The Varied Impact of Couple Relationship Breakdown on Children: Implications for Practice and Policy

This review of international literature assesses the impacts that the relationship breakdown of parents has on children and factors that can provide support should this occur. The parental separation process causes significant albeit short‐term distress for most children, with a minority reporting longer‐term outcomes such as socio‐economic disadvantage, behavioural problems, poor educational achievement, and physical and emotional health problems. Factors increasing the likelihood of sustained disadvantage include: poverty; poor parent–child relationships; continuing parental conflict, multiple transitions in family formation; and poor maternal mental health. Supporting the factors that can improve child outcomes, exploring opportune ways to strengthen couple and family relationships, and integrating the views of children (for example, in court‐based dispute resolution) are the leading implications for practice and policy.     

The role of dualities in arbitrating continuity and change in forms of organizing

A substantial body of literature on new forms of organizing has forecast the end of bureaucracy. More recent empirical studies, however, indicate that high‐performing organizations are adopting dual forms of organizing in which the controllability advantages associated with traditional forms work to complement and support the responsiveness attributes of new forms of organizing. The paradox is that, if organizations discard the key planning, co‐ordinating and direction‐setting mechanisms of traditional forms of organizing, they also remove the stabilizing dimensions of organizational form that are essential in periods of uncertainty and change. The challenge for organizations lies in learning how to manage the tensions or dualities between traditional and new forms of organizing, a process demanding the arbitration of continuity and change. This paper explores the concept of dualities and its salience in the management of organizing forms. First, the nature of dualities is explained; secondly, a set of characteristics is developed to describe the behaviour of dualities; and thirdly, suggestions are presented for arbitrating the tensions that exist in organizing form dualities. These three contributions are relevant because they signal the route to the effective creation and management of organizing form dualities, the benefit of which is the constructive combination of dynamic capabilities (underpinning innovation and responsiveness, the hallmarks of new forms of organizing) and operational capabilities (underpinning stability and efficiency, the hallmarks of traditional forms of organizing).     

The Planets Aligned: Is Child Protection Policy Reform Good Luck or Good Management?

Abstract

Governments across Australia are struggling to address escalating child protection notifications, a marked increase in the number of children in State care, a decrease in the number of foster carers and chronic workforce shortages in child welfare services. This paper explores the reform process that culminated in the proclamation of the Victorian Children, Youth and Families Act, 2005 and represents an aspect of the response in Victoria to these wider issues. It explores the history of the reform from the perspective of key actors from government, non-government sectors and academics who participated in the process. The paper explores the “ingredients of social policy reform” and how the change process was managed in Victoria. It does not seek to evaluate the reform but rather to understand the complex processes through which a propitious moment for reform was both seized and constructed.     

The Effects of Parental Divorce: A Culture-Specific Challenge for Young Adults in South Korea

Extensive research into the offspring of divorced parents has indicated associations between parental divorce and developmental outcomes for young adults. Nevertheless the impact of cultural variation on the lives of young people with divorced parents has been neglected. Qualitative research using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to examine the experiences of six Korean adults of divorced parents, who detailed the impact of parental divorce on their lives and told us how their feelings toward their parents and their own ideas about family formation had been reevaluated. Overall, participants expressed concerns in common with other children of divorce and concerns specific to their Confucian cultural context, namely ambivalent feelings toward their parents' divorce, confusion about traditional filial piety, and a view of the self as damaged and needing reinvestment.     

Comparing Pansexual- and Bisexual-Identified Participants on Demographics,Psychological Well-Being,and Political Ideology in a New Zealand National Sample

Pansexuality, characterized by attraction to people regardless of their gender, is an emerging sexual identity. Research has started to explore the differences between those who identify as pansexual and those who identify as bisexual, typically defined as being attracted to both men and women. This article extends past research by testing for differences between those who identify as pansexual (n = 52) and bisexual (n = 497) in a nationally representative sample. We used the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) to test for differences in demographic variables, psychological well-being, and political ideology. We found that pansexual participants were younger, more likely to be gender diverse (transgender or nonbinary), and more likely to be from the indigenous Māori ethnic group than bisexual participants. Pansexual participants also reported higher psychological distress and were more politically liberal than bisexual participants. These results suggest that people who identify as pansexual are, on average, quantifiably different from those who identify as bisexual; this study adds to a new but growing body of research on emerging plurisexual identities.     

Changing compatibility of cohabitation and childbearing between young British women born in 1958 and 1970

We investigate the effect of parenthood on whether non-marital unions led to marriage or parting for two cohorts of British women when they were aged between 16 and 29. We compare the effect of conceptions leading to births and the presence and characteristics of children on the odds that a cohabitation was dissolved, or that it was converted to marriage, for women born in 1958 and 1970. A multilevel, multiprocess, competing-risks model allows for multiple cohabitations per woman and endogeneity of fertility status. We find that cohabiting couples’ response to impending parenthood and the presence of children changed over time. In particular, the proportion of cohabiting couples who married before a birth decreased and, in the 1970 cohort only, the risk of dissolution declined during pregnancy. There is also evidence that the presence of a child cemented a cohabiting union for women from the 1970, but not the earlier, cohort.     

The relationship between childbearing and transitions from marriage and cohabitation in Britain

In this article, we describe a general framework for the analysis of correlated event histories, with an application to a study of partnership transitions and fertility among a cohort of British women. Using a multilevel, multistate competing-risks model, we examine the relationship between prior fertility outcomes (the presence and characteristics of children and current pregnancy) and the dissolution of marital and cohabiting unions and movements from cohabitation to marriage. Using a simultaneous-equations model, we model these partnership transitions jointly with fertility, allowing for correlation between the unobserved woman-level characteristics that affect each process. The analysis is based on the partnership and birth histories that were collected for the 1958 birth cohort (National Child Development Study) aged 16-42. The findings indicate that preschool children have a stabilizing effect on their parents 'partnership, whether married or cohabiting, but the effect is weaker for older children. There is also evidence that although pregnancy precipitates marriage among cohabitors, the odds of marriage decline to prepregnancy levels following a birth.     

In the slammer: the myth of the prison in American gay pornographic video

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the significance of the prison scenario and its various permutations in the texts of American commercial pornographic video. The paper will identify the prison as a highly eroticised all male environment, an arena where the active/passive dichotomy of gay pornography is staged and re-staged. The significances of the prison are multiple. The prison draws on a gay mythology of homosexual desire that has its origins in sources as diverse as the literature of the Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet and the erotic illustrations of Tom of Finland and Etienne. Prison scenarios take many shapes in gay pornography such as the American penitentiary, the military brig, and the fantasised dungeon of the leatherman. I see these scenarios as performing an important function within gay porn by offering idealised spaces for the acts of pornography: voyeurism, narcissistic display and active/ passive role-play.