Changes in staff confidence and attributions for challenging behaviour after training in positive behavioural support,within a forensic mental health setting: a replication study with follow-up

Positive behavioural support (PBS) is a proactive approach to managing challenging behaviour. Staff in a forensic mental health service were provided training in PBS. The study aimed to assess the effectiveness of training by measuring changes to staff confidence and attributions for challenging behaviour before training, post training and at six-month follow-up. Qualified and unqualified staff were compared, as were male and female staff. Confidence was measured using an adapted version of the Confidence in Coping with Patient Aggression Instrument. The Challenging Behaviour Attributions Scale and the Causal Dimension Scale II assessed staff attributions. Staff confidence levels in working with challenging behaviour increased following PBS training, and this increase was maintained at six-month follow-up, for unqualified, qualified, male and female staff. Changes in attributions for challenging behaviour were observed post training; however changes were not maintained at follow-up. Limitations and clinical implications were outlined.     

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid-1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working-class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.     

Introduction: Rethinking Agrarian Labor in the US South

This special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies seeks to broaden discussion of the history of rural labor in the post-Civil War US South beyond the confines of the cotton plantation, studies of sharecropping, and black-white race relations. This introduction summarizes the contributions to the special issue, highlighting their most significant points. Collectively, five interrelated issues emerge from the essays: the role of the state in mediating agrarian labor relations, the importance of paramilitary or vigilante violence in the reassertion of the social power wielded over rural laborers, the significance of access to land and other resources of rural self-sufficiency, the ongoing struggle over labor mobility, and the recomposition of agrarian households as units of production.     

Radical Transactionalism: Legal Consciousness,Diverse Economies,and the Sharing Economy

This article proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community‐level action for sustainability, focusing on its troubled relationship to the sharing economy. Through a conversation between scholarship on legal consciousness and diverse economies, it shows how struggles over transactional legality are a neglected site of activism for sustainability. Recognizing the diversity of economic life and forms of law illuminates what we call ‘radical transactionalism': the creative redeployment of legal techniques and practices relating to risk management, organizational form, and the allocation of contractual and property rights in order to further the purpose of internalizing social and ecological values into the heart of economic exchange. By viewing sharing‐economy initiatives ‘beyond Airbnb and Uber’ as sites of radical transactionalism, legal building blocks of property and capital can be reimagined and reconfigured, helping to construct a shared infrastructure for the exercise of collective agency in response to disadvantage sustained by law.