Rethinking Empowerment: A Postmodern Reappraisal for Emancipatory Practice

Summary This article is concerned with the implications of the postmodernchallenge to critical theory for the practice of empowerment.How do we conceptualize empowerment from a postmodern perspective?It is argued that the modernist concept of power upon whichempowerment rests, can have unintended disempowering effects.By conceptualizing power as a commodity, identities are forcedinto a powerful–powerless dualism which does not alwaysdo justice to diverse experiences. Thus we can sometimes contributeto dominance in spite of our liberatory intentions. It is arguedthat social workers need to become more aware of the self-discipliningand self-regulatory processes involved in professional workto address the social relations of power embedded in professionalpractices. Foucault's analysis of how marginalized knowledgesare affected by dominant cultural practices suggests a redefiningof empowerment as the insurrection of subjugated knowledge.The implications of this redefinition for practice is illustratedby reference to work with indigenous people in Australia.     

Social Enterprises as Hybrid Organizations: A Review and Research Agenda

The impacts of the global economic crisis of 2008, the intractable problems of persistent poverty and environmental change have focused attention on organizations that combine enterprise with an embedded social purpose. Scholarly interest in social enterprise (SE) has progressed beyond the early focus on definitions and context to investigate their management and performance. From a review of the SE literature, the authors identify hybridity, the pursuit of the dual mission of financial sustainability and social purpose, as the defining characteristic of SEs. They assess the impact of hybridity on the management of the SE mission, financial resource acquisition and human resource mobilization, and present a framework for understanding the tensions and trade‐offs resulting from hybridity. By examining the influence of dual mission and conflicting institutional logics on SE management the authors suggest future research directions for theory development for SE and hybrid organizations more generally.     

From Public Housing to Welfare Housing

This paper examines the shift in housing policy from public housing to welfare housing during the 1970's and the period of the Fraser government in particular. The period saw a series of new Commonwealth State Housing Agreements directed toward market pricing of public rental stock; at the same time Federal funds were declining, with marked effects on the public housing sector. The paper reflects on these trends and highlights certain contradictions in public housing policy.     

The politics of gendered emotions: disrupting men's emotional investment in privilege

This paper explores the implications of the neglect of emotions in critical masculinity studies and profeminist masculinity politics. This neglect in part results from feminist and profeminist critiques of the literature on emotional inexpressiveness as a tragedy for men that ignores male privilege and men's social power. To focus on men's emotions is seen by some profeminist commentators as psychologising men at the expense of sociological understandings of men's social power. However, in neglecting the place of emotions in men's lives, critical masculinity studies has overlooked the ways in which men's emotional attachment to privilege can perpetuate oppressive gender relations and male violence against women. By exploring men's emotional investment in unequal gender relations, the article outlines ways in which emotions can also be used as a catalyst to disrupt men's attachment to male privilege.     

Regionalizing Healthcare in Alberta: Legislated Change, Uncertainty and Loose Coupling

In this paper,we examine the re-organizing attempts of the Alberta government in healthcare from the viewpoint of uncertainty,loose coupling and the frequently unrecognized consequences of such change.We suggest that our understanding of change processes can be enhanced by conceptualizing the impact of task and environmental uncertainty through the nature of coupling between organizational elements.Based on our .ndings,we propose that the greater the degree of loose coupling in an organization,the more di .cult change is likely to be,and the more likely the occurrence of unanticipated consequences.     

Finding the Signal by Adding Noise: The Role of Noncontrastive Phonetic Variability in Early Word Learning

It is well attested that 14‐month‐olds have difficulty learning similar sounding words (e.g., bih/dih), despite their excellent phonetic discrimination abilities. By contrast, Rost and McMurray (2009) recently demonstrated that 14‐month‐olds’ minimal‐pair learning can be improved by the presentation of words by multiple talkers. This study investigates which components of the variability found in multitalker input improved infants’ processing, assessing both the phonologically contrastive aspects of the speech stream and phonologically irrelevant indexical and suprasegmental aspects. In the first two experiments, speaker was held constant while cues to word‐initial voicing were systematically manipulated. Infants failed in both cases. The third experiment introduced variability in speaker, but voicing cues were invariant within each category. Infants in this condition learned the words. We conclude that aspects of the speech signal that have been typically thought of as noise are in fact valuable information—signal—for the young word learner.     

Rethinking the Significance of Attitudes in Preventing Men's Violence Against Women

The concept of attitudes has been an important component of campaigns to address men's violence against women. Attitudes have been examined in relation to men's perpetration of violence, women's experience of violence and community and institutional responses. In this article we argue that there has not been sufficient interrogation of the limitations of attitudes in understanding and addressing men's violence. We propose a social constructionist approach to attitudes and emphasise the need to locate attitudes within the context of familial, organisational, community and social norms which support violence against women. Furthermore, we argue that to prevent violence against women, we must develop interventions beyond cultural and attitudinal change to encompass changes in structural relations and social practices.     

The Incompatibility of System and Lifeworld Understandings of Food Insecurity and the Provision of Food Aid in an English City

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - We report qualitative findings from a study in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith city with high levels of deprivation. Primary...