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A postal survey and semi‐structured interviews were under taken with mental health day centre staff in two regions of England, investigating whether criticisms levelled at buildings‐based day services are justifiable. The majority of respondents agreed with recommendations outlined in From Segregation to Inclusion (National Institute for Mental Health in England/Care Services Improvement Par tnership, 2006), believing that mental health services should ideally be based in community locations. Respondents believed that this would help to challenge stigma, facilitate community integration, and provide service users with more oppor tunities. However, concerns were expressed as to the availability of mainstream facilities and whether this approach would be suitable for all service users. Suggestions on how day services could be improved included having access to reliable sources of funding, relaxing access criteria, and having greater service user involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of day labor worker centers in improving wages and working conditions of migrant casual workers in the USA.

The paper reports the results of a survey of worker center executive directors and senior staff, with particular attention to the ways in which centers maintain wage rates, allocate jobs, and redress grievances.

Day labor worker centers are now an important presence in construction industry casual labor markets, performing HRM functions that benefit employers and workers.

The research was undertaken during a time when the US construction industry was enjoying an expansion. It is unclear what a macroeconomic downturn might mean for the effectiveness of worker centers to maintain labor standards.

Conditions of instability and the violation of basic labor standards that occur in casual labor markets in the USA exist in other countries as well. Day labor worker centers might be a model intervention that could apply in other contexts.

The paper presents results from the first national survey of day labor worker centers. It highlights the key activities of these emerging labor market institutions.

This chapter compares and contrasts organizing and advocacy among US domestic workers and day laborers. These two occupations share many features: both are ill-suited to conventional unionism; immigrants, many of them unauthorized, have long dominated the workforce in both; both are entry-level jobs at the bottom of the labor market (although both are also internally stratified); and both have been the focus of advocacy and organizing at both the local and national level in recent decades. Yet, there are also significant contrasts between the two. First and foremost, women are the vast majority of domestic workers while men predominate among day laborers. Another striking difference is that while domestic labor is hidden from public view inside private households, day laborers are regularly on display on street corners and other public spaces. This chapter explores the effects of such similarities and differences on the collective action repertoires of day laborers and domestic workers. In both cases, many workers have individualistic, entrepreneurial ambitions, a formidable organizing challenge; yet, orientation does not necessarily impede and sometimes even facilitates collective action. Day laborers’ demands are largely economic, and these (predominantly male) workers often hope to return to their countries of origin; domestic workers (overwhelmingly female) are more interested in improved opportunities within the US. Although women are overrepresented in the leadership of both domestic workers’ and day laborers’ organizations, male day laborers and female domestic workers have distinct experiences and aspirations, and put forward different types of demands, generating gendered collective action repertoires.

The purpose of this paper is to compare data from national social care statistics on day services and home care for people with learning disabilities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

National social care statistics (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) reporting the number of adults with learning disabilities accessing day services and home care were reviewed, with data extracted on trends over time and rate of service use.

Regarding day services, despite some variations in definitions, the number of adults with learning disabilities in England, Scotland and Wales (but not Northern Ireland) using building-based day services decreased over time. Data from Scotland also indicate that adults with learning disabilities are spending less time in building-based day services, with alternative day opportunities not wholly compensating for the reduction in building-based day services. Regarding home care, there are broadly similar rates of usage across the four parts of the UK, with the number of adults with learning disabilities using home care now staying static or decreasing.

Similar policy ambitions across the four parts of the UK have resulted (with the exception of Northern Ireland) in similar trends in access to day services and home care.

This paper is a first attempt to compare national social care statistics concerning day services and home care for adults with learning disabilities across the UK. With increasing divergence of health and social service systems, further comparative analyses of services for people with learning disabilities are needed.

The purpose of this paper is to help senior center managers and service researchers understand why some patrons experience health benefits, primarily fatigue relief, through senior center day services participation.

The authors conduct two separate studies at a senior center. The first study represents a grounded theory that offers an original, basic social process regarding mental restoration in senior centers. The second study draws on Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and employs survey methodology.

Senior center patrons who perceive a center's restorative stimuli experience health benefits such as relief from four types of fatigue, enhanced quality of life, and improved physical and mental well-being.

The paper shows that senior centers may be relatively inexpensive, non-medical services that can help patrons relieve fatigue symptoms, which are often treated with pharmaceutical medication and medical visits. A limitation is the small sample size, which restricts generalizability.

The results show that senior center managers may promote patron health by fostering service designs and programs that allow members to temporarily escape from everyday life and interact in an ever-changing environment that fosters a sense of belonging.

Senior center day services help patrons relieve fatigue, and its symptoms, in an affordable, non-medical, and non-pharmaceutical manner.

The paper clarifies the role of senior centers in patrons’ lives by drawing on ART. Senior centers that can offer patrons restorative environments are likely to play a significant role in patrons’ physical, social, and mental well-being.

Community policing has been around for at least two decades now and it is safe to say that it has become, in large part, more about managing disruptive subjects and virtuous citizens than preventing crime or disorder (Crank, 1994; DeLeon-Granados, 1999; Yngvesson, 1993). While the rhetoric of community may be succeeding where the policing policy is failing, the experience has certainly contributed to the growth of homologous efforts that include community prosecution and community correction. We see a criminal justice system pro-actively seeking to blur the boundaries between its institutions and the communities they work within and, all too often, without. In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in justice approaches that turn their attention toward the community. There are literally hundreds of examples of this trend, from offender-victim reconciliation projects in Vermont and Minneapolis to ‘beat probation’ in Madison, Wisconsin; from neighborhood-based prosecution centers in Portland, Oregon, and New York City, to community probation in Massachusetts. Of course, the most well-known version of community justice is community policing, but localized projects involving all components of the justice system have been widely promoted (Clear & Karp, 1998, p. 3).Like community policing and community prosecution, community correction programs generally focus on partnering with service providers and community groups in order to more finely calibrate their service delivery. For community corrections the recent focus has been on delivering re-entry programs and expanding the availability of intermediate sanctioning options. The sheriff (above) focuses on re-entry, to link jails and communities in two ways: extending the correctional continuum into power-poor communities and increasing political support for expanding the criminal justice system in more affluent communities. Even as fiscal stress translates into budget cuts in education, housing, drug treatment, and other services, the reach of the criminal justice system expands outside the fences as new community-based partnerships and inside the fences as an increasingly program-rich environment. These partnerships are, not surprisingly as we shall see, dominated by criminal justice professionals and dependent on coercive control techniques. Further, their budgets are growing with funds in previous eras earmarked for providing many of the same services in a social welfare, rather, than social control, service delivery context. While these budgetary trends map a macro political trend from an old democratic New Deal toward a new republican new deal network of patronage relationships (see Lyons, forthcoming 2004), this paper examines the micro politics of community corrections developing within an increasingly punitive American political-culture.

The current business world is very different to that in which the original assessment centres were designed 50 years ago. The traditional centre still serves well for selection at lower organisational levels, but nowadays the need is for accurate diagnosis of development needs that include the delegate in the assessing process. Time must also be allocated for delegates and assessors to agree on evaluation of performance and sketch out a development plan. Hoechst (UK), seeking to develop managerial staff to director level, decided to adopt this Development Centre method. The Development Centre is described, and its impact assessed by Hoechst's divisional executive director.

The concept of social inclusion features prominently in current policy and practice developments in mental health services. The Social Exclusion Unit (2006) highlighted the need for mental health day services to promote inclusion and participation, by integrating with the wider community, and by supporting and encouraging users to access opportunities in the local community. The Leeds i3 (inspire, improve, include) project aimed to modernise local mental health day services accordingly. The aim of our study was to develop and validate a measure of social inclusion to be used in mental health day services in Leeds. The underlying assumption was that recent changes in mental health day service provision would substantially improve social inclusion of the service users.The social inclusion questionnaire was developed through extensive iterative consultation with mental health service users and staff, and its reliability was proven using test‐retest statistics. It was shown to be a simple, inexpensive, user‐friendly and repeatable measure that could be used routinely by mental health day services. Factor analysis of the questionnaire showed that social inclusion had seven important components. We suggest that these components form a useful basis for discussion with service users, as well as for planning and evaluating services.

Activity planning was introduced in Somerset in 2004, to support modernising day services. We called it My Day. It is a structure for care staff to ensure they support people with learning disabilities to engage in everyday activities both at home and in the wider community, and a way to arrange individualised daily household tasks, personal self‐care, hobbies, social arrangements and other activities with people with learning disabilities. A recording process is integral to My Day to enable statistical returns to be produced that inform service delivery at the point of delivery. Its main purpose is to ensure that people with learning disabilities remain at the centre of daily activity planning and that their wishes and aspirations are recognised. My Day is one of the ways in which outcomes can be measured for people with learning disabilities in Somerset.