The 'Change for Children' Programme in England: Towards the 'Preventive-Surveillance State'

Following the Children Act 2004 and the launch of the 'Every Child Matters: Change for Children' programme, England has embarked on the most ambitious changes in children's services for over a generation. While the government presented the changes as a response to the Laming Report into the death of Victoria Climbié, they are much more than this. They build on a number of ideas and policies that had been developed over a number of years, which emphasize the importance of intervening in children's lives at an early stage in order to prevent problems in later life. This paper provides a critical analysis of the assumptions that underpin the changes and argues that the relationships between parents, children, professionals, and the state, and their respective responsibilities, are being reconfigured as a result, and that the priority given to the accumulation, monitoring, and exchange of electronic information has taken on a central significance. What we are witnessing is the emergence of the 'preventive-surveillance' state, where the role of the state is becoming broader, more interventive, and regulatory at the same time.     

The use of discretion in prison disciplinary committees

Prison disciplinary committees are faced with the formal role responsibility of adjudicating disciplinary cases in an equitable manner and the informal role responsibility of supporting the authority of the staff members who file charges of rule violations by inmates. Analysis of 630 disciplinary cases reveal that dispositional decisions vary according to the number of charged rule violations and that the pattern of the dispositional decisions can be explained by role conflict but not by the thesis that the cases vary in terms of the adequacy of the evidence supporting blameworthiness.     

Epistemic stance in orchestral interaction

An interactional participant's epistemic status relies on their access to “epistemic domains” which exist beyond the unfolding interaction in which they are expressed. Heritage argues that comparative access and epistemic status can be described along an “epistemic gradient” and that it is the expression of this status which, in the interaction, exists as the taking, aligning to, and challenging of epistemic stance. This paper describes some of the resources musicians use in interaction to encode the epistemic domains from which knowledge comes during orchestral rehearsal. As “sound-hearing” and “instrument-playing” are central to the work of musicians, the discussion will focus on how perceptions of auditory and corporeal experience are deployed as part of musicians' epistemic stance taking. I will argue that these epistemic stances, as expressions of graded and differential access to epistemic domains, form part of the construction of authority in orchestral rehearsal.