Participation—for a change: Disabled young people lead the way

Virtually every Government programme for children and every Government Department in the UK is expected to involve children and young people in its policy development and service delivery (Children and Young People's Unit, 2001). It is the new orthodoxy. Yet, hard questions are often avoided when reciting the mantra of participation. Why bother? What has changed as a result? This paper first seeks to explore the constraints and limitations of this drive in public policy in England. Secondly, by looking at one specific example, it considers elements of practice to enable participation to be effective as a catalyst for change. Third, it proposes a framework that sets out an agenda for social inclusion that is itself influenced by children and young people and not reliant on the changing and often clashing fashions in Government.     

A Behavioral Look at the Training of Alex: A Review of Pepperberg’s The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots by Irene Pepperberg is reviewed from a behavior analytic orientation. The results of the...     

Social Work Education and criticality: some thoughts from research

This article has been developed from a keynote speech delivered by Bill Badham at a Practice Teaching Conference held in Leicester on 13-14 October 1998. The aim of the conference was to explore practice teaching in the context of the voluntary sector and consider strategies for development and change. The article considers the value to voluntary sector agencies of offering assessed practice placements to social work students. From the benefits to practice teachers and individual agency representatives, it broadens the discussion to the benefits to social work as a whole of having an integrated voluntary sector perspective in social work education.     

Time, Place and Competence: Society and History in the Writings of Robert Edgerton

This is an article by an historian about the work of an American anthropologist and social scientist who has for many years observed, recorded and participated in the lives of the mentally handicapped. It had its origins in a dissatisfaction with existing histories of retardation and a desire to seek out twentieth century sociological perspectives with relevance to and resonances for earlier periods.

The paper falls into three sections. The first describes and analyses the polarity-social competence and incompetence within given cultures-which is central to Edgerton's conception of what he terms 'socio-cultural retardation'. This is followed by an evaluation of The Cloak of Competence [1], which concentrates on the interactions between deinstitutionalisation, stigma and passing for normal. A concluding section returns, by means of an examination of the validity of the notion of a 'retarded community', to a final interrogation of the causes as well as the meanings and contradictions implicit in 'socio-cultural retardation'. Attention is also briefly given to the ways in which historians, and explicitly historical methodologies, can contribute to further research within the general paradigm which Edgerton has pioneered.     

Violence at work: An issue for the 1990s

Violence and conflict appear to be increasingly common aspects of everyday life, to the point where people take them into consideration when planning their activities and feel anxious about their possible occurrence. It is not only actual violence which offers a contemporary source of stress but also the threat of violence, although subjective estimates of risk are not always accurate. For example, it would appear that while the elderly feel the most threatened, the greatest risk is to those in their late teens and early twenties. This discrepancy between objective and subjective risk is understandable in terms of the different factors which have been shown to drive the subjective assessment of risk: availability of information, controllability and magnitude of outcome. Often it is the media which provides us with the information that we have on violence, and it is that presentation of information which helps shape our assessment of risk. For example, attacks by young persons on the elderly may be more dramatic and newsworthy than, albeit more frequent, attacks on other young persons. Thus they are reported to a greater extent and a distorted impression of risk begins to develop, which may be reinforced by realistic feelings of potential helplessness by the elderly in the face of any such attack, and fear of the magnitude of the consequences of violence. Whatever the real basis for a fear of violence, the available statistics in most European and North American countries suggests that, even taking into account the effects of reporting bias, acts of violence are increasing.     

Knowledge,identity and the middle class: from collective to individualised class formation?

This paper highlights a number of strong indications of important changes in the work and labour market experiences of professionals and managers, the core of the ‘new middle class’(nmc) in most contemporary class theories. Following an outline of some of these changes, it is argued that several central theoretical strategies shared by class theorists -notably a residual ‘functional essentialism’ and the choice of microfoundations - prevent them from adequately theorising these changes. The paper offers an altemative approach to theorising the contemporary nmc that avoids the reductionism of many existing approaches, and that is grounded in microfoundations focused on the relation of narratively constructed identities to social action. On this basis, an account of the contemporary emergence of a new segment of the nmc, the ‘nmc bricoleur’, is outlined, and its relation to empirical studies of the changing nmc is suggested. The paper concludes with some speculations about the likely future of Anglophone new middle classes.     

IN SEARCH OF WHAT IS RIGHT: THE MORAL DIMENSIONS OF THE DRUG DEBATE

The protagonists in the drug debate are talking past one another. While some argue that the drug debate is a health and social issue and should primarily be analytical and based on empirical evidence, others, explicitly or implicitly, treat it as a moral issue: overwhelmingly, in Australia, based on Christian beliefs. The aim of this paper is to set out a framework for the debate which explicitly recognises its moral as well as its empirical and analytical dimensions. It is hoped that greater transparency will facilitate the debate and may help the formulation of common positions. Heroin maintenance is used as an example to illustrate the arguments.