The Eurovision Song Contest – A Continent (still) Divided?

Credited as one of the most successful major televised music events held annually in Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) still serves as a battlefield between Eastern and Western European aesthetic paradigms. Although the Western paradigm has long been regarded as an almost universal criterion of success, the contemporary ESC presents a unique opportunity for post-communist acts to contest that hegemony while playing with its conventions. This article examines how, in the post-1989 situation, the most successful Eastern European acts purposely exploited, juxtaposed and subverted several aesthetic categories, demonstrating their understanding of the conventions promoted at the ESC on the one hand, while undermining and contesting them on the other. The article argues for greater attention to such strategies as over-exploitation of stereotypes and auto-stereotypes, as well as mocking the prevailing aesthetics by playing with such notions as authenticity, folklore, nationalism, essentialism, camp, kitsch or hyper-reality and challenging the contest's utopian and nostalgic ideals.     

Intensive management reduces butterfly diversity over time in urban green spaces

Urban Ecosystems - Loss and fragmentation of semi-natural grasslands have had negative consequences for grassland biodiversity, such as butterflies. Urban parks and other urban green spaces have so...     

Open Dialogue: Frequently Asked Questions

Open Dialogue is an approach to working with people and their families experiencing psychosocial distress. Interest in Open Dialogue in Australia has been growing recently, raising questions about its adaption and implementation to local contexts. This article is an attempt to answer some of the frequently asked questions we have encountered in training and discussions about Open Dialogue. We attempt to provide responses to questions of how Open Dialogue is different to what is done already, how it fits with current approaches, how you know if you are doing it, whether it is passive or just about doing reflections, issues about including the social network, and concerns about the evidence base. This article aims to present a variety of viewpoints in relation to these questions and to hopefully further discussions on how Open Dialogue can be implemented and adapted to Australian health care and social care contexts.     

Public sector managers: the decision to leave or remain in a job

The public sector faces a grave problem as far as managerial retention as the result of the increasing number of retirements and of voluntary resignations. Despite the vital interest in managerial turnover in the public sector, research is scarce. This study, which increases our understanding of why public sector managers leave their positions, takes a qualitative and narrative research approach in examining voluntary turnover. Interviews were conducted with operations managers (in education, social care, and technical activities) at three Swedish municipalities. We identify a multitude of environment push and pull factors with a focus on administrative support, supervisory support and illegitimate tasks. The narratives of managerial turnover reveal the complexity of the decision to leave or remain in a job, containing a mixture of push and pull factors, negative feelings, unmet expectations and extraordinary events. Three possible HRD actions to decrease undesirable managerial turnover are identified: re-work organizational structures; re-model job characteristics; and re-examine managerial turnover decisions as a long and complex process. Our hope is that the findings are used for ultimately create healthy organizations.     

Determinants of recent immigrants’ location choices: quasi-experimental evidence

This paper exploits a Danish spatial dispersal policy on refugees, which can be regarded as a natural experiment to investigate the influence of regional factors on recent immigrants’ location choices. The main push factors are lack of co-nationals and immigrants. Additional push factors are lack of rental, including social, housing and lack of institutions for qualifying education, which explain why recent immigrants are attracted to large cities. Finally, placed refugees tend to leave locations with relatively high regional unemployment, and there is indirect evidence of welfare seeking.

The Use of the Partnering Concept for Public–Private Collaboration: How Well Does it Really Work?

This paper critically scrutinizes the key success factors and tools described in the partnering literature by exploring how they are implemented in a public–private partnering collaboration. In addition to this the paper investigates to what extent these tools facilitate the relationship between the parties in a partnering process. The empirical data consist of two longitudinal case studies. Both cases are large and complex urban development projects in the Swedish water and sewage industry. The results from the cases were ambiguous and positive; as well, some negative outcomes were present. Further, the processes were in both cases far from easy and it required a lot of effort from the parties in the collaboration to make the collaboration work and establish a culture based on trust, especially higher up in the organization. As could be expected, the reality is thus far more complex and cumbersome than previous studies indicate.     

Professional discretion and length of work experience: what findings from focus groups with care managers in elder care suggest

ABSTRACT

Research has explored how care managers in elder care – who often function as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – regard professional discretion. The way in which length of work experience affects care managers’ use of professional discretion remains, however, unexplored. This article present findings from 12 focus groups with 60 care managers. By bringing attention to how care managers experience the needs assessment process, this article sheds light on how these ‘street-level bureaucrats’ struggle when they try to balance their clients’ needs against institutional frameworks and local guidelines. Length of work experience seems to play a role in how care managers claim to use professional discretion. Experienced care managers describe how they deviate from the guidelines at times in order to create an increased scope of action in their decision-making process. Those with less time in the profession describe greater difficulties in this respect. Findings suggest that research should explore if length of work experience plays a role in the actual way in which care managers assess needs and make decisions. As such, they contribute to our understanding of how needs assessment processes are navigated by professionals while also pointing towards the nature of professional discretion in gerontological social work.     

Family involvement in the institutional eldercare context. Towards a new understanding

This article focuses on family involvement and its various patterns and expressions in the context of end-of-life care in a nursing home. Based on analyses from an ethnographic study carried out at a nursing home ward, the aim is to describe and analyze the conditions of aging and dying for the old residents, as well as effects on their visiting families and relatives. As in similar research findings, it became clear from the study that families continue to visit and contribute to the care of the old resident throughout the years, from the time of placement to their demise, but that this involvement might vary both in content and in extent. However, it was found that families' involvement (as well as their changing relationships and roles) is particularly shaped by the very process of dying and lingering aura of death on the ward. The analysis presented in the article evinces the difficult — and in many ways impossible — role of the family in the institutional end-of-life setting, and discloses the various patterns and manifestations of family involvement in this environment. Different meanings and implications of family involvement are discussed and highlighted.     

Time and exclusion

Drawing on interviews with parents of children with complex disabilities in several school systems in a US state, this paper examines how temporal units such as the school day and school year and practices organized around artifacts like clocks and calendars work as ‘devices of temporal distanciation’ to separate children with disabilities from other children and exclude their families from critical relations with schools. The paper focuses on two kinds of effects: the ways differentiated timetables separate children and the ways constructing school time in bounded, discrete units limits the ability of parents and children to make key elements of their lives visible to the school.     

Attachment Style With Mother,Father, Best Friend,and Romantic Partner During Adolescence

Self‐reported attachment styles with mother, father, best friend, and romantic partner were assessed longitudinally across adolescence. Three cohorts (ages 13, 16, and 19 years; N=373) from a community sample were followed across 2 years. There was only one change in attachment styles with age: the oldest adolescents were more dismissive than the younger. Adolescents were more secure with mother than with father, and most dismissive and fearful with father. Boys were more dismissing than girls, who were more fearful with a romantic partner (n=158). Across time, attachment insecurity with father was associated with insecurity with a best friend. Attachment insecurity with a romantic partner was associated primarily with insecurity with friend, but changes over time tended to be associated with insecurity with mother. Results support the view of a differentiated hierarchy of attachment figures in adolescence, with the quality of parental attachment contributing to close extra‐familial relationships.