Re-examining Social Work Roles and Tasks with Foster Care

In order to promote developmental outcomes with children and young people and to nurture their positive health and well-being in foster care, social workers and case managers are required to direct professional attention toward both the child or young person and her/his daily living environment(s)—at home, at school, and in the local neighborhoods in which they live. When viewed from an ecological perspective, foster care environments are represented conceptually as a nested cluster of settings ranging from immediate life spaces and networks of relationships in a foster home, at school, and in a neighborhood, to organizational contexts holding a statutory duty of care for children and young people assigned looked after status, along with national policies and statutes which frame foster-care environments. This article explores how social-work roles and tasks with children and young people in foster care change as Social Workers transition from case management roles within state, provincial, or local authority departments to become Supervising Social Workers, or Team Managers of Foster Carers, or Directors of foster care services.     

Use of Self in the Context of Youth Work

Used in the education of counselors, nurses, occupational therapists and social workers, “use of self” is a way of understanding how practitioners bring about human change. In this article, the author discusses how use of self can be applied to youth work and is related to “developmentally responsive practice” thereby providing a deep theoretical construct for understanding youth work as relational. The author concludes by presenting the barriers to the use of self paradigm in the current climate of assessment and accountability, designed to measure static inputs and outputs rather than dynamic systems or ecologies and presents a challenge to the field for designing methodologies that are equally dynamic, responsive and relational.     

Why University Education Matters: Youth Work and the Australian Experience

In many countries youth work education in the university confronts a precarious future. Paradoxically, this takes place as the labor market is unable to meet demands for qualified practitioners. This article makes a case for further investment in university-based youth work education. While presenting labor demand and supply arguments, we also suggest that a good university education is important for producing graduates capable of becoming experts and good practitioners in the Aristotelian sense of the word. This entails the provision of learning opportunities to attain specialist knowledge, technical expertise and ethical capacities of the kind that distinguish youth work practice from other approaches to work with young people. Such an education also promotes the prospect that practitioners are able to develop a professional habitus that advances youth work as a discrete field of professional practice. While the material used in this article is Australian, we suggest there are sufficient commonalities between the Australian experience and many other countries for the arguments, findings and recommendations made here to have more general applicability.     

Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework

ABSTRACT

This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.     

Why Do Social Work Practice Research?

Social work practice research focuses on researching all kinds of social work practice, including social work practice teaching, practitioner self-inquiry, and also social work services. In this article, first the dilemma of social work research in China will be analyzed; then the nature and position of social work research will be clarified; finally the procedure of practice research will be introduced. In short, the author intends to argue that as social work is a practice-oriented discipline, the creation of social work knowledge is for achieving social work professional goal and its research is practical and practice-oriented.     

Sensory speculations:Visual discourse and the vision of visuality

It is now commonplace within the discipline of art history and visual culture to speak to theories of vision and visuality. Recent questions concerning the subject of vision, sexed positionalities and discourses of viewing are indebted to theories of visuality, which now occupy a privileged place within the study of visual culture. Theories of visuality have revealed both the terms of cultural visibilities and significantly the how of what we see. And yet despite this engagement of the opacity and duplicity of the visual, recent work into visuality has been plagued by a re‐occurring myopia regarding the corporeal This oversight within the visibilites of visual discourse is the unchallenged idea of a ‘human vision’ within the social constructivist project. In this article I assess how this universal operates as the matter for theories of visuality and of the ramifications of this for the project of the critique of vision.     

社会计量在小组工作教学中的应用

小组工作教学与传统的教学方式不同。社会计量是检测团体动力的方法,在小组工作教学中有多种运用方式。在小组工作教学中,适当运用社会计量,既能促进班级同学的人际互动,又能让学生在体验中掌握专业方法。     

教育训练视角下民警群众工作能力建设

从党中央到各行业、从公安实战部门到公安教育训练机构,都非常重视公安民警群众工作能力建设,通过对民警群众工作现状进行总结与述评,并对基层调研发现的问题进行了汇总与分析,从教育训练的视角对民警群众工作能力建设提出了若干对策与建议。     

企业知识员工激励机制研究

企业知识员工激励是一个伴随知识经济时代而产生的新课题,对知识型员工进行激励,既要结合知识员工自身的个体特点,也需要综合考虑知识员工群体的总体特点,还要考虑知识员工的工作性质。企业必须构建灵活的福利和薪酬激励体系,满足不同类型知识员工的需求;必须营造宽松的文化氛围,提供知识员工自主的工作环境;必须对知识员工进行系统培训,为知识员工职业生涯提供发展空间。     

工会工作领域“二八”现象值得关注

当今工会工作领域,存在一种＂二八＂现象：省级工会干部培训,竞争型企业的工会干部往往不到两成,八成多都来自机关、事业单位、垄断企业和各级总工会;各项主题活动,似乎也都为＂非典型性工会＂所设计,每年评选表彰,上榜者八成以上为＂非典型性工会＂。这种现象需要引起我们应有的重视,应采取切实有效措施来加以解决。