Parenting and the Harry Potter stories: a social care perspective

This paper analyses the capacities of the parents in the Harry Potter stories, written by J. K. Rowling, from a social care perspective. It argues that there is a synergy between what the social sciences have discovered about ‘good enough parenting’ and the insights that can be gathered from entering the imaginative world of literature. This is illustrated by a discussion of the qualities of the parents and parent substitutes in the four books published between 1997 and 2000. It concludes that fictional experiences of childhood create empathy in the reader and enable us to confront the need for imagination as parents and practitioners, while the social sciences keep knowledge grounded and evidenced. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hard stories in the workplace

Relationships between family caregivers and professional health care providers typically begin during an intensely painful and stressful time. This article examines the literature on professional attitude and response to suffering with particular emphasis on how exposure to hard stories affects the development and quality of alliances with family caregivers. First person accounts from a qualitative, phenomenological study conducted with mothers of children with acquired physical disabilities are used to illustrate the perspectives of caregivers and the qualities they identify as contributing to competent, meaningful, and mutual relationships that allow for bearing witness to hard stories.     

Disability,embodiment and ableism: stories of resistance

Non-disabled responses to visible impairment embody either social invisibility or over-attentiveness. The subjective and inter-subjective experiences of impaired bodies and intersubjective encounters within society are important aspects of disablement and the construction of a disabled identity. Impairment is read by and influences the social structure of ableism. This paper attempts to understand how ableist discourses about impaired bodies have impacted on and been resisted by disabled people and how embodiment is related to identity. In pursuit of these aims, a qualitative study was conducted with seven people who have visible physical impairments. The results indicate that disabled embodiment is produced and experienced within an ableist context that mobilizes the charitable gaze and the medical model to signify impaired bodies at the expense of the recognition of disabled identity. In order to deconstruct ableism and to recognize and respect the value of the disabled identity, a politics of recognition is required.     

Netizens’ evaluations of corporate social responsibility: Content analysis of CSR news stories and online readers’ comments

Analyzing stories about corporate social responsibility (CSR) published in two online Korean newspapers and reader's comments about them, this study investigated how the online readers interpreted the CSR activities, looking at the effect of CSR types, situations, and the degree of corporate fame. The study found that readers tend to be cynical toward CSR activities after a crisis and a monetary donation type of CSR. In addition, the more famous the company, the more likely there were cynical comments about its CSR activities.     

Management she wrote: organization studies and detective stories

It has been postulated that social sciences in general and organization theory in particular can profit from parallels and analogies with fiction literature. As the main form of expression in social sciences, like in literature, is a written product, inspired imitation can visibly improve the literary forms of organization theory, without diminishing its specificity. This essay argues that one genre in fiction literature is especially suitable for such comparisons. This is the genre of the detective story, where the detective, much like the researcher, must untangle the social tissue to arrive at an explanation.     

Multiple stories: Collaborative and generative possibilities for psychological evaluation

This paper explores a collaborative generative approach to psychological assessment employed in Puerto Rico, with children, adolescents, and adults. It begins with a critical reflection on how the dominant discourse of mental health, founded in the suppositions and practices of Euro-American-centred psychological knowledge, has been disseminated to the globalise south under the claim that its assertions are unaffected by social, ideological, or historical forces. It discusses how its claims of expert scientific knowledge have contributed, through classificatory instruments such as the DSM and the ICD, to the production and re-production of deficit narratives in our day-to-day life. It also examines how these practices have been applied in the use of assessment instruments in Puerto Rico. It then describes, how, through a collaborative approach and narrative theory, the established colonising practices and narratives of traditional forms of psychological assessment can be questioned, deconstructed, and transformed. This approach promotes the co-creation of dialogic and generative spaces that allow for the emergence of multiple stories and performances that give meaning to a person's identity and relational being. A brief clinical case exposition is used to illustrate how this collaborative, dialogic, and culturally sensitive approach to psychological assessment can help to undermine and disrupt deficit-based narratives and provide families with new generative possibilities for re-storying and re-performing their lives and particularly, the lives of their children.     

“The troublesome other and I”: Parallel stories of separated parents in prolonged conflicts

This qualitative study aims to explore how noncohabiting parenting couples in prolonged conflict construct the other parent and themselves. Ten parents from five parent couples were interviewed. A dyadic analytical design was used, where parent's stories of conflict were analyzed in parallel with their co‐parent. Drawing on positioning theory, self‐identity as parents emerged as implicit counter positions in storylines, which construct the co‐parent as “the troublesome other.” Two typologies of conflicted storylines were prominent in the findings: storylines of violations of trust, positioning the co‐parents in relation to traumatic events in the past and, storylines of who is bad, positioning the co‐parent as either a disloyal co‐parent or a dysfunctional parent. The findings indicate that prolonged conflicts made it impossible to find available positions for cooperation. We argue that family therapists should aid each household toward promoting child and family resilience rather than continued efforts to solve chronic conflicts.     

Telling stories,reflecting, learning: hannah arendt and organization

This article is written in recognition of the need for dialogue between organization theory and other disciplines and languages. It uses some concepts coined by Hannah Arendt to develop reflection concerning organizational dynamics. Arendt's category of action, as different from both labour and work, makes possible to define, in an original way, the political dimension of organizational action. The category of thought, again, as defined by Arendt, allows us to highlight the production of meaning which takes place in organizations. With the help of those two concepts, the author develops a notion of organizational learning as a process where the political and cognitive dimensions of organizational action are strongly interrelated.