Themed section: the person-centred turn in welfare policies: bad wine in new bottles or a true social innovation?

This themed section is aimed at evaluating different personalised policies and at drawing a clear map of opportunities and challenges for future implementations. All the essays are based on evaluative researches and on original case studies. They concern different policies: the Australian National Disability Scheme (NDIS) a first serious venture into personalised funding; personalisation in the management of offenders in probation services within the English criminal justice system; social care services for young disabled people attempting to personalise their transition from childhood into adulthood (in Redbridge, UK); health personal plans for disabled people (in Sardinia, Italy). These case studies address the question of how transferable the concept of personalisation is from the social care sector to other and outline different methodologies for developing and evaluating person-centred policies. Last but not least they reflect on a bundle of issues which seem to emerge autonomously from such different case studies. We can sum up their results affirming that personalisation is not an individual consumer-client technology, simply confronted with a single market context and new professionals. It has to be steered within an appropriate context, including new type of professionals, users' led associations and a new governance's architecture. If the public role has to shape freedom and control, helping people to exercise choice in a collectively responsible way and, consequently, to participate in creating public goods, then the person-centred turn will have to confront, at least, some emergent issues, which in turn need specific forms of governance.     

Lesbians in empirical psychological research: a new perspective for the twenty-first century?

Lesbians have been consistently ignored in empirical psychological research. The current research extends Lee and Crawford's ( 2007 ) comprehensive review, which used both quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze the amount and kind of research on lesbians. Quantitative measures from 1975-2009 showed that the increase found in Lee and Crawford in 2001 has leveled off and the neglect of lesbians remains pronounced. Using cluster analysis of data derived from content analysis of abstracts published from 2003-2009, we identified six topic groups: Others' Attitudes, Sexual Orientation, Intimate Relationships, Coping and Coming Out, Lesbians' Problems, and Life in Heterosexual Society. In particular, transformative research was scarce and scattered across the identified clusters. Results are discussed in terms of what they reveal about the social construction of lesbianism in psychological research.     

Networks — a new paradigm of rural development?

The network concept has become widely utilised in socioeconomic studies of economic life. Following the debates around exogenous and endogenous development, networks may also have particular utility in understanding diverse forms of rural development. This paper assesses whether networks provide a new paradigm of rural development. It seeks to capture a series of differing perspectives on economic networks — including political economy, actor-network theory and theories of innovation and learning — and attempts to show how these perspectives might be applied to different types of rural areas. The paper demarcates two main “bundles” of networks: “vertical” networks — that is, networks that link rural spaces into the agro-food sector — and “horizontal” networks — that is, distributed network forms that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural processes of economic change. It is argued that rural development strategies must take heed of network forms in both domains and that rural policy should be recast in network terms.     

Women's risk for revictimization by a new abusive partner: for what should we be looking?

The purpose of this article was to examine the prevalence of, as well as risk factors for, revictimization by a new partner. Data was collected via face-to-face interviews at Time 1 (about 5 weeks after obtaining a protective order against a violent partner [DVO partner]) and at Time 2 (approximately 12 months later). Of those women who reported having a new partner at Time 2 (n = 412), 35.2% reported abuse. Findings indicate that there is a subset of women who are at greater risk of experiencing abuse by future partners: women with greater cumulative lifetime victimization and those who abuse or are dependent on illicit drugs. Intervening with women when they obtain a protective order is a critical point of intervention to reduce women's risk for revictimization.     

Geopolitics and religion – a mutual and conflictual relationship. Spatial regulation of creed in the Baltic Sea Region

The geopolitical history of religion in the Baltic Sea area shows a development from the time of the Lutheran Reformation of a mosaic of states with very different jurisdictions of creed, from the tolerance under local containment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to the strict Evangelical mono-religion of the Scandinavian countries. With seventeenth-century mercantilism, groups of skilled people of ‘foreign’ religion were invited to newly founded towns and ironworks in order to promote the economy. In the eighteenth-century enlightened absolute monarchs, defying both church and bourgeoisie, allowed groups of Catholics and Jews to Scandinavia under spatial restrictions on settlement. In Russia non-Russians of different religions were tolerated, while dissidents to the Orthodox Church were deported to peripheral places. With the Prussian territorial expansion in Germany, more groups were included into citizenship, including Jews. The last states to include groups of ‘foreign’ creed were the early nineteenth century semi-independent states of Norway and Finland.     

Zyban: a new aid to smoking cessation treatment--will it work for psychiatric patients?

1. Psychiatric patients who smoke are more highly dependent on nicotine and are less likely to be successful at quitting. When they attempt to quit, depression is more likely to be a part of the withdrawal process. 2. Careful monitoring is required when psychiatric patients abruptly start or stop smoking. Clinicians must be aware that changes in smoking status will affect the actions and side effects of neuroleptic medications. Prescribing clinicians should ask about their patients' smoking patterns on a regular basis. 3. Psychiatric nurses have an ethical responsibility to identify individuals at risk of smoking-related disease, to inform current and future smokers about the risks of cigarette smoking, and to provide counseling and education for those who wish to quit.     

Integration and the struggle to turn space into “our” place: Homemaking as a way beyond the stalemate of assimilationism vs transnationalism

This article investigates homemaking as a set of practices and a perspective on migrants’ ways of local incorporation, with its own material, emotional and relational underpinnings. Homemaking has the potential to emerge as an original category of analysis in immigrant integration, moving beyond the contraposition between assimilationism and transnationalism. Based also on our ongoing research, both in the United States and in Europe, we argue for the significance of migrants’ interactions with specific local structures of opportunities, including people and institutions as much as the built and natural environment. The latter is a critical site where the meanings, opportunities and contents of integration are negotiated between immigrant newcomers and their local and transnational counterparts. Migrants’ stratified rights, opportunities and aspirations to make themselves at home open a promising research perspective on group relations, as embedded in everyday materialities. While integration is a multi-dimensional and multi-scalar effort, it still rests on place-bound fields of inequalities and interaction within and between groups, and on underlying differences in views, emotions and practices of home. These are both a mirror of larger asymmetries of power and of the opportunities available to challenge them.     

Stuck in the land of disability? The intersection of learning difficulties,class, gender and religion

This article discusses the discrepancy between formal rights to full social inclusion and the lived experiences of young adults with learning difficulties. It draws on inclusive life history research in Iceland and employs intersectional theory to study the social participation of young adults with learning difficulties. In an attempt to understand the complex political, economic and ideological forces that hinder the actualisation of their formal rights the intersection of disability, class, gender and religion in the production and reproduction of existing social hierarchies is examined. The article demonstrates how the research collaborators resisted their devalued social construction and attempted to create and affirm themselves as competent social actors.     

Relational sociology: a well-defined sociological paradigm or a challenging ‘relational turn’ in sociology?

In this paper I present and summarize the theoretical proposals of four leading scholars of the so-called ‘relational sociology’. First of all I try to contextualize its emergence and developments in the increasingly globalized scientific system. From this particular (and international) point of view, relational sociology seems to develop through a peculiar scientific path opened and charted by well-identified actors and competitors, their invisible colleges, their global connections, cleavages, and coalitions. Whatever the structuring of this field, it accomplishes the criticism of classical individualistic and collectivistic sociological theories, a task strongly facilitated by the development of new methods and techniques of empirical research, and by the increasingly powerful computing capabilities. After this brief historical reconstruction, and following very strictly the contributions of the four scholars, I try to synthetize their theoretical designs, focusing the analysis on two scientific issues of great significance for the future of relational sociology: the specific ontology of ‘social relations’ and the methodologies used to observe it adequately. Finally, I wonder if we are facing a new sociological paradigm, already well structured and internationally established, or rather a ‘relational turn’ that probably will develop into a new ‘sociological field’ internally very differentiated and articulated.     

Is there a need for a theory of urban ecology?

Although urban ecosystems are governed by the same ecological laws as rural ecosystems, the relative importance of certain ecological patterns and processes differs between the two types of ecosystems. For instance, as compared to rural areas, urban habitats are usually more islandlike, more often represent early successional stages, and more easily invaded by alien species. All these features are results of the intense human influence on urban landscapes. The question then arises whether a distinct theory of urban ecology is needed for understanding ecological patterns and processes in the urban setting. The answer is no, because urban ecosystems can be successfully studied using existing ecological theories, such as the metapopulation theory. However, due to the intense human presence approaches that include the human aspect are useful in studying urban systems. For instance, the human ecosystem model, which emphasizes human impact by identifying social components with connections to ecology, is a useful approach in urban studies. This model, combined with the urban–rural gradient approach, forms an effective tool for studying key ecological features of urban ecosystems. Better understanding of these features would increase our ability to predict changes that land use causes in urban ecosystems, and would help to integrate ecology better into urban planning.     

Health Journalists and Three Levels of Public Information: Issue and Agenda Disparities?

This is a 2-phase study of the sources of information health journalists use and rely upon for writing health news stories. The 1st phase of the study includes both depth interviews and an online survey with 188 health journalists. Phase 2 of the study extends the findings from Phase 1, with particular attention paid to the roles of public health information officers at 3 government levels: local, state, and federal. Results from this study suggest that a monolithic, “1-size-fits-all” media relations model for public information officers is not adequate in the current health news environment. Findings explore differences in perceptions of the value of public information sources at 3 levels and suggest that some bureaucratic inefficiencies may interfere with more effective source/subsidy–provider relationships.     

Burnout: The end of the line or a signal for change?

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explore my own experiences and professional choices through an examination of the concept of burnout in social work.

I have set out to use some aspects of the research and theory about the concept of burnout and relate them to the particular circumstances of my case. After a brief introduction and examination of what burnout is, I divide the paper into three sections dealing with the social and historical factors in burnout, the individual factors and the organizational factors.

I have attempted to show a connecting thread throughout, linking the various factors through the theme of disillusionment. It appears that the problem of dealing with omnipotence and accepting reality are as germane to this topic as they are to the individual's development. I have also attempted to draw an analogy between the factors that may aid this developmental task and organizational factors which can contribute to or help prevent burnout.