Mainstream or margin? The current use of family group conferences in child welfare practice in the UK

A decade has passed since family group conferences were initially introduced into the UK by Family Rights Group. Ten years on, this paper examines the extent to which family group conferences have developed and become embedded into current social work practice. Despite the initial interest by social work practitioners and the picture often painted of a growing radical movement, the degree to which family group conferencing has become part of mainstream practice has until now remained fairly anecdotal. A number of difficulties have been identified with implementing the model, including fitting it into an existing system and the challenge it poses to professionals to hand over power. Two surveys, the first undertaken in 1999 and the second in 2001, describe the current use of the model in the UK by Councils with Social Services Responsibilities (Councils). The surveys reveal the areas of practice within which family group conferences are being used, the size and capacity of projects and why some Councils have adopted the model whilst others remain hesitant. It concludes by considering why family group conferences remain on the margins of practice.     

Stress at Home, Peace at Work: A Test of the Time Bind Hypothesis

Objective . We test the central thesis of Hochschild's (1997) The Time Bind : people who are unsatisfied with housework, parenting, or their marriage work more hours, or at a minimum prefer to work more hours, especially if satisfaction with work is high. Methods . Using the data from the 1987–1988 National Survey of Families and Households, we analyzed the influence of work and home satisfaction on the actual and desired work hours of 1,533 respondents who were employed, married to an employed spouse, and had one or more resident children under age 18. Results . We found that people who were more satisfied with work than home or who were dissatisfied with home life in general did not work more hours or even desire to do so. Conclusions . Contrary to Hochschild's assertions, there was little evidence that working parents dissatisfied with home life worked more hours or desired to spend more time at work.     

Indigenous perspectives for strengthening social responses to global environmental changes: A response to the social work grand challenge on environmental change

ABSTRACT

The “Grand Challenges for Social Work,” is a call to action for innovative responses to society’s most pressing social problems. In this article, we respond to the “Grand Challenge” of Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment from our perspective as Indigenous scholars. Over the last several decades, diminishing natural resources, pollution, over-consumption, and the exploitation of the natural environment have led to climate change events that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples. We present how environmental changes impact Indigenous peoples and suggest culturally relevant responses for working with Indigenous communities. We propose a decolonizing cyclical, iterative process grounded in Indigenous Ways of Knowing.     

Understanding how deficit discourses work against implementing participatory approaches in Australian Indigenous policy

One of the few things that everyone can agree on with respect to Australian Indigenous policy is that repeated government experiments aimed at improving Indigenous well‐being in Australia and particularly in remote Australia have failed. Outcomes remain poor and are, if anything, deteriorating in a number of areas. Critics have characterised the history of Indigenous policy as a series of failed policy experiments. The latest experiment in the quest to improve outcomes involves attempts to move away from the usual rational‐technical approaches, toward participatory approaches or “partnerships”. However, governments are struggling to implement these innovations. Self‐evidently, the Closing the Gap policy is grounded in deficit discourse. This paper examines how this discourse works within the existing Indigenous policy world to create possibly irreconcilable tensions with attempts to introduce participatory approaches. It does this using Logics of Critical Explanation, an interpretive method which allows us to understand how policy actors work within an existing policy world to either replace or augment their norms, values and ideologies to work in the new ways that are asked of them, or to resist innovation and revert to the status quo.