Work functioning: a conceptual framework

Adequate and reliable methods for evaluation of clients with work disabilities are crucial for both the individuals who are assessed and for society as a whole. Sound and precise work assessments are needed to guide clients to suitable interventions using a minimum of rehabilitation resources. Occupational therapy literature contains evidence that work function assessments are complex and that there is confusion over work assessment concepts. Therefore, further development and evaluation of adequate concepts and theoretical models within the area of work assessment is needed. This article proposes a conceptual framework for different dimensions of work functioning and points out important factors for work assessment. The concepts proposed and defined in the article are: work functioning, work participation, work performance, and individual capacity.     

The need for explicit argumentation in ethical decision-making in social work

This article addresses the need for social workers' explicit argumentation in ethical decision-making, i.e. the justification offered in adopting a particular course of action with their clients. It is the main assumption of this article that social workers need to be aware and explicit of the personal and professional ideas, concepts, values, and assumptions that guide their practice. In the following sections we clarify central concepts such as argumentation and its explicitness, present a conceptual framework for analyzing ethical decisions in social work, illustrate its applicability on social work dilemmas, and discuss possible implications for social work practice and education. Finally, we recommend that social work education put emphasis on: (1) developing more awareness for inner deliberations and making these explicit and amenable for evaluation; and (2) developing specific skills for explicit argumentation in ethical decision-making.     

Introduction

ABSTRACT

Conceptualizations of mental health and mental illness continue to be an important influence in shaping social work practice and education. By critically analyzing the emergence of the current concepts of “brain disease” and “behavioral health,” we are able to better understand the stakeholders in this renaming process. The inherent assumptions and the sociopolitical aspects of these two concepts are analyzed. Recommendations for social work practitioners and educators in preparing for a future in which they will participate more fully in the professional dialog about changes in the vocabulary of mental illness and thus more meaningfully shape the service delivery system in general, and the social work domain, in particular, are offered.     

Objects and Motives in a Product Design Process

Activity theory seems to be a potential framework for analyzing the complexity of product design, because of its concern with mutual transformations of objects, collectives, and subjects. In turn, design work provides a rich ground for discussing the key concepts of activity theory. This article uses an analysis of the development of a new healthcare appliance to open up discussion about the notions of object and motive in activity theory.     

Teaching Note—Preparing Doctoral Students to Confront the Grand Challenges: Strengthening Baseline Statistical Skills

We describe a statistical seminar designed to provide a common foundation in core statistical concepts among all students as they enter a social work PhD program. Student feedback surveys assessed students’ statistics preparation prior to entering the program, and pre- and posttests were compared for increases in statistical knowledge. Nearly half (42.1%) reported no prior statistics training, and exposure to IBM SPSS Statistics software was low (M=1.54 out of 5, SD=1.38). Students showed significant gains in posttest knowledge. Findings suggest substantial variability in students’ statistical preparedness, and for many, knowledge of basic concepts is rudimentary. Such a seminar may allow programs to begin with more advanced quantitative course work and move to increasingly more complex topics over time (e.g., multilevel modeling).     

How is ‘racism’ understood in literature about black and minority ethnic social work students in Britain? A conceptual review

ABSTRACT

This conceptual review interrogates a body of literature concerned with black and minority ethnic (BME) social work students in Britain since 2008. This period has coincided with an increasing focus on diversity in Higher Education, but also lower prominence being given to race in social work. In social work education, there has been increased attention to the needs and experiences of BME students. While most of this literature acknowledges racism, what constitutes racism and how it can be understood usually remain implicit. This review aimed to explore influential concepts in the literature and the ways these affected how racism is understood and identified. A search was carried out for articles in peer-reviewed academic journals between 2008 and 2018. In this article, we discuss four recurring concepts of racism in this literature: subtle racism, institutional racism, cultural difference and pedagogical solutions. The article analyses the assumptions underpinning these concepts, and the implications for how racism has been understood and investigated in this literature. The subsequent discussion calls for a more reflexive approach and identifies questions that future research could explore, which could lead to improved understandings of racism in social work education.     

Social Enterprise in Higher Education: A Viable Venture?

Social enterprise is a burgeoning, although nebulously defined, strategy for linking market-based revenues with social good in nonprofit, for-profit, and public organizations. This article offers a unifying definition of social enterprise, tracks its development throughout traditional sectors, and takes a first step in extending the concepts of social enterprise to the higher education sector. We argue that administrators of university centers associated with schools of social work should employ social enterprise principles. Key benefits would be to gain revenue for the centers, break down disciplinary silos in the university, better link social work schools to the world outside academe, help train students in an emerging organizational model, and increase civic engagement in the university.     

社会质量研究及其新进展

本文考察了社会质量研究的两个独立起源,对各自的概念、理论和方法等进行了详尽的介绍。文章还着重分析了欧洲社会质量研究在亚洲的推进情况,指出目前国内社会质量研究无论在概念还是理论体系和方法上,都是欧洲社会质量研究的移入而不是本土社会质量的学术继承与发展。无论是从欧洲的社会质量研究,还是从该研究移入过程中本土化的努力与尝试来看,目前社会质量研究还存在很多局限。     

Capital at Home and at School: Effects on Child Social Adjustment

We argue for analyzing school and family social capital, human capital, and financial capital as parallel concepts and investigate their effects on child social adjustment. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) merged Child‐Mother Data, to which we add indicators of capital in the children's schools. Findings suggest that although school capital effects are present, family social capital and maternal and child human capital effects are more prevalent. Interactions between family and school capital refine these findings. We derive inferences regarding how investment at home and at school can work together to promote child social adjustment.     

Winnicott and clinical social work: A facilitating partnership

This article examines the applicability of D. W. Winnicott's theoretical concepts to clinical social work practice with clients whose psychosocial well-being has been compromised by environmental deprivation and related developmental vulnerabilities. This examination is organized around three questions: (1) Why is Winnicott relevant for social work? (2) Which of his concepts are most useful for social workers? (3) How can these concepts be put into practice with social work problems and populations? The translation of theory to practice is illustrated with case material.     

Strategic Management and the Performance of Public Organizations: Testing Venerable Ideas against Recent Theories

Miles and Snow, among others, argue that strategy content isan important influence on organizational performance. Theirtypology, applied recently to public organizations in the UnitedKingdom, divides strategic actors into four general types: prospectors,defenders, analyzers, and reactors. This article begins by integratingwork on strategy content or strategic management into the O'Toole-Meierformal theory of public management. This study shows that strategycontent is a subset of generally accepted management functionsin public organizations. The article then proceeds to test thestrategic management concepts in a large, multiyear sample ofpublic organizations. The results show that strategy can beseparated out from other elements of management for a distinguishableassessment of its impact on organizational performance. Unlikethe predictions of Miles and Snow and the empirical findingsof Boyne and Walker, however, we find that the defender strategyis the most effective for the primary mission of the organizationand that the prospector and reactor strategies work best inregard to the goals of the more politically powerful elementsof the organization's environment.     

Design Imaginaries: Knowledge Transformation and Innovation in Experimental Architecture

This article tracks the work of a group of architectural researchers and treats their experimental practices as vantages for analyzing the social production and transformation of architectural knowledge. This requires first examining the role of so-called design imaginaries, or modes of prototyping and analysis, which these researchers draw on to explore wider theoretical questions, as well as to test varying theories and hypotheses. It also includes examining how seemingly contradictory design concepts figure into their creative work, which we argue hold theoretical resonance with Gregory Bateson’s ideas on Learning III and Yrjö Engeström’s notion of expansive learning.     

Stories of Risk and Protection: A Turn to the Narrative in Social Policy Education

This paper discusses the role of ‘story’ in social policy teaching within social work education. In particular, it uses the explication of two students' stories of their own experience to consider approaches to the concepts of risk and protection. The paper sets a scene whereby the roles of narrative, practitioner-wisdom (Phronesis) and personal experience need to be addressed within social policy education. Then, using stories generated by an educational intervention building on memory work, it illustrates how the ‘pragmatic eclecticism’ of narrative analysis can illuminate some of the complexities of social policy constructs. A range of analytical tools have been brought to bear on the stories, including the distinct but related concepts of ‘role’ and ‘performance’ and literary devices such as genre and plot, as well as a consideration of intertextuality. This is done to support the notion that social policy needs to broaden its methodological range.     

Evaluating Students’ Micro Practice Field Performance

The current study represents an effort to determine whether a universally recognized set of objectives for field-based learning in micro-level practice exists despite apparently widespread belief to the contrary among social work educators. A review of efforts over the past 50 years to conceptualize field learning and an analysis of current data on student performance criteria identified eight learning objectives for field study. These objectives reflect both traditional concepts and contemporary demands on the profession. Based on these learning objectives, the authors have proposed a method for evaluating student performance in the field.     

Historical Sociology and Secularisation: The Political Use of ‘Culturalised Religion’ by the Radical Right in Spain

The critique of the theory of secularisation has favoured the emergence of a series of concepts for the analysis of contemporary socio-religious transformations, such as ‘culturalised religion’. These categories constitute, in turn, an opportunity to rethink the process of secularisation from the perspective of historical sociology. Against this background, this article carries out a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities of secularisation in Spain from which a cultural approach to religion (‘culturalised religion’) emerges and its potential connection to the expansion of the radical right-wing party Vox, which became the third-largest party in Spain's parliament in the 2019 national election. After analyzing this interrelation between ‘culturalised religion’ and the radical right on the basis of statistical sources, discourse analysis and bibliographical sources, the article concludes by stressing the importance of historical sociology for understanding phenomena like ‘culturalised religion’, which take us out of the binomial logic that has marked part of the interpretation of secularisation (revival of religions vs decline of the religious) and introduce us into the multiple interactions between the historical past and sociological reality.     

High tech and high performance: Managing appraisal in the information age

Conclusion Information technology leaders recognize that the greatest impediments to success are often people related rather than information, technology, and systems related (Roepke et al., 2000). Obviously, the human component is a central concern when organizations introduce technology to the performance-management process. After all, combining people and technology successfully is critically important to firms. While the potential for accelerating positive HRM outcomes through various technology applications clearly exists, implementation that fails to consider trust, fairness, system factors, objectivity, personality, or computer literacy and training (among other concepts) has negative implications for an organization’s distinct and inimitable human component. Possible gains in efficiency, objectivity, or accuracy that a high technology approach to performance management produces could turn out to be costly for firms if they bring about user dissatisfaction leading to diminished job attitudes, poor performance, or increased turnover.     

Promoting Creative Practice through Social Work Education

It has been suggested that the essence of professional work lies in the balance between the performance of technical tasks and the exercise of judgement and discretion—the ‘technicality/indeterminacy’ debate. A skilled social worker must be capable of applying a range of knowledge, skills and values in a variety of practice circumstances, the precise nature of which cannot always be predicted. This presents a challenge for social work education, previously governed by a reductive notion of ‘competence’ in its planning and delivery. This paper will explore the nature of judgement and creativity in practice, identifying why such concepts are essential in contemporary social work. Accepting that qualified social workers must be capable of acting independently and autonomously, it will then examine the task that this presents for social work education—the need to prepare students (at both qualifying and post‐qualifying levels) to exercise judgement and discretion in professional practice. The paper will argue that the development of innovative forms of social work will depend upon the existence of forms of education that can foster and enhance students' ability to work creatively, and present ways in which this can be managed within both academic and practice curricula.     

New social intervention technologies as a challenge in social work: IFSW Europe perspective

ABSTRACT

This study aims at analyzing the degree of training, use, and practice of the new technologies among the social work professionals in their work environment and at finding out their main reluctance or reservations to a more intensive use of ICTs in the performance of their tasks. For this purpose, a structured and closed questionnaire has been sent to the chairpeople of the professional organizations’ members of the International Federation of Social Workers Europe (IFSW Europe), which also includes Turkey and Israel. The reason for this choice lies in the fact that the representatives for the professional organizations have a privileged view on the situation of the profession from a global perspective and are the key informants on the current situation surrounding the social workers. This study allows us to know, among other results, that the success of ICTs among the professionals will depend on their ability to adapt to the specific professional nature of the social worker in the intervention domain. However, the uncertainty regarding the security of the personal data treatment, regarding the increase of the non included or paid work hours, and also, regarding the increase of professional stress are key factors explaining the reluctance of some professionals to a more intensive use of ICTs.     

Flexibility and work-family balance: a win-win solution for companies? The case of Italy

Flexibility of working time is currently coming to the fore, with varying degrees of intensity, in European countries. After a brief analysis of flexibility (origin, characteristics, spread) in Europe, this paper will focus in particular on the Italian case by presenting a phenomenon attracting growing attention: ‘Smart Working.’ This is an innovative approach to work organisation that integrates and exceeds concepts such as teleworking and mobile working, thus questioning traditional constraints (such as physical space or work times and tools) and seeking new balances based on greater freedom for workers, as well as their empowerment. By taking advantage of two recent empirical investigations carried out in Italy (2011–2012) we could illustrates the relevance of S.W. in terms of both aspiration and practice, and its high incidence on core issues such as care, fertility rate, and the daily challenge of balancing family and work. In light of this, we tried to discover whether and under what conditions the introduction of different S.W. forms could be a win-win solution for companies and employees alike.