A Political Critique of Kantian Ethics in Social Work

Correspondence to Stephen A. Webb, Department of Social Work, University of Dundee, DD1 4HN. Summary This paper addresses the Kantian theory of the subject whichis found in contemporary social work discourse on ethics andvalues. It is argued here that the Kantian idea of persons as(i) rational, (ii) autonomous, and (iii) ends-in-themselvesis wholly inadequate to the social work doctrine of ‘respectfor persons’. To show this, we counterpose a Foucauldianview of history, moral codes and theory of the person, and themeaning this can have in the social worker-client relation.This alternative reading claims that social work is essentiallya political practice which is constructed by various discursiveand institutional strategies of power. Therefore, it is suggestedthat social work needs a political reading of its own discourse.To this end we outline a Foucauldian micro-political analysisof the social work ‘subject’ or person as a pointwithin a field of discursive-knowledge based strategies.     

Rethinking Crowd Violence: Self-Categorization Theory and the Woodstock 1999 Riot

According to self-categorization theory (SCT), incidents of crowd violence can be understood as discrete forms of social action, limited by the crowd's social identity. Through an analysis of the riot at Woodstock 1999, this paper explores the uses and limitations of SCT in order to reach a more complex psychology of crowd behavior, particularly those instances that appear unmotivated, irrational, and destructive. Psychological and sociological literature are synthesized to explore the role of communication in establishing social norms within the crowd. Several modifications to current crowd psychology are proposed, including a false consensus effect of motivation and the mediation of personal and social identities.     

DEPOSIT INSURANCE AND EXTERNAL FINANCE

In this article we examine one potential explanation for the cross-country differences in the importance of banks and capital market financing of investment. We provide both an equilibrium model predicting and empirical evidence showing that countries with explicit deposit insurance and a high degree of state-owned bank assets have smaller equity markets, a lower number of publicly traded firms, and a smaller amount of bank credit to the private sector. Finally, our results suggest that the effects of deposit guarantees are more important than the origins of national legal systems. (JEL G21 , G22 , G32 )     

AGGREGATE DEMAND AND INTEREST RATES: A MACROECONOMIC APPROACH TO THE TERM STRUCTURE

This paper develops a model in which the term-structure of interest rates obtains as an equilibrium outcome of the interactions of firms, households and rationally informed speculators. Exogenous disturbances whose impact effects fall only in the market for short-term bonds generate equilibrium movements in the yield on long-term bonds and the level of investment spending. In the case of risk-averse speculators, a purely transitory, unanticipated shock to the money supply generates a long distributed-lag effect on the level of aggregate demand.     

Fieldwork and the commodif ication of culture: why the natives are restless

Ľauteur aborde la question de la recherche anthropologique sur le terrain à la lumière de la conception marxiste du procès de travail. Cette démarche met en évidence deux contradictions fondamentales: soit entre ľappropriation privée du produit ethnographique et la nature collective de la recherche sur le terrain, ďune part, et entre la valeur ďéchange que ľanthropologue assigne à la culture et la valeur ďusage qu'elle possède pour les indigènes, ďautre part. Ces contradictions sont source ďaliénation et de résistance à la recherche anthropologique, lesquelles ont un impact direct sur le travail ethnographique de même que sur ľimplication politique de ľanthropologue en général.
The paper presents a model of anthropological fieldwork based on Marxist assumptions about the labour process. An argument is developed that this process contains two fundamental contradictions: 1/ that between the collective nature of fieldwork and the private appropriation of the ethnography; and 2/ that between the native view of culture as use value and the anthropological view of culture as exchange value. These in turn are argued to foster native alienation and resistance to anthropological research, with consequent changes in both the structure of fieldwork and in the extent of political involvement of anthropologists.     

Back to basics: child psychiatry after Cleveland

SUMMARY. In this personal view of recent developments, the author suggests that child psychiatrists were taken by surprise when they began receiving a rapid increase of referrals involving sexual abuse. Many saw their prime role as needing to adapt psychiatric techniques to determine whether abuse had occurred. Child sexual abuse was seen as being outside of normal psychiatric conditions. These responses led to major controversy within the profession. It is argued that the Cleveland Inquiry should now allow child psychiatrists to work with sexually abused children in a more traditional way, their main function being to assess and treat the whole child and its family and evaluate the significance of the abuse in a wider context