浅析社会工作的结构化过程

本文旨在分析社会工作的运行机制,试图溯源社会工作广泛的主客体关系,借助吉登斯的结构化理论,反思社会工作领域内的多重解释和二元对立,并将社会工作的运行机制归结到结构化的构成之中,在密布资源和规则的结构之中发现充满"实践意识"的行动者,从而感应社会工作发展的脉动。     

Latino Faces,Corporate Ties: Latino Advocacy Organizations and Their Board Membership

Although they have increased exponentially since the 1960s, social scientists know little about ethnic advocacy organizations. These nonprofits are important bridges between underresourced communities and mainstream funding organizations and their directors are established ethnic leaders. Sociologists study interlocking directorates—or shared board membership—to understand how organizations fit together within broader social networks. Network concepts, particularly the theory of institutional isomorphism, suggest that organizations are likely to be similar to the extent they are connected and operate within a common organizational field. We apply this logic to Latino advocacy organizations to examine the underlying source of cohesion across this ethnic field. We ask whether the organizations are tied by interlocking directorates of ethnic elites who sit on their boards of directors or if board members' common affiliation with other elite institutions creates the structural conditions that facilitate potential ideological or behavioral similarity. A social network analysis of five prominent Latino advocacy organizations reveals support for both hypotheses: Latino board members are both embedded in ethnic‐based networks and entrenched within elite organizational webs. This suggests that ethnic elites who sit on the boards of Latino advocacy organizations are also corporate elites, selected for the social capital they bring to these nonprofits.     

Global Governance,neoliberalism and national responses: The case of Bangladesh’s ready‐made garment (RMG) sector

This article on the ready‐made garment (RMG) sector of Bangladesh shows how over‐reliance on foreign capital for development financing and deregulated investment—a hallmark of neoliberal economic arrangements—undermines the incorporation of SDGs’ and INGOs’ equity principles, contributing to biased policy responses yielding unequal outcomes. The article cautions that while countries prioritize economic growth over social and environmental nourishment and continue to adopt neoliberal economic policies to promote economic growth, inequity is unavoidable, if not inevitable. Thus, the way forward may be to shift the focus of ‘development’ from the economy to society, to building ‘good societies’ where institutions and strategies, including those that contribute to economic growth, are organized such that these complement not compromise the evolution of such societies.     

Placement Educators’ Experiences and Perspectives of Supervising International Social Work Students in Australia

International social work students in Australia have reported difficulties in finding quality placement opportunities and dealing with issues such as language and cultural barriers. While placement issues have been mostly investigated from a student perspective, this study explores the experiences and perspectives of placement educators towards supervising international social work students. It draws on an online survey of 83 placement educators working for an Australian university. The majority of placement educators reported that they supervised international students differently to domestic students. These differences were negatively framed as challenges involving students’ language competence, their understanding of cultural norms, and knowledge of Australian welfare systems. This framing implies that cultural and linguistic differences between international students and placement educators are viewed in terms of student deficiency rather than as a positive opportunity for mutual learning and professional development.     

Seventh-Grade Social Studies versus Social Meliorism

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS), in the state of North Carolina, has gone through considerable recent effort to revise, support, and assess their seventh-grade social studies curriculum in an effort to serve three goals: comply with the Common Core State Standards (Common Core), comply with the North Carolina Essential Standards (Essential Standards), and create a curriculum that best serves students. Meanwhile, the curriculum theory of social meliorism was conceived of over a century ago. Since its inception it has influenced curriculum development and provided a foundation for many other curriculum theories that all start from an assumption that social meliorism holds to an accepted truth that the purpose of education is to improve society and address its injustices. Given contemporary discussions about how to achieve social justice, this is a philosophy that seems particularly meaningful when thinking about the ways that schools can help to accomplish the goals of social justice. I intend to investigate the seventh-grade social studies curriculum of WCPSS in 2014 and juxtapose it with the goals and ideals of social meliorism, determine how well the curriculum addresses the goals of that curriculum theory, and make suggestions for how a social meliorist might suggest modifying the curriculum to better serve the needs of society.     

Thumbs up for privacy?: Differences in online self-disclosure behavior across national cultures

This study investigates relationships between national-level culture and online self-disclosure behavior. We operationalize culture through the GLOBE dimensions, a set of nine variables measuring cultural practices and another nine measuring values. Our observations of self-disclosure come from the privacy settings of approximately 200,000 randomly sampled Facebook users who designated a geographical network in 2009. We model privacy awareness as a function of one or more GLOBE variables with demographic covariates, evaluating the relative influence of each factor. In the top-performing models, we find that the majority of the cultural dimensions are significantly related to privacy awareness behavior. We also find that the hypothesized directions of several of these relationships, based largely on cultural attitudes towards threat mitigation, are confirmed.     

社会需求视角下地方高校行政管理本科的课程设置

地方高校行政管理专业的课程体系普遍存在课程设置结构比例失调,教师知识背景影响课程设置以及课程设置的市场化与功利化倾向等问题。因此,为了有效回应社会的人才需求变化,地方高校管理者和教育者必须积极优化课程设置结构比例,加强与其他学科间的渗透交融以及提升课程的实用性,以期通过重构课程体系,培养适合区域经济发展所需要的人才。     

Social network and family business: Uncovering hybrid family firms

What does it mean for a private enterprise in China to be embedded in a family? Our purpose here is twofold: (1) use social network analysis to describe what it means for a firm to be embedded in a family, (2) reveal from the application a new kind of firm, not family, yet akin to family. Armed with data on a large probability sample of private enterprises — a third of which meet ownership and employment criteria of being family businesses — we uncover a category of “hybrid family firms” that look modern in the style of firms that exclude family, but operate socially in ways similar to family firms. Our conclusion from summary statistics on the sample is that there are no differences in average performance level or network advantage for the three categories of businesses: family firms, hybrid family firms, and family-excluded firms. The fact that CEOs of family firms and hybrid family firms more often turn to family as key business contacts is a fact about network composition that raises no question about network mechanisms. Whether the CEO turns to more or fewer family contacts, government help is more likely with stronger political connections, and business success and survival are more likely with a large, open network. That said, the look-modern, act-traditional hybrid family firms stand alone in prospering with a CEO embedded in a closed business network. Recognition of hybrid family firms adds to the literature’s illustrations of social network analysis used to distinguish types of businesses and business people, and extends the population of organizations within which governance and strategy are likely to be better understood when viewed through a family logic.     

The arithmetic of outcome editing in financial and social domains

Outcome editing refers to a set of mental rules that people apply when deciding whether to evaluate multiple outcomes jointly or separately, which subsequently affects choice. In a large-scale online survey (n = 2062) we investigate whether individuals use the same outcome editing rules for financial outcomes (e.g., a lottery win) and social outcomes (e.g., a party with friends). We also test the role of numeric ability in explaining outcome editing. Our results show that people’s preferences for combining or separating events depend on whether those events are in the financial or the social domain. Specifically, individuals were more likely to segregate social outcomes than monetary outcomes, except for when all outcomes were negative. Moreover, numeric ability was associated with preferences for outcome editing in the financial domain but not in the social domain. Our findings extend the understanding of the arithmetic operations underlying outcome editing and suggest that people rely more on calculations when making choices involving multiple financial outcomes and more on feelings when making choices involving social outcomes.     

How to keep Rosie the riveter from contracting VD: A case study of how U.S. social reformers used public relations during World War II

Much of public relations historiography on World War II focuses on the government uses of the function. This study fills a gap in the literature by exploring how a non-governmental organization called the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) used persuasion communication efforts to enlist the aid of management, labor, and local communities in the United States in the control of venereal disease (VD) rates. The case study advances a more diverse understanding of how activists have utilized public relations and found that the social reformers’ use of persuasive communications strategies and activities aligned with the view of public relations as the strategic and intentional participation in the social construction of meaning to achieve a planned outcome.