家庭养老、机构养老与社区养老的比较分析

当前,关于养老社会工作的理论研究相当薄弱,实际服务活动正处于较为盲目的境地.尽管通常认为社区养老优于机构养老,而机构养老又优于家庭养老,但在今后相当长的一段时间内,多元养老方式并存将是中国养老工作的一大特色.在科学发展观统领下,必须对各种养老方式展开多维比较和综合研判,在因地、因时、因事制宜的基础上不断实现中国养老工作的有效创新.     

代理关系中仲裁条款的独立性

通过代理人签订合同是一种普遍的商业行为,在代理人为被代理人签订的包含有仲裁条款的合同中,当事人对代理行为的效力产生争议时,合同中仲裁条款的效力如何认定是一个值得探讨的问题。单纯用代理理论去认定通过代理的仲裁条款的效力会得出违背仲裁制度的结论。从仲裁条款独立性的基本价值理念分析代理关系中仲裁条款的效力可以对该问题有一个合理的解答,不同类型越权代理行为中的仲裁条款对被代理人及相对人应当有不同的效力。     

股权集中,投资决策与代理成本

通过建立实物期权模型,我们分析了集中股权结构下,股东异质性所导致的控股股东代理冲突对企业投资决策和负债融资代理成本的影响。研究发现,集中股权结构下的控股股东价值最大化动机会导致过度投资的产生,并显著提高负债融资的代理成本,即控股股东的价值侵占行为不仅影响到大小股东间的代理冲突,而且会加重股东与债权人之间的代理冲突。控股股东的持股比例会产生公司治理的正向激励效应,持股比例的增加会降低过度投资程度、增加企业价值和降低负债融资代理成本。而控制权和现金流权的分离则会产生公司治理的负向侵占效应,分离程度的增加会导致更严重的过度投资、更低的企业价值和更高的负债融资代理成本。     

Assessing Child Welfare Agency Practices and Attitudes that Affect Father Engagement

ABSTRACT

The importance of fathers' involvement in their children's lives is irrefutable. Supportive, warm, and positive involvement of fathers leads to children being well-adjusted. Indeed, involved fathers positively influence their children's cognitive ability, social behavior, psychological well-being, and educational achievement. For children in foster care, when fathers are involved they have significantly shorter stays in foster care than those whose fathers are not involved. For parents to demonstrate fitness to parent they must show the successful completion of goals specified in a case plan that promotes safety and permanence of their child. This cross-sectional study investigated how fathers' perception of social workers' attitude and practice skills was associated with fathers' understanding and confidence with regard to completing the case plan goals. A purposive sample of 56 child welfare-involved fathers completed the Child Welfare Father Involvement Questionnaire. The findings indicated that the more positive fathers perceived social workers' attitude and skills, the greater their understanding about the case plan goals and greater confidence to complete case plan goals. The results were statistically significant. These results have implications for child welfare training to build the social worker-client relationship in a compassionate manner while maintaining a rigorous assessment and monitoring of fathers' parenting capabilities.     

Openings,absences and omissions: Aspects of the treatment of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity in British cultural studies

Abstract

British cultural studies has, in an innovative and exciting way over the last three or four decades, opened up spaces for the serious analysis of many aspects of culture, including those inextricably related to questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and subordinated groups in urban environments in Britain. However, there have been a number of weaknesses and omissions with regard to Britain's black, Caribbean-descended population. Some of these are possibly the result of earlier, unresolved theoretical and methodological disputes within the field of cultural studies; others stem, perhaps, from an over-reliance on approaches arising out of youth subcultural analytical frameworks. Consequently, less than the required attention has been paid to the active cultures of achievement developed by the adult, black working-class population of Caribbean descent in Britain from the 1950s to the 1990s.     

Agency Practices Affecting Social Workers Who Treat Substance-Abusing Clients

Abstract

This study interviewed 115 MSWs with substance abuse training working in general social service agencies to determine if they viewed their settings as facilitating or hindering their work with substance-abusing clients. This study builds on the work of Lightfoot and Orford (1986) who found that social workers were more hindered than helped by their agencies' practices regarding substance-abusing clients.

Results: A majority of workers viewed their agencies as facilitating substance abuse-related work through support from supervisors and administrators, availability of substance abuse training, workers' freedom to choose clients, and opportunities to supervise others on substance abuse-related issues. Supervisor data corroborated these findings. This is a hopeful sign for the profession contrasting with considerable social work literature documenting the profession's historic ambivalence toward substance-abusing clients.     

Transformative Homes

ABSTRACT

In the era of global workflows and massive migrations, it has been suggested that the notion of home is breaking free from its material aspects to become a set of exportable routines and practices. On the other hand, it is argued that the materiality of spaces and objects can support migrants' well-being in the new destination. Drawing on the ethnography of a Moroccan household in Rome, Italy, we illustrate how actions pertinent to the material home can favor identity development and the exercise of agency. First, we discuss squatting as a collective action of appropriation and transformation, which led to the identification with a transnational, intercultural category of migrant. Second, we illustrate the activities of furnishing as the locus of syncretic and reflexive processes, in which elements of the host country and themes from the migratory experience are mixed and reinterpreted in novel ways. Our analysis supports the view that the materiality of the home and the actions it affords play a major role in the socio-psychological adjustment of migrants and—on a wider scale—in processes of cultural dynamism and renovation.     

The Impact of Openness on Adoption Agency Practices

ABSTRACT

This article reports the results of a longitudinal study of the changing openness-related practices of private U.S. adoption agencies. Staff from private adoption agencies were interviewed at three points in time, in 1987–89, 1993, and 1999, about their current practices and attitudes regarding openness in adoption and any changes that may have taken place since the previous interview. From 1993 to 1999 agencies continued a trend toward offering and encouraging more open adoptions. During this period fully disclosed arrangements became more common and had the greatest growth since 1987, while confidential adoptions continued to decrease in frequency. Mediated adoptions remain the predominant arrangements. Changes in the adoption options offered by the agencies at all three time periods have been driven primarily by the demands of the birthmother for greater openness. However, by final data collection in 1999, most agencies in this sample changed from viewing the birthmother as their primary client to viewing the adopted child as their primary client. Implications for agency practices are discussed.     

Rethinking the Canon: Reflections on a Text That Ought to be Essential Reading

Abstract

The 2006 war in Lebanon that erupted between Hezbollah and Israel marked the largest evacuation of Americans abroad since World War II. This article captures the experiences of Lebanese-American women and investigates how gender identity was expressed during these evacuations. Presented from the point of view of a participant-observer and personal interviews, findings show that gender became a master identity that influenced these women's choices regarding how to escape the country and return to the United States. Some embraced dependency upon masculinist exercises of power while others claimed agency as they determined their own fate and carried out their own evacuation without waiting to be rescued by the state or male kin members. The evacuation stories in this article confirm and illuminate the complexity of ethnic citizenship and gendered agency.     

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign ‘Stop Violence against Women’. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders.