Deconstructing Hierarchies: A Pedagogical Model with Service User Co-Teachers

This article examines the contribution of partnering with service users to the training of health and welfare professionals in Israel. These professions, while professing a shift to the social model of disability, still practise according to a medical model, which functions to strengthen the legitimacy of the professional and sustain the dependency of their clients. In adopting the social model of disability, we present a new pedagogic model in which social work students engage throughout the course with a co-teacher service user to contest these traditional methods and deconstruct accepted hierarchies. This teaching method focuses on the development of a new therapeutic dialogue within the partnerships created in the classroom, which enables the students and co-teachers to participate in the challenging experience of integrating theoretical knowledge with lived knowledge, thereby contributing to the development of a more inclusive knowledge base.     

Participatory Action Research in Affordable Housing Partnerships: Collaborative Rationality,or Sleeping with the Growth Machine?

Abstract

Participatory Action Research (PAR) emphasizes working with communities to develop questions that are relevant to their needs, then co-generating research to answer these questions. Typically, PAR focuses on empowering marginalized communities. Transforming Housing is a community–university collaborative partnership based in Melbourne Australia, with researchers asking developers, government, investors and community housing providers what they need to know in order to provide more and better affordable housing, then collectively generating ideas. After three years, this article takes a reflective practice lens to examine both possibilities and pitfalls arising from PAR with the rich and powerful. The article concludes that collaborate research on affordable housing can lead to outcomes intellectually honest, sustainable beyond political cycles and capable of effecting positive change at both the local and the metropolitan scales. However, this form of collaborative research can be easily derailed by politics, and does not address underlying structural inequalities.     

Framing Service Learning in Social Work: An Interdisciplinary Elective Course Embedded within a University–Community Partnership

While academic service learning has grown in popularity across disciplines and universities, the pedagogical strategies for service learning courses vary greatly, especially for courses focused on development in underserved communities. Ideally, service learning pedagogy should place equal importance on student and community benefits, build reciprocal relationships with community partners, and engage students in deep reflection about social cultural and economic issues. In designing a new service learning elective course to engage students in a rural town revitalization project, we intentionally framed the course to meet the aforementioned goals. We used a three-component service learning pedagogy model that: (1) embedded the course in an existing university–community partnership; (2) mobilized interdisciplinary teams of students for community-identified projects; and (3) promoted reflection on complex economic and social justice issues by integrating students' processing through blog, faculty–student–community discussions, and community feedback. Benefits to students and community based on two qualitative studies are discussed, as are implications for social work education and research.     

Promoting Healthy Routes Back to Work? Boundary Spanning Health Professionals and Employability Programmes in Great Britain

Between 2003 and 2011, the Pathways to Work (PtW) initiative was established across Great Britain, as policymakers sought to address the ‘health‐related, personal and external barriers’ faced by people who were out of work and claiming incapacity benefits (IBs). In the first 18 districts that PtW was rolled‐out, the Public Employment Service (Jobcentre Plus) and National Health Service (NHS) organizations worked in partnership to deliver ‘condition management programmes’, which helped IB claimants to cope with health problems. Evaluation research has identified significant health benefits associated with these condition management programmes, but there has been less discussion of the role of frontline NHS professionals in ensuring that services worked effectively on the ground. This article deploys the concept of ‘boundary spanning’ to explore the role of NHS professionals within PtW. Drawing on more than 50 in‐depth interviews, the article concludes that these NHS staff played a key boundary spanning role in facilitating partnerships, based on an ability to engage with the values/practices of other partner organizations (especially Jobcentre Plus) and a willingness to challenge established professional boundaries and ways of working. The article notes that recent policy initiatives have abandoned the PtW partnership approach in favour of more familiar models of contracting out, and that NHS professionals have been excluded from the delivery of health/employability services. It is argued that these recent changes may negatively affect the quality and range of health‐related services available to people on IBs.     

The Semarang Environmental Agenda: a stimulus to targeted capacity building among the stakeholders

Recently, a sustainable development action plan was prepared for the city of Semarang, Indonesia. An essential component of this action plan was the building up of an effective partnership among the diverse stakeholders to ensure their commitment. Such an approach in which the city's stakeholders are actively involved in decision making was new for Semarang. This paper describes the roles and attitudes of the different stakeholders in the development of the action plan, and the complex and difficult process to forge partnerships between them. The paper explores the constraints faced during this participatory process, and suggests that there is a need to build the capacity of all stakeholders involved — local government, civil society and the private sector — so that they will be able to play their envisaged respective roles better.     

Just deliberation: Can communicative rationality support socially just environmental conservation in rural Africa?

This article evaluates the use of deliberative methods for filling the democratic deficit arising from the shift to management through partnerships in conservation in developing countries. We ask whether deliberative approaches are feasible in a rural African context and the extent to which they can form a basis for socially just environmental decision making. In answering these questions we focus on two main concerns: the possibility of achieving satisfactory representation and the possibility of constructing counter-factual spaces of deliberation in which identity-based bias is suspended in favour of reasoned argument. Our survey data suggests that participants are themselves satisfied that representation is fair, and that the consensus attained at the end of deliberative events is not the result of domination of more powerful interests. Nevertheless, our more qualitative observations of individuals involved in deliberative events provide stronger cause for caution. It is not possible to leave power and prejudice out of deliberative processes, though well managed spaces of deliberation can temporarily mitigate these and in doing so provide some empowerment to normally marginalised participants.     

Community-based behavioral health interventions: Developing strong community partnerships

The popularity of community-based interventions has experienced a revival over the last two decades. The general theme behind this trend is that greater community involvement provides researchers and practitioners with culturally relevant information to make interventions successful. This involvement is usually solicited through the formation of community coalitions and advisory boards. Although the positive influence of community partnerships is well established, strategies for successfully developing and sustaining these partnerships are less clear. To address this gap, this paper presents evaluation findings from The Making Connections Initiative, a national effort emphasizing community-level prevention strategies for improving the mental health of men/boys. Sixteen grantees were tasked with developing a coalition of community organizations to provide input into the development and implementation of a local prevention initiative. An evaluation of the 16 grantees’ planning activities identified four themes related to developing and sustaining successful community partnerships. This article reports on the strategies that were found most successful across grantees. With the increasing popularity of community-based programs, strategies for successfully partnering with local organizations are particularly important. This study adds to the limited research on best practices for forming community partnerships and should serve as a guide for community-based evaluators and program planners.     

The Government–Third Sector Interface in Québec

In this paper, the authors analyze different forms of interface between the government and third sector organizations in Québec. In order to do so, they studied relationships in eight different fields of activity: homeless youth services, housing for intellectually deficient people, support organizations for natural caregivers, community leisure centers, community housing for the elderly, daycare centers, social economy organizations for domestic assistance, and services specializing in employment for handicapped people. Following a review of international literature on the relationship between the government and the third sector, the paper analyzes these relationships on the basis of the typology developed by Jennifer M. Coston, which is adapted to the Québécois context. In the eight activity sectors studied, the authors found the presence of four different types of interface between the government and the third sector: “subcontracting,” “coexistence,” “supplementarity,” and “co-construction” relationships.

The effect of knowledge collaboration on business model reconfiguration

This study examines whether and to what extent the presence and intensity of knowledge collaboration across different partners affects business model reconfiguration (BMR). We build on the business model (BM) literature and operationalize BMR by introducing the presence and intensity of collaboration and firm size effects as main explanatory factors in affecting the propensity of incremental and radical BMR. We analyze a large sample of UK firms during 2002–2014 to capture the effect of knowledge collaboration and firm size on BMR. Positively incremental forms of BMR will be influenced by the presence and intensity of knowledge collaboration, while radical forms of BMR are affected by the intensity of collaboration with customers and the collaboration with suppliers by large firms. Furthermore, firms of different sizes do not equally benefit from knowledge collaboration with suppliers for both incremental and radical BMR, while they do equally benefit from collaboration with other partner types.     

Examining Pathways from Innovation Orientation to Patient Satisfaction: A Relational View of Healthcare Delivery*

The federal government and industry leaders view innovation as a potentially fruitful way to improve hospital performance, specifically patient satisfaction. However, translating a hospital's innovation orientation into improved performance is challenging given that important network participants—namely physicians—may possess different aims. Grounded in Relational RBV, this study tests a model linking innovation orientation to patient satisfaction through a pathway of knowledge‐sharing routines (physician partnering and customer relationship management) and complementary capabilities (hospital responsiveness). Further, this study investigates the moderating role of physician employment (a form of governance) by examining hospitals with high and low levels of employed physicians. Structural Equation Modeling results from a paired sample of primary survey and secondary data from 173 acute care hospitals in the USA reveal the following. Hospitals with high levels of employed physicians translate innovation orientation into patient satisfaction by using customer relationship management (CRM) programs to influence hospital responsiveness directly, ultimately leading to patient satisfaction. Hospitals with low levels of physician employment use CRM programs in a fully mediated fashion to inform physician partnering activities, which influence hospital responsiveness, driving patient satisfaction.