The Devils in the Detail: Some Reflections on Contracting for Social Care by Voluntary Organizations

This paper explores the political origins and the process of introduction of the community care policy in the United Kingdom. The particular concerns of voluntary organizations in the face of the new responsibilities conferred upon them by legislation and their expectations of likely outcomes are examined. Evidence from a recent research study undertaken as part of the ESRC's Contracts and Competition Programme is then employed to draw up a preliminary balance sheet of the actual experience of voluntary bodies, their role in the operation of community care policy and their changing relationships with other agencies and the users of services.     

Bayesian estimation of the latent dimension and communities in stochastic blockmodels

Statistics and Computing - Spectral embedding of adjacency or Laplacian matrices of undirected graphs is a common technique for representing a network in a lower dimensional latent space, with...     

Independent Mental Health Advocacy: A Model of Social Work Advocacy?

ABSTRACT

Advocacy has received less attention in social work research than other aspects of social work practice. This paper draws attention to two tensions in social work advocacy; between worker-led advocacy and person-led advocacy, and between individual advocacy and system level advocacy. We argue that human-rights-based social workers must choose a person-led approach over a worker-led approach while advocating with both systems and individuals. This argument is made by drawing on findings of an evaluation of Independent Mental Health Advocacy (IMHA) in Victoria, Australia. It is shown that social work training had not prepared social workers for rights-based, person-led advocacy and that social workers in public mental health services were struggling to maintain the rights of people in their services even with assistance from IMHA.

IMPLICATIONS

• Independent Mental Health Advocacy (IMHA) is a model of advocacy influenced by social work theory and delivered in part by social-work-trained advocates.

• Social work training is not preparing social workers for person-led, human-rights-based advocacy.

• Public mental health social workers are struggling to maintain the rights of people in mental health services even with the support of external advocacy services.

     

Conflict and the separateness of peoples: investigating the relationship between multiplicity,inequality and war

ABSTRACT

The discipline-defining claim that anarchy leads inevitably to security-competition and war between states is unsustainable. This article investigates whether the concept of multiplicity can offer a reintegrated account of insecurity in world politics. As highlighted by rational choice approaches, substantive conflicts of interest are a necessary condition for organized violence to be a permanent possibility within, across and between societies. A materialist argument is presented that the most enduring incompatible interests arise from clashes over the rules of economic appropriation and redistribution, and the appropriate boundaries between social groups. Historically, unevenness and the possibility for exploitation have created structural pressures towards simultaneous social stratification and the institutionalization of inter-societal warfare. Because of the central importance of social boundaries for structural inequalities, multiplicity has profound implications for both patterns of organized violence and the fundamental issue in the study of politics: who gets what, when and how.     

Indian policy as an emergent property of the American policy making process

This paper argues that we can improve our understanding of American Indian policy if we think about it as an emergent behavior of the American policy making process. It is what the political system does and does not do that relates to Native nations. From a perspective guided by complexity theory, Indian policy appears to be about assimilating Indian land and natural resources and not about assimilating Indians into the larger American society. After suggesting that the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 is only the most recent in a long history of assimilation policies to emerge from the American political system, this article concludes that Indian gaming revenues brighten, and paradoxically, threaten the future of American Indian tribes.     

跨越边际与自我的足迹——访澳大利亚著名人类学家王富文(Dr.Nicholas Tapp)教授

自20世纪80年代以来,中国西南边疆以其多元的民族文化和丰富的区域特点,吸引了大批中外人类学、民族学家们的学术兴趣,并相继出现了"族群"、"区域"和"跨境"三大研究模式。澳大利亚国立大学人类学系高级研究员王富文博士(Nicholas Tapp),回顾了他从泰国转入中国西南少数民族地区的跨国研究经历,对特定时代中西学术交流的特点与目前海外中国西南研究的学术动态作了较为客观的评价,对于我们了解目前西方人类学界盛行的"跨境"研究模式具有一定的启发意义。     

The Role of Emotion in Global Warming Policy Support and Opposition

Prior research has found that affect and affective imagery strongly influence public support for global warming. This article extends this literature by exploring the separate influence of discrete emotions. Utilizing a nationally representative survey in the United States, this study found that discrete emotions were stronger predictors of global warming policy support than cultural worldviews, negative affect, image associations, or sociodemographic variables. In particular, worry, interest, and hope were strongly associated with increased policy support. The results contribute to experiential theories of risk information processing and suggest that discrete emotions play a significant role in public support for climate change policy. Implications for climate change communication are also discussed.     

Mobilized by Direct Democracy: Short‐Term Versus Long‐Term Effects and the Geography of Turnout in Ballot Measure Elections*

Objectives. A number of recent studies find that direct democracy increases voter turnout. In this article, we ask: Who does direct democracy mobilize to vote and how are they mobilized? We distinguish between long‐term and short‐term effects on voter turnout, noting that much of the current literature has focused on participatory theory. Methods. Our research design harnesses the power of geographic information systems and examines turnout in special initiative‐only elections using registered voter lists. Our model draws on individual and Census tract data, incorporated using a hierarchical generalized linear model. Results. The findings demonstrate how partisan context mitigates the potential for direct democracy to mobilize from the middle, and clarifies the dominance of short‐term as opposed to long‐term effects in increasing voter participation in ballot initiative elections. Conclusion. Mobilization via direct legislation occurs mostly because voters are actively mobilized by partisan campaigns, not because of an increase in participatory fervor.