Adoption,personality disorder and parental guilt: Implications of genetic research for social work

Few adoptive parents are aware that serious behavioral and personality problems can occur in adopted children. When such problems are manifested, parents are often guilt-ridden, believing that they are to blame. Recent research suggests that the risks associated with adoption may be genetically linked. Social workers who counsel adoptive parents need to be aware of potential problems, explain possible risks to them, and use these research findings to positive effect.     

Child Poverty Measurement in the UK: Assessing Support for the Downgrading of Income-Based Poverty Measures

Social Indicators Research - In 2016 the UK’s Conservative Government radically changed the official approach to child poverty measurement, scrapping targets for income poverty and material...     

Measuring Economic and Social Impacts of Membership in a Community Development Financial Institution

This study uses qualitative and quantitative measures to answer the question: “does a community development financial institution (CDFI) provide a measurable level of social benefit to its members?” Results indicate that a CDFI does change lives in many important ways, from providing members with the ability to get their financial houses in order, to helping members take control of their financial futures, and finally through building a sense of empowerment that reaches beyond the finances of an individual or family. In general, impacts were greater for lower income and less educated households, households with children, households that used more services, and for households that indicated wealth and asset building services were most important.     

Roll-out neoliberalism and hybrid practices of regulation in Australian agri-environmental governance

In the last 15 years, agri-environmental programmes in Australia have been underpinned by a neoliberal regime of governing which seeks to foster participation and ‘bottom-up’ change at the regional level at the same time as encouraging farmers to become entrepreneurial and improve their productivity and environmental performance without government interference. However, while experiencing a degree of success in terms of farmer involvement, considerable tensions are evident in such programmes. Drawing on an ‘analytics of governmentality’, this paper argues that while current agri-environmental programmes enable authorities to combine often competing and contradictory imperatives under the rubric of single political problems—what has been termed hybrid forms of governing—it also contributes to the continuing failure of these programmes to achieve their desired effects. As a consequence, neoliberal forms of governing tend to be characterised by experimentation with a range of governmental technologies in order to make programmes workable in practice. We explore two different types of technologies—standards schemes and direct government regulation—that have emerged in recent years, and how these have sought to address the limitations evident in ‘participatory’ programmes. The paper concludes by arguing that while these initiatives seek to encourage farmer compliance in seemingly divergent ways, their capacity to be workable, and have broader effects, in practice will depend upon their capacity to manage the competing imperatives of environmental degradation, capital accumulation and private property rights.     

The feeling edge of culture

During the 1960s, the new generation changed the American Creed by deemphasizing sensitivity to evidence, emphasizing feelings and deductive thought, while assuming an adversarial position against the sociopolitical order and embracing the American Black's struggle against racism. Driven by pain, fueled by fear and anger and oriented by existential values of being, the Civil Rights Movement, sought to actualize political values of justice and equality. As peaceful demonstrations dwindled, violence increased, converting individual anger to social rage. Anger's cognitive structure changed the concept of society into a dichotomy of Black victims and White oppressors, forming an ethic of sensitivity with victims occupying the moral high ground. Pain and tragedy were banished from view and blamed on oppressors as individual identities divested civil traits and acquired cultural identity, disuniting the civil society. Rubbing against the American Creed, the ethic of sensitivity produced a feeling of malaise posing a threat to mental health.