A new approach to care proceedings

A new approach to care proceedings, introduced in April 2008 with revised Children Act 1989 Guidance Volume 1 and the Public Law Outline (PLO), a procedural guide for the courts, adds a semi‐formal pre‐proceedings stage. This paper critiques the aims and objectives of the pre‐proceedings process in the light of what is known about the families who become subject to care proceedings. Drawing on the Care Profiling Study, the analysis of a random sample of 386 court files for care proceedings brought in 2004 and the Ministry of Justice's preliminary study of the operation of care proceedings under the PLO, it questions whether formalizing communication between the local authority and the parents immediately before proceedings can produce the intended benefits of diverting cases from the courts and improving the preparation of court applications. It considers how the new processes fit with existing safeguarding and planning procedures, the impact on workers and families, and whether the procedures will help produce good, long‐term arrangements for children at risk of significant harm more quickly.     

Longing for Recognition Commentary on the Work or Jessica Benjamin

This essay considers Jessica Benjamin's conception of recognition and relationality, concentrating on the role of destruction and of dyadic relations. I argue that Benjamin has tended in her recent work to posit clinical practice as an area in which the destructiveness in relations can be transformed into more productive and even harmonious experiences of difference. Benjamin has also provided a dyadic alternative to the triangular conception of desire and relationality, offering an important alternative to schemes that are restricted to the oedipal model. I ask whether forms of triangulation are nevertheless central to the workings of desire that exceed the purview of Oedipus, in particular, whether understanding the coconstitutive relations of homosexuality and heterosexuality offer a queer approach to triangularity.     

Aging Well at Home: Evaluation of a Neighborhood-based Pilot Project to “Put Connection Back into Community”

There is growing interest, in the United States and globally, to transform communities to become more aging friendly. However, the majority of emerging initiatives lack a formal evaluation component, limiting our understanding of their effectiveness and the ability to replicate them. This study is an evaluation of a pilot project, the Aging Well at Home (AWAH) Program, which aimed to “put connection back into community” to support the psychological well-being of urban seniors who were aging in place. We examined AWAH's effect on stress, loneliness, and depression through interviews with 33 seniors at enrollment and at 9 months later. Findings revealed a significant decline in participants’ perceived stress (p < .001); however, AWAH was less successful in lessening loneliness (p < .09) and was not associated with any change in depression (p > .33). In self-assessments, the majority of participants reported a greater sense of self-efficacy and social connection as a result of AWAH participation. The study offers preliminary evidence of the utility of a neighborhood approach to improving older adults’ quality of life.     

Prominence in a Network of Communication: Work Relations in a Children's Psychiatric Hospital*

Colleague consultation in professional organizations is both important and commonplace. One consequence of consultation is that some individuals acquire more prominence than others in the work contact networks. The literature suggests that variation in prominence depends on personal characteristics, such as occupation, education, ascribed traits, and activities both inside and outside the organization. Using sociometric data for the staff members of a psychiatric hospital for children, various hypotheses dealing with the effects of personal attributes are examined. An alternative explanation is that social relations within and between organizational subunits influence the likelihood that subunit members will be prominent in the hospital-wide communication network. The analysis indicates that these subunit relations have direct effects on prominence and also mediate the effects of certain personal characteristics.     

Growth through defeat and the reenactment of a family drama

The thesis of this paper is that defeat in psychotherapy, as in premature termination, or an incomplete or unsuccessful therapeutic experience, may be due to insufficient attention to the reenactments of a family drama on the part of the patient and/or the therapist. Insight for understanding in a nonjudgmental manner is emphasized. This is because of inclinations toward self denigrating attitutdes, particularly in relation to “defeat” experiences.     

Passing it on: The inheritance of summer houses and cultural identity

As part of an ongoing study of extended kinship with a focus specifically on the non-fungible inherited property of a summer house, interviews were conducted with 60 respondents, second to fourth generation heirs to typically modest summer cottages in New England. While not all of Protestant stock, all come to embrace a cultural identity of inner-worldly asceticism as explicated in Weber’sProtestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, if they are to use the house at all. Such summer houses require disciplined work on the part of their heirs, both to maintain the property and to conserve it “for the glory of God” rather than capitalize on it by selling it off to developers. Sacralized by its heirs, the summer house becomes the focus of their ongoing relations with each other, across and between the generations. The study suggests that the perpetuation of the Protestant Ethic may not require an “iron cage”: instead, the sharing of material property contributes to warm relations among extended kin (currently ignored by sociological analysis of families) as well as to their collective and individual sense of cultural identity. She has edited and contributed to three books on the sociology of the arts and culture (most recently,Paying the Piper: Causes and Consequences of Art Patronage [University of Illinois Press, 1993]). This paper was originally presented at the 1995 Meetings of the American Sociological Association in Washington, D.C.     

Social indicators of basic needs: Quantitative data for human rights policy

This paper reports on the author's effort to improve the consistency and objectivity of the economic rights section of the annual Country Reports, prepared by the Department of State, to provide a basis for equitable implementation of this aspect of U.S. human rights policy. The purpose was to define relatively objectively the extent to which a country's basic human needs are filled, as a backdrop to a discussion of the country's policy effort. This complex and evolving area of foreign policy had few participants who were sophisticated about social policy or social data, and existing social indicators had many problems of reliability. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights to which the U.S. is signatory, were taken as starting points, along with literature on basic needs in developing countries. Education, health, income and nutrition were selected as the highest priority rights for immediate action, policy issues were outlined for discussion, and a set of overview, background, and diagnostic social indicators were selected for inclusion in the reports. Principles for the selection of indicators included simplicity, ready availability across many nations, reliability, credibility, comprehensibility and correspondence to policy issues. Indicators, which are available through the World Bank, included life expectancy, literacy rates, infant mortality, school enrollment, population per physician, percentage of FAO daily nutritional requirement, percentage served by clean water. Cautions are raised that indicators should be used only in context of expert qualitative analysis of a country's situation because they are imperfect and limited measures. They should not be linked to policy too directly because the causal connection may be tenuous. The project is seen as a first phase in improving the information used in this policy area and giving more visibility to the issues.     

The Resurgence of Community Centres

Small community centres have mushroomed in numbers during the 1980s. Most State welfare departments have announced policies and funding programs to support these centres. These policies espouse potentially conflicting purposes. They include the community development goal of mobilising the community through self help ventures, the reform of the social service delivery system via a local base for better services, and the devolution of welfare responsibilities from central government agencies to community groups.