Emotional labour and befriending in family support and child protection in Tower Hamlets

This paper describes the emotional labour and befriending of families in East London by Family Support Workers (FSWs). The study is derived from an evaluation of the Family Welfare Association's Tower Hamlets Family Support Service. A key finding is that engaging the emotions of families enables high quality and effective support in the family home. FSWs win trust and elicit narratives from families, particularly from mothers and children. The narratives of families are a rich source of informing better practice. In line with Government objectives, the participatory work of FSWs helps to balance understanding on family support, health and child protection. According to Government and research, the early identification of child protection issues is particularly important in mitigating their worst effects. FSWs gain trust and early disclosure on child protection cases. This prevents child care problems from deteriorating into child protection issues. FSWs also act as informal advocates and help to balance social service assessments with the views of families. FSWs take a proactive, non‐stigmatizing, non‐intrusive approach to families. FSWs are sensitive and responsive to the emotions, ethnicity and specific needs of families.     

Working‐class mothers’ school involvement: a class‐specific maternal ideal?

Recent ideological shifts, along with budgeting constraints, have made parental involvement in the schooling process necessary. Such expectations have increased the toll on working‐class mothers, who now have to assume responsibility in three time‐consuming areas: child care at home, school involvement and labour market participation. In analysing how mothers deal with this threefold expectation, research has focused on class‐specific maternal ideals and practices, but rarely directed systematic attention to how these concurrent expectations shape the maternal ideals they embrace. Moreover, few studies have examined how mothers’ maternal ideals shape their employment interruptions. The current paper considers how working‐class mothers rationalize the maternal ideals they embrace with regard to school involvement and examines how they negotiate them vis‐à‐vis other possible maternal ideals. Interviews of 48 Israeli low‐income mothers reveal that educational success is consensually perceived as critical for maximizing life chances and that this understanding evolved from the gradual realization that school involvement through extensive mothering – where women rely on others to meet their children's schooling needs – must be replaced by school involvement through intensive mothering – namely, personal presence‐based nurturing. We draw some implications relevant to the debate over class‐based maternal ideals.     

Underperformance in Affluence: The Remarkable Relative Decline in U.S. Heights in the Second Half of the 20th Century*

Objective. We use the complete set of NHES and NHANES data collected between 1959 and 2004 in order to construct trends for the physical stature of the non‐Hispanic white and black U.S. adult population and compare them to those of western and northern Europeans. Method. Regression analysis is used to estimate the trend in U.S. heights stratified by gender and ethnicity, holding income and educational attainment constant. Results. U.S. heights stabilized at mid‐century and a two‐decade period of stagnation set in with the birth cohorts 1955–1974, concurrent with continual rapid increases in heights in western and northern Europe. Americans had been the tallest in the world for (more than) two centuries until World War II, but by the end of the 20th century fell behind many European populations. Only since the most recent birth cohorts 1975–1983 is some gain apparent among whites but not among blacks. The relationship between height and income and between height and educational attainment has not changed appreciably over time for either men or women. Conclusion. We conjecture that the U.S. health‐care system, as well as the relatively weak welfare safety net, might be why human growth in the United States has not performed as well in relative terms as one would expect on the basis of income alone. The comparative pattern bears some similarly to that of life expectancy insofar as the United States is also lagging behind in that respect.     

Kissing Macaca: Blogs,Narrative and Political Discourse

Blogs rest at the cross‐section of politics, media, and discourse. This relatively new medium has injected itself into the spectacle that is campaigns; competing narratives seek to define candidates, lure voters, and wage a war over the ownership of symbols and meaning‐making. Blogs influence the formation of narratives within the political spectacle of campaigns. This article seeks to describe local/regional blogs as social and discursive phenomena that participate in, and provide part of, the discourse of political spectacle. The article looks at this political subculture and attempts to express through an analysis of form, function, and meaning this new, palpable discursive force — a counter to the existing hegemony. The case studies utilized are the local/regional blogospheres that have developed in the states of Connecticut and Virginia. In Connecticut, we analyze the metonymic chains built in the Ned Lamont versus Joe Lieberman senatorial race and, in Virginia, Jim Webb against former lobbyist Harris Miller in the primary and Senator George Allen in the general election.     

Open innovation and organizational features: An experimental investigation

This paper reports experimental results on open innovation in which free-riding, efficiency and spillover depend on the ability to affect the number of innovation contributors, and the modularity of the innovation task. This paper provides a tractable laboratory setting that relaxes the restrictive assumption of the theoretical literature that costs of development are independent across individuals. We have induced more distributed problem solving and spillover of knowledge when the process is more non-modular. When efficiency is measured as the percentage of profits made over maximum profits, small groups were more efficient than large groups in the non-modular production environment and efficiency was higher in the modular production environment irrespective of group size. Significantly, there was a higher percentage of spillover in the non-modular production environment, especially for large groups.     

Testing an AHP model for aircraft spare parts

This research aims to develop and test a practical and precise multi-criteria classification of aircraft spare part inventory management, using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), in order to maintain aircraft operational availability and to reduce unnecessary downtime. In this study, a multi-criteria model is developed within a large-scale aircraft maintenance and repair firm in Indonesia. Spare parts data were extracted from the inventory system and analysed to triangulate the model outcome, demonstrate its validity and compare the results against the mathematical results generated by the system’s algorithm. The findings suggest that AHP can lead to a transparent, rapid and systematic classification model, this is highly accurate and precise with an outcome comparable to traditional methods. The conclusion proposes that the AHP classification model is more effective and transparent than the currently available mathematical methods. This research contributes to the development of the multi-criteria inventory classification literature in the context of the aviation industry.