Thinking systemically about fieldwork education—A third way

Abstract

This paper reviews fieldwork education initiatives in a number of Australian States and New Zealand and within the United Kingdom throughout the 1990s. This provides the context for a review of parallel developments of fieldwork education in Western Australia—including the development of a Joint Schools/AASW/Employing Agencies Coordinating Committee, a fieldwork syllabus, two levels of professional supervision training and an enhanced fieldwork assessment manual. As a contrast to the government-driven initiatives in fieldwork education in the UK and the prescribed profession/school of social work-driven requirements in the Australian/New Zealand literature, a community development model of working systemically with multiple stakeholders is presented as a third way in which a multi-layered change initiative is developed, implemented and reviewed. The writer argues for greater attention to core practice tasks and to rigorous assessment processes within fieldwork education, and the active involvement of industry, as essential for educating competent and confident social workers.     

Problematising international placements as a site of intercultural learning

This paper theorises some of the learning outcomes of a three-year project concerning student learning in international social work placements in Malaysia. The problematic issue of promoting cultural and intercultural competence through such placements is examined, where overlapping hegemonies are discussed in terms of isomorphism of social work models, that of the nation state, together with those relating to professional values and knowledge, and the tyrannies of received ideas. A critical discussion of cultural competence as the rationale for international placements is discussed in terms of the development of the graduating social worker as a self-reflexive practitioner. The development of sustainable international partnerships able to support student placement and the issue of non-symmetrical reciprocation, typical of wide socio-economic differentials across global regions, is additionally discussed.     

R&D productivity rides again?

A recent analysis of R&D productivity suggests that there are grounds for ‘cautious optimism’ that the industry ‘turned the corner’ in 2008 and is ‘on the comeback trail’. We believe that this analysis is flawed and most probably wrong. We present an alternative analysis of these same data to suggest that the industry is not yet ‘out of the woods’ and suggest that many of the systemic issues affecting pharmaceutical R&D productivity are still being resolved. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

'What Matters to Me is not What You're Talking About' - Maintaining the Social Model of Disability in 'Public and Private' Negotiations

Moving from a medical to a social model of individual disability is a political process of change with implications for understanding of and relationship to borders between individual, social life and political participation. This process has echoes in the conceptual experience of change through movement for women's liberation and gay liberation. Conceptualisation of a public/private divide has been identified in both these movements, and can also be used productively to further the use of a social model of disability. In this way, public change in status and participation can be linked to private defeat of barriers to public and political participation. This article identifies some uses of conceptualising public and private as a way of locating service provision within a social model of disability.     

A new variational Bayesian algorithm with application to human mobility pattern modeling

A new variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm, split and eliminate VB (SEVB), for modeling data via a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is developed. This new algorithm makes use of component splitting in a way that is more appropriate for analyzing a large number of highly heterogeneous spiky spatial patterns with weak prior information than existing VB-based approaches. SEVB is a highly computationally efficient approach to Bayesian inference and like any VB-based algorithm it can perform model selection and parameter value estimation simultaneously. A significant feature of our algorithm is that the fitted number of components is not limited by the initial proposal giving increased modeling flexibility. We introduce two types of split operation in addition to proposing a new goodness-of-fit measure for evaluating mixture models. We evaluate their usefulness through empirical studies. In addition, we illustrate the utility of our new approach in an application on modeling human mobility patterns. This application involves large volumes of highly heterogeneous spiky data; it is difficult to model this type of data well using the standard VB approach as it is too restrictive and lacking in the flexibility required. Empirical results suggest that our algorithm has also improved upon the goodness-of-fit that would have been achieved using the standard VB method, and that it is also more robust to various initialization settings.     

Contents of Volume 18, 2002

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 18, 2002     

Broadening the Intersectional Path: Revealing Organizational Practices through ‘Working Mothers’ Narratives about Time

This article is concerned with the complex inequality experienced by mothers in employment, and applies ‘strong intersectionality’ to women's narratives about time to reveal the intersecting inequalities women experience and gendered organizational practices. Drawing on empirical research with 30 Irish ‘working mothers’, this article explores the way time is ordered and managed to create gendered inequalities for women at the intersection of maternity with paid work. By conceptualizing gender, maternity and class as simultaneous processes of identity practice, institutional practice and social practice, following Holvino, women's narratives reveal that organizations manage and order time to fit with notions of ‘ideal workers’, which perpetrate older hierarchies and gendered inequalities, and which create regimes of inequality for women at the intersection of maternity with paid work.