Introduction to the Special Issues on the Supervision of Staff and Field Education of Students

Two Special Issues of the Clinical Social Work Journal have been dedicated to building on the social work discipline’s tradition and commitment to the supervision of staff and field education of students. These issues bring together contemporary theorizing, clinical supervisory and field education practice experience and wisdom, and research studies to contribute to the knowledge base for practicing supervisors and field educators. As the first of the Special Issues, this issue has been dedicated to the supervision of staff. In this Introduction, we share the salient aspects of the articles published, as they relate to contemporary social work supervision, relational considerations within the supervisory dyad, models of supervision for fields of specialization, as well as measurement and evaluation. Implications are shared, with highlights and connections for practicing supervisors made throughout.     

Revisiting gendered assumptions of practitioner power: An exploratory study examining the role of social media expertise

The purpose of this exploratory study was to expand upon previous literatures in public relations power, and fill the need for more scholarship regarding practitioners’ perceptions of social media work, power, and gender. Findings from a survey of PRSA members showed that there is a gendered difference in power perception between males and females regardless of their PR roles or level of experience, but social media expertise was perceived equally between both genders. We argue that while social media expertise may serve to reduce a gendered power divide in public relations, continued critical exploration of social media and gender inequality is necessary.     

Verzerrte Beteiligung

To cope with the erosion of civic engagement, the expansion of public participation is postulated an efficacious remedy. Many authors notice the drawback of low turnout with unequal and biased participation compared to institutional elections. As the very first, this article not only emphasizes biased participation, but empirically analyses the biased output of participation methods.The example is the referendum on Stuttgart 21 (S21) in the year 2011. The counterfactual result for nonvoters is predicted by linking macro and micro-data. Estimations on municipality-level show participation-bias above elections, but below petitions and demonstrations. The counterfactual result predicts an enhanced rejection of S21.     

Konfundierte Ergebnisse durch ein zu stark beschränktes Design?

Recently C. Czymara and A. Schmidt-Catran published in this journal (KZfSS 2016 (2)) a factorial Survey-Experiment to contribute to the current debate on the inflow of refugees in Germany. The authors concluded from their Survey-Experiment that in particular highly qualified immigrants who show little culture distance should get accepted in Germany, while for instance Muslim immigrants would be more strongly rejected. In this comment it is argued that authors’ results probably suffered from a strong confounder bias. The employed experimental design also allows for a lot of alternative interpretations. Therefore, readers of the original article or further users of the data should be more cautious when interpreting the results.     

Weiterbilden und Weiterkommen? Non-formale berufliche Weiterbildung und Arbeitsmarktmobilität in Deutschland

Politicians and the business leaders regularly stress the importance of (further) education for individual life chances. Still, it is far from clear whether non-formal further training, i.?e. short training courses, which are the most common forms of further education in Germany, lead to career advancement. In this study, we analyze the impact of non-formal further training on labor market mobility using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) over the period from 2009 to 2016. Event history models for discrete time intervals show that employer-provided courses reduce mobility and promote career stability, which contradicts hypotheses derived from human capital theory, which is commonly used in the literature. More concretely, employer-provided courses prevent downward mobility (safety net function), but also reduce upward mobility and firm changes. Based on these findings, we suggest that future research should consider transaction costs and the firm context as well as the distinction between employer-provided and non-employer-provided training.     

Social Impact Bonds und der Disput um die Wohlfahrt

Social Impact Bonds are novel financial mechanisms for social welfare programs. What’s new about them is that they include professional financial investors into state provision of welfare. Its promise is to help states save public money in times of austerity by becoming more effective and selling their risk of failed social investments to the financial market. Against it, its critics see a further mode of capitalization of the public sphere (Landnahme). This article investigates Social Impact Bond s between the poles of de- and repolitization. On the one hand, the Social Impact Bond prevents public and democratic debates over welfare by means of privatization and methodical rationalization, on the other hand it addresses the welfare state and public expenditures to be important again. This is new, after decades of diminishing welfare states. Which sort of dispute the Social Impact Bond will bring about depends on the institutional context of its implementation.     

Die Finanzialisierung von Unternehmen

Since the 1990s the financialization of the enterprise is an increasingly important aspect of capitalist development also in Germany. However, more recently a growing number of scholars point at a problematic conceptual stretching of financialization. The term has been defined too differently and ambiguously and has not been distinguished sufficiently from seemingly similar concepts. Financialization has been prematurely identified with a set of fixed effects often condensed to stagist concepts of capitalist development. When analyzing effects financialization has been regarded in isolation without considering interaction effects with other structurations of fields and hence the multi-referentiality of the enterprise. In order to overcome these shortcomings the article proposes a concept for the analysis of firm level financialization which draws on a more general sociological concept of field structuration and dynamics in which the “multi-referential enterprise” operates. Based on this concept the article analyses episodes of financialization in Germany showing its dynamics and limits. Financialization of enterprises proves to be structurally limited, institutionally contested, and unfolds its effects in deferent actor constellations at firm level due to its multiple and contradictory embeddedness.     

Much Ado About Nothing? Macro-Prudential Ideas and the Post-Crisis Regulation of Shadow Banking

Post-crisis, macro-prudential ideas have challenged the epistemic authority of private risk management technologies, declaring them to be pro-cyclical contributors to systemic risk. This discursive challenge has been most critical of the shadow banking system, where private risk management instruments are central. This challenge, however, has not been translated into regulatory tools which reflect these convictions. This paper studies this process of discursive challenge to (failed) regulatory intervention for the case of the repo-market, the heart of the current shadow banking system. It traces regulatory efforts on the global and EU level from regulatory statements to (lack of) action, documenting both the persistent articulation of macro-prudential ideas challenging private risk-management systems and timid to no regulatory intervention. It links this hiatus to international coordination problems, the need for macro-prudential action to span regulatory communities, involving banking and financial market authorities and disagreements between micro- and macro-prudentially oriented regulators. The lack of evidence and the difficulty to generate it are identified as major impediments for regulatory consensus, further aggravated by ambiguities about the goals of anti-cyclical regulation. Beyond governance problems and the persistent appeal of private risk-management systems, the paper thus points to difficulties operationalizing macro-prudential ideas as a major explanatory factor.