Images for change: community development, community arts and photography

This article explores how community development objectives canbe achieved through critical photographic practice. It summarizesthe literature relating to community arts practice and its potentialfor social regeneration. Photography is then located withinthis context and explored as a critical practice, with particularattention being given to photo-elicitation, photo-novella andphotovoice methods. The literature is discussed and analysedto explore how far critical photographic practice can meet theobjectives of community development.     

Testing a Moderated Model of Satisfaction with Urban Living using Data for Brisbane-South East Queensland,Australia

Using survey data collected from households living in the Brisbane-South East Queensland region, a rapidly growing metropolis in Australia, path analysis is used to test links between urban residents’ assessment of various urban attributes and their level of satisfaction in three urban domains-housing, neighbourhood or local area, and the wider metropolitan region – moderated by selected demographic characteristics of respondents. The analysis also shows the relative contribution of those urban domains to overall life satisfaction. Neighbourhood satisfaction is shown to be much less important in predicting overall life satisfaction than is satisfaction with housing and the region. However, neighbourhood satisfaction impacts indirectly on overall life satisfaction, mediated by regional satisfaction and housing satisfaction. In predicting regional satisfaction, the cost of living and government service provision are shown to be most important, with pollution important for younger people and parents, while improvements to transport systems are more important for the baby boomer generation. Neighbourhood satisfaction is best predicted by neighbourhood interaction and perceived crime, with neighbourhood interaction being more important for older people, while perceived crime is more important for younger and single people. Access to facilities is a poor predictor of neighbourhood satisfaction, except for parents. Satisfaction with housing is shown to be best predicted by housing age, temperature and home ownership. However, larger homes are important for parents, while young people prefer smaller homes. The importance of various urban attributes does not vary between genders. While material concerns like the cost of living and the provision of services are shown to be primary factors underlying overall satisfaction with urban living, the importance of environmental issues and demand for smaller homes might be expected to increase over time.     

Governmentality by Network in English Primary Healthcare

In England, the quality of clinical work is being regulated in new ways following recent developments in “clinical governance” policy and apparent failures in the previous system of medical self‐regulation. Using multiple case studies, this paper examines how these changes are affecting professional governmentality and discipline in general practice. Formal organizational structures play little role in clinical governance there. Clinical quality is managed largely through semi‐formal networks, relying on medical self‐surveillance. Compliance is achieved largely by discursive appeals to the legitimacy of clinical governance, but local GPs’ leaders also argue that governments might otherwise regulate medical practice more actively. As yet the effects of clinical governance activity on service delivery are slight. Professional self‐regulation is replacing permissive exception management with more collegial, directive methods.     

On ‘Consistent’ Poverty

The measurement of poverty as ‘consistent’ poverty offers a solution to one of the primary problems of poverty measurement within Social Policy of the last three decades. Often treated as if they were synonymous, ‘indirect’ measures of poverty, such as low income measures, and ‘direct’ measures, such as indices of material deprivation, identify surprisingly different people as being poor. In response to this mismatch, a team of Irish researchers put forward a measure which identified respondents in as being in poverty when they experienced both a low standard of living, as measured by deprivation indicators, and a lack of resources, as measured by a low income line. Importantly, they argued that the two measures required an equal weight. In this paper, I present a reconsideration of the consistent poverty measure from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. In particular, I examine the claim that low income and material deprivation measures should be given an ‘equal weight’. I argue that, from a conceptual perspective, the nature of the indicators at hand means that a deprivation-led measurement approach might be understood to align with the definition of poverty which Nolan and Whelan outline and, from an empirical perspective, that it is the material deprivation measure—and not the low income measure—which is particularly effective in identifying individuals at risk of multiple forms of deprivation. However, I argue that greater attention needs to be given to the question of whether indicators of material deprivation provide a sufficient measure of material poverty and suggest that advancing the measurement of material deprivation beyond its relatively rudimentary state represents an important priority for poverty research.     

NATURE IS ORDINARY TOO

In a recent article in Cultural Studies, Jennifer Daryl Slack called for the jettisoning of ecocultural studies as an add-on to Cultural Studies and the revitalizing of Cultural Studies with the eco as integral to it. One way I propose of doing so in this article is to revalue and re-establish the beginnings of Cultural Studies, and of ecocultural studies, in the work of Raymond Williams in which both were integral to the other. I call Williams both a founder of Cultural Studies and the founder of ecocriticism and ecocultural studies, though of course he did not use these terms, nor make these distinctions between them, but that is the point. Williams is exemplary in this respect in that he just got on and did the eco and this is no more the case than in his development of the concept of livelihood sadly missing from the glossaries of Cultural Studies' terms. This article traces the development of the concepts of culture, nature, landscape and livelihood in Williams' work. It argues that livelihood deconstructs the culture/nature binary and decolonizes the commodification and aestheticization of land as landscape. It reinstitutes nature as ordinary, as the stuff of work and everyday life. Nature, like culture for Williams, is ordinary too.     

Is GP Restratification Beginning in England?

English National Health Service general practice is being restructured through the introduction of primary care groups (PCGs) and trusts (PCTs), and the personal medical services (PMS) schemes. Theories of GPs' professional organization have to be modernized accordingly. Past theories have tended to concentrate on the occupational level rather than consider the effects of different forms of market and quasi–market on practitioners' income and their ability to control their everyday practice. This paper extends the theory of professionalization, as an occupational group's strategy for control over its work, to cover these matters, and thereby hypothesizes an explanation of GP responses to current changes in NHS primary health care. Case study data from four PCGs and four PMS pilots suggest that general practitioners are responding in some cases by defending enclaves of traditional general practice; in others by concentrating on clinical rather than managerial interests; and in others again by forming a new dominant coalition with NHS managers. Restratification seems to be beginning in NHS general practice although other policy developments may yet prevent it. Researchers should monitor this potentially important change as PCTs form.