The Meaningful Involvement of Service Users in Social Work Education: Examples from Belgium and The Netherlands

This article links the development of service user involvement championed in the United Kingdom to two examples in Dutch-speaking qualifying social work programmes: one from Belgium and one from the Netherlands. In both projects, a longer lasting cooperation with more marginalised service users was established. The Belgium project highlights social work lecturers and service users living in poverty, working in tandem to deliver a module to social work and socio-educational care work students. The example from the Netherlands involves young people from a homeless shelter as peer-researchers, working together with social work students.

Both projects, one focusing on social work education and on social work research, highlight striking similarities in the positives and challenges of working with service users including how this challenges both groups preconceptions of the other, deepens learning but also creates greater potential for confrontations which need to be managed creatively. The article also identifies the pre-requisites for this to be effective including appropriate resourcing, training, facilitative skills and acknowledges that collaborations can be extremely fragile. However, such projects need further investment, experimentation and implementation on an international scale to share learning and promote creative approaches for the development and learning of social work students.     

Young people negotiating and maintaining boundaries in youth work relationships: findings from an ethnographic study of youth clubs

‘Professional boundaries’ set limits on appropriate behaviours in the relationship between the service users and practitioners. The professional literature often assumes boundaries are maintained by the practitioners, occupational bodies, or organisational policy. However in youth work this is under-researched. An ethnographic study of four youth clubs in the North East of England into ethical practice revealed that young people were surprisingly adept at maintaining boundaries with the youth workers. These boundaries were negotiated and maintained through the young people's use of space, their willingness to interact with the workers, the way they shared information with the workers, and their inclusion of youth workers into their social networking. Young people also showed a sophisticated awareness of the organisational boundaries youth workers were operating within, and often cooperated in maintaining them with the worker. The article concludes by arguing youth workers should take seriously young people's ability and willingness to set and work within boundaries, and see their negotiation and maintenance as a mutual endeavour. However, this may provide a challenge to organisations with rigid policy-defined boundaries.     

What does wellbeing do? An approach to defamiliarize keywords in youth studies

Wellbeing has become a keyword in youth and social policy, a construct deployed as a measure of a good life. Often associated with physical and mental health, wellbeing encompasses numerous indicators, from subjective experiences of happiness and satisfaction to markers of economic prosperity and basic human needs of security. This article examines wellbeing as an organizing concept in discourses on young people and argues for defamiliarizing its truth claims and cultural authority by investigating what wellbeing does. We begin by examining the rise of wellbeing, drawing attention to its conceptual muddiness and ambiguity. Framed by the Foucauldian notion of problematization, the analysis proceeds along two routes: first, through an historical consideration of wellbeing as a relational concept with antecedents, focusing on ‘self-esteem’; and second, through a reading of wellbeing in contemporary educational policy. Informed by Somers' historical sociology of concept formation and Bacchi's critical policy analysis, we illuminate the mixed dimensions of wellbeing's reach, placing it within longer traditions of youth studies and psy-knowledges and showing its transformative promise as well as its individualizing effects. In doing so, we elaborate a methodological approach that can be adapted to examine other keywords in youth studies and social policy discourse.     

交往的发展——居民参与的社区营造模式探讨

居民参与社区建设和营造是解决我国当代居住社区邻里交往缺失的途径之一。本文探讨了居民参与社区建设应始于何处,建筑师应如何通过设计手段引导和启发居民进行参与活动,在参与的同时促使居住区社会网络的形成与成熟,达到改善居住区人际关系的最终目的。     

论城市规划中的公众参与

随着城市规划从技术手段到公共政策的性质转变,实践中封闭的规划编制程序逐渐成为许多城市规划问题的源头。通过对公众参与功能和外国公众参与实践的分析,我国应增加公众参与的操作性规定,发挥社区组织和居民团体的作用,构建一个开放、透明、包容、公平的公众参与城市规划程序。     

上海社工职业化模式问题与展望

上海社会经济的发展需要职业化和专业化的社会工作。20世纪90年代中期以来,上海一直在稳步推进社会工作职业化。以授权为特征的职业化的主要内容包括:政府购买服务,民间组织经营,行业自律与管理,注册社工提供专业化服务。在职业化的过程中,上海社会工作在性质定位、需求定位、非政府参与和制度框架等方面还存在一些问题。面向新世纪,上海社会工作职业化需要全面拓展,走近百姓,广泛参与,规范运作。     

共享住宿平台监管机制的演化博弈研究——基于第三方监管视角

针对当前共享住宿平台存在的管理乱、隐患多、维权难等诸多问题,以及政府缺乏有效监管的现实情况,分析共享住宿平台的最佳监管机制的状态。文章将消费者参与度引入博弈模型,从第三方监管视角出发,构建演化博弈模型,分析共享住宿平台与政府监管部门行为的影响机理。研究表明：随着关键参数的取值变化,系统分别呈现出四种演化稳定结果,以及一种周期性的随机状态;加大政府的惩罚力度、提高消费者的参与度,可以引导系统向最优状态演化。从制度体系、声誉机制和信息披露机制方面为平台的规范发展和政府部门监管提供决策参考。     

大数据驱动下的影视文本创作 和生产模式变革

大数据正以其对规律和趋势的分析预测功能,对人们生活和影视内容生产产生日益深刻的影响。数据化思维是贯穿当下影视生产创作的重要思维形态,延承的正是传统数据化思维的基本认知过程。大数据驱动下的互动参与生产模式主要体现在,借助于受众行为数据分析,可以对导演、故事、表演、影像、剪辑和声音等影视元素进行选择,并在此基础上进行生产或再生产。这些将推动影视内容生产在技术和观念上不断变革。     

A new tool for urban governance or just rhetoric? The case of participatory budgeting in Taipei City

Increasing interest in participatory budgeting has been observed in local governments around the world. This paper stresses direct citizen participation in the budgeting process leads to good governance, deepens democracy and improves social justice, while also highlighting some challenges in its efficiency and effectiveness. Unlike participatory budgeting, the Sub-borough Chiefs Forum is a community-based representative democratic mechanism; it could be regarded as a form of participatory budgeting in a broad sense. If so, then did the Taipei programme simply duplicate the goals of the Forum or lead to a better governance by making up for the inadequacies of the Chiefs Forum? To find out whether the Taipei participatory budgeting programme made a difference, we carried out qualitative and quantitative comparisons of projects passed under the participatory budgeting process and at the Forum. We also interviewed several participatory budgeting participants and sub-borough chiefs. The findings suggested that participatory budgeting and the Forum generated different proposals and budget requests, and the Taipei programme supplemented the shortcomings of the Forum and therefore led to deeper civic engagement and better urban governance.     

Age limits for participation in child protection court proceedings in Sweden

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Swedish legislation, children have the right to participate in child protection proceedings. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the notion of age and maturity in child protection proceedings in order to elucidate how these aspects could influence children's rights to participate. We focus on the view of three groups of actors involved in child protection proceedings in Sweden—social workers, lawyers, and laypersons in social welfare boards and administrative courts—and on how children's age and maturity should be taken into consideration in decisions on their participation in court. The analysis is based on survey data. The study found that social workers, laypersons, and lawyers have different views on when children are old enough to have the right to litigate in court. Additionally, there is no consensus on how the maturity of the child can be assessed to inform the decision about participation. More discussion is needed about what competences a child needs to participate in court and to what extent this right should be limited by their age. Importantly, courts and decision‐making proceedings can be made more child friendly.