Foster carer perceptions of support and training in the context of high burden of care

The challenges of providing sensitive and structured care for children in foster care go well beyond normative experiences of parenting. The present paper describes a mixed‐methods study of foster carers' perceived need for support and training, referenced to estimates of their burden of care. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 17 foster carers in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. Carers' perceived need for support and training were identified through qualitative analysis of interviews using domain analysis method. Carers' burden of care was estimated from the Parenting Stress Index and from a measure of carers' encounters with children's emotional, behavioural and relationship difficulties that was designed for the present study (the Caregiver Behavioural Encounters Index). Foster carers reported substantive, unmet needs for support and training. Foster carers also reported high parenting stress and encounters with a wide range of children's mental health difficulties, including both uncommon and severe difficulties, which together represent an exceptional burden of care. Carers' highest priority need was for training and support on managing and responding to children's mental health difficulties, while their greatest existing support came from Caregiver Liaison Social Workers and other carers. The findings suggest a number of critical implications for practice.     

Assessing the Utility of Stochastic Employee Movements

This article illustrates the substantial effects employee movements (i.e., movements due to employee promotions, transfers, and separations) have on the value of a human resource intervention. Two methods for estimating differential employee movements are presented and their resulting utility estimates are contrasted and compared. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of each procedure are discussed as well as the value such information provides to organizational decision makers.     

How does inequality aversion affect inequality and redistribution?

We investigate the effects of inequality aversion on equilibrium labor supply, tax revenue, income inequality, and median voter outcomes in a society where agents have heterogeneous skill levels. These outcomes are compared to those which result from the behavior of selfish agents. A variant of Fehr-Schmidt preferences is employed that allows the externality from agents who are “ahead” to differ in magnitude from the externality from those who are “behind” in the income distribution. We find first, that inequality-averse preferences yield distributional outcomes that are analogous to tax-transfer schemes with selfish agents, and may either increase or decrease average consumption. Second, in a society of inequality-averse agents, a linear income tax can be welfare-enhancing. Third, inequality-averse preferences can lead to less redistribution at any given tax, with low-wage agents receiving smaller net subsidies and/or high-wage individuals paying less in net taxes. Finally, an inequality-averse median voter may prefer higher redistribution even if it means less utility from own consumption and leisure.     

Explaining Gender Gaps in Legislative Committees

ABSTRACT

Legislative committees are often the epicenter of parliamentary influence, so their composition matters. Men are widely overrepresented in prestigious, influential committees, with women concentrated in low-status committees. These gender gaps have repercussions for power, visibility, careers, and policy outcomes. Yet the puzzle of why committees are gendered remains unsolved. Combining insights from quantitative and qualitative methods, we offer two major advances. We develop the literature on committee allocations, providing the first comprehensive gendered analysis. And we show how gender permeates all aspects of political careers from socialization to the political summit, leading to deep-rooted inequalities of power, influence, and opportunity.     

The City God Returns: Organised and Contagious Networks at the Xiamen City God Temple

This paper explores the revival and current networks of the Xiamen City God temple in Southeast China. I divide the networks into two forms: the first is organised and composed of systematically and consciously structured networks; the second is contagious, made up of networks that are more unwieldy and impossible to fully map as they are formed through the affective intensity of ritual events. The two forms of networks are mutually dependent: without the donations and participation generated through organised networks, the ritual events would never take place; without the ritual events that generate networks of contagion, there would be no interest or reason to support the temple and the god’s efficacy would be seen in decline.     

Shared mobility in a Māori community

ABSTRACT

Shared mobility is being advanced as a novel, technologically sophisticated approach to reducing the environmental impacts of high levels of car ownership. However, communities have long shared modes of transport for reasons other than environmental quality. We describe the shared mobility practices undertaken in a Māori community in the East Cape region of New Zealand. They reveal long-established ways of sharing that are underpinned by, and support, cultural principles. Shared mobility provides an appropriate and comfortable environment for people to share vital and sacred information and to strengthen social bonds. It also reflects the desire of tribal members to retain cultural practices that benefit the collective. The findings make it clear that sharing transport has far more than economic and environmental benefits. We suggest that it is time for the social and cultural benefits of sharing transport to become part of the global narrative on twenty-first-century collaborative consumption.     

Precarity in the Nonprofit Employment Services Sector

Drawing on interview and focus group data, this article explores research undertaken as part of a larger research project exploring precarity in the nonprofit employment services sector in a mid‐sized Canadian city. We critically survey major legislative changes to Canadian employment and income security policies and programs, including the restructuring of work and labor relations, growth of performance‐based contracting‐out, erosion of intergovernmental transfers, worker stress, and emotional tolls. Our study's results demonstrate how employment precarity in the nonprofit employment services sector is amplified by top‐down and centralized relationships with funding partners and policymaking divorced from the employment experiences of frontline staff. We make the case that it is important to work against rising workplace precarity to strengthen organizational and workplace conditions, as well as build environments more supportive of optimal employment support services. En se fondant sur des entretiens et des données découlant de groupes témoins, cet article présente des explorations entreprises dans une recherche plus large étudiant la précarité dans le secteur des emplois de service dans une ville canadienne de taille moyenne. Nous faisons une revue critique de changements importants intervenus dans la législation portant sur l'emploi au Canada et les politiques et programmes de la sécurité du revenu, incluant la restructuration du travail et des relations de travail, l'augmentation de la privatisation se fondant sur la performance, la diminution des transferts intergouvernementaux, le stress au travail et les conséquences émotionnelles. Les résultats de notre recherche démontrent comment la précarité de l'emploi dans les secteurs des services à but non lucratif est amplifiée par des relations allant du haut vers le bas et centralisée avec des partenaires et des politiques séparés de l'expérience des travailleurs sur le terrain. Nous démontrons qu'il est important de travailler contre la précarisation en renforçant les conditions organisationnelles et de travail, tout en construisant des environnements favorisant une offre de services de l'emploi optimaux.     

Give a dog a bone: representations of Scotland in the popular genre cinema of Neil Marshall

The best-known and most influential cinematic image of Scotland is that which constructs the country as the civilised modern world’s northern boundary and ideological antithesis. This historically venerable representational tradition incorporates Brigadoon (d. Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1954), Brave (d. Mark Andrews/Brenda Chapman/Steve Purcell, USA, 2012) and much else in between. The following essay examines what is perhaps the most explicit and extended twenty-first century manifestation to date of Scotland’s classic celluloid stereotype: the oeuvre of British popular genre filmmaker Neil Marshall. Analysis of this director’s Scottish trilogy – Dog Soldiers (GB/Lux/USA, 2002), Doomsday (GB/USA/SA/Ger, 2008), and Centurion (GB/Fr, 2010) – suggests not simply the historical persistence of a particular cultural representation of a particular national culture and identity, but also the varied, and often non-nationally specific, thematic uses to which Scottish cinematic stereotypes can be and are put. That conclusion suggests a number of possible future directions for Scottish cinema criticism more generally. First, the need for a more inclusive critical engagement with popular genre cinema, a hitherto under-examined area with the study of Scotland’s relationship with the moving image. Second, the extent to which critics might usefully approach Scottish-set and -themed cinema in a more multifaceted manner than has frequently been the case in historical terms. Neil Marshall’s oeuvre exemplifies the complex interplay of nationally and non-nationally specific images and ideas that exist within many popular filmic representations of Scotland.