Social Work and Power

Abstract

This article argues that youth housing workers in Victoria, Australia, are vulnerable to housing affordability problems and one reason for this is inadequate pay. A survey of 10 youth housing workers explained the ways in which they had struggled to afford housing. Some paid more than 30% of their wage on housing costs. Others relied on income other than their youth housing worker salary to afford rental accommodation, which included pay from a second job, drawing on credit, and financial support from partners, family, and friends. Most reported that they did not have sufficient income to save to purchase a home. These findings resonate with secondary source aggregate data, which identified that for almost a decade the pay of youth homelessness service workers in Victoria has not kept pace with average wage growth and rises in rents and house prices. Improving youth housing workers pay is recommended as a way to address their housing affordability concerns.     

Negotiating the boundaries of intimacy: the personal lives of asexual people

This paper uses findings from research diaries to explore the use of practices of intimacy among asexual people. While much of the literature to date has focused on the supposedly transformative and political nature of uniquely asexual practices of intimacy, our findings suggest something different. Rather than seeking to transform the nature of intimate relationships, asexual people make pragmatic adjustments and engage in negotiations to achieve the forms of physical and emotional intimacy they seek. We discuss this in relation to three areas: friendships, sex as a practice of intimacy, and exclusion from intimacy. Our findings suggest the importance of not only considering the social context in which asexual people practise intimacy, but also how the practices in which they engage may be shared with non‐asexual people.     

Are we ready for them? Overseas-qualified social workers' professional cultural transition

Developing sociocultural competence in a new country is essential for migrants practising social work within new and distinct cultures. An argument for interventions needed to support the cultural transitioning of a migrant social work workforce is made, informed by findings from a mixed methods study of the experiences of overseas-qualified social workers in New Zealand. One of the main findings relates to migrant social workers' professional adaptation to the new environment. We focus the discussion here on how the perceptions and practices regarding the cultural dimensions of the transition informed their adaptation. Although this is a highly contextual example of social work practice in a foreign setting, the dynamics have equivalents in many international contexts as migration of labour is common globally. We argue that a greater focus on the migrant workforce is required in debates on globalisation. The discussion of the findings will highlight the need for culturally informed interventions to enable an increasingly global workforce to successfully make a professional cultural transition.     

The Long Goodbye: Women, Companion Animals, and Maternal Loss

Heightened and often anxious attachment to companion animals can be one of the sequela of women's unresolved grief over early maternal loss. Clinical data suggest that, especially among women, the death of pets can reactivate the unfinished mourning over the mother. Drawing on one extensive case study, this paper examines this little explored, but commonly experienced relationship. From the perspectives of attachment theory and feminist therapy, the paper addresses the human-animal bond, gender differences in grief, the long term effects of early maternal loss, later attachment style, and companion animals as internalized parent/child figures. Recommendations for treatment are offered to help women work through both losses.     

A ‘good,average man’: calculation and the limits of statistics in enrolling insurance customers

Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a necessary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who themselves were slow to alter their commercial practices in line with emerging knowledge. I examine some of the reasons for this glacial pace and some of the ambiguities on which statistical ‘certainties’ were built as part of an argument that the role of statistics and mathematics in market calculation is both less and more than it seems. This is manifest in the history of industrial life assurance, an industry with a phenomenally successful track record in the mass enrolment of consumers. Unlike their predecessors, industrial companies disdained swamping their target markets with probabilistic arguments in favour of a very different sort of argument that, nevertheless, carried a trace of statistical thinking with it. This trace came in the form of ‘good, average men’, the agents who became industrial insurance's core marketing device and who translated the essentials of a statistically informed product into a more palatable, more calculable form.     

The way we were in 1983; Le Tour de Moonee Ponds Family Health Centre (by Appointment to the Queen)

In this paper, originally presented at the Sydney Family Therapy Conference in 1983, the author satirised the state of family therapy in Australia at the time, with its awe of overseas gurus, and in so doing mirrored some of our distinctive contributions to world culture. In her epilogue, the author briefly describes subsequent life events which have made her, twenty years later, a very different person, and a very different therapist as well.