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...     

Corporate Social Responsibility als Integrationsherausforderung

The increasing debate on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in science as well as in practice reflects the relevance of ethical questions for management. However, it is still unclear which responsibilities can be ascribed to corporations and how they can deal with such attributions on an operational level. The blurring and ambivalence in the discussion about CSR indicate a need for a theoretical clarification which is traced back to a not yet satisfactorily resolved integration of the constructs “profits” and “ethics”. The aim of the article is to provide a theoretical structure which is tailored to offer reliable focal points for a sophisticated handling of conflicts between profits and ethics.     

Do children from small families do better?

The education, income, wealth and satisfaction with life of australians aged 25–54 are examined in relation to the circumstances of their childhood, paying particular attention to variation by number of siblings when growing up. The data are from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survery. Educational attainment, income earned and household wealth tend to be greater for people who grew up in relatively small families. The effect of the number of siblings on educational attainment is greater for females than for males. However the advantages of growing up in a smaller family do not translate into higher levels of satisfaction with life. The implications of the findings for the public debate on fertility and child-related benefits in Australia are discussed, as are the implications of a child-quality-child-quantity trade-off for the explanation of fertility levels in more developed countries.     

The theory and practice of equal opportunities policies: liberal and radical approaches

This paper explores the conceptual confusions characteristic of the practice of equal opportunities policies the workplace. The differences between‘liberal’and‘radical’approaches to policy making are identified and described. It is argued that, while these are conceptually distiner from one another, in practice they are routinely confused and conflated. In particular the preferred procedures of the liberal approach are widely assumed to result in the preferred outcomes of the radical approach. It is suggested that these confusions are not merely the product of intellectual error but arise from misunderstandings and deceptions generated in the struggle for power between participants in the work process     

Cultural Issues in Therapy: On the Fringe

This paper argues that issues of culture have occupied a fringe position in the thinking and practice of most Australian family therapists. Starting with a definition of culture as epistemology, it examines factors pertaining to government policy, demography and the experience of migration to argue the relevance of a cultural perspective in mainstream family therapy discourse. The paper then looks at two central consequences for family therapy and training — cultural oppression and maintaining the status quo — if a cultural perspective continues to be neglected. It then proposes ways that therapists can introduce a cultural perspective in their thinking and clinical work. The paper concludes with a case vignette which illustrates some of the ideas.     

A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern

Bourdieu and Darbel's classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), remains one of the most influential academic studies of the social indices of art perception. Its findings were central to Bourdieu's on-going study of culture-mediated power relations, as found in the book Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), as well as social surveys of the behaviour of museum audiences across the world. Much in Bourdieu's account of art perception, however, has begun to appear dated and in need of supplementation. This paper will be a critical but sympathetic re-reading of Bourdieu's sociology of art perception in the light of recent criticisms of his approach. Whilst fine art and its institutions continue to function as sources of social identification and differentiation, this paper argues that the relationship between perception and stratification is somewhat looser than connoted in Bourdieu's work. Beyond the shift to a less rigid taxonomy of social formations, the immense expansion of the visual arts complex has opened up possibilities for the dissemination of art knowledge beyond the cultivated bourgeois. The erosion of boundaries between the aesthetic and the economic, between art and popular culture, are the result of processes of commodification that have placed museums alongside shopping malls within the realms of consumption and entertainment. New audiences have emerged from this mix with less dichotomized - that is, either cultivated or popular - ways of seeing culture that suggest a revision of Bourdieu's overly integrated account of class and cognition. An alternative, 'postmodern', approach to art perception is entertained, where an aesthetics of distinction is replaced by a culture of distraction, but this abstracts culture from any structural grounding. Capturing the shift to an accelerated cultural present, instead, requires a warping of Bourdieu's categories to account for broader patterns of culture and economy and the accentuation of modern visual culture.     

Queering Canadian Social Work Accreditation standards and procedures: a content analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews and critically analyzes the Canadian Association for Social Work Education—Association Canadienne Pour La Formation En Travail Social’s (CASWE-ACFTS’) Accreditation Standards and Procedures from a Sexual Orientation Gender Identity and Expression (SOGIESC) lens to examine how such are addressed in relevant documents. The CASWE-ACFTS Queer Caucus undertook a lead role in examining ‘diversity’ in the documents as it serves as an umbrella term for SOGIESC and other intersecting positionalities. This paper iterates an initial response in the CASWE-ACFTS Queer Caucus’ ongoing consultation with the CASWE-ACFTS’s Education Policy Committee’s work on Education Policy and Accreditation Standards 2019 (EPAS2019). The content analysis of the documents reveals that SOGIESC issues are not adequately addressed and this has implications for undergraduate and graduate social work curricula in Canada. The authors provide recommendations that address the integration of SOGIESC in CASWE-ACFTS’s Accreditation Standards and Procedures documents.