Anti-Oppressive Practice and Social Work Students' Portfolios in Scotland

Anti-oppressive practice is seen by social work educators as a key approach to social work in the UK. However, controversies exist about its use in practice. Recent literature has criticised the complexities and problematics of anti-oppressive practice. An examination is made of the content of portfolios completed by social work students undertaking a final practice learning opportunity on a post-graduate programme in Scotland. The findings indicate that students gave considerable attention to power, empowerment and partnership but there was also an apparent general acceptance of agency policies, procedures and wider structural oppression. Also some aspects of social divisions and forms of oppression such as gender, age, disability and language received considerable attention while others such as ‘race’, class, sexuality and religion received less attention. Limitations of the research are noted. Suggestions for improvement in considering anti-oppressive material include a focus on both micro and macro issues, ranging from the structure for the portfolio and the content of supervision discussions through to agency policies and procedures and the national guidelines provided to social work programmes.     

Reference functions and possibility theorems for cardinal social choice problems

 In this paper, we provide axiomatic foundations for social choice rules on a domain of convex and comprehensive social choice problems when agents have cardinal utility functions. We translate the axioms of three well known approaches in bargaining theory (Nash 1950; Kalai and Smorodinsky 1975; Kalai 1977) to the domain of social choice problems and provide an impossibility result for each. We then introduce the concept of a reference function which, for each social choice set, selects a point from which relative gains are measured. By restricting the invariance and comparison axioms so that they only apply to sets with the same reference point, we obtain characterizations of social choice rules that are natural analogues of the bargaining theory solutions. Received: 8 August 1994/Accepted: 12 February 1996     

Urbanization and de-urbanization of the black population before the civil war

Pre-Civil War black urbanization is examined using data from federal census records, 1790 to 1860. The black population is found to be as urban as the white population initially, but its urbanization underwent relative decline in the last two decades before the Civil War. Foreshadowing current patterns, the northern black population was heavily concentrated in the largest cities, and the free black population was the most urban of all groups. The timing of black urban decline in the North, as well as regional and size of place differences in that decline, suggest that both competition with immigrants in major eastern seaboard cities and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 contributed to black de-urbanization. For the South, the explanations of black urban decline proposed by Wade, Conrad and Meyer, Goldin, and Bonacich are evaluated, and Bonacich’s split labor market theory is judged to be most consistent with the demographic trends.     

The multiattribute evaluation of program-planning contractors

This note describes how the theory of measurable multiattribute value functions was used to evaluate the proposals of three competing subcontractors for a program-planning project undertaken by Los Alamos National Laboratory. The purpose of the program-planning project was to develop a methodology for the evaluation of alternative long-range strategies for the achievement of controlled thermonuclear fusion. A measurable multiattribute value function was developed based on eleven criteria. Eight judges made evaluations on each of these criteria, and their judgments were synthesized to identify the winning subcontractor. While we emphasize details associated with this specific application, we expect the problem structure and methodology to be amenable to other contractor-and proposal-evaluation efforts after only minor modifications.     

A procedure for optimal augmentation of multidimensional designs

The augmentation of an existing multidimensional design is discussed from the point of view of estimability of certain two-factor interactions which are nonestimable from the original design. A general procedure is proposed which achieves this with a minimal number of additional assemblies and which is optimal in a certain sense. The individual steps in this procedure are described in detail and illustrated by an example.     

Speculative method and Twitter: Bots,energy and three conceptual characters

This paper aims to contribute to recent innovations in social scientific methodology that aspire to address the complex, iterative and performative dimensions of method. In particular, we focus on the becoming‐with character of social events, and propose a speculative method for engaging with the not‐as‐yet. This work, being part of a larger project that uses Speculative Design and ethnographic methods to explore energy‐demand reduction, specifically considers the ways in which energy‐demand reduction features in the Twitter‐sphere. Developing and deploying three automated Bots whose function and communications are at best obscure, and not uncommonly nonsensical, we trace some of ways in which they intervene and provoke. Heuristically, we draw on the ‘conceptual characters’ of idiot, parasite and diplomat in order to grasp how the Bots act within Twitter to evoke the instability and emergent eventuations of energy‐demand reduction, community and related practices. We conclude by drawing out some of the wider implications of this particular enactment of speculative method.     

The ordinal egalitarian bargaining solution for finite choice sets

Rubinstein et al. (Econometrica 60:1171–1186, 1992) introduced the Ordinal Nash Bargaining Solution. They prove that Pareto optimality, ordinal invariance, ordinal symmetry, and IIA characterize this solution. A feature of their work is that attention is restricted to a domain of social choice problems with an infinite set of basic allocations. We introduce an alternative approach to solving finite social choice problems using a new notion called the Ordinal Egalitarian (OE) bargaining solution. This suggests the middle ranked allocation (or a lottery over the two middle ranked allocations) of the Pareto set as an outcome. We show that the OE solution is characterized by weak credible optimality, ordinal symmetry and independence of redundant alternatives. We conclude by arguing that what allows us to make progress on this problem is that with finite choice sets, the counting metric is a natural and fully ordinal way to measure gains and losses to agents seeking to solve bargaining problems.