At the threshold of retirement: From all-absorbing relations to self-actualization

To investigate the complexities of the retirement process, the present article draws on a case study of Eva, a Swedish woman who “awakened” from all-absorbing relations. It considers the ways in which retirement can enable liberation from patriarchal kinship structures and embodied values of respectability. The aim is to illuminate how deep, embodied values can become conscious and explicit during precarious life situations and transitional phases. The relation between the Swedish welfare state, an I-we balance, and gender equity values are illuminated. These analytical dimensions support the analysis by providing insights into the ways in which individuals embody and use cultural and social structures when they aim to manage unpredictability and to create change toward self-actualization.     

论夜间搜查——从两则案例谈起

由于我国《刑事诉讼法》对搜查的时间未作规定,导致司法实践中夜间搜查频繁出现。夜间搜查很容易侵犯被搜查人和与其同住的人的隐私权和生活安宁权,给其造成伤害,司法实践中也确实发生了因夜间搜查而把人吓病的案例。因此,我国在再次修改《刑事诉讼法》时应规定禁止夜间搜查。当然,在保护公民隐私权和生活安宁权的同时,也要兼顾打击犯罪的需要,法律可以设置一些禁止夜间搜查的例外。     

庄子与易经精神比较

道家庄子与易经精神有许多相互沟通之处,如齐物论"天籁地籁人籁"与易经八卦、天运黄帝咸池张乐与易经阴阳思想以及庄子外杂篇与易经卦象的沟通等。以通的原则来解释庄子与易经的精神,可以诠释他们的精神内涵和"与天地精神相往来"的气质。     

西方平等理论从古典自然法学到新自然法学的嬗变

平等是一个非常复杂和抽象的范畴,西方法学对平等理论的热爱和追逐从未停止过,从古典自然法学追求的抽象的平等的政治理想,到新自然法学对平等的制度设计的现实关怀,平等理论随着自然法学的发展实现了其自身的嬗变,这种改变也是时代的要求、历史的必然。     

Retrofitting Drucker: Knowledge work under cognitive capitalism

This article uses Peter Drucker's work vector-like, to carry the thesis of cognitive capitalism into the management field. Drucker's prophetic insights into the knowledge society are juxtaposed with recent, Italian autonomist Marxist-inspired analyses of capitalism's cognitive phase. If the capacity to create knowledge – or what autonomists call the ‘general intellect’ – is becoming the key productive force, arguably there is a need for a full-blown social form of knowledge management. Our reading of Drucker thus retrieves the one worthwhile thing from the rubble of normative knowledge management. It is the idea of society-level knowledge management premised on a universal and unconditional guaranteed basic income (GBI; or social wage). Basic income represents not just a social investment in knowledge, which Drucker himself called for, but also compensation for biolabour's augmented social productivity. With Drucker as the steppingstone, we conclude, the autonomist tradition merits greater attention from critical management and organisational scholars interested in factoring class and gender back into the knowledge management equation.     

The duty to care and the need to split

This paper arises out of psychoanalytically oriented consultancy to teams of staff in the helping professions where there is a statutory 'duty to care'. It takes as its premise the seemingly paradoxical hypothesis that workers may need to split off part of their emotional experience in order to preserve their own mental health and provide reliable services to their clients. I argue that while a professional 'duty to care' requires us to be emotionally 'in touch', the demands of our clients together with the demands of the institutional response to the 'duty to care' cause us to split off parts of our awareness. I also argue that provided the splitting does not become extreme we are doing no more or less than the rest of society. In other words, there is a degree of 'normal splitting' which numbs our awareness of danger and destructiveness and seeks to protect us from too much anxiety and pain. Yet if professional workers are charged with the responsibility of assessing risk and acting accordingly for the protection of all concerned they need ways of being 'in touch' (re-integrating the splits) for some or enough of the time. Finally, I will describe ways of being 'in touch', illustrating the difficulty and the pain of re-integrating the splits and some of the insights that can arise out of this work with examples from my consultancy work.     

Practice supervisors’ perceptions of social work students and their placements – an exploratory study in the Norwegian context

Practice placement has been a basic component in Social Work Programmes for many decades in Norway as elsewhere, and supervision of students has been a valued role for social workers. Here, we have carried out a pilot study of nine supervisors from various practice settings, dealing with their experience with and views about supervision of students. The aim was to get more knowledge of student supervision today and the meaning of student supervision in different practice settings. We found that the content of supervision depended on the agency context. Supervision embodies core agency values. There was a lack of common ground between supervisors and the school of social work, and between supervisors and the students.     

Work,parenting and gender: the care–work negotiations of three couple relationships in the UK

Changes globally mean that there are now record numbers of mothers in paid employment and a reported prevalence of involved fathering. This poses challenges to mothers and fathers as they negotiate care–work practices within their relationships. Focusing on interviews with three heterosexual couples (taken from a wider UK qualitative project on working parents), the paper considers care–work negotiations of three couples, against a backdrop of debates about intensive mothering and involved fathering. It aims to consider different configurations of work and care within three different couple relationships. We found that power within the relationships was negotiated along differential axis of gender and working status (full- or part-time paid work). We present qualitatively rich insights into these negotiations. Framed by a critical discursive psychological approach, we call on other researchers to think critically about dominant discourses and practices of working, caring and parenting, pointedly how couples situated around the world operationalise these discourses in talking about themselves as worker and carers.     

Tracing the roots of mindfulness: Transcendence in Buddhism and Christianity

The field of social work has embraced mindfulness skills in the training of social workers and as an intervention used in practice. However, there is little discussion regarding the theoretical or religious roots of mindfulness. In addition, social workers often employ mindfulness by practicing within a behaviorist frame. Missing from this behaviorist frame are the historic religious definitions, aims, and values of mindfulness, which lead to a fuller understanding of mindfulness in social work practice. This article traces the religious roots of mindfulness to clarify its goals in both Buddhism and Christianity, with an emphasis on the Mahayana branch of Buddhism and the contemplative and mystical traditions within Christianity. In both religions, mindfulness leads one to an experience of transcendence, assisting the follower to realize that the self belongs in relationship with a divine oneness in Buddha nature, that is believed to be intrinsic to all sentient beings (in Buddhism), or a divine God through the person of Jesus Christ (in Christianity) where the self is retained. Social workers uphold the values of mindfulness and the profession itself when being sensitive to root mindfulness practice within its historical and religious contexts, particularly within Buddhist and Christian faith systems.     

Bayesian analysis of multivariate stochastic volatility with skew return distribution

Multivariate stochastic volatility models with skew distributions are proposed. Exploiting Cholesky stochastic volatility modeling, univariate stochastic volatility processes with leverage effect and generalized hyperbolic skew t-distributions are embedded to multivariate analysis with time-varying correlations. Bayesian modeling allows this approach to provide parsimonious skew structure and to easily scale up for high-dimensional problem. Analyses of daily stock returns are illustrated. Empirical results show that the time-varying correlations and the sparse skew structure contribute to improved prediction performance and Value-at-Risk forecasts.