Sifting the wheat from the chaff—the organization of telephone intake and the selection of social assistance inquirers in Sweden

In Sweden, the initial contact between help-seeking people and a social welfare office normally takes place over the telephone, with designated intake officers handling those aiming to apply for social assistance. Citizens seeking help are here sorted according to various eligibility criteria as well as according to different intake routines. The outcome of the sorting process is that some receive an appointment for a further assessment while others are sent away. This article describes and classifies the degree of selection at seven telephone intakes, discusses relations between the degrees of selection and reasons for selection and distinguishes several selection strategies.     

Introduction. Ce que les écrits font au travail

As is known, large numbers of writings circulate within every kind of professional environment. As a result, there is extensive research on the formats, uses and roles of writings in work. However, the approach taken here is not to describe what is done with writings in work. The central hypothesis rests on a performative vision of writings, one that gives them the power to act, agency. It can be summed up as follows: what do writings “do” to work? Studying work through its writings is a way to connect two dimensions that are too often kept separate: situated activities on the one hand, organizational functions on the other. Indeed, writings are material and robust — though not always lasting — traces of concrete activities, and they provide a handhold for the rigorous analysis of work as close as possible to its conditions of realization. However, writings travel and circulate. They form links between workers, groups, workshops, services, firms, without which production could not take place. They stretch work beyond its source. To track them is therefore to shift the field of enquiry to moments other than the present of the observed situation, and also to other nearby, surrounding workspaces. This brings out the procedural and interactive dimensions of organizations, their integrating capacity. Exploring what writings do to work is therefore not only to place oneself at an intermediate level between situated action and organized action. For the sociologist, it is a way of connecting these two perspectives “on paper”, by embedding the analysis of the actual work in spatially and temporally broader collective actions, and by documenting organizational analysis on the basis of observed work situations. It is a way of contributing to a more extensive ecology of activity, more clearly anchored within its organizational envelope.     

伊盟、伊合与中国中东人文外交

伊斯兰世界联盟与伊斯兰合作组织是泛伊斯兰主义制度化的产物,伊盟主要通过朝觐平台间接对伊斯兰国家政治施与影响,伊合则通过推进议题的方式直接对伊斯兰国家政治产生影响;我国历来重视发展与这些泛伊斯兰国际组织的友好关系,并取得了宝贵历史经验与良好的成效;在明确我国与泛伊斯兰国际组织开展人文交流与合作的资源优势、基本目标及其实现途径的基础上,探索我国对中东国家开展“全方位、多层次、宽领域”人文外交的应对之策,旨在进一步提升我国对中东伊斯兰国家的人文外交能力.     

Competing Values Framework: A useful tool to define the predominant culture in a maternity setting in Australia

Objective

To identify the predominant culture of an organisation which could then assess readiness for change.

Johann Gottfried Herders philosophische Grundlegung der Iernenden Organisation

Herder’s philosophical model of the learning organisationThe author describes Johann Gottfried Herder’s education philosophy and his plans for an ?alternative“ school. His ?alternative school concept“ shows how the teacher as supervisor of the learning process should take the individual needs into account and adapt the didactics and methods of teaching to these needs. This practice conforms to the rules of today’s reformed schools. Learning as an extension of subjective experiences and life possibilities requires an open organisational structure, and this is what Herder designed.     

Crise de la rationalité industrielle et transformations de la prescription. Une étude de cas

Studies of industrial rationality should be reconsidered given the thoroughgoing changes under way. We have switched from a Taylorist rationality based on Scientific Management, which claimed to fit production into a single viewpoint, to a dissemination of the sources of the directions to be followed and an overall destabilization of any attempt at rationalization, and as a consequence, to a looser sense of rationality even among engineers. But this does not at all benefit wage-earners. Often without bearings, they have to cope with instructions; but have a harder time doing so whenever their organization provides them with few tools for coping and whenever the instructions, or part of them, are contradictory.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">„Mönche aus Wien,bitte lüftets eure Geheimnisse</Emphasis>.“ Über die Abweichungen der Beratungspraxis von den Idealtypen der Organisationsberatung

A discrepancy between the explicit theories of organizational consulting and consulting in practice has to be assumed. This paper analyzes the difference between front stage and back stage in organizational consulting. Therefore the idealtyps of organizational consulting are reconstructed and put in contrast with actual consulting behaviour (on the basis of 48 interviews with consultants). As a result three thesis can be stated: Based on the clients’ expectations a divergence between the idealtyps and the consulting practice has been identified, which leads to convergence in the consulting practice (convergence thesis). For systemic consulting (in German: Systemische Organisationsberatung) this divergence is as significant and vast (value transfer thesis) that it doesn’t seem justifiable to take it as an independent approach on organizational consulting (three realtyps thesis).     

Wenn die Arbeitsfähigkeit gefährdet ist: Möglichkeiten institutioneller Konfliktbearbeitung

Mediation and conflict-moderation in organisational conflictsOrganisations are subject to permanent changes and must therefore master the task of permanently dealing with conflicts from a new. If the functioning of work of subsystems or the organisation as a whole is threatened, rapid interventions are demanded. The author introduces mediation as a intervention method. Two methods are compared in a practice test: mediation and conflict-moderation.