Volunteer and coordinator perspectives on managing women volunteers

Recent changes in Australia, such as the new public management and national competition policy, have affected the way that human services are provided and have complicated the role of volunteer coordinators. However, because volunteers are free to choose their level of contribution, it is the volunteers' perspective that is the ultimate yardstick against which their coordination is assessed. The aim of the research examined here was a deeper understanding of women volunteers' and their coordinators' views of their work. The research was conducted within a qualitative paradigm, employing individual and focus group interviews. The analysis identified eight areas of concern for volunteers around their management. The analysis of the coordinators' interviews revealed three coordination styles—horizontal, nurturing, and managerial—of which the managerial was most in conflict with the volunteers' perspective.     

A Proud Label: Exploring the Relationship between Disability Politics and Gay Pride

This paper draws parallels between disability politics and the gay pride movement, in order to illustrate how different minority groups share experiences in common whilst retaining distinct qualities. Through exploring this relationship, issues such as normalisation, passing and challenging prejudice will be presented in a wider context. The social model of disability will be applied to experiences within the gay and lesbian community and the experience of dual oppressions will be addressed. The paper concludes with a focus upon the concept of the personal as political and the force of collective power.     

From Syllables to Syntax: Multilevel Statistical Learning by 12‐Month‐Old Infants

To successfully acquire language, infants must be able to track multiple levels of regularities in the input. In many cases, regularities only emerge after some learning has already occurred. For example, the grammatical relationships between words are only evident once the words have been segmented from continuous speech. To ask whether infants can engage in this type of learning process, 12‐month‐old infants in 2 experiments were familiarized with multiword utterances synthesized as continuous speech. The words in the utterances were ordered based on a simple finite‐state grammar. Following exposure, infants were tested on novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The results indicate that the infants were able to perform 2 statistical learning tasks in sequence: first segmenting the words from continuous speech, and subsequently discovering the permissible orderings of the words. Given a single set of input, infants were able to acquire multiple levels of structure, suggesting that multiple levels of representation (initially syllable‐level combinations, subsequently word‐level combinations) can emerge during the course of learning.     

Social Protection and Health: Experiences in Uganda

There is an interesting and continuing debate on the nature and role of social protection in poverty reduction. Within the health sector, discussion has focussed on the drawbacks associated with fee exemption schemes and community‐based health insurance, with much less attention paid to the policy option of abolishing user fees. This paper reviews empirical evidence on the impact of the Government of Uganda's decision in 2001 to abolish user fees for health services. The paper finds that this policy intervention has had a significant positive impact on health‐seeking behaviour in Uganda and concludes that this policy measure can make an important contribution towards a more ‘promotional’ policy approach to social protection.     

Democrats, Dictators, and Demonstrators

Using a data set of democratic movements and democratic transitions that took place between 1960 and 1990, I investigate the implications for economic growth of these events. There are two comparisons of interest: successful democratic movements to movements that are repressed, and successful democratic movements to democratic transitions that occurred without such movements. None of these events has a positive effect on economic growth.     

Watching and Listening: A Paediatrician's Career, 1944-1986

The medical model of disability has been much criticised in recent years and the traditional power of the doctor to diagnose, direct practice and provide services is now being challenged. Paediatricians have been accused of making crude assessments of potential ability in children, damaging the quality of family life in the process. Yet, the Cleveland affair admits ambiguities in the public perception of paediatricians. Are they to be advocates for their vulnerable clients or partners of parents? Can they be both? Medical attitudes arise from the political and social culture in which practitioners are learning and operating. In this paper one paediatrician shares his reflections on a 42-year career, during which period medical, social and economic changes were to radically alter his practice and perceptions.     

The changing practice of urban planning

The purpose of this paper is to explore the changing nature of urban planning practice in the Third World. I shall seek to answer four main questions. First, what changes have there been in recent years? Second, why have these changes occurred? Third, are these changes, on balance, for good or ill? And fourth, what will or should happen next? Clearly these are ambitious questions to ask under any circumstances. And within the scope of a short paper such as this it may be regarded as reckless even to make the attempt. But I hope that the paper may at least clarify some of the questions, even if it fails to provide all the answers.     

Sexual needs, control, and refusal: how "doing" class and gender influences sexual risk taking

The poor are disproportionately affected by unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We know relatively little, however, about the sexual processes behind these disparities. Despite studies of gender enactment's influence on sexual behaviors, few analyses examine the sexual "doing" of social class. We conducted sexual history interviews with 36 women and men, half middle class and half poor and working class. Most respondents reported that men have greater sexual appetites than women, but the middle class were more likely to cite social influences while the poor and working-class respondents primarily ascribed biological origins. The social construction of sexual controllability among the middle class contributed to perceptions that sex was a containable force. Poor and working-class women described men's sexual needs as physiologically irrepressible, which shaped sexual refusal. Our findings move beyond socioeconomic status (SES) as a "risk factor" and explore two examples of how gender and social class mediate people's sexual selves and health.