Social Citizenship Guarantee for Minorities in Japan: Present and Future

In recent years, the presence of minorities and their ways of life have become the subject of public interest in Japan. These minorities have experienced misrecognition and denial of their rights, and have been forced to live without benefiting from social redistribution. However, the lack of acceptance of minorities or their ways of life by majorities is being challenged. These aspects of recognition and redistribution are matters of universal human dignity. They are indispensable when considering issues of security in the lives of minorities. To achieve this security it is necessary to consider social citizenship. It described the way we are treated in society. In this article I examine the current state of social citizenship for minorities in Japan. An analysis of the contents and characteristics of social policy and social security systems in which social citizenship is embodied suggests that social citizenship in Japan is still strongly based on traditional social standards. This traditional orientation constitutes an obstacle to guaranteeing social citizenship for minorities. Moreover, the more serious inherent problem is that neither the concept of citizenship nor that of rights has been adequately accepted by the people. Given these points, it is unsurprising that the majority perceives minorities as deviant, and this situation has made guarantees of social citizenship for minorities much more difficult. A full guarantee of social citizenship for minorities requires further efforts to be made in human rights education and citizenship education.     

Citizenship Social Work: A Community Environmental Scan of Re-enfranchisement Social Work Supports after Felony Conviction

Alexander (2012) argues that the corrections system relegates African American men to permanent second class status. Although social work has advanced the democratic project, African Americans often have had to forge a parallel social assistance system. In a community environmental scan, the authors apply the Citizenship Social Work framework to assess availability of services, supports, and advocacy efforts to address civil, political, social and economic rights for African American men with felony convictions. The authors find that a number of social work services are available, but the majority focus on social and economic rights, rather than civil and political rights, perhaps emphasizing professional service over social justice.     

Trust,Power and Safety in the Social Work Supervisory Relationship: Results from Australian Research

Social work, as a discipline, places considerable importance on the provision of supervision, promoting it as a key process supporting critical reflection and practice improvement. A supervision relationship built on trust has the potential to provide a safe context within which practice issues can be explored. This article reports on an Australian study of social work supervision and the ways in which a trusting supervision relationship supports safe practice and critical reflection. A context of trust within the supervisory relationship is found to promote safe practice, providing the basis for what supervisees felt was satisfying supervision. Within a trusted and supportive supervisory relationship participants wanted and valued challenge which was seen to promote professional growth and positive client outcomes. Whether this occurs, however, depended on how power was exercised and how safe they felt in the supervisory relationship. The research argues the need for social work to reclaim supervision through a revitalised commitment to advancing supervision practice, research, and research-based policies.     

Children's Participation,Childhood Publics and Social Change: A Review

Progress in the implementation of children's participation rights in England is reviewed and situated within a broader agenda of social change. The article argues that much of the energy for ‘change for children’ has resided within a governance pathway across policy, practice and research. An alternative perspective is offered by re‐connecting children's rights debates to those of social movements and asking whether childhood publics are possible, what they might look like and where they might be found. It is concluded that a cross‐national and longitudinal perspective grounded in everyday life is likely to provide a more nuanced understanding of the change for children.     

Building Community Trust Through Cooperatives: A Case Study of a Worker-Owned Homecare Cooperative

Trusting relationships bind people together. Building community trust is increasingly being identified as a viable strategy for improving the well-being of community members. This article explores how cooperatives build trust among worker-owners as well as with their clients and other professionals. It reviews theoretical and empirical perspectives on trust and cooperatives. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews, document review and a survey. It was observed that cooperatives provide regular contacts among members, and between members and their clients and professionals during training, conferences, task oriented committees, general membership meetings, and social events. This fosters shared understanding, empathy, openness, and confidence, which in turn promotes the building and maintenance of deeper and wider trust.     

Motivations and Differential Participation in a Community Currency System: The Dynamics Within a Local Social Movement Organization1

Community currency is an understudied, alternative social movement. These local networks are grassroots, collective efforts to form an alternative market with the hopes of empowering the economically marginalized and building social capital. Original data collected from members of a local currency system are employed to investigate their motivations to join and the congruence between motivating factors and various forms of participation. Four categories of motivations are identified and multivariate models are estimated to assess which are the most salient predictors of differential participation. The results provide some support for the congruence hypothesis. As Knoke (1988) predicted, member motivations play a role in shaping forms of participation. This evidence is used to draw larger implications for social movement research.     

Power and Social Work: A Change in Direction

This article examines the elite model of conceptualizing poverty. The authors contend that elites frame the discussions about employment and poverty; consequently, they prevent any meaningful examination of the root causes of poverty and circumvent any proposals that shift the balance of power. The challenge for social work is that the elite model considers the profession as an agent responsible for executing social policy that supports the status quo. Thus, social workers have unwittingly become part of the problem.

The authors argue that the way to address this problem is to transform the profession of social work from within. Among the ways to create this transformation are to focus social work education on the function of politics; strengthen field education; promote action-based research; and integrate a global perspective into practice and policy initiatives.     

Social Research and the Privacy and Participation of Children: Reflections on Researching Australian Children's Playlore

Social research into the daily activities of children is important if we are to understand how children perceive themselves in relationship to their world. Ethically managed social research that allows children to speak as informed and competent subjects is thus vital. However, research regulatory bodies may be more concerned with protecting the privacy of children than facilitating their participation in research projects. In a context where publicly funded researchers are encouraged to make their data available for reuse, the bureaucratisation of the consent and ethics processes may impinge on the conduct and benefits, and the future accessibility, of the research itself. Reflecting on the findings of the Childhood, Tradition and Change research on playlore in Australian primary schools, we argue for a more balanced approach from regulatory authorities between protection and participation in relation to low‐risk social research with children.     

Social Capital in Korea: Relational Capital,Trust, and Transparency

This article starts by distinguishing two different types of social capital, that is, societal moral resource capital and relational capital. Social capital as a societal moral resource is best characterized in Putnam's works. Social capital as the relational mobilization of information and control is best conceptualized by Coleman. By contrasting these two aspects of social capital, and by contextualizing the peculiarity of social relations in East Asian countries, this article explores the characteristics of social capital in Korea. For that purpose, I focus on the working of relational capital, or inmaek, in the creation and reproduction of social inequality. Moreover, I calculate the macro-level transformation of Korean society in terms of the role of societal moral resources.     

Social Networks and Individual Perceptions: Explaining Differential Participation in Social Movements

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both perspectives find empirical support: the intensity of participation depends both on the embeddedness in social networks and on the individual perceptions of participation, that is, the evaluation of a number of cognitive parameters related to engagement. In particular, to be recruited by an activist and the perceived effectiveness of one's own potential contribution are the best predictors of differential participation. We specify the role of networks for social movements by looking at the nature and content of networks and by distinguishing between three basic functions of networks: structurally connecting prospective participants to an opportunity to participate, socializing them to a protest issue, and shaping their decision to become involved. The latter function implies that the embeddedness in social networks significantly affects the individual perceptions of participation.     

The Good Society: Core Social Values,Social Norms,and Public Policy

This essay is an attempt to transcend the contentious political environment by offering a conceptual framework for discussing the outlines of a “good society” and its constituent elements. We offer an argument that is grounded in social theory that identifies a way to develop public policies to remedy long‐standing economic and social problems in American society. The development of public policies that can unify individuals and groups to provide their support depends upon the existence of core social values and shared social norms to realize those values. We proceed by first identifying a set of core social values that we believe most Americans would endorse, and then present a set of guides for behavior that would advance those values. Finally, we propose a series of public policies that are consistent with the core values and social norms and that would help to create what we have called the “good society.” Our assumption is that when a citizenry endorses a set of core values and acts in a fashion that supports those values, the usually divided political factions will be compelled to respond with real solutions.     

Lived Realities and the Construction of Social Problems: The Case of Wife Abuse

This article examines the official and subjective realities of one social problem, wife abuse, and it considers consequences of differences between these two types of reality. First, claims appearing in the professional literature are used to define the specific content of the official social problem. Then, characteristics of violence as experienced are compared with this official definition. Finally, data from a shelter for battered women are used to illustrate consequences of official definitions in organizations designed to ameliorate the individual troubles associated with social problems. The study demonstrates how the official definition of wife abuse acts and actors has reduced the recognizability of the phenomenon in lived experience and also set the stage for reality-definition contests in social services for abused wives. This illustrates the importance of examining sociologically the specific content of social problems claims and the necessity of attending to social problems in their full phenomenological realities.     

The Practical Realities of Implementing Progressive Social Work: A Case Example in Parenting Education

What actually happens when an agency sets out to implement progressive social work by shifting power and decision making from agency personnel to people with particular needs? Both staff and participants are thrust into roles different from those they occupy in traditional settings. Interpersonal dynamics change. New ways of making decisions evolve. Tensions arise as new ways of doing things and relating replace usual practices. This article explores what happened when an agency set out to implement progressive social work in the context of developing and implementing a parent education program in which parents designed and taught a parenting program. Results explore decision-making processes, group dynamics, inclusion, team building, program administration, and the impact of participation. Seven lessons learned are described.     

Institutionalization of Trust as Response to Globalization: The Case of Consumer Cooperatives in South Korea

This paper explores an explanation which elaborates how individuals effectively enact and sustain trust in the sphere of social economy and the capability. I discuss how value employed by actors and the strategies and power relation in the socio-economic value sphere and focus on the function of ‘trust’ as the key mechanism of the interaction. This paper examine South Korean consumer cooperative Hansalim as a case of social economy which successfully institutionalize their system in competitive economic market arena.      

Small Voices: Children's Rights and Representation in Social Work Research

The persons who are social work's constituencies are typically disenfranchised and excluded. This is particularly the case with children whose voices are routinely suppressed. This paper outlines why Children's Article 12 Rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to express their views on all matters concerning them should also apply to social work research. The ethical issues around research with children are explored and a number of different research methods are outlined in order to offer a starting point for social workers wishing to place children's viewpoints and voices at the centre of their research.     

The Promotion of Children's and Adolescents’ Social Participation in Italy and Scotland

This article presents the theoretical framework, methodology and the main results of a comparative research on the promotion of children's social participation in Italy and Scotland, which was based on politicians’, managers’ and practitioners’ representations. Promotion of participation here is considered a form of social intervention in which adults construct and treat children as citizens entitled to be involved in decision‐making processes, due to their competence in self‐expression and making choices. The study revealed a coexistence of different images of childhood and social intervention, as well as some interesting differences and similarities between the two socio‐cultural contexts.     

The Utilization of Technology in Graduate Schools of Social Work

SUMMARY

Fifteen faculty from graduate schools of social work and staff from three social work organizations were interviewed by telephone for this qualitative study to describe utilization of technology. Schools were engaged in technology activities that ranged from basic to special technology projects. For the most part there was unevenness in the use of technology within each school and between schools. A number of themes emerged. Eleven recommendations are given to help schools to become leaders in the field of social work and technology.     

Social capital online: Collective use of the Internet and reciprocity as lubricants of democracy

This article puts the democratic potential of using the Internet into perspective through an analysis of how collective uses of the Internet promote social capital. Research results reveal that social capital online (i.e. trust and reciprocity) is enhanced by involvement in collective use of the Internet such as participation in online communities and use of the Internet among informal groups in everyday life. This process could counter negative aspects of Internet use. Further, accumulated online social capital can be a powerful predictor of online political participation, i.e. online reciprocity has a positive effect on intention to participate in online civic discussion. Finally, the authors' analyses indicate the possibility of a spillover of online social capital into offline arenas. It is concluded that collective use of the Internet can be a lubricant for democracy.     

Children and the ‘Social Cohesion’ Agenda in Sport: Children's Participation in ‘Ethnically Mixed’ Sports Teams in the North of England

This study is set in the North of England in the context of debates around the integration of communities, after a series of street disturbances in the early 2000s. The debates centred upon ‘social cohesion’ and the social mixing of Pakistani British and White British communities. The current study explores this from the context of 10‐ to 11‐year‐old Asian, Black and White British boys participating in cricket and football clubs. It draws on the sociology of childhood approach that sees children as active participants and co‐creators of their own lives. This more nuanced approach sheds important light on children's own negotiations of home, peers, sports clubs and identities that are key to how cohesion is achieved.