Social identities and political cleavages: the role of political context

Summary. Using a novel method, the paper investigates the influence of social group identities on attitudes and on voting in a variety of political contexts. Examining the major regions of Britain, Canada and the USA, we find considerable national and regional diversity in the nature of social cleavages. For example, social class and race had widely different effects across societies, but within societies their effects on attitudes and on voting were very similar. However, despite that, age and religion had a similar effect on attitudes across societies; the effects on voting varied considerably. The significant within-country differences underline the importance of using region, rather than country, as the unit of analysis. More importantly, these results highlight the role of political context, especially competing cleavages and the structure of party competition, in the establishment of politically relevant social cleavages.     

Educational Issues for Children and Young People in Families Living in Emergency Accommodation—An Irish Perspective

The article explores how homelessness may impact on the educational participation of children and young people in families living in emergency accommodation in Dublin. Many difficulties arise in terms of maintaining consistent schooling for children when they are part of a homeless family, including problems getting to and from school if living at a distance from their original schools, frequent changes in school and inadequate facilities and overcrowding in their temporary accommodation. Despite the many difficulties involved in maintaining children's regular school attendance, it is evident that school may represent the only stability for a child in an otherwise insecure and changing routine. Copyright © 2006 Children's Research Centre.     

Symbols of Organization: Informal Ways of Negotiating the Global and the Local in MNCs

Abstract In this article I build on the growing number of anthropological studies of businesses and explore the role that symbols play in the development of globalizing business networks. Transnational business people employ symbols not only to define boundaries between groups and develop collective solidarity but also to construct continuously changing networks between different social spaces and even, in the final analysis, between the concepts of global and local. The case study presented here focuses on the use of the symbols defining ‘German business style’ by the employees of a branch of a German bank in London as they interact with colleagues in the office, staff at their Frankfurt head office, and their clients and competitors. I conclude that, first, the use of symbols in social interaction is key to the negotiation of global and local spaces, and second, that, as the concepts of ‘global’ and ‘local’ spaces are themselves symbolic constructs, the drawing of distinctions between the two may be misleading.     

Reflective Supervision for Child Protection Practice – Reaching Beneath the Surface

This paper describes a model of reflective supervision for child protection practice that is informed by psychoanalytic theory. Eileen Munro promotes the idea of depth in practice, referring to the skills and knowledge required to undertake the work. Her reports highlight the importance of supervision to provide a thinking space for practitioners where reflection can take place. This paper will explore the importance of supervision in more depth and describe how psychoanalytic ideas can help us understand the complexities of our work with families, anchoring us to a solid theoretical base and helping to make sense of the maelstrom of feelings that are stirred in us as well as in our colleagues and clients.     

Public relations critical intersections special section introduction

The theme of this special section arose from the idea that interdisciplinary interactions, or the cross-fertilization of methods, philosophies, theories, and modes of practice across disciplines, can open out productive ways of addressing complex issues and wicked problems. Our call for papers reached out to public relations scholars and to researchers in other fields to submit articles at these generative intersections at different time. They were invited to reflect on traditional concerns, or current issues, or projected trends in public relations and elsewhere. As editors making a call to open boundaries, we invited participation along a spectrum of possible intersections whether of content, methods, pedagogy or technology. Taking different positions on that spectrum, the articles in the section examine the nature, engagement and evaluation of intersections. In writing this introduction, the editors took an overview of the articles in the light of three fundamental questions: “How and where does interdisciplinarity occur in public relations?”; “Are there indications of how public relations intersects with other fields to engage existing and potential future challenges?”; and “What principles might serve to evaluate answers to questions one and two?” In addition, we explore how each of the selected intersections in the articles might add value to public relations as a discipline and a practice.     

Access to justice for Aboriginal People in the Northern Territory

This article discusses research in the Northern Territory on Aboriginal civil and family law needs. It is based on focus group discussions and interviews with legal services providers and other associated organisations. The article argues that key areas of legal need involve discrimination, housing, child protection, social security, credit/debt and consumer law problems. It further argues that welfare conditionality, particularly as embodied in the NT Intervention and subsequent Stronger Futures policies, has exacerbated the need for legal assistance and advocacy for Aboriginal people.     

Preference for realistic art predicts support for Brexit

Following the UK’s EU referendum in June 2016, there has been considerable interest from scholars in understanding the characteristics that differentiate Leave supporters from Remain supporters. Since Leave supporters score higher on conscientiousness but lower on neuroticism and openness, and given their general proclivity toward conservatism, we hypothesized that preference for realistic art would predict support for Brexit. Data on a large nationally representative sample of the British population were obtained, and preference for realistic art was measured using a four‐item binary choice test. Controlling for a range of personal characteristics, we found that respondents who preferred all four realistic paintings were 15–20 percentage points more likely to support Leave than those who preferred zero or one realistic paintings. This effect was comparable to the difference in support between those with a degree and those with no education, and was robust to controlling for the respondent’s party identity.     

你所不知道的普京

尽管他常常高调现身,但其形象依然模糊并难以捉摸。他在克格勃内的身份,他在前东德德累斯顿的工作经历从来都是一个谜,甚至他担任圣彼得堡市长助理时的活动,人们也都知之甚少。直到1996年8月,他到莫斯科赴任,仍有人将他贬损为一个平庸的角色。一名叶利钦时代的高官曾评价他是"一个庸才",是"叶利钦家族"的傀儡,追逐金钱的"克格勃恶棍"。也许所有这一切表象都是不准确的。事情的发展最终证明,他比十几年前几乎所有人所能认识到的那个人更加重要,也更     

Evaluating the Quality of Social Work Supervision in UK Children’s Services: Comparing Self-Report and Independent Observations

Understanding how different forms of supervision support good social work practice and improve outcomes for people who use services is nearly impossible without reliable and valid evaluative measures. Yet the question of how best to evaluate the quality of supervision in different contexts is a complicated and as-yet-unsolved challenge. In this study, we observed 12 social work supervisors in a simulated supervision session offering support and guidance to an actor playing the part of an inexperienced social worker facing a casework-related crisis. A team of researchers analyzed these sessions using a customized skills-based coding framework. In addition, 19 social workers completed a questionnaire about their supervision experiences as provided by the same 12 supervisors. According to the coding framework, the supervisors demonstrated relatively modest skill levels, and we found low correlations among different skills. In contrast, according to the questionnaire data, supervisors had relatively high skill levels, and we found high correlations among different skills. The findings imply that although self-report remains the simplest way to evaluate supervision quality, other approaches are possible and may provide a different perspective. However, developing a reliable independent measure of supervision quality remains a noteworthy challenge.