Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Editorial

     

Regulation and Risk in Social Work: The General Social Care Council and the Social Care Register in Context

The 2000 Care Standards Act led to the setting up the GeneralSocial Care Council (GSCC) as the new governing professionalbody for social workers and other social care employees in England.¹The GSCC published national Codes of Practice for social carestaff and their employers in 2002, whilst 1 April 2003 saw theintroduction of the Social Care Register. The stated aim ofthese developments is to protect the public, improve the qualityof care offered by social workers and increase public confidencein the profession. However, such intentions disguise the increasein regulatory control that the GSCC and social care employershave gained over the workforce—intrusions that have metrelatively little criticism. By locating these developmentswithin a broader social context, one in which risk and its managementare at the forefront of contemporary social policy and practice,this paper argues that underlying the debate is a climate offear and distrust in which there is a tendency to view peopleas either vulnerable, dangerous or both. Such a degraded viewof the subjects of social work also pertains to social workersthemselves, who are simultaneously seen as assessors of risk,at risk and as a risk.     

Evocative and function-altering effects of contingency-specifiying stimuli

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - This study examined the effects of various forms of contingency-specifying stimuli (CSSs) on the compliance of 4-year-old children, and attempted to separate the...     

Rules as environmental events

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior -     

Changes in an intellectual elite 1960–1990: The Royal Society revisited

This paper has attempted a partial replication of Porter's study of an anglophone intellectual elite, i.e. Section II of the Royal Society. It has found continuing, albeit reduced, institutional domination by the University of Toronto, along with a notable decline in the role of Oxford. It has also found that foreign influence has increased with possible negative implications for the mobility opportunities of Canadians born in Canada¹⁰ and for the elite's performance of its social role of articulating and advancing the interests of Canadian society. While the domination of those of British ancestry has declined, the elite remains unrepresentative in terms of many of its ascribed social characteristics. In particular, a seemingly low representation of females, Jewish people, and Canadians born in Canada is evident. While Canadian intellectuals are now much more critical of the status quo than they were when Porter wrote, the separation between anglophone and francophone intellectuals appears to be as great as ever. All this may help to explain a number of the weaknesses which characterize Canadian society.     

Becoming Poor: The Experiences of Elders1

Elderly Americans residing in nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) areas have higher poverty prevalence than their metropolitan (metro) counterparts. Data from both the response and nonresponse files of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1988 wave) are analyzed to establish the extent to which this disadvantage also occurs in the length of poverty spells and the risk of becoming poor at older ages. Specifically, for individuals aged 55 and older Kaplan-Meier survival functions and multivariate discrete-time hazards models are estimated to document residential differences in the poverty risks of metro and nonmetro men and women. Nonpoor nonmetro elders are much more likely to become poor than metro elders. These results hold when controlling for race, education, marital status, age, change in work effort, becoming widowed, and types of income received.