Enhancing Employees’ Work Performance through Organizational Justice in the Context of Financial Crisis. A Study of the Greek Public Sector

In a period of economic crisis, the increasing pressure of sparse financial resources and the structural reforms in labor law are factors pushing and forcing managers of both public and private organizations to do more with less. The current study explores how employees’ performance in the public sector is affected by perceptions of organizational justice in terms of resource allocation (e.g., benefits and compensation). The responses received from a sample of 490 employees working for public organizations in Greece indicated that work performance is significantly and positively related not only to employees’ satisfaction with pay, but also to employees’ perceptions of distributive and procedural justice.     

Motivational Interviewing as Governmentality: Shaping Victims of Men’s Violence into Responsible Subjects?

Motivational interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based counselling method that has spread rapidly in Sweden during the last two decades. It is a technique designed to empower individuals to change an unwanted life situation. Through interviews with a strategic sample of persons engaged in work with men’s violence against women, this article critically examines the use of MI in this context. By analysing the interviews from a governmentality perspective, it is suggested that MI is a technique to produce a knowledgeable, strong, and self-animated feminine subject, capable of making the “right” choices and subsequently “choosing” to avoid violence. Although this may be beneficial to some, the analysis suggests that this places primary responsibility on the woman subjected to violence for her predicament and future. This may in turn increase the risk of self-blame for those who cannot follow through with their commitment, and obscure and renounce the role and responsibility of both the counsellor and the rationalized neoliberal welfare state. In addition, the one-sided focus on the individual largely ignores the surrounding context, which may obscure men’s responsibility for violence. This may ultimately undermine the collective formation of a political subject from women’s shared experience of violence.     

建国前后陈云论工人阶级和工会工作及意义

建国前后（1948-1953 年）,陈云担任中华全国总工会主席,他在六次劳大报告中提出解放区工 会工作任务,标志着工人阶级夺取政权后工会工作方针的根本转变。之后,他将工会工作置于国家建设的大局中, 对工人阶级和工会工作作出了一系列论述,如坚持全心全意依靠工人阶级的指导方针,关心工人的切身利益, 重视发挥工会组织的作用等,这些思想和主张丰富了建国初期的工运方针,推动了建国前后工人运动的发展和 工会工作,为新中国工运思想的形成和发展奠定了理论基础,在今天仍然有重要的借鉴和指导作用。     

Child Workers in India: Context and Complexities

This paper portrays the nature of child workers in India and seeks to understand its many complexities. It looks at the definition of child labour, the extent of its prevalence, the reasons why children work, and the occupations they are engaged in. It outlines India’s position on international obligations, its expanding domestic laws, and the tardy implementation of these laws. It examines some of the inherent cultural constraints and the role of values and beliefs in perpetuating child labour. It analyses the relationship between education and child workers, and a possible solution in the form of compulsory education. The paper emphasises that child workers in India are from the marginalized sections and do not work out of choice. It stresses that this phenomenon is, above all, a problem for the children. The paper concludes by advocating the need to discard attitudes that are discriminatory or rationalise abuse, and the need to adopt a rights-based, child-centred approach to counter the increasing number of child workers.

Chapter 6: Essential Orientations and Practices

SUMMARY

In civic youth wouth work program staff focus on larger outcomes and do not often attend to the importance of seemingly mundane and simple tasks. Young people talk about how these simple tasks have powerful meaning for them and their work even as adult volunteers talked about the challenges of working democratically with young people. To integrate these perspectives there are some practices that describe how this work is done: co-creation, contributory, interrogatory, contextual, caring-for-the-world, processual, open, invitational, and a commitment to more than the self.     

Chapter 8: The “Citizen” in Youth Civic Engagement

SUMMARY

The concept of citizenship is a central, necessary, and defining feature of youth civic engagement. Any effort to educate young people for citizenship entails an implicit idea of what a “good citizen” is. There are a number of different and sometimes competing versions of what is a “good citizen.” This chapter reviews “standard” accounts of citizenship in political theory and offers lived citizen as a critical expansion and bridging dimension to current discourses of citizenship. We develop this idea through our readings of the three initiatives in conversation with the writing of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey. Our reading of Arendt and Dewey provides a grounded, embodied, and fluid understanding of the relationship between doing citizen activities (PA, YIG, YSC), becoming citizen (learning through interaction), and being citizen.     

Chapter 11. The Economics of Group Care Practice

Abstract

For the past two decades, economic influences have significantly impacted the provision of health and welfare services for children, young people and their families in communities around the world. The dynamic of cost has reshaped both the nature and provision of group care services, promoting de-institutionalization and transforming the nature of caring services offered in local communities. In a reappraisal of themes identified in his seminal contribution more than two decades ago, this leading authority looks back at key themes impacting on the economics of social care that shape group care services for the new millennium.     

Chapter 7. “Learn What You Like and Like What You Learn”

Abstract

Mark Twain once famously quipped, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.” Paul Simon, the American folk singer, begins one of his songs “When I think back on all the crap I learned at high school, it's a wonder I can hardly think at all.” These men could just have easily been discussing schooling in Ireland, for this is the way many Limerick children and youth felt about formal school life prior to their involvement with St. Augustine's Youth Encounter Project. But it is prior to their involvement.

This chapter provides a demographic profile of the pupils of that project and explores aspects of the day-to-day life of the project as a child and youth care intervention by examining some of the influences of risk replacement or resiliency projects that have influenced provision of services. This Limerick YEP attempts to alter the approach from one that is risk, deficit, and psychopathology-oriented to one that is protection, strength, and asset focussed. A question posed is, “Has the early intervention enrichment programme assisted the pupils to reintegrate successfully within the community?” By reintegrate I mean the ability to attend a regular school, hold a job, live again with their family and such things. This chapter also explores the establishment of the Youth Encounter Projects in Ireland in the context of an important but largely overlooked study completed by Egan and Hegarty over two decades ago (1984). No official review has been published since.     

Chapter 11: Therapeutic Foster Parent:

Training can help foster parents manage reactions to the foster child, avoid stress and burnout, and cope with the difficult times so that placement is sustained. Training is necessary so foster parents will not take the child's aggressive behavior personally, will avoid becoming embroiled in power struggles, and will be less likely to become hurt or embarrassed by the child's behavior. Training will involve individual consultation by the social worker as well as participation in a foster parent group. Staff will assistn foster parents to develop behavioral management and communication skills as well as their own coping and self-control skills. Foster parents are given permission to take care of their own needs, are assisted in developing stress management skills, learn how to increase their own self-esteem, and learn to use cognitive approaches to handle their own emotions. Foster parents develop an understanding that they cannot change the child's behavior but can only change the way which they respond to the child, which may provide the child opportunities to change his or her own behavior.     

Methodology

Abstract

Any discussions about specialized helping environments for children or young people would be incomplete without reference to the relationships found between practices in group care centers and schools. This involves thinking of a child's total environment as a curriculum for teaching competencies and learning outcomes important to daily living. The task involves making a conscious effort to deal with a child's functioning in the present, thereby avoiding diagnostic conclusions that emphasize difficulties in one area of their life as the cause of learning problems.