Tolerance Within Community: Does Social Capital Affect Tolerance?

Credit cooperatives are financial intermediaries that pay attention to social criteria. Thus, if such entities want to survive and thrive in the new international context, they cannot ignore their inefficiencies in both the financial and social dimensions of their activity. However, previous research on efficiency in credit cooperatives is very limited and only considers their financial activity. To date, no study has been published giving evidence through indicators on whether these banking institutions are socially efficient. This paper therefore constructs a social efficiency index of Spanish credit cooperatives during the period 2008–2014 and examines its main explanatory factors. After applying a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis approach, the results from the first stage indicate that, on average, the social efficiency of Spanish credit cooperatives reaches an acceptable level of 66.42 %. Second-stage truncated regression reveals that entities with a greater proportion of branches in urban areas are socially less efficient, whereas both their size and the number of service points have a positive effect. Interestingly, social efficiency also varies significantly depending on the regional location of credit cooperatives in Spain. As a result, our findings enable these Social Economy financial institutions to both know their performance relative to their social activity and use this information to improve their competitiveness in the future.     

Conceptual Model and Map of Financial Exploitation of Older Adults

This article describes the processes and outcomes of three-dimensional concept mapping to conceptualize financial exploitation of older adults. Statements were generated from a literature review and by local and national panels consisting of 16 experts in the field of financial exploitation. These statements were sorted and rated using Concept Systems software, which grouped the statements into clusters and depicted them as a map. Statements were grouped into six clusters, and ranked by the experts as follows in descending severity: (a) theft and scams, (b) financial victimization, (c) financial entitlement, (d) coercion, (e) signs of possible financial exploitation, and (f) money management difficulties. The hierarchical model can be used to identify elder financial exploitation and differentiate it from related but distinct areas of victimization. The severity hierarchy may be used to develop measures that will enable more precise screening for triage of clients into appropriate interventions.     

The effect of political generation on identity and social change: Age cohort consequences

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore how political generation affects the ways in which diverse individuals come together and change their social and personal identities. Drawing on 52 in-depth interviews with members of the Red Hat Society, we show that women draw on their political generation, and the gains of the women’s movement specifically, to oppose cultural constructions of aging. The Red Hat Society provides a “free space” for women to foster a collective identity that both visibly challenges aging norms and provides its members new standards for self-approval. We conclude by highlighting the importance of focusing on political generation to understand collective action over the life course and call for more scholarship on the function of political generation in social change.     

Book Review

Homophobia: An Australian History Shirleene Robinson (ed), The Federation Press, Sydney, 2008, pb, x + 262 pp., $35.00     

Career Counseling With Clients Who Have a Severe Mental Illness

Individuals who are diagnosed with a serious mental illness encounter a variety of barriers that can impede their career development. In this article, the career barriers of clients who have a severe mental illness are reviewed, and a developmental approach to career counseling with this population is described. A case example is provided to illustrate the complex process of developmental career counseling with people who are seriously impaired by a psychiatric illness.     

Gender and New Public Management: Reconstituting Academic Subjectivities

This article is located within the context of British Higher Education. It examines the ‘radical reforms’ of New Public Management (NPM) (marketization and managerialism) in the management of university organizations. The article has two main aims. First, to explore the extent to which NPM initiatives have influenced individual women academics’s day–to–day experiences of the gendered academy and their professional identities. Second, to understand individuals’ active responses to NPM to develop theorizing of individual resistance in public service organizations. Adopting a Foucauldian feminist framework, it is suggested that the introduction of NPM presents a site for political struggle for women academics. The article explores the gendered nature of NPM, to determine how, in three individual universities, different women academics have responded to the ‘managerialist challenge’. Finally, the article focuses on the ways in which different women academics might accommodate, resist, or transform the discourses of NPM, the factors facilitating this, and the material outcomes.     

When My Mom Was a Little Girl … : Gender Differences in Adolescents' Intergenerational and Personal Stories

Narratives about parents may help adolescents navigate their own experiences. Yet, research has not examined what adolescents know about their intergenerational past. Sixty‐five 14‐ to 16‐year‐old middle‐class, racially diverse adolescents narrated two stories about each parent's childhood, and 2 positive personal stories. Narratives were coded for structure (length, elaboration), theme (affiliation, achievement), and internal states. Mothers' stories were more elaborative, affiliative, and emotionally rich than fathers', which were more achievement focused. Girls' personal narratives were longer, more elaborative, and more emotionally rich than boys' and resembled narratives about mothers but not fathers. Adolescents may be narrating parents' experiences through gendered lens of the parent but personal experiences through their own gendered lens. Implications of intergenerational narratives for adolescent identity are discussed.     

‘Sitting on the Mourning Bench’: Mental Health Workers and an Elderly Client

Abstract

The present article documents the experience of a first year social work student on fieldwork placement in an Aged Persons Mental Health Service. The student was part of a team providing service to a long-term client of the service when he was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The student's compassionate response to the client raises questions about grief and professionalism, which she explored through a journal and in discussion with her supervisor and other team members working with the client. As part of their reflective practice, the student, her supervisor and the client's mental health workers formed a collective to document their experience and present a staff education session. This article is the outcome of these processes and explores important grief issues in Aged Psychiatry and demonstrates the valuable contribution made by a student to the work of the team in the rich learning environment of a fieldwork placement in aged psychiatry. It is published with the kind permission of the client's next of kin.     

Habermas and green political thought

Conclusion My principal ecocentric objection to Habermas's social and political theory has been that it is thoroughly human-centered in insisting that the emancipation of human relations need not require or depend upon the emancipation of nature. Although Habermas has moved beyond the pessimism and utopianism of the first generation of Critical Theorists by providing the conceptual foundations of the practical and emancipatory cognitive interests, he has, as Whitebook points out, also markedly altered the spirit of their project. Yet it is precisely the spirit of the early Frankfurt school theorists, namely, its critique of the dominant imperialist orientation toward the world (rather than its critique of a simplistically conceived idea of science) and its desire for the liberation of nature, that is most relevant to - and provides the most enduring Western Marxist link with - the ecocentric perspective of the radical Greens.

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