Seasonality and Flexible Labor in Resorts: Organizations,Employees, and Local Labor Markets

Seasonality, a chronic problem in the resort industry, is addressed in this seven-year participant observation and in-depth interview study of five Hawaiian resorts contiguously arrayed along a sandy beachfront strip. In order to operate profitably, these organizations must keep their labor costs trimmed as they move through annual cyclical fluctuations that place different labor demands on each department. We examine their use of various kinds of "flexible" employees, including both seasonally contingent and adaptable full-time workers. We examine the way these organizations expand and constrict their labor force annually. Studies of contingency labor have shown the benefits of this solution for organizations but have ignored the effects of labor flexibility on employees and local labor markets. In this article we take this broader view, looking at the integration of organizations, employees, and local labor markets and the way their interplay is forged in symbiotic and exploitive ways to maintain a system of human resources that reinforces a stratified social relations of production.     

‘Building the boat while sailing’: The first year of an employment based diploma in social work

The Stockport Diploma in Social Work (DSW) has developed an employment-based route, which derives from the experience of operating the Greater Manchester Certificate in Social Service since 1975. The article describes some of the key issues which have been faced by the programme partnership in its first year of operation. These include organising the direct observation of students' practice, recognising the role change and demands made of practice teachers, and promoting the involvement of job supervisors in the assessment process, within the framework of CCETSW Paper 30. Difficulties in devising an effective means of assessing students' competency are explored, together with the underlying resourcing constraints which now face DSW partnerships. Some of the unresolved issues still facing the programme are acknowledged as requiring further discussion and a collaborative approach by all DSW programmes.     

Starting to assess anti-racist practice in the DipSW

This paper reports on a small study financed by CCETSW's Welsh Committee and commissioned by its Anti-Racism Sub-Committee. It concerns an attempt to help practice teachers in a sample of all-white or predominantly white placements to assess students' awareness of anti-racist practice in accordance with DipSW requirements through the use of assignments provided by the programme. The study evaluates this process through the responses of students and practice teachers and concludes that, with appropriate support, this approach can make a useful contribution to learning, assessment and consciousness raising.     

It’s not just about where someone lives: educating student social workers about housing-related matters to promote an understanding of social justice

The links between housing and wellbeing are well established, and yet failings of current UK policy and practice can result in severely limited and inappropriate accommodation options for those in greatest need. Access to appropriate and affordable housing should therefore be a key area of concern for social work professionals: such access is closely linked to social justice and the promotion of human rights. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of detailed research on the links between housing and social work practice, and practitioners have reported feeling ill-equipped to support service-users with housing related needs. This paper draws on the illustrative example of a teaching session developed by the authors to argue that educating social work students about housing-related matters not only reduces this reported practice knowledge gap, but may also develop their understanding of social justice. In addition to supporting calls for further research, the authors therefore encourage those involved in social work education to ensure that practice in the context of housing related needs is covered clearly within the curriculum.     

Visual Expressions of Corporate Superiority: A Review of Jacqueline Hassinck’s Photographic Art Project and Booklet ‘The Table of Power’

Arguing that institutional rationality constitutes a meta‐institution upon which the specific institutions of the capitalist social order depend, this paper explores the possibility that it might be interrogated through the imaginary worlds created by readers in their responses to literary fiction. It does so by constructing a fictive encounter between the response aesthetics of Wolfgang Iser and two novels by Ian McEwan, Saturday and Enduring love, both of which feature institutional rationality as a core element of the ‘reality’ from which they are constructed.

The conclusions are somewhat negative. The problems posed to McEwan’s personifications of institutional rationality, despite the author’s reputation for arbitrary and sometimes macabre plotlines, are nowhere such as to call into question their understandings of the events which befall them. Nor, reading the novels as explorations of that very one‐dimensionality, are readers likely to be induced into a questioning of their own understandings of the world. This is because the novels in question, like most modern literary fiction, have been produced within a tradition which reaches back to the romantic/humanist reaction to institutional rationality, and this makes it possible for readers to distance themselves from characters in which it is exemplified. Far from producing a critical Imaginary, readers who respond in this manner are likely to externalize any interrogations of institutional rationality suggested by its fictional recontextualization and produce, instead, one in which the superiority of their own understandings of the world is confirmed. Whilst this may be opposed to institutional rationality in the routinised sense of an antagonistic accommodation, nothing new is added by the reading of the novels.

Whilst some of the problem may lie in the characterization of the principle protagonists in the selected novels – which is both flat and static – it is suggested that there is also a problem with the initial expectation of a critical imaginary created by Iser’s theory. The fact is that its creation depends on an assumed response on the part of the reader that has no evidential basis. This empirical deficit cannot be made good either by Iser’s earlier construct of an ‘implied reader’, nor by his later posit of self‐aware role‐taking as a fundamental anthropological need. Whilst one cannot rule out the possibility that some readers might respond as Iser supposes – even to the novels discussed in this paper – there is no particular reason to rule it in either.     

How Objects Believe for Us: Applications in Organizational Analysis

This paper analyzes the concept of belief in contemporary organizations. Most studies tend to envisage belief as something internal to the thinking and feeling person. We argue, however, that belief does not only reside ‘inside’ the individual subject but also in an external economy of objects and rituals. What we call the ‘objectivity of belief’ highlights how various things such as commodities, artefacts, machines and even other people may believe in our place. We develop these ideas by drawing on a rich tradition of social theory that includes Marx and ?i?ek, and apply it to the study of objects, belief and power in contemporary organizations.     

Disparities in Academic Achievement: Assessing the Role of Habitus and Practice

Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social reproduction—with its core concepts cultural capital, habitus, practice and field—is a leading account of the intergenerational persistence of educational inequality. Although numerous studies examine the relationship between class, cultural capital and academic outcomes, and some focus on gender differences in cultural capital, few attempt to operationalize Bourdieu’s accompanying concepts of habitus and practice, and to consider gender differences along these dimensions. The present study addresses these gaps by examining a “structure-disposition-practice” model of the relationships between family socioeconomic status (SES), sex, habitus, academic practices, and academic achievement using multilevel Canadian data. Findings of SES and gender differences in the model offer qualified support for the potential of Bourdieu’s framework to help increase our understanding of class and gender disparities in educational outcomes. Results suggest that habitus, practice and the “structure-disposition-practice” model are not only theoretically sophisticated, but also empirically sustainable and that future efforts to more precisely measure the model’s concepts and relationships are warranted.     

Violent civic nationalism versus civil ethnic nationalism: Contrasting Indonesia and Malay(si)a

In 1963 the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah formed the Federation of Malaysia. In the same year Indonesia gained control over West Papua. In the first case the integration was accomplished participatory and peacefully, in the second violence reigned supreme. I argue that different visions of community, nation and state, developed during the decades of decolonisation and the early years of state- and nation-building, are responsible for the different outcomes. Contrary to the expectations of the predominant theories on nationalism the ethno-cultural variant of nation-building in Malaysia proved to be much more integrative than the civic variant espoused by the Indonesian nation-builders.