nuanced understanding of disability in social work practice with care leavers. Highlighting disability rights and going beyond diagnosis and categorisations of disabled people can challenge a medical model approach to service provision.     

Performance Management,Caseloads and the Frontline Provision of Social Services

Caseloads and performance management are important working conditions of workers delivering public social services in street‐level organizations. The literature on these working conditions argues that high caseloads and performance management have considerable consequences for workers' performance in terms of the quality of services they provide and the results they realize. This article empirically investigates and compares these consequences, drawing on the results of a quantitative study of frontline workers in 14 local welfare agencies in the Netherlands. These workers are responsible for the delivery of welfare‐to‐work policies to social assistance recipients. The findings show that high caseloads do, indeed, have a detrimental effect on workers' performance, whereas the impact of performance management is more modest, though confirming some of the findings reported in other studies on performance management. The results also show that by focusing service provision on a proportion of their caseload, workers are able to reduce the negative impact of high caseloads somewhat. Overall, the article finds that the negative impact of high caseloads is more pervasive than that of performance management. The article concludes that the recent focus in the literature on performance management and its consequences for public services should not turn scholars' attention away from the ‘traditional’ public administration problem of high caseload sizes.     

Frontline workers' competency in activation work

Frontline workers play a crucial role in implementing activation policies. Nevertheless, research on what competencies are required for activation work is limited. We explored activation competency based on a survey of 1,735 frontline workers in the Norwegian labour and welfare administration. Factor analysis revealed two distinct underlying dimensions in activation competency: market competency and user‐oriented competency. We found that the social workers in the study viewed themselves as having significantly less market competency and slightly more user‐oriented competency than non‐social workers have, but the differences were small. The results also indicate that these effects are partially mediated by attitudes towards conditionality. The results give reason to treat activation competencies as twofold and raise the question of whether social work education improves frontline workers' competency in activation work compared with frontline workers with other educational backgrounds.     

Recognizing and addressing child neglect in affluent families

This paper explores how social workers intervene with affluent parents when there are child protection concerns about neglect. Based on data gathered from a small‐scale exploratory qualitative study with 30 practitioners from 12 local authorities across England, this study examined three overarching questions: (a) How do social workers identify risk factors for vulnerable children in affluent circumstances? (b) Which factors inhibit or enable social workers' engagement with resistant affluent parents when there are child protection concerns? (c) What kind of skills, knowledge, and experience is necessary for social workers to effectively assert their professional authority with affluent parents when there are concerns about abuse and neglect? The findings revealed that indicators of neglect can be difficult to identify and challenging to respond to when parents are affluent. Results indicate that social workers have to navigate complex power relationships with parents who are able to use their class privileges to resist their interventions. The paper concludes with a discussion of social workers' skills and capacities for engaging highly‐resistant affluent parents in the child protection system.     

A Comparative Study of Child Abuse Risk Assessment in the United States and Korea

The perceptions and judgments of social workers who interview the child and family are especially significant factors in child abuse assessment process. The current study describes and compares child protection workers’ assessment processes in Korea and the USA through the use of case vignettes and in‐depth interview. The responses from social workers in these two countries were compared and discussed in the areas of: risk assessment; perception of the main problems; tolerance of corporal punishment; and judgments about appropriateness of interventions. Most revealing was that Korean social workers determined abuse based on their child abuse definition and the US Army FAP social workers determined abuse based on their definition, which was affected by legal standards and cultural differences. Korean social workers are more likely to remove a child from the home, even in mild cases, but US FAP social workers would recommend child removal from the home as a last option. The social workers that participated in this survey play a vital role in the safety of children in child protective services. Both countries can benefit from sharing information to improve the child protection services delivered. Social workers' professional judgment leads to objective and consistent outcomes and are less likely to compromise child safety in the decision making process.     

Good Jobs,Bad Jobs?: Understanding The Quality of Aged Care Jobs,and Why It Matters

Much research on paid care work focuses on this work as care. An equally important issue is its characteristic as paid work. This paper focuses on the characteristics of jobs in Australian aged care facilities, using data from a comprehensive 2003 national survey of direct care workers in Australian aged care facilities. It shows that, on a range of characteristics including pay, aged care jobs compare quite well with other jobs held by Australians who have similar characteristics to aged care workers. Aged care jobs are certainly not unequivocally ‘bad’ jobs. Yet turnover rates amongst these workers are quite high. The paper shows that workers' expectations about remaining in the aged care sector depend largely on their experience of work, particularly their job satisfaction. Job satisfaction, in turn, is affected most by their experience of the work of caring. As in most workplaces, the ability to use their skills without hindrance is important. But care work offers distinctive rewards not captured by notions of professional identity and commitment. The paper concludes by suggesting that a focus on these distinctive rewards will be important in fully understanding paid care work as paid work.     

Social workers' perspectives on parental engagement when children are at risk in Romanian society

This paper presents the findings of a study that looked at social workers' perspectives on parental engagement in making the difficult choice of either taking the child into care or keeping the family together. The paper first explores the specific context of children at risk in Romanian society and explains that in this middle‐income nation there is an absence of evidence‐based risk assessment tools, which prompts social workers to use their own ‘common sense’ risk assessment indicators. The findings of this small‐scale, non‐representative study on several public non‐voluntary child protection services in Romania suggest that social workers' perceptions of specific dimensions of parental engagement in non‐voluntary child protection may influence service delivery decisions and outcomes.     

Fraternally yours: the union architecture of Oskar Stonorov and Walter Reuther

For architect Oskar G. Stonorov (1905–70) and labour leader Walter P. Reuther (1907–70) unions were not simply instruments for collective bargaining. They were also agents for transforming established social practices that denied the working class access to decent housing, parks and art; discriminated against African Americans; and destroyed the natural environment. Architecture and site planning were key to this transformation as they addressed concerns of social justice and environmental quality. Stonorov and Reuther shared an aesthetic agenda as well – to expose workers to the emancipating beauty of modern design – as they believed well-designed housing contributed to both their personal lives and productivity at work. From 1941 until their deaths in 1970 they devised plans for workers' housing and town planning, sculpture, urban renewal and environmentally sensitive site planning. They sought to involve workers in the design process, mark union territory on former elite-owned properties, give control of housing production to organized labour and advance workers' educational opportunities. This article examines their architectural endeavours as part of a labour narrative and as an index of the turbulent social and political changes taking place from the inter-war years to 1970.     

Co‐production in the epidemiological clinic: A decentred analysis of the tensions in community‐based,client‐facing risk work

Public health policies to prevent disease within populations are giving rise to shifting patterns of healthcare delivery in the late modern era. There is an inherent tension in modern medicine between evidence‐based standardisation, on the one hand, and patient‐centred specificity on the other. This tension manifests in recent policy narratives regarding public health risk (which we have characterised in terms of the epidemiological clinic) and co‐production. Drawing on co‐produced data with health trainers (lay health workers tasked with supporting behavioural change in patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease) in a deprived post‐industrial region of England, our decentred analysis focuses on three extended narratives from this data set. Our analysis builds on and develops emerging theories of risk work, informed by Habermas, and we explore the extent to which elite narratives of public health risk are resisted, absorbed, or bracketed off by client‐facing health workers—emphasising the heterogeneity of responses—and locate these responses within the context of the workers' employment conditions, their embodied experiences, and their wider beliefs and traditions. We argue that co‐production—albeit in a highly constrained form—is possible while delivering public health interventions. However, in the context of a community where health is so adversely affected by wider social problems and where task shifting has drawn lower status healthcare workers into these client‐facing roles, workers must find their own ways to negotiate and attempt to reconcile this context with the risk‐framed practices they are required to carry out.     

Workers' Compensation and Family and Medical Leave Act Claim Contagion

At $60 billion per year, the workers' compensation system has come under increased scrutiny as firms, insurers, and researchers study the dynamics of claim filing. The Family and Medical Leave Act also covers most workers, and there has been very little research concerning the effects of FMLA legislation on employment. One hitherto neglected research area in both workers' compensation and FMLA is claim contagion. That is, as a claim is filed within a workgroup, does this increase the likelihood that others within the same workgroup will also file claims? We find the answer to be yes. We also find that this contagion effect is subject to diminishing returns to scale, however, in the sense that the claims probability increases at a decreasing rate as fellow employees' claims frequency increases. We argue that this is consistent with a model in which workers learn about filing a workers' compensation or FMLA claim from other workers.     

Open spaces,supple bodies? Considering the impact of agile working on social work office practices

There has been a shift towards social workers in many areas of the UK being based in large open plan offices and working more flexibly and remotely in space. This approach is commonly referred to as ‘agile working’. The paper explores the impact of agile working on social workers' practices and experiences in office spaces. It discusses data from an ethnographic study of children's safeguarding social work teams in two locations. One team was based in a large open plan office and was engaged in agile working, the other team was located in a much smaller office and was not using this approach. Data from observations of practice, analysis of material spaces, and interviews with social workers and those responsible for planning office space are examined. The paper concludes that there are qualitative differences between such spaces which are due to agile working arrangements and which are likely to impact significantly on social workers' experiences of practice, interactions with colleagues and development of practice knowledge. The data also suggest a lack of understanding in social work of the spatial requirements of practitioners and the significance that private and open space has for children's social work in the current UK context.