What is a transformative approach to care,and why do we need it?

The meanings of care are contested – the approaches to care in the development and feminist literature have varied greatly. At the same time, care is a common word, loaded with moral meanings concerning notions of duty and love, and care is commonly associated with women. These associations are not innocent; they have concrete effects in shaping different policy agendas and institutional responses to care and care work. While the feminist meanings of care stem from feminist philosophy, feminist economics, and feminist social policy research, these meanings compete with the more conservative and traditional meaning of care in the development discourse. This article provides a conceptual introduction to care, and aims to show how the different understandings of it affect the ways policymakers approach the issue. Depending on the way care is framed, policies and practices can be designed and implemented in transformative ways, in the sense of supporting carers – predominantly women – and lightening their care burdens, while challenging the notion that this work is intrinsically ‘female’ and of lesser importance than work seen as ‘productive’. The article invites development practitioners to reflect on their own views about care, and to identify what can be done to recognise, reduce, and redistribute care at multiple levels.     

Building a Dam,Constructing a Nation: The ‘drowning’ of Capel Celyn

Throughout history, the planning and construction of a dam has become symbolic of wider political events and processes. This paper investigates how the Tryweryn scheme in north-west Wales in the 1950s and 1960s became a central signifier within the emergent Welsh nationalism of the period. The project, providing water to the city of Liverpool, flooded the village of Capel Celyn and displaced its 48 residents. However, the opposition to the project extended beyond this rural community, with the scheme becoming a focal point for Welsh nationalism. This paper explores this significance, arguing that the Tryweryn scheme was articulated in a number of ways that elevated the project from a local issue to a national outcry, resulting in the term ‘Tryweryn’ having a resonance that continues to this day.     

Disabled children’s childhood studies: a distinct approach?

This paper suggests that the emergence of disabled children’s childhood studies as an area of study offers a distinct approach to inquiry; it represents a significant shift away from the long-standing deficit discourses of disabled childhoods that have dominated western culture and its reaches. On the one hand, contemporary childhood studies contest normative, Eurocentric mantras around the ‘standard child’; while on the other, disability studies critique the medical discourses and the scope of its authority. However, while drawing on these two approaches, disabled children’s childhood studies provide more than this combined critique. In disabled children’s childhood studies, disabled children are not viewed as necessarily having problems or being problems, but as having childhoods.     

‘My profession is gone’: how social workers experience de-professionalization in the Netherlands

Recently social work in the Netherlands underwent two major changes. Specialized agencies were replaced by one-stop shops (district teams) and the welfare state was replaced by a ‘participation society’, in which vulnerable groups have to rely on their social network rather than resort to professional care. The first change is termed ‘de-specialization’; the second ‘basic de-professionalization’. The research question in this article is: how do Dutch social workers experience and evaluate these two developments? Qualitative interviews with 29 experienced social workers show that most of them endorse de-specialization, as this type of aid is deemed better for clients with complex problems. Moreover, many social workers like to take on new tasks. Basic de-professionalization is met with more reserve. Social workers observe that many clients do not have a suitable network and need professional help. In addition, they feel that their profession is being degraded as lay people and volunteers take over (part of) their work. However, they feel unable to resist this development, because resistance might get them sacked. Some social workers even enhance basic de-professionalization because of their willingness to continue working as (retired) volunteers. Social workers and theorists need to address and counter the move towards basic de-professionalization.     

‘Politics is social work with power’: training social workers for elected office

Training social workers for leadership roles in electoral campaigns and political offices increases the profession’s effectiveness in promoting public policy that reflects our professional values and commitment to social justice. This research describes and evaluates an educational experience in the US that prepares social work practitioners and students to run for elected office; to work in leadership positions at the local, state, and federal levels; and serve as effective advocates for social change. Participants’ plans for future political engagement before and after the training were compared. Following the training, participants are more likely to plan to be politically active in general. Their intentions to work on campaigns, run for office, and engage with elected officials increased. These results can inform education in other social work settings.     

Child protection decision-making: social workers’ perceptions

ABSTRACT

Decision-making is located at the heart of social work as a core professional activity, because much of what social workers do concerns decisions about future courses of action. Drawing on elements of the learning together systems model and Falkov’s Systemic Family Model, this study investigated social workers’ perceptions regarding how child protection decisions are made. Evidence was drawn from a constructivist–-interpretivist qualitative research design, involving 16 semi-structured interviews with qualified and experienced social workers and 20 direct, non-participant observations of child protection meetings. Evidence from the study suggests that professionals and family members do not rely entirely on the guidance on the threshold criterion of the likelihood and significance of risk of harm when making decisions. Instead, they use discretionary intuition and analytical judgement, involving multidimensional criteria which includes consensus between professionals and with family members; individual professional’s state of mind; other agencies and professionals’ priorities as well as external factors such as the availability of resources. Conclusion can be drawn that existing guidance on decision-making is inadequate, hence the discretionary use of a combination of intuitive heuristics and analytical thinking in a complementary manner. This study, therefore, contributes to considerable conceptual clarity regarding the complex child protection decision-making process.     

Positive You: a self-advocate’s arts-based approach for building self-esteem

Positive You is an inclusive arts project supporting learning disabled people to explore self-esteem through art-making. The project was developed by self-advocate Leah Jones who observed a gap in service provision after struggling with her own confidence and self-esteem for many years. This article has been co-written by Leah and her support Jade French using a life-story approach. Leah hopes that by sharing her story, this article will not only demonstrate the value of art-making in developing self-esteem, but also that learning disabled people can develop their own employment opportunities with the right support.     

Child welfare workers’ experiences of obstacles in care order preparation: a cross-country comparison

This paper examines the significant obstacles that child protection workers in four countries, England, Finland, Norway and the USA (CA), believe they would face at their workplace, in a case of a child removal decision. There are many potential barriers employees may experience in their work practice, either external factors, organizational factors or individual factors, or combinations of these. Presented with the same situation, we ask workers what they perceive as significant obstacles, if any, for preparing a care order at their work place. The findings show that roughly two out of three workers say they would experience obstacles, and the main obstacle by far is related to time and/or large caseloads. Lack of organizational structures or poor management is the second major obstacle, followed by collaborative problems with external partners and challenges related to providing evidence. Only a few workers mention individual factors. The workers’ perspectives show that the obstacles they experience may have a negative influence on the quality of their decision-making. The study indicates that improvements do not firstly require more leadership or structural changes, but more time and resources to limit caseloads. There are country differences showing that perceptions of what is sufficient time and resources are highly relative, as the caseloads and actual time available for workers vary significantly across countries.     

‘Man up!’ bullying and resilience within a neoliberal framework

This study investigates perceptions in relation to bullying, with a particular focus on discussions around resilience, drawing on data from focus group interviews with young people (mean age 14 years old), parents and teachers (N?=?40). We view self-conduct and the governance of human behaviour as situated within a neoliberal framework, locating accountability and responsibility within the individual. Our methodological framework consists of a multi-level ‘synthesised’ discourse analysis. Firstly, drawing on discursive psychology, we focus on the interactive accomplishments of talk, such as managing facts, blame and accountability. The second level of discourse analysis focuses on the wider discourses that participants draw on to make sense of themselves, including common sense discourses and ideologies. In their narratives, the participants construct resilience in relation to bullying in terms of individual empowerment, responsibility and ‘manning up’; a skill that can be taught and acquired. Not only that, long-term implications of bullying are negated in favour of a neoliberal approach towards self-responsibility in the here and now. This has implications for strategies in relation to bullying and supporting young people in building resilience. More research is needed to establish key notions in relation to resilience, and the multidimensionality of protective factors in relation to bullying.     

‘A city is not a company,a flat is not a commodity’: urban movements and defenders of tenants’ rights in Poland

This article describes urban and tenant movements that have been created in Poland in response to the commercialization of urban space and the complete commodification of the right to housing. On the one hand, spatial segregation in Polish cities was fully approved by the state; on the other hand, it became a source of income for new owners of acquired buildings, who often used criminal methods to intimidate tenants. Brutal evictions encountered social resistance from the emerging tenant movement, non-institutionalized left-wing communities and endangered tenants, who were often pensioners and members of the lower classes. The author mentions undertaken and possible methods of social self-defence such as eviction blockades and rent strikes. He also raises the question of whether urban movements can become part of a broader social movement for systemic change.     

Social work students’ reflections on a solution-focused approach to child protection assessment: a qualitative study

This exploratory study examines how Estonian graduate social work students’ reflections of the solution-focused approach in the context of child protection assessment can change as a result of coursework in this model. Students’ responses indicate some changes in the nature of responses after the solution-focused training course, including the adoption of techniques that help to focus on solutions (e.g. miracle question and scaling questions). Following the training, students underscored the importance of changing problem-focused ‘traditional thinking’. The findings highlight a challenge in social work education, suggesting a need to target goal-directed talk throughout the social work curriculum to support competence in conducting comprehensive, strength-based assessments.     

School enrolment and mothers’ labor supply: evidence from a regression discontinuity approach

We analyze the impact on maternal employment of a universal school reform in Norway which lowered the school starting age from seven to six. We use a regression discontinuity approach exploiting exogenous variation in the compulsory school enrollment rule caused by the reform. Our results reveal positive short-term effects on labor supply (approximately five percentage points) and on earnings (about 12600/1350 NOK/Euro). Subgroup analyses show that the positive effects are much stronger for mothers with low wage potential, a group of mothers that were less likely to use formal childcare prior to the reform. The positive effects for this subgroup of mothers suggest that expanding child-care can be an effective tool for increasing labor supply of mothers who previously had relatively low labor market earnings potential.     

Cosmopolitanism and integrationism: is British multiculturalism a ‘Zombie category’?

The alleged death of British multiculturalism has been celebrated in some quarters and regretted in others. Invoking Ulrich Beck’s discussion of zombie categories, we argue that while the appeal of ‘multiculturalism’ as a term has clearly declined, the category in Britain that it refers to encompasses not a single charter, but a series of political settlements and public policies that remain in place even though they have been joined (and frequently challenged) by others. Distinguishing between the term and the category is a valuable means of assessing the persistence of multiculturalism as a mode of integration in Britain.     

How good is good enough? Exploring social workers’ conceptions of preparedness for practice

This study examined the question: ‘How do social work practitioners construct preparedness for practice?’ The answer to this question was explored through a research conducted in 2013 consisting of a survey based on the Australian Association of Social Workers’ Practice Standards and interviews with social work practitioners who had experience working with graduating social work students in their final field education placements. The responses of 25 survey participants suggest that social work practitioners generally expect new graduates to have ‘moderate’-level skills across the different practice areas, although a small but notable number of supervisors expect new graduates to have general work preparedness at a ‘developed’ level. In addition to having a clear understanding of and identification with professional values, purpose and ethics, the eight interview participants spoke of the importance of empathy and the ability to work within a multidisciplinary organisational environment.     

‘This is a stage’: A study of public relations practitioners’ imagined online audiences

Public relations (PR) practitioners are among those cultural intermediaries who privilege symbols, products, and communication rituals in society. Through interviews (n = 26) and analysis of practitioners’ Twitter accounts, this study considers how members of this field identify their personal social networking site audiences and how these behaviors are implicated in the performance of their online identity. Findings indicate practitioners feel pressure to use personal social media in accordance with field-constrained norms and that an “occupational publicness” pressure requires them to be visible online outside of the workplace. The persistent specter of public criticism from audiences and the prioritizing of organizational interests above their own self-expression limits performances of PR practitioners’ authentic selves online.     

Visions of resilience: lessons from applying a digital democracy tool in New York’s Jamaica Bay watershed

Resilience to extreme weather events and other sudden changes is an issue facing many communities in the early twenty-first century. Planning to respond to disasters is particularly complicated in densely inhabited, multi-jurisdictional urban social-ecological systems like the watershed of Jamaica Bay, a large urbanized estuary on the south side of New York City. This area contains parklands managed by New York City, the National Park Service, and other agencies, four sewage treatment plants, three former landfills, and urban and suburban communities, all of which were heavily impacted by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Here successful resilience planning and response requires participation from a wide variety of government and civil society players each with different types of knowledge, value systems, and expectations about what resilience means. To investigate how “visions” of future resilience differed among several communities living in or concerned with Jamaica Bay, New York, we deployed a free, Internet-based modeling framework called Visionmaker that enabled interactive scenario creation and testing. Through a series of standardized workshops, we recruited participants from a variety of different communities of practice (i.e. researchers, land managers, educators, non-governmental organization staff, and community board members) to design “visions of resilience”. Visions spanned terrestrial and marine environments and contained natural and built ecosystems. Most users favored increasing resilience through expanding salt marsh and green infrastructure while, for the most part, keeping the built city landscape of streets and buildings intact. We compare and contrast these visions and discuss the implications for future resilience planning in coastal cities.

     

‘Just what is there now,that is what there is’—the effects of theater improvisation training on clinical social workers’ perceptions and interventions

Flexibility, Therapeutic Presence (TP), and collaborative tendency are core capacities in clinical social work as well as in theater improvisation. This mixed-methods pilot study studied the effects of theater improvisation training on 35 graduate-level social work students, who participated in an experiential, semester-long ‘theater improvisation skills for clinicians’ course, compared to a control group of a similar cohort. These variables were measured before, after, and at a three-month follow-up to the course. Additionally, Follow-up semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 course graduates. Quantitative results showed a significant increase in flexibility and TP immediately following the course compared to the controls, which was not maintained at the three-month follow-up. The qualitative findings indicated an increase in flexibility, open-mindedness, TP, and self-awareness following the training. Triangulation of both sets of data suggests that improvisation training contributed to changes in participants’ general attitudes and perceptions regarding their clinical work. However, longer training is needed in order for these skills to effectively impact their clinical work. The findings suggest that improvisation skills can help clinical social workers increase their flexibility and TP, as well as other important alliance abilities. Implications for teaching and research are discussed.     

Comparison between occupational noise measurement strategies: why is it important?

The international standard ISO 9612:2009, regarding the determination of occupational noise exposure through an engineering method, establishes a methodology for evaluating the exposure of workers to occupational noise, through the specification of three different strategies, namely: task-based measurement (TBM); job-based measurement (JBM) and; full day measurement (FDM). In this work, questions are raised, "resulting in a literature review regarding the need to test the functionality of the three strategies, through the systematic comparison between them and analysis of their application impact at several levels. There is a need to test the compare these three strategies, since there are no peer-review studies in this domain. In fact, there are still no studies that systematically do the comparison between them and analyze the impact of their application at various levels, such as the precision and accuracy of the results, the required equipment, time spent and, most important, the estimation of the uncertainty associated to the measurements.     

‘The house belongs to both’: undoing the gendered division of housework

This article studies 28 dual-income Spanish childless couples who were undoing gender in routine domestic work. We understand ‘undoing gender’ as defined by Deutsch [(2007). Undoing gender. Gender & Society, 21, 106–127, p. 122]: ‘social interactions that reduce gender difference’. The dual-earner couples came from different socio-economic backgrounds and were interviewed in four different Spanish towns in 2011. The analysis shows that resources in a wide sense, time availability, external help, ideas about fairness, and complex gender attitudes are key interdependent factors that can weave together to form different configurations leading to a non-mainstream division of housework. All configurations were based on principles of gender equality: some couples found it fair to have a 50/50 division of domestic work, others a 50/50 division of all work (paid and unpaid); and a third group showed conflicts in practice. These couples’ ways of undoing gender illustrate the external, individual, and couple circumstances under which spouses are able to achieve a non-traditional construction of unpaid work.     

What is sex and why does it matter? A motivational approach to exploring individuals' definitions of sex

What sexual experiences qualify as "having sex"? We investigated two assumptions apparently underlying research on how individuals make these judgments: that individuals have clear definitions regarding what qualifies as sex and that these judgments depend on how closely the activity being assessed matches their definitions of sex. Using open-ended questionnaires, 100 students, 51 women and 49 men, described their experiences that were "almost but not quite sex" or "just barely sex" and situations where there was uncertainty or disagreement about whether the experience qualified as "sex." In contrast to the above assumptions, many respondents expressed ambiguity about their definitions of sex, and their decisions about labeling an experience as "sex" often seemed influenced by the consequences of applying this label.