Search results

It is estimated that approximately 10% of children and young people in Scotland have mental health problems (Scottish Government, 2008), resulting in a rapidly increasing need for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Primary mental health workers (PMHW) have been identified as one of the key professional groups within a multidisciplinary CAMHS team to progress the agenda of early intervention and identification of mental health problems among children and young people. One discrete aspect of the PMHW role is the facilitation and delivery of consultation services to a wide range of agencies. Consultation, in this context, is understood as a community activity for disseminating knowledge, creating understanding and facilitating non‐CAMH professionals to support children and young people with psychological difficulties (Scottish Executive, 2005). This paper discusses a smallscale study that aims to deconstruct the concept of consultation and explore the professional expertise and service requirements necessary for effective delivery. It concludes that complex and multifaceted skills are required if a consultation is to be meaningful and effective. Consequently, and despite competing discourse, there remains a strong debate for retaining the role of the PMHW, specifically for the delivery of early intervention and health promotion activities, such as consultation. The study took place in Scotland, but UK‐wide data is drawn on to provide a more comprehensive picture.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model for ethical and fair complaint handling. This provides a basis for research and the development of financial institution complaint handling approaches and practices.

Ethical issues posed by the application of fairness theory to complaint handling are explored. The ethical soundness of organizational justice theory is critiqued. Multi-disciplinary literature is drawn on to develop a conceptual model for ethical fairness in complaint handling.

Issues relevant to an ethical approach to complaint handling, and which are underdeveloped in current organizational and perceived justice frameworks, are identified. These include issues of autonomy, context, reflexivity, moral value, stakeholder voice, power and moral accountability. A conceptual model for ethical fairness in complaint handling is proposed.

This paper establishes a research agenda. Further development is required.

The proposed model contributes to the development of complaint handling practices and competency frameworks.

Justice theories have been proposed as theoretical frameworks for service recovery procedures, however, moral and critical questions have been neglected. The model proposed challenges financial institutions to move away from traditional normative perspectives, which seek to solve problems through managerial interventions, and adopt a perspective which is interpretivistic and reflexive. The model recognizes ethical issues and seeks to minimize inherent power positions, identify accountability and question moral values. Through envisioning complaint handlers as boundary spanners, new light is shed on their relational and communicative roles.

Purpose – We outline a novel perspective on the role the allocation medium plays in how groups allocate resources fairly. Building upon recent research that demonstrates the unique norms invoked by the resource of money, we propose that what individuals’ judge to be a fair allocation principle among group members systematically varies as a function of whether the resource being distributed is money versus other resources that are allocated within organizations. In light of the existing research, we argue that an egalitarian allocation principle will be understood to be less fair when the norms of the market are invoked by the distribution of a resource that is a medium of exchange (e.g., money) rather than an in-kind good (e.g. food). We conclude by discussing the implications of identifying the unique properties of money for a wide set of literatures.

Approach – In this theoretical paper we review prior research examining contextual variables influencing allocation preferences and attempt to identify the different characteristics of money as a resource that might influence conceptions of fairness.

Value – This chapter offers a theoretical review of the relevant literature and will be of interest to scholars of social justice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore why young people use and participate in social networking sites (SNSs) with specific reference to Bebo.

A qualitative approach is employed in this paper with a view to exploring the uses and gratifications (U and G) that girls aged 12‐14 years, both seek and obtain from the Bebo SNS. The research is conducted in a school setting in Ireland.

The findings indicate that the participants are actively using Bebo for their own personal motives and gratifications in terms of presenting and managing a certain identity and persona in a social context. Furthermore, the relatively impersonal nature of the online environment is seen to especially facilitate the young participants in negotiating the practicalities and difficulties that can arise offline, in terms of forging identities and managing relationships.

U and G theory has attracted criticism in terms of a perceived limitation that it only serves to offer lists of reasons as to why audiences attend to the media, and furthermore, a perception that much of the extant U and G research has desisted from discerning between gratifications sought (GS) and gratifications obtained (GO). This paper affirms the appropriateness of the U and G theoretical approach in the context of online research. The authors conclude that SNS such as Bebo facilitate the participants in this paper in executing personal aims (for example, identity creation and management) with a view to obtaining certain gratifications (for example, peer acceptance). Therefore, a clear distinction but inextricable link is demonstrated between the GS and GO from participating in SNS.

Purpose – Trust and justice are generally considered distinct but closely related constructs. Individual perceptions of procedural justice and trustworthiness have been shown to reciprocally influence one another, each independently promoting trust (Colquitt & Mueller, 2007). We consider instances where these may instead diverge: how intentional efforts to build trust may unintentionally erode justice, and how the use of fair procedures may reduce trust.

Approach – We argue that the anomalous divergences between trust and justice are evident only when simultaneously considering judgments at two levels: the interpersonal level (i.e., within dyads inside the team) and the team level (i.e., shared perceptions of all team members).

Implications for research and practice – The unintended effects described in this chapter describe a “dark side” to a number of taken-for-granted practices in organizational life (favor-paying, punishment processes, and approaches to redress). We expect that this chapter should promote new research using the team context to bridge the trust and justice literatures, and provoke a careful reconsideration among practitioners of these approaches.

Originality – We propose three previously overlooked disjunctures between trust and justice. First, we show how procedurally unfair approaches to allocating favors may be beneficial in building dyadic trust between team members. Next, we describe how fair (open and transparent) group processes for punishing perpetrators may erode trust by skewing group members’ perceptions of the prevalence of trust violations. Finally, we describe how the most effective forms of redress at the interpersonal level may provoke perceptions of injustice at the team level.

There has been very little qualitative “fieldwork” of audit practice. This is especially the case in relation to investigations into how audit engagements proceed. The purpose of this paper is to engage with audit practice in order to explore and explain the internal dynamics and paradoxical conditions within audit engagement teams.

The research adopts a qualitative methodology, framed around an intensive case study that involves several methods of data collection and analysis including interviews, observation and document analysis. The authors observe audit team practices, work programmes and organisation including observations of individual and teams involved in audit engagements.

Using the lens of paradox theory, the authors explore the backstage of audit work, where audit teams are challenged with recurring contradictory requirements and opposing demands. The authors provide insight on the complexity associated with inadequate resourcing and planning that tend to stimulate the emergence of paradoxes in audit engagement work in a government audit context. As a result, the authors identify the occurrence of cascading reduced audit quality practices (RAQP) as the teams respond to the paradoxes they face.

The authors reveal the interlinked and cumulative coping strategies, namely, downplaying responsibility and downscaling audit processes. These strategies are performed concurrently by team leaders and audit members to manage paradoxical tensions. The authors also identified superficial audit supervision as another type of RAQP performed by team leaders.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.