Complaining Our Way to Quality: Complaints, Contracts and the Voluntary Sector

The research on which this paper is based is part of a wider study of quality assurance and the voluntary sector. The focus of this paper is on complaints procedures, as part of quality assurance mechanisms, where voluntary agencies are the contracted service providers. The authors argue that, with the introduction of contracting and particularly with its further development, the way in which complaints mechanisms currently operate will need to be revised if they are to be an effective part of the quality assurance process.     

Gender‐Sensitive Research in a Chinese Community

The aim of this article is to foster an awareness of the need for gender‐sensitive research in the context of the methodological and ethical challenges posed by such research. We trace the development of gender sensitivity and masculinity in social work practice and research and connect this to an overview of the issues posed by research on sensitive topics. Reflecting on a research project involving Chinese male sexual abuse survivors, we draw conclusions illustrating and proposing a range of methodological practices and ethical safeguards. We underscore the importance of gender‐sensitivity in performing research on sensitive topics with men in a Chinese community.     

Good Friendships among Children: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

Ethical dimensions of friendship have rarely been explicitly addressed as aspects of friendship quality in studies of children's peer relationships. This study identifies aspects of moral virtue significant for friendship, as a basis for empirically investigating the role of ethical qualities in children's friendship assessments and aspirations. We introduce a eudaimonic conception of friendship quality, identify aspects of moral virtue foundational to such quality, review and contest some grounds on which children have been regarded as not mature enough to have friendships that require virtue, and report a qualitative study of the friendship assessments and aspirations of children aged nine and ten (n = 83). In focus group sessions conducted in ten schools across Great Britain, moral qualities figured prominently in children's assessments of friendship quality. The findings provide evidence of children having friendships exhibiting mutual respect, support, and valuing of each other's good character.     

Sexuality and gender identity: from a discursive to a relational analysis

This paper concentrates on the recent controversy over the division between sex and gender and the troubling of the binary distinctions between gender identities and sexualities, such as man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual. While supporting the troubling of such categories, I argue against the approach of Judith Butler which claims that these dualities are primarily discursive constructions that can be regarded as fictions. Instead, I trace the emergence of such categories to changing forms of power relations in a more sociological reading of Foucault's conceptualization of power, and argue that the social formation of identity has to be understood as emergent within socio-historical relations. I then consider what implications this has for a politics based in notions of identity centred on questions of sexuality and gender.     

Post-Fordism,union strategy and the rhetoric of restructuring: The case of Australia, 1980–1996

Theory and Society -     

Accountability and the Camera Perspective Bias in Videotaped Confessions

Prior research indicates that altering the perspective from which a videotaped confession is recorded influences assessments of the confession's voluntariness. The present study examined whether increasing decision makers' sense of accountability attenuates this biasing effect of camera perspective. Participants in a high-accountability (but not a low-accountability) condition were told that they would have to justify their judgments concerning the voluntary status of a video-taped confession to a trial judge. Although supplementary measures indicated that high-accountability participants processed information contained in the video-taped confession more carefully and thoroughly, the camera perspective bias persisted. This result adds to a growing body of work indicating that the criminal justice system needs to be seriously concerned with how it acquires and utilizes videotaped confession evidence.