Social work and a love of humanity

Abstract

The idea of a ‘love of humanity’, though largely absent from social work literature, is a potent concept for challenging the dominant discourses of individual material wealth, greed and power. It can be associated with the postmodern agenda of emancipation from oppressive discourses of professional ‘expertise’. Love, or a ‘love of humanity’, has the same intent as formulations of social work grounded in postmodern critical theory, but it uses a different language. It uses a language of lived experience and personal commitment - a language that appeals to our hearts -a language passionate about, and incorporating, human rights and social justice.     

The privatization of British Telecom—Its impact on management

This article describes the series of changes which British Telecom has gone through over the last 10 years or so— changes which have often been dramatic and highly publicized. Faced with the challenges of the fast-changing business environment of the past decade—the most obvious of which was the technological revolution—British Telecom was perceived to be safe and reliable, but slow to change and expensive. Its strengths were the widespread understanding and acceptance of the need for change, its reservoir of the necessary skills and talent, a sound commercial infrastructure and a corporate culture. The author describes the organizational changes which have taken place and looks to a future where change is endemic if a business is to survive.     

Summarizing the Effect of a Wide Array of Amenity Measures into Simple Components

A significant issue existing within the rural economic development literature revolves around the difficulty with sorting out the controversy of the effects of amenity activities on rural economic growth. This problem is due to the different ways amenity attributes are linked to regional economic performance. Numerous researchers utilize principal component analysis to compress groups of variables that describe attributes of natural-based amenity and quality of life into scalar measures. While principal components are good at reducing a collection of variables into single measures, they often lack interpretability because they define some abstract scores which are often not meaningful or not well interpretable in practice. We apply the simple component analysis suggested by Rousson and Gasser (2004, Applied Statistics 53, 539–555) to summarize the information in groups of variables into a limited number of simple components and improve interpretability at a modest loss of optimality. Simple components allow us to identify and interpret the effect of attributes that most influence regional economic performance so as to gain better insight into policies to preserve and advance those attributes. The same methodology is appropriate for any social science discipline when there is a need to replace a larger number of multiple indicator measurements with a smaller set.     

Review Essay: Democratic Government in the Age of Globalization?

Public Organization Review -     

A stitch in time: an experiment in collaboration

Writing biography is rarely as straightforward as simply drawing together the threads of someone else's life. Not only must the biographer grapple with the challenge of pulling that life into a narrative shape, she must also deal with the issue of the biographical self to consider the way in which that self impacts and influences the story. Seen like this, biography becomes a collaborative experience--a mesh of self/other relations. Using the case study of the "Michael Fields "--the subjects of my biography in-progress--this paper explores the effects of the researcher/subject relationship and the way in which it affects a kind of scholarly desire both on (and off) the page.     

Critical reflection in social work: a response to globalisation?1

This article presents a reflective theoretical deconstruction of my practice with disempowered human service workers. Specifically, it presents a case study of how critical reflection was fostered amongst a group of practitioners in Geelong, a regional Victorian town in Australia. This models how a critical postmodern analysis provided a framework for overcoming entrenched power dynamics and structural barriers in a particular context and at a particular point in time. It describes and analyses the content of this work in terms of its significance and implications for responding to the impact of globalisation on this group, which was undermining the effectiveness of their social work practice.