Child safety in policy: Who is being kept safe and from what?

Keeping children safe from harm is a national policy priority in Australia. Extensive inquiries and reviews have highlighted institutions' persistent failures to respond ethically and appropriately to child abuse and its life-long impacts on survivors. Policy efforts now reflect considerable emphasis on safeguarding children, including through the development of ‘child safe’ organisations. The realisation of these policy aspirations requires close attention to how ‘child safe’ is conceptualised and operationalised in different organisational contexts. Drawing on an analysis of policy in Australia and other international jurisdictions, namely New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland, this article engages critically with the notion of ‘child safe’ in policy, to explore who is to be safe, from what and how, in organisational settings. The findings suggest emergent discourses of ‘child safe’ are bound up with particular constructions of both children and safety, reflect current social and political understandings and agendas, and have implications for organisations' approaches to safety. Ensuring the safety of children in Australia and other jurisdictions requires continuing scrutiny of policy implementation to make sure current policy efforts are not reduced to compliance-based imperatives that protect organisations, but fail to create the cultural conditions that enhance children's wellbeing and safety.     

Working the ‘spaces’ between policy and practice: the contributions offered by resilience theory and action research

The policy‐practice dimension often presents challenges particularly in the policy arena of child well‐being. Policy designers identify risk factors and design programmes intended to develop protective factors in areas of need. The 2004 Australian Communities for Children (CfC) initiative aimed to improve the social, health and educational outcomes for young children living in socio‐economically disadvantaged localities. Its method was to engage local community members to contribute towards developing protective factors. Rather than considering this national–local arrangement, an unworkable alliance, we examine the performance of CfC through three examples and demonstrate how resilience theory and action research can assist this programme achieve its social inclusion aims and well‐being outcomes. We choose not to disregard policy programmes like CfC, rather we emphasize the possibilities offered when working these complex spaces involving multiple and inherent contradictions. The spaces that often exist between the policy and its implementation are rethought to allow a greater opportunity for the growth of innovation and change.     

Book review

La domination masculine Pierre Bourdieu Seuil, París, 1998, 134 pp., 85 F     

SIMULATION FOR FIRE DEPARTMENT DEPLOYMENT POLICY ANALYSIS

This paper discusses the use of simulation in the determination and analysis of alternative deployment strategies for urban fire supression systems. The simulation model utilizes the New York City-Rand Institute simulator of fire department operations tailored for use with the Denver Fire department. A distinction is made between static deployment (where mathematical programming methods are used) and dynamic analysis (which employs the simulation model). The simulation model is described, as are its extensive data requirements. The results discuss measures of validation of the simulation and outline the recommendations resulting from this research.     

The impact of organisational politics and trust in the top management team on strategic decision implementation success: A middle-manager's perspective

The implementation of strategic decisions is a complex and demanding process that requires an open and lateral communication of free-flowing information to make sense of and champion a firm's intended changes. For the process to be effective, middle managers need to operate within an environment that nurtures a pro-social mindset and helps to cope with stressors caused by the possibility of harm done by the intended changes to their vested interests. Drawing from the job demands-resources model, we argue that organisational politics represent an organisational demand, which may hinder the implementation of strategic decisions. To cope with this demand, implementers recruit organisational resources (i.e. trust in the top management team) that may moderate the negative effects of dysfunctional politics. To test our hypotheses, we drew on a sample of 228 middle managers from 114 private Greek firms with more than 100 employees across various industries. We found that when organisational politics were high during the implementation process, implementation success diminished. However, their negative impact was reduced when trust in the top management team was high. Conversely, when organisational politics were low, middle managers reported a higher implementation success regardless of how highly the top management team was trusted. Our study is the first to test the influence of organisational politics on the success of the implementation process from a middle manager's perspective. In addition, we show that implementation success can be viewed through a demands-resources lens, which provides a meaningful contribution to research on strategy implementation.     

Predicting Career Indecision in College Students: The Roles of Identity Formation and Parental Relationship Factors

Students' identity formation and perceptions of parental acceptance and encouragement of independence were investigated as predictors of career indecision. The Mother-Father-Peer Scale (Epstein, 1983), Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status (Bennion & Adams, 1986), and Career Decision Scale (Osipow, Carney, Winer, Yanico, & Koschier, 1976) were administered to 169 undergraduate students with a mean age of 19.68. Analysis using multiple regression indicated that career indecision was predicted by a greater degree of identity moratorium and diffusion, less maternal acceptance and fewer years in college. Suggestions for future research and counseling applications are provided.     

Positive Feelings After Casual Sex: The Role of Gender and Traditional Gender-Role Beliefs

The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of positive and negative affect following casual sex. Specifically, the primary goal was to investigate how traditional gender-role beliefs, peer approval of casual sex, perceptions of others, sexual assertiveness, and sexual pleasure influence affective experiences. Second, we aimed to determine the extent to which these associations were comparable for men and women. Although we expected mean differences on many of these constructs (e.g., men perceiving more peer approval), we expected the relationships between these constructs to be comparable for women and men. Participants ages 18 to 35 (N = 585) were recruited from a large university and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and described their most recent casual sex experience in a self-report questionnaire. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses indicated that gender-role beliefs were significantly associated with less sexual assertiveness and more negative perceptions of others; for women they were also associated with less peer approval of casual sex. For women and men, sexual assertiveness predicted sexual pleasure; and sexual pleasure was associated with affect. To decrease the gender discrepancy in positive affect and sexual pleasure, it is important to develop a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships among norms, casual sex experiences, and affect.