Social work in mental health services: A survey of the field

Abstract

A survey of social workers employed in mental health services was conducted in Victoria in mid-1997. Approximately 300 social workers were identified as working in the sector. About half were employed in adult clinical services, 23% in psychiatric disability services, 12.4% in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and the rest in a range of other services. More than 90% worked in a community based service or team. The number of entry-level (SW I) positions in clinical services was found to have declined over the last ten years from 61 to 14, resulting in a lack of opportunities for social workers to gain experience in base grade positions, and difficulty in recruiting to SW II positions. Major issues of concern reported by social workers included: the lack of accommodation and other community resources for consumers; diminished opportunities for professional development, supervision, and discipline-specific training; lack of professional recognition; increasing workloads; and organisational emphasis on throughput rather than quality.     

Women's Success in Academic Science: Challenges to Breaking Through the Ivory Ceiling

Although a greater number of women are entering academic science than ever before, women remain underrepresented and are perceived as less successful than men in their fields. The reasons behind this are complicated and debatable. In this paper, I review the challenges that women continue to face in the natural and social academic sciences. Women continue to face barriers toward obtaining academic positions and securing promotions. A crucial aspect of the problem lies in the subjective definition of “success,” which creates subconscious biases as well as gendered processes within institutions. These processes include biased evaluations of success in academia, limited mentorship for women in science, limited networking opportunities, and lack of institutional support for mothers. Future research should look more closely at the gendered definition of success, and related constraints within academia that keep women from breaking through the ivory ceiling.     

Microfinance Participation and Women's Empowerment: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Sample of Women in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

More than 30 million married women in Bangladesh access microfinance, an empowering anti-poverty tool, amidst mixed responses from scholars about microfinance's empowering effect. The present study evaluates whether microfinance participation empowers women using a culturally suitable conceptualization of empowerment constituting autonomy, decision-making power in the household, and justification of partner violence. This study utilizes data from a representative probability sub-sample of 6,150 married women aged between 15 and 49 years from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2011 to assess the difference in empowerment between microfinance participants and a control group using propensity score matching techniques. Findings revealed that women who participated in microfinance were not statistically different at the 0.05 level from women who did not participate in microfinance in terms of empowerment when groups were matched on socio-demographic variables ensuring that treatment and comparison groups had equal propensity to participate in microfinance, casting doubt on the assertion that microfinance participation positively affects women's empowerment. Future research needs to focus on what empowerment may mean in relation to the outside world; we need to move beyond a familial understanding of empowerment to examine the individual in terms of her individual identity in the socio-political world in which she resides.     

Zum Einfluss der Inhaberführung auf die Betriebsrat-Geschäftsführer-Beziehung – Eine theoretische und empirische Analyse in mittelständischen Unternehmen

This paper examines the quality of the relationship between business managements and works councils in small and medium-sized enterprises and strives for answering the question, which factors determine the quality. As ownership is an important determining factor of the establishment of works councils in small and medium-sized businesses, especially the impact of ownership on this relationship has been investigated. Agency theory and stewardship theory give hints that the owner management can have different impacts on this relationship. In order to test these contradictory hypotheses we have estimated a Heckman selection model to investigate which factors determine the quality of the relationship between business managements and works councils. Our results based on data generated from a survey in small and medium-sized enterprises conducted by the IfM Bonn in the years 2005 and 2006 indicate that ownership has a negative influence on the establishment of works councils, but a positive one on the quality of the relationship between business management and works council. Thus, the hypotheses predicting the existence of stewardship behaviour among owners and the existence of agency behaviour among managers can be confirmed.     

Neoliberal co-optation and authoritarian renewal: social entrepreneurship networks in Jordan and Morocco

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes social entrepreneurship networks (SENs) – composed of social entrepreneurs, business and political elites, and international actors – in Jordan and Morocco and how they foster processes of authoritarian renewal through neoliberal forms of co-optation. I argue that these new neoliberal networks and pre-existing patterns of social interaction complement each other, fostering linkages between well-established elites and hand-picked social entrepreneurs as well as societal groups. The two case studies illustrate different trajectories of the development of SENs and their embeddedness in the respective political, social and economic contexts. Importantly, such trajectories indicate a similar direction of travel: social entrepreneurship, rather than acting as a driver of progressive change, has been aligned with the authoritarian regimes and cements neoliberalism as a mode of governance. This mutation of neoliberal tactics towards more inclusionary and consensual patterns seeks to ensure the survival of both neoliberalism and of authoritarian governance. Thus, the article brings to light repertoires of authoritarian neoliberalism that have hitherto been under-studied. Moreover, it offers a critical perspective on social entrepreneurship as an increasingly popular phenomenon that, in academia and beyond, has all too often been approached from an uncritical and apolitical perspective.     

How Should Autonomous Cars Drive? A Preference for Defaults in Moral Judgments Under Risk and Uncertainty

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise to make traffic safer, but their societal integration poses ethical challenges. What behavior of AVs is morally acceptable in critical traffic situations when consequences are only probabilistically known (a situation of risk) or even unknown (a situation of uncertainty)?  How do people retrospectively evaluate the behavior of an AV in situations in which a road user has been harmed? We addressed these questions in two empirical studies (N = 1,638) that approximated the real‐world conditions under which AVs operate by varying the degree of risk and uncertainty of the situation. In Experiment 1, subjects learned that an AV had to decide between staying in the lane or swerving. Each action could lead to a collision with another road user, with some known or unknown likelihood. Subjects’ decision preferences and moral judgments varied considerably with specified probabilities under risk, yet less so under uncertainty. The results suggest that staying in the lane and performing an emergency stop is considered a reasonable default, even when this action does not minimize expected loss. Experiment 2 demonstrated that if an AV collided with another road user, subjects’ retrospective evaluations of the default action were also more robust against unwanted outcome and hindsight effects than the alternative swerve maneuver. The findings highlight the importance of investigating moral judgments under risk and uncertainty in order to develop policies that are societally acceptable even under critical conditions.     

Catching a glimpse: Corona‐life and its micro‐politics in academia

The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.     

Identification,Estimation, and Control of Uncertain Dynamic Systems: A Nonparametric Approach

This article is devoted to a presentation of the author' practice of the non-parametric estimation theory for the estimation, filtering, and control of uncertain dynamic systems. The fundamental advantage of this approach is a weak dependency on prior modeling assumptions about uncertain dynamic components. This approach appears to be of great interest for the control of general discrete-time processes, and in particular, biotechnological processes, which are emblematic of nonlinear uncertain and partially observed systems.     

Methodological standards for randomised controlled trials of interventions for preventing recurrence of child physical abuse and neglect

Despite the significant financial and human resources invested in child protection services (CPS), it is unknown whether these services are effective in preventing recurrence of child physical abuse and neglect. This paper reviews available studies evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions and identifies methodological limitations and factors that may contribute to these limitations. We searched databases to identify randomised controlled trials published in peer‐reviewed journals in the past five decades that evaluated interventions to reduce recurrence of physical abuse and neglect. We outlined ten methodological standards that are important for rigorous testing of psychosocial interventions and applied them in critically appraising identified studies. Thirteen randomised controlled trials were reviewed. This review identified methodological limitations (e.g. small sample size, lack of standardisations, contamination) that made it difficult to draw reliable conclusions as to the effectiveness of interventions. Field‐specific factors that contributed to methodological limitations (e.g. heterogeneity of sample, multiple family problems, psychosocial nature of interventions) were identified and recommendations were provided for improvement. It was concluded that it is possible to implement high‐quality trials that are ethical and feasible in the child welfare field. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.