This paper gives a brief overview of the background to current efforts to help more people with learning disabilities take up direct payments. It reflects on some of the…
Abstract
This paper gives a brief overview of the background to current efforts to help more people with learning disabilities take up direct payments. It reflects on some of the challenges involved for stakeholders, and describes the positive steps that many partnership board areas are beginning to take.
Valuing People presents a range of challenges for managers and other stakeholders. Partnership boards are charged with leading the change process. The paper sets out the steps…
Abstract
Valuing People presents a range of challenges for managers and other stakeholders. Partnership boards are charged with leading the change process. The paper sets out the steps that the West Sussex Board has taken to meet these challenges and describes in particular a ‘framework for frameworks’ that the Board has adopted to produce truly person‐centred and inclusive plans. The paper concludes that stakeholders can be empowered to find their voice where planners commit to an inclusive process.
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Martin Routledge and Zoe Porter
Personal budgets are part of the Putting People First agenda in England and are at the heart of the biggest change in social care for decades. This article discusses the rationale…
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Personal budgets are part of the Putting People First agenda in England and are at the heart of the biggest change in social care for decades. This article discusses the rationale and evidence base behind their introduction and focuses on the challenges to moving from small scale pilots to nationwide implementation.
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Awareness of the problem of elder abuse was aroused in Norway in the early 1980s. A pilot project conducted between 1991 and 1994, described here, established an important body of…
Abstract
Awareness of the problem of elder abuse was aroused in Norway in the early 1980s. A pilot project conducted between 1991 and 1994, described here, established an important body of knowledge based on casework. Central authorities believe that improved knowledge and competence will result in local change and further development to help the victims of violence.
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With service user led training becoming more popular in the training of mental health workers, little attention seems to have been paid to how the trainers themselves experience…
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With service user led training becoming more popular in the training of mental health workers, little attention seems to have been paid to how the trainers themselves experience this and the effect it has on them. Here Shaun Johnson, who has worked as the facilitator of a service user led training organisation and is a service user trainer himself, gives an overview of the issues and difficulties faced by service user trainers and how their lives could be made so much easier if unintentionally created problems could be avoided.
The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why accountants who moved from accounting firms to public service adapted their identities to reduce insecurity. The literature…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why accountants who moved from accounting firms to public service adapted their identities to reduce insecurity. The literature on accountant identity highlights insecurity caused by promotion criterion to partnership, which requires accountants to win new work for their employers and leads to overtime, as a serious problem which has permeated the accounting profession. However, there have been few studies that explore whether accountants who moved to the public service, where they have stronger job security and can enjoy work-life balance, have resolved the insecurity problem, although a neoliberalism turn accompanied by New Public Management-style reforms has increased the number of accountants in public service. Therefore, the authors of the current study aim to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the identity transitions of South Korean (hereafter Korean) accountants who joined the public service.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors theorise the nature of the process of identity adaptation with conceptual tools from Pierre Bourdieu, such as habitus and capital, and examine whether the accountants took a “vision-of-division” or a “di-vision” strategy in the public service to secure their identity. For this purpose, the authors interviewed accountants and their non-accountant colleagues, and investigated other written sources, such as newspaper articles and business cards.
Findings
The authors found that Korean accountants in Big-4 firms dealt with the same insecurity issues as accountants in western countries and perceived public service as an attractive alternative to remove this insecurity. However, accountants who joined the public service found themselves confronted with different types of problems, such as accounting/costing work being regarded as demeaning, which made their identity insecure. Therefore, some accountants took a di-vision strategy that makes the difference between themselves and typical public servants less visible by avoiding accounting/costing work, using bureaucratic designations and de-emphasising their accounting credentials. Accountants took this strategy because the symbolic value of their accountancy qualifications grew weaker over time, due to the increase in the number of qualified accountants, and because the public service field valued bureaucratic habitus and capital more highly than those of the accountants.
Originality/value
From a methodological aspect, the authors collected participants’ business cards and analysed which designations/credentials they chose in order to create a certain perception. This analysis helped the authors understand how accountants work on their identity by de-emphasising accounting credentials to secure their identity in an organisational field. In a theoretical dimension, the current study argues that the symbolic capital of accounting credentials is dependent on the organisational and social context in line with Bourdieu, and, contrary to Bourdieu, on the supply and demand in the professional labour market.
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Jiongyi Yan, Emrah Demirci and Andrew Gleadall
This study/paper aims to develop fundamental understanding of mechanical properties for multiple fibre-reinforced materials by using a single-filament-wide tensile-testing…
Abstract
Purpose
This study/paper aims to develop fundamental understanding of mechanical properties for multiple fibre-reinforced materials by using a single-filament-wide tensile-testing approach.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, recently validated single-filament-wide tensile-testing specimens were used for four polymers with and without short-fibre reinforcement. Critically, this specimen construct facilitates filament orientation control, for representative longitudinal and transverse composite directions, and enables measurement of interlayer bonded area, which is impossible with “slicing” software but essential in effective property measurement. Tensile properties were studied along the direction of extruded filaments (F) and normal to the interlayer bond (Z) both experimentally and theoretically via the Kelly–Tyson model, bridging model and Halpin–Tsai model.
Findings
Even though the four matrix-material properties varied hugely (1,440% difference in ductility), consistent material-independent trends were identified when adding fibres: ductility reduced in both F- and Z-directions; stiffness and strength increased in F but decreased or remained similar in Z; Z:F strength anisotropy and stiffness anisotropy ratios increased. Z:F strain-at-break anisotropy ratio decreased; stiffness and strain-at-break anisotropy were most affected by changes to F properties, whereas strength anisotropy was most affected by changes to Z properties.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to assess interlayer bond strength of composite materials based on measured interlayer bond areas, and consistent fibre-induced properties and anisotropy were found. The results demonstrate the critical influence of mesostructure and microstructure for three-dimensional printed composites. The authors encourage future studies to use specimens with a similar level of control to eliminate structural defects (inter-filament voids and non-uniform filament orientation).
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Gregory Jeffers, Rashawn Ray and Tim Hallett
Methodological traditions are like any other social phenomena. They are made by people working together, criticizing one another, and borrowing from other traditions. They are…
Abstract
Methodological traditions are like any other social phenomena. They are made by people working together, criticizing one another, and borrowing from other traditions. They are living social things, not abstract categories in a single system.– Andrew Abbott (2004, p. 15)