Mary Parker Follett: epilogue to or return of a social work management pioneer?

The authors present an overview of the major concepts and contributions of Mary Parker Follett to the development of social work management theory, past and present. The case is made for Follett to be afforded a more visible role in the profession's understanding and teaching of modern management theory and practice. The authors show how Follett's work served as an important bridge between changing eras in management thought, specifically as related to scientific management and the subsequent human relations models. Even after six decades, Follett's work, in its timelessness and timeliness, remains contemporary, for it is rooted in her keen ability to grasp the complexities inherent in the human services enterprise, and thus it continues to inform one's understanding and behavior within the organizational context.     

Community Organization and Administration

The author argues that when minority content has been included in the social work curriculum, the affective domain of cross-cultural study has been bypassed in favor of cognitive mastery. This article presents a conceptual system for evaluating students' progress in the affective area as a way of preparing them for the demands of cross-cultural practice and as a step toward creating a confluence between content and process.     

Why don’t we care more about carelessness? Understanding the causes and consequences of careless participants

ABSTRACT

Although careless respondents have wreaked havoc on research for decades, the prevalence and implications of these participants has likely increased due to many new methodological techniques currently in use. Across three studies, we examined the prevalence of careless responding in participants, several means of predicting careless respondents, and the implications of careless respondents on data quality and recruitment attempts. At the same time, we sought to examine the geographic differences of careless responding and provide psychometric evidence for using embedded questions to detect these participants. In Study 1, we found over 1/3^rd of participants showed some evidence of careless responding and that careless respondents exhibited certain personality and demographic characteristics. In particular, carelessness seemed more prevalent in Asian samples than in North American samples. In Study 2, we found nearly 1/4^th of participants showed evidence of careless responding and that conclusions based on data including versus excluding these participants differed in significant yet unpredictable ways. Finally, in Study 3, we found that nearly 2/3^rd of participants who signed up for the study did not meet advertised study requirements for participation and including these participants changed the structure of the data obtained.     

Heteronormative Labour: Conflicting Accountability Structures among Men in Nursing

Drawing on interview and diary data from 40 men in nursing in the US, the current study advances our theoretical understanding of how heteronormativity and masculinity intersect to shape men's performance of carework. Men in nursing are constrained by their accountability to stereotypes that they are gay and/or hypersexual, challenging their work in the feminized profession of nursing. As heteronormativity is embedded in the institution of health care, men nurses of all sexualities must perform additional labour on the job to reconcile their conflicting accountability to heteronormative stereotypes and occupational standards of care. We conceptualize this additional labour as heteronormative labour — work performed in order to strategically manage heteronormative expectations and realized through discursive, cognitive and emotional strategies. The experiences of men in caring professions remain rich for advancing theory on the relationship between sexuality and gender generally and in the workplace.     

Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims‐making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference‐rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes.     

Rural Disadvantage and Malaria in Less‐Developed Nations: A Cross‐National Investigation of a Neglected Disease

Although often forgotten among people in affluent nations, malaria represents a leading global health concern in poor, rural countries. Malaria is traditionally thought of as a rural disease, given the close proximity of rural households to mosquito disease vectors. However, more insight is needed to investigate the larger social, economic, and environmental conditions that perhaps interact with rurality to explain why some nations continue to have high levels of prevalence of this preventable and eradicable parasitic infection. We employ structural equation modeling to efficiently test for both direct and indirect effects of rurality. The results demonstrate that rurality works in important indirect ways; although rurality has indirect links to malaria through export agriculture, health spending, and sociohealth resources, careful decomposition of the indirect effects illustrates that the indirect effects through heath spending and sociohealth resources are most important. Overall, the findings suggest that rural vulnerabilities to malaria are not inherent and can be largely addressed by increasing public health provisions among rural populations.     

Gendered Dimensions of the HIV Pandemic: A Cross‐National Investigation of Women's International Nongovernmental Organizations,Contraceptive Use,and HIV Prevalence in Less‐Developed Nations

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pandemic has a profound impact on women as a result of social and biological vulnerabilities to the infection. In this article, we explore the influence of democracy, women's international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and contraceptive use on female HIV rates, using indirect‐effect modeling techniques to properly test the interrelationships among key variables. Structural equation models reveal that democracy and women's INGOs work to reduce female HIV rates indirectly, by promoting the use of contraceptives among women in less‐developed nations. Despite these promising findings, the analyses also reveal that INGOs are negatively associated with sociohealth dimensions of female empowerment, which thus serves to promote HIV rates. The results suggest that interventions undertaken by INGOs may not be as successful as government programs in addressing inequalities in health and social resources for women in poor nations.     

Communicating collaborative leadership

Collaborative or shared leadership has frequently been advocated as an alternative to vertical or top-down leadership. Building on the conceptual and theoretical aspects of collaborative leadership developed in previous research, this study examined the specific communication behaviors and processes used to create collaborative leadership. Based on participant observation ethnography and interviews of all the major participants, the authors collaborated on this study to explore how the leader's attitudes, behaviors, and communication supported collaboration and how the group members participated in creating a collaborative culture. The findings may be transferable to other group endeavors in which leaders and members wish to create a collaborative group process.