Organisation Workshop. Beyond the Workplace: Large Groups,Activity and the Shared Object

Organisation Workshop stands for a body of practice derived from the pioneering work that Clodomir de Morais did with the Brasilian Peasant Leagues starting in the early 1960s and shown to be relevant today in situations of high unemployment. Two essential ingredients are a large group and a common resource pool. The Organisation Workshop method is illuminated by Leontiev’s “objectivised activity” concept, as well as important insights from 3 generations of activity theory (CHAT). Moraisean thought and practice are shown to open up new avenues to community development and to break new ground in the social psychology of the large group.     

Use of information systems in social work – challenges and an agenda for future research

ABSTRACT

In the age of digitalisation social work is transforming. With the increased use of information systems, social workers are meeting new professional challenges. In this paper, we report findings covering a nine-year longitudinal study on critical issues in the use of a Case Management System in a Swedish social work agency. The study includes a stakeholder-based evaluation, interviews and document analysis. Comparing the evaluation findings with the literature helped us identify six areas in need of intensified research: (i) Usability and interface design; (ii) Mismatch between social conceptualisation and system conceptualisation of the case; (iii) Skills and training for information systems use; (iv) Statistical production for accountability and quality assurance; (v) Terminology for interpersonal understanding; (vi) IT Governance. As can be seen from the areas above, this kind of research depends on professional knowledge from the social work field – but also from the field of information systems. Hence, we suggest deeper collaboration between the two areas of knowledge in order to scrutinize the complexity of social work information systems. Clearly, the intersection of social work and information systems is a neglected research area, and we attempt to contribute by providing guidance for intensified research and practical knowledge generation.     

Disparities in Children’s Family Experiences by Mother’s Socioeconomic Status: The Case of Finland

A well-known argument claims that socioeconomic differentials in children’s family structures have become increasingly important in shaping child outcomes and the resources available to children in developed societies. One assumption is that differentials are comparatively small in Nordic welfare states. Our study examines how children’s experiences of family structures and family dynamics vary by their mother’s educational attainment in Finland. Based on register data on the childbearing and union histories of women in Finland born from 1969 onwards, we provide life-table estimates of children’s (N?=?64,162) experiences of family dissolution, family formation, and family structure from ages 0–15 years, stratified by mother’s education level at the child’s birth. We find huge socioeconomic disparities in children’s experiences of family structures and transitions. Compared to children of highly educated mothers, children of mothers with low levels of education are almost twice as likely to be born in cohabitation and four times as likely to be born to a lone mother. They are also much more likely to experience further changes in family structure—particularly parental separation. On average, children of low-educated mothers spend just half of their childhood years living with both their parents, whereas those of high-educated mothers spend four-fifths of their childhood with both parents. The sociodemographic inequalities among children in Nordic welfare states clearly deserve more scholarly attention.     

Perceived Safety in Extra-Care Housing for Senior Residents

Extra-care housing (ECH) is a new housing model in Sweden, falling in between ordinary homes and sheltered housing. The perception of safety among residents living in ECH was explored with the use of in-depth interviews (n = 28, on average 83 years old). A qualitative thematic analysis resulted in a model of perceived safety in the housing environment consisting of four themes: being able to manage on my own; a safe social context; being able to stay; and protection and safety. The model can be used for information, planning, and development of ECH in general.     

Lighting old age--how lighting impacts the ability to grow old in own housing, part one

A functionally optimized housing development designed to meet the demands in different phases of living (universal design) may result in the elderly living longer in their own homes. In this study a total of 165 healthy persons were included out of a total of approximately 320 persons turning 75 years of age in 2009 living in Drammen municipality. They went through a quantitative, questionnaire-based interview (including VAS and SF-36) and 20 participants were then selected for a qualitative in depth interview. The lighting conditions in the kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom and staircase were measured according to a simplified procedure. The overall lighting conditions were evaluated to be rather low, with means between 35 and 121 Lux, but the quantitative interviews showed that on most questions the scores were rather low, indicating that the overall thriving is good regardless of rather low lighting values.     

DISPOSITIONAL OPTIMISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL NETWORK DIVERSITY

Personality has yet to be examined as an indirect yet powerful determinant of the diversity of personal social networks that is independent of preference‐ and population‐based mechanisms. I use the 2004 General Social Survey to illustrate how dispositional optimism shapes core discussion network size as well as demographic heterophily among core ties. I find that optimism is associated with enhanced network size as well as ties among nonkin and across lines of age, education, and race. Following these results, I urge closer attention to personality as it dynamically shapes the social structure of opportunities and resources.     

Estimating network properties from snowball sampled data

This article addresses the estimation of topological network parameters from data obtained with a snowball sampling design. An approximate expression for the probability of a vertex to be included in the sample is derived. Based on this sampling distribution, estimators for the mean degree, the degree correlation, and the clustering coefficient are proposed. The performance of these estimators and their sensitivity with respect to the response rate are validated through Monte Carlo simulations on several test networks. Our approach has no complex computational requirements and is straightforward to apply to real-world survey data. In a snowball sample design, each respondent is typically enquired only once. Different from the widely used estimator for Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS), which assumes sampling with replacement, the proposed approach relies on sampling without replacement and is thus also applicable for large sample fractions. From the simulation experiments, we conclude that the estimation quality decreases with increasing variance of the network degree distribution. Yet, if the degree distribution is not to broad, our approach results in good estimates for the mean degree and the clustering coefficient, which, moreover, are almost independent from the response rate. The estimates for the degree correlation are of moderated quality.     

Dimensions of Capacity in Nonprofit Human Service Organizations

The purpose of this paper is to present and develop a firmer grasp of the underlying dimensions of organizational capacity in nonprofit human service organizations. The paper draws on the resource-based view of the organization (Barney et al. in Journal of Management 37:1299, 2011; Wernerfelt in Strategic Management Journal 5:171, 1984), which recognizes that organizational attributes and capabilities facilitate performance. Interviews were conducted with 66 executives in moderate sized, human service organizations to discuss factors that influence performance. Findings suggest that human, financial, and social capital all contribute to organizational performance. Executives emphasized the quality of people associated with the organization including the role of the board of directors in supporting performance. Many respondents also believed that maintaining healthy and dynamic external relationships was critical to success.     

Monies that Matter,on the Discursive Power of the Bank for International Settlements

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and its committees perform an increasingly important systemic regulatory role on the global financial markets, as well as for national monetary policies. In this article I argue that the cooperation and coordination among central banks makes this community vital for global discourse formation around monetary policies and financial interaction. The self-image displayed in speeches and evaluations of BIS representatives indicate that the community influences national economies. Using the concept of performativity for analysing the power dynamics of the BIS community, the article argues that cooperating central banks have considerable influence on economic interaction both nationally and globally. The nature of this political influence is not conspiratory or intentional, but embedded in the economistic interaction within and around the BIS.     

Fiducial and Posterior Sampling

The fiducial coincides with the posterior in a group model equipped with the right Haar prior. This result is generalized here. For this the underlying probability space of Kolmogorov is replaced by a σ-finite measure space and fiducial theory is presented within this frame. Examples are presented that demonstrate that this also gives good alternatives to existing Bayesian sampling methods. It is proved that the results provided here for fiducial models imply that the theory of invariant measures for groups cannot be generalized directly to loops: there exist a smooth one-dimensional loop where an invariant measure does not exist.