Assessing social work and nursing students’ intentions to work with dying patients

This study assessed social work and nursing students’ intentions to provide end-of-life care, based on the Theory of Planned Behavior. A total of 181 social work and nursing students completed a questionnaire examining intentions to provide end-of-life care, attitudes, subjective norms, perceived control, death anxiety, subjective knowledge, and sociodemographic characteristics. Students manifested a moderate level of intentions to provide end-of-life care, with nursing students indicating higher levels of intentions than social work students. Multiple regression analyses revealed that attitudes, subjective norms, and previous experience were the main predictors of intentions to provide end-of-life care. Recommendations for academic programs are discussed.     

She persisted: the pursuit,persistence, & power of African American women in social work graduate programs at Historically Black Institutions (HBI)

Social work graduate programs have long grappled with ways to attract and retain students at the intersection of race and gender. The central structure of this analysis is a hermeneutic phenomenological qualitative study on the pursuit and persistence of African-American women in graduate Social Work programs at a Historically Black Institution (HBI). The data in this article were derived from the responses of 13 participants written in their own words. The themes that emerged around the pursuit of a social work degree were (a) service to Black communities, (b) resistance to misrecognition, and (c) a seat at the table. After sharing the salient characteristics of the findings, the article opens a discussion around the significance of HBIs in educating social workers to work in urban communities and the implications for policy and practice.     

Examining the Nursing Home Physical Environment Through Policy-Driven Culture Change

A critical need exists to challenge approaches to nursing home care due to rigid organizational factors and hospital-like culture. It has been argued that resident care needs to move toward a person-centered approach by addressing the organizational, social, and physical environments in nursing home facilities, a process often known as culture change. In response to this need, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has created funding for pay for performance (P4P) nursing home incentive programs to allow nursing home providers to receive CMS reimbursements for culture change in the facilities. Through care staff interviews, site observations, and a document review, this qualitative study assesses the impact of a Midwestern state P4P incentive program in three participating nursing homes. Using an environment and behavior (E-B) policy orientation framework, this study examines culture change through a focus on policy, the physical environment, place attachment, and social and psychological processes in the study settings.     

Professional discretion and length of work experience: what findings from focus groups with care managers in elder care suggest

ABSTRACT

Research has explored how care managers in elder care – who often function as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – regard professional discretion. The way in which length of work experience affects care managers’ use of professional discretion remains, however, unexplored. This article present findings from 12 focus groups with 60 care managers. By bringing attention to how care managers experience the needs assessment process, this article sheds light on how these ‘street-level bureaucrats’ struggle when they try to balance their clients’ needs against institutional frameworks and local guidelines. Length of work experience seems to play a role in how care managers claim to use professional discretion. Experienced care managers describe how they deviate from the guidelines at times in order to create an increased scope of action in their decision-making process. Those with less time in the profession describe greater difficulties in this respect. Findings suggest that research should explore if length of work experience plays a role in the actual way in which care managers assess needs and make decisions. As such, they contribute to our understanding of how needs assessment processes are navigated by professionals while also pointing towards the nature of professional discretion in gerontological social work.     

‘We are actually,after all,just children’: caring societies and South African infantilisation of adults with intellectual disability

This article comments on infantilisation by attending to South African adult intellectual disability (ID) care through an intersubjective ethics of care lens, and shows how such an ethic can shine light on shifting our responses towards ID. Care performance data were gathered from three sources within two South African specialist ID care sites – from 10 adult residents, 16 nurses as spatiotemporal carers, and three wards as ethnographic sites. Deeply embedded and interwoven throughout various care practices is the disabling of adults with intellectual impairment when literally referred to as ‘children’. These adult-unmaking processes constitute practices that fall short of Tronto and Kittay’s caring societies ethic. Care exchanges generate relational and intersubjective spaces in which people are understood as never meeting full criteria for personhood. Infantilising care dynamics require urgent attention if we wish to change ways in which ID is viewed and responded to in South Africa.     

Tracing disorder across theories of autism,empathy, and mental health care

Abstract

Categories of mental disorders are generally understood through a biomedical paradigm of clinical research, diagnosis, and intervention. Here, diagnoses operate as professional tools, facilitating care organization and information exchange across diverse social contexts. In this article, I focus on how the diagnosis of autism-spectrum disorder operates in this manner. Autism conceived as a biomedical disorder is then contrasted with proposals by the neurodiversity movement, who understand core qualities of autism as alternative expressions of otherwise normal processes of brain development. Finally, I supplement these conversations with insights from Gerald Edelman’s theory of neural plasticity and Felix Guattari’s paradigm of ethico-aesthetic care. Understood together, these allow mental disorders and community care generally to be reconceived in terms of networks of expressive, embodied, and dynamically embedded rhythms that transcend individual persons. This serves, additionally, to illustrate a concept of empathy that traverses neurological, psychological, and sociocultural domains.     

母国区域制度质量对民营企业海外市场进入模式的影响

  海外市场进入模式是跨国企业实现国际化战略目标的重要战略决策。虽然国内外学者已经意识到制度因素对新兴市场跨国企业海外市场进入模式的影响,但大多集中在对东道国制度环境影响的研究,很少考虑母国区域制度环境的复杂性,且缺乏相应的实证检验。         在此背景下,基于制度理论和社会资本理论,探讨母国区域制度质量对中国民营企业海外市场进入模式的影响机理。以规制差异和文化差异为调节变量,以社会资本为中介变量,构建母国区域制度质量与民营企业海外市场进入模式之间关系的概念模型,并以2015年进行海外市场投资的210家中国民营上市企业为研究对象进行实证研究。         研究结果表明,①母国区域制度质量与民营企业海外市场进入模式呈正相关关系,即所处的母国区域制度质量越好,民营企业更倾向于选择独资的海外市场进入模式;②母国与东道国间的规制差异和文化差异负向调节母国区域制度质量与民营企业海外市场进入模式的正向关系;③社会资本对母国区域制度质量与民营企业海外市场进入模式的关系起部分中介作用,即民营企业获得的社会资本越多,对市场信息等方面的把控能力越强,越倾向于采用独资的海外市场进入模式。         研究结果展现了中国市场分割情景下民营企业海外市场进入模式的独特性,拓展了国际商务领域对新兴国家制度环境的理解和认识,促进了制度理论和社会资本理论在国际商务领域的应用和发展。在管理实践中,民营企业在进行海外市场进入模式决策时,应充分考虑其所在的区域制度环境,同时也要善于构建不同类型的社会资本,以提高企业战略决策的可靠性和有效性。     

How do labour laws affect unemployment and the labour share of national income? The experience of six OECD countries, 1970–2010

Using longitudinal data on labour law in France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States over the period 1970–2010, the authors estimate the impact of labour regulation on unemployment and the labour share of national income. Their dynamic panel data analysis distinguishes between the short‐run and long‐run effects of regulatory change. They find that worker‐protective labour laws in general have no consistent relationship to unemployment but are positively correlated with labour's share of national income. Laws specifically relating to working time and employee representation are found to have beneficial effects on both efficiency and distribution thus proxied.