The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social…
Abstract
The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social policy. Whilst area policy has been strongly influenced by Pigou's welfare economics, by the rise of scientific management in the delivery of social services (cf Jaques 1976; Whittington and Bellamy 1979), by the accompanying development of operational analyses and by the creation of social economics (see Pigou 1938; Sandford 1977), social policy continues to be enmeshed with the flavours of Benthamite utilitatianism and Social Darwinism (see, above all, the Beveridge Report 1942; Booth 1889; Rowntree 1922, 1946; Webb 1926). Consequently, for their entire history area policies have been coloured by the principles of a national minimum for the many and giving poorer areas a hand up, rather than a hand out. The preceived need to save money (C.S.E. State Apparatus and Expenditure Group 1979; Klein 1974) and the (supposed) ennobling effects of self help have been the twin marching orders for area policy for decades. Private industry is inadvertently called upon to plug the resulting gaps in public provision. The conjunction of a reluctant state and a meandering private sector has fashioned the decaying urban areas of today. Whilst a large degree of party politics and commitment has characterised the general debate over the removal of poverty (Holman 1973; MacGregor 1981), this has for the most part bypassed the ‘marginal’ poorer areas (cf Green forthcoming). Their inhabitants are not usually numerically significant enough to sway general, party policies (cf Boulding 1967) and the problems of most notably the inner cities has been underplayed.
Few thoughtful men or women will deny, as we enter the last two decades of the twentieth century, that ours is truly an Age of Anxiety. Even in an America still uniquely stable…
Abstract
Few thoughtful men or women will deny, as we enter the last two decades of the twentieth century, that ours is truly an Age of Anxiety. Even in an America still uniquely stable and prosperous relative to much of the rest of the world, the general mood is no longer an optimistic one. For many of us the future appears clouded at best, perhaps laden with catastrophes. Clearly all of us are witnesses to, and in some cases participants in, a great turning point in human affairs. We thus find ourselves living in the end of one epoch while at the same time the rough outlines of a new civilisation come into view. Such momentous transformations of the social structure, economy and political landscape are invariably accompanied by, and often preceded by, major shifts of intellectual commitment. In other words, as our world has changed drastically in the twentieth century, basic patterns of thought and philosophical orientation have either reflected, or in some cases even helped to initiate, these changes. In the brief space allotted to us, we will attempt to present a sketch of the most important of these shifts in thought, always keeping in mind that because of the fact that we find ourselves in media res, these observations can be little more than fragmentary perceptions of a reality that has itself not yet been finalised.
Management Development seems to lend itself to interminable controversy, is it manager or management development? How does it differ from organisation development? What is the…
Abstract
Management Development seems to lend itself to interminable controversy, is it manager or management development? How does it differ from organisation development? What is the difference between training and development? While these questions excite discussion among trainers and personnel specialists, the results of the arguments do little to help managers understand what management development is supposed to achieve.
Writing is one of the key features of the life and work of the symbolic interactionist. The foundation of good writing is the establishment of the self and identity of the…
Abstract
Writing is one of the key features of the life and work of the symbolic interactionist. The foundation of good writing is the establishment of the self and identity of the interactionist qua writer. The best writers are those who write constantly – not necessarily in formal text form but also in term of journals, note-taking, and so forth. Writing does not retrieve our ideas from our minds and memories; it creates them as retrievable gems of our work. My argument is that, as symbolic interactionists, we have the opportunity, if not responsibility, to position the drama of everyday life in our writing because our respondents experience their everyday lives dramatically.
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Peter Bates, Sam Smith and Robert Nisbet
Local policies often prohibit care staff from online contact with the people they support. The purpose of this paper is to review the reasons put forward for this ban and seek…
Abstract
Purpose
Local policies often prohibit care staff from online contact with the people they support. The purpose of this paper is to review the reasons put forward for this ban and seek explanations.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines relevant literature on the use of social networking by disabled and nondisabled people. This paper offers a critique of common policies and justifications and poses a challenge to those who impose such regulations.
Findings
The paper finds no support for current policies.
Research limitations/implications
The authors found only a limited amount of research in this area, and research findings were not commonly utilised by policy makers.
Practical implications
Policy makers and regulators need to take a more rigorous and person-centred approach to rule making in respect of social media.
Social implications
A widespread ban on the use of social media in communications between staff and the people they support is exposed as paternalistic and exacerbating infantilisation and exclusion rather than seeing disabled people as digital citizens. Regulators and those with responsibilities for safeguarding need to adopt a more empowering and person-centred approach.
Originality/value
This paper will only make a difference if regulators and those with responsibilities for safeguarding adopt a more empowering and person-centred approach rather than the fear-based blanket prohibitions that have applied to date.
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Carroll L. Estes and Linda A. Bergthold
In the mid 1980s, amidst a massive restructuring of U.S. capital and a retrenchment of the welfare state, little attention has been paid to the ill‐defined “nonprofit” or…
Abstract
In the mid 1980s, amidst a massive restructuring of U.S. capital and a retrenchment of the welfare state, little attention has been paid to the ill‐defined “nonprofit” or “voluntary” service sector in the American economy. The Filer Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs characterised it in 1975 in the following way:
To those concerned with challenges and challengers to conventional wisdom, the entirely credible perception of ours as a planet in the midst of a deep environmental crisis offers…
Abstract
To those concerned with challenges and challengers to conventional wisdom, the entirely credible perception of ours as a planet in the midst of a deep environmental crisis offers fruitful grounds for analysis. Crises stimulate those who have, in the existence of the crisis, firm proof that the wisdom which girds the status quo is deficient and/or those who apply it are. This is particularly true when the crisis is perceived to be grave and dread‐laden. Skin cancer due to the depletion of the ozone layer is on the increase. Large, at times devastating, climate changes are loose upon the planet. Whether given quasi‐ scientific names like the “greenhouse effect” or lumped together in a melange of “acid rain”, “toxic waste” and “industrial cancers”, the result is the same. Rational citizens of the everyday‐person‐on‐the‐street sort feel threatened. The threat is given shape and substance by the mass media. The environmental crisis is a credible crisis. One need not list radical political activism as one's vocation to list the environmental crisis as one of one's fears as we enter the 1990's.
World War I is the pivot of twentieth century American history because it transformed the United States from a regional into a global power. As the fiftieth anniversary of World…
Abstract
World War I is the pivot of twentieth century American history because it transformed the United States from a regional into a global power. As the fiftieth anniversary of World War II winds down, we remind ourselves of the first “Great War” and its continuing importance to American self‐conception and memory.
It is eminently fitting that the Greeks who gave us their word for “speaking fair” should also have supplied us with the ultimate exemplification of its use. They were wont to…
Abstract
It is eminently fitting that the Greeks who gave us their word for “speaking fair” should also have supplied us with the ultimate exemplification of its use. They were wont to refer to the Furies, a group of avenging goddesses, as the Eumenides or “The Fair Ones.” Since the Furies were imagined as having a batlike shape which was adorned with a profusion of snakish hair, they were not fair at all, but rather terrifying, intimidating in the highest degree. To euphemize a phenomenon is to call it something other than what it most particularly is, anything at all provided the new designation is gentler, milder, less offensive, less threatening. It is even possible, as in the case of the Furies renamed Fair Ones, to effect a 180‐degree reversal of meaning.
THE catalogue, as a library appliance of importance, has had more attention devoted to it than, perhaps, any other method or factor of librarianship. Its construction, materials…
Abstract
THE catalogue, as a library appliance of importance, has had more attention devoted to it than, perhaps, any other method or factor of librarianship. Its construction, materials, rules for compilation and other aspects have all been considered at great length, and in every conceivable manner, so that little remains for exposition save some points in the policy of the catalogue, and its effects on progress and methods. In the early days of the municipal library movement, when methods were somewhat crude, and hedged round with restrictions of many kinds, the catalogue, even in the primitive form it then assumed, was the only key to the book‐wealth of a library, and as such its value was duly recognized. As time went on, and the vogue of the printed catalogue was consolidated, its importance as an appliance became more and more established, and when the first Newcastle catalogue appeared and received such an unusual amount of journalistic notice, the idea of the printed catalogue as the indispensable library tool was enormously enhanced from that time till quite recently. One undoubted result of this devotion to the catalogue has been to stereotype methods to a great extent, leading in the end to stagnation, and there are places even now where every department of the library is made to revolve round the catalogue. Whether it is altogether wise to subordinate everything in library work to the cult of the catalogue has been questioned by several librarians during the past few years, and it is because there is so much to be said against this policy that the following reflections are submitted.