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This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid organization–i.e. a public child protection agency at the intersection between the market and the public sector.

The paper is based on a one-year ethnography of how employees achieve to qualify their work as “good work” in situations with several and sometimes conflicting ideals of what “good work” is. Fieldwork material was collected by following casework activities across organizational boundaries. By combining accounting literature on hybridization with literature on practices of valuation, the paper develops a novel theoretical framework which allows for analyses of the various practices of valuation, when and where they clash and how they persist over time in everyday work.

Throughout the study, four distinct registers of valuation were identified: feeling, theorizing, formalizing and costing. To denote the meticulous efforts of pursuing good work in all four registers of valuation, the authors propose the notion of sequencing. Sequencing is an ongoing process of moving conflicting registers away from each other and bringing them back together again. Correspondingly, at the operational level of a hybrid organization, temporary compartmentalization is a means of avoiding clashes, and in doing so, making it possible for different and sometimes conflicting ways of achieving good results to continuously hybridize and persist together.

The single-case approach allows for analytical depth, but limits the findings to theoretical, rather than empirical, generalizability. The framework the authors propose, however, is well-suited for mobilization and potential elaboration in further empirical contexts.

The paper provides a novel theoretical framework as well as rich empirical material from the highly political field of child protection work, which has seldomly been studied within accounting research.

Empowerment is a key value when working with clients subject to racist incidents in housing services. Casework practice is the process whereby, for example, housing officers, anti‐social behaviour officers and neighbourhood wardens work with a tenant who has reported a racist incident to help resolve the complaint. This article focuses on the need for racist/hate incident caseworkers to be aware of the value of empowerment, and to be able to offer an empowering service when working directly with clients. The article argues that victims of racist incidents value a dedicated and non‐judgemental casework service that offers them some pathway to help, assistance and a secure sense of self and place. The caseworker is able to facilitate all this by the service they offer to their clients by recognising and responding to the values of empowerment, advocacy and a victim‐centred service.

Complex conflicts in elder abuse, its causes, typology, protection and prevention, suggest that co‐operation by multi‐disciplinary social services should be a major consideration in policy decision‐making, planned intervention and support. Casework of the Elder Mediation Project (EMP for empowerment), and related agencies, provides some practical evidence for this view. There are shared casework values and similar as well as different skills. However, when service user interests are paramount, the professional concerns of service providers for defined roles and boundaries raise ethical issues. Are there conflicts between old people's needs for trusting, confidential relationships with one worker, and case co‐ordinators' promotion of varied specialist input? Could approaching elder abuse through a multi‐skilled key worker, as well as by multi‐disciplinary social service workers, offer complementary and co‐operative interventions? Brief anonymised case notes suggest that practitioners may face professional conflicts about social intervention as casework diversifies and service user involvement in decision‐making increases, but some guidelines to good practice are offered.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

The purpose of this discussion paper is to describe the transition over the past five years of a highly specialist group treatment programme to a tiered public health delivery model within the offender personality disorder (OPD) pathway. The focus of this journey of transformation has been the Challenge programme, currently the only OPD specialist service for men with sexual convictions in the community in England and Wales, and now a pan-London service.

More than 600 high-risk men with sexual convictions are screened into the OPD pathway and reside currently in the community across London. The programme leads have developed a triage model – based on the wider OPD model – that applies the principles of the least intervention necessary and the most effective use of limited resources.

Preliminary informal feedback was sought on the new consultation approach and innovative joint casework delivery models. The model of care is discussed in relation to the preliminary feedback, which was encouraging in terms of satisfaction with the consultation service and in terms of the people on probation who found that participating in the joint casework enhanced their working relationship with offender managers. The consistent use of a single model of care and a careful triage approach across the city to working with this group of individuals is still in development. Early feedback suggests that the service has to potential to be effective, but establishing this requires formal evaluation.

Practice implications include the need to address the lack of confidence that many practitioners report when working with people with sexual convictions. Virtually delivered group consultation may enhance the development of skills as it may providing a flexible toolkit for delivery.

This practice paper describes the only specialist community service for men with high-risk, high-harm sexual convictions and personality difficulties in the UK.

This paper argues for a case management rationale in adult protection management and practice, drawing insights from a series of linked training initiatives and an evaluation of the role of the specialist adult protection co‐ordinator. An explicit case managed approach contrasts with much current practice for adult protection, where responsibilities often vary widely within, between and across agencies and professional and worker roles.

There is agreement in the literature that offenders often acquire guns through unregulated private encounters with friends, family members and petty criminals. Although anecdotes suggest that licensed gun dealers also play a role, most studies have ignored or discounted the possibility that dishonest retailers are a significant source of supply. This effort explores gun markets in Los Angeles by examining the redistributive history of firearms seized by police and by reviewing Federal gun trafficking investigations. One finding, that corrupt licensed dealers diverted sizeable quantities of guns to end users and to unlicensed street vendors, suggests that retail sources may serve as a far more important source of firearms for criminals than is commonly supposed.

MBIT is a manualised mentalization-based approach to working with hard to reach young people at risk of a wide range of life adversities including severe mental illness, substance misuse, family breakdown, school exclusion, offending and homelessness. The on-line manual (www.tiddlymanuals.com) describes how Adolescent Mentalization-Based Integrative Therapy (AMBIT) is a systemic intervention requiring attention to four different domains of intervention simultaneously; much emphasis is placed on the support systems for workers to maintain this balance in what are often chaotic working conditions. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how these four main components of the AMBIT approach link together in actual clinical practice.

The authors illustrate the core techniques of the AMBIT approach, namely, “working with your client”, “working with your team”, “ working with your network” and “learning as a team” with a series of case vignettes, demonstrating the inter-relationship of these components rather than seeing them as separate strands.

A range of mentalization-based techniques such as “thinking together”, mentalized formulation, “disintegration grids” and web-based manualising are described and illustrated in relation to a series of case vignettes in order to address barriers to effective practice. The vignettes emphasise how these components must be linked together and held in balance, and how easily they become disconnected in working with young people’s ambivalent or even hostile relationships to help.

First, developing a shared, mentalized formulation of a young person’s difficulties is an important aspect of working with highly troubled young people. Second, mentalizing is a relational process and is easily disrupted, for both workers and young people, by raised anxiety and affect, a common feature of working with this client group. AMBIT provides specific methods, for example, “thinking together” for supporting the mentalizing of individual workers in their team in an explicit way. Third, workers from different agencies may often find it difficult to make sense of each other’s behaviour and decision making. AMBIT proposes the use of a mentalizing approach to this difficulty using a technique called a disintegration grid. Finally, AMBIT proposes a new practitioner focused approach to manualising as a method by which a team can become more explicit about its methods of working in order to support systematic practice and evaluate outcomes.

The innovative AMBIT approach proposes that clinicians need to attend to team and network relationships at least as much as their relationship with the client, in addition to adopting a stance of learning as a team from their casework. A high level of clinical skill is needed to support a team to achieve this balanced approach to casework. This work is of interest to all multi-disciplinary teams working with hard to reach young people.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel online video-based approach to supervision for statutory caseworkers. Caseworkers recorded a video of their meetings with their clients and sent the video to their supervisor. The supervisor selected clips in the video. They held an online meeting where they reviewed the clips, and the supervisor gave feedback and they reflected together. The caseworker then used what they had learnt in their future practice. The caseworker then recorded a new meeting, and the supervision cycle restarted.

In total, 11 statutory caseworkers from three municipalities in the Copenhagen area participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews. The interviews focused on the professional learning and challenges caseworkers faced in relation to participating in the supervision process.

The caseworkers reported that they used the method to assess their own practice in a more realistic way as the use of video gave a more accurate image than merely recalling what had occurred. They reflected about and developed their relationship with clients, their conversational style and use of communication techniques, skills in relation to running meetings, and skills in relation to eliciting the young person’s perspective. The caseworkers were anxious when they received their first feedback from supervisors, but this diminished. The focus on supporting clients in their personal development challenged caseworkers who identified as having an administrative rather than interventional role. Some found the online meeting technology difficult to master.

This study presents and explores the use of a novel approach to statutory casework supervision.