Search results

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.

The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.

Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.

The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.

This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of one part of a larger study, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, which explored the management of pain in adult male prisoners in one large category B prison in England. In this paper, the authors focus on the attitudes and perceptions of prison staff towards pain management in prison.

A qualitative design was utilised to explore the staff perceptions of pain and pain management in one adult male prison. Questionnaires were provided for all staff with prisoner contact, and a follow up focus group was undertaken to further explore questionnaire data.

The questionnaire and focus group findings demonstrated that staff had a good awareness of pain and pain management in prison, with both physical and emotional pain identified. The frequency of approaches by prisoners to staff for pain relief was noted to be high, whilst awareness of how the prison environment could potentially exacerbate pain was discussed. The acquisition of analgesia by prisoners for secondary gain was identified as a challenge to both assessing levels of pain and providing pain relief in prison, illustrating the complexity of providing care within a custodial culture. The effect on staff of caring for prisoners found to be confrontational and deceitful was significant for participants, with feelings of anger and frustration reported.

This study was undertaken in one adult male category B prison with a very high turnover of prisoners. Staff working in other types of prison, for example, higher security or those more stable with longer sentenced prisoners could provide alternative views, as may staff caring for younger offenders and women. The challenges to undertaking research in prison with staff who can understandably be reluctant to engage in reflection on their practice cannot be underestimated and impact significantly on available methodologies.

This qualitative research is the first of its kind to offer the perspectives of both health care professionals and prison staff working with prisoners complaining of pain in an English prison. It provides the groundwork for further research and development.

Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.

The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.

Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?

A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.

The purpose of this paper is to critique the role of homeless hostels in contemporary society, examining their role and legitimacy as sites of discipline and regulation of behaviors, ideas and aspirations.

The research draws upon in-depth qualitative interviews and supplementary observations undertaken in two homeless hostels in Stoke-on-Trent.

The research finds that even the most benign interventions enacted in homeless hostels are infused with disciplinary and regulatory techniques and suggests that the author needs to consider the legitimacy and efficacy of such approaches when seeking to understand the role of the hostel in assisting residents in (re)developing their autonomy.

While there are legitimate reasons for the deployment of such techniques in some cases, legitimacy can be undermined where expectations go unmet or where developing residents’ and service user’s needs are not necessarily the main object of the interventions.

Hostel providers need to consider the ethicality and legitimacy of the interventions in place when seeking to help service users and residents to (re)develop their autonomy and ensure that efforts are focused in an effective and meaningful way.

Homeless people are among the most vulnerable and excluded in society. The paper seeks to draw attention to the disciplinary and regulatory techniques to which they are subject in order to ensure that approaches employed to support homeless individuals have a clear, ethical and legitimate basis.

The research draws upon original data collected as part of a doctoral research project into wider experiences of unemployment.

Purpose – This chapter critically reflects on the author’s failed attempt to incorporate visual methods in follow-up research on immigration detention and deportation in Britain. In particular, it considers the uses and limits of participant-generated visuals, and the specific method of photovoice, which were originally conceived as a means to explore themes of home, identity, and belonging in and through practices of detention and release or expulsion.

Methodology/approach – This chapter discusses the visual method of photovoice to consider the uses and limits of participant-generated visuals.

Findings – Drawing on the notion of research “failure,” this chapter highlights the challenges and limitations of photovoice in follow-up research with individuals who were detained and/or deported, pointing to various methodological, logistical, ethical, and political issues pertaining to the method itself and the use of the visual in criminological research.

Originality/value – Criminologists are increasingly considering the visual and the power of photographic images within criminological research, both as objects of study and through the use of visual methodologies. This shift toward the examination, as well as integration, of images raises a number of important methodological, ethical, and political questions worthy of consideration, including instances where visual methods like photovoice are unsuccessful in a research project.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

For many, quality circles have been a struggle, total quality management has been something to “get around to one day” and continuous improvement has just been another expression meaning total quality management, which, of course is something that we will “get around to one day”. Worse, the acronyms used ‐ QC, TQM, CI ‐ have joined such exotic practices as JIT (Just‐in‐Time inventory), CAD‐CAM (computer‐aided development and manufacturing) and more recently BPR (business process re‐engineering) in an alphabet soup of consultant‐led packages, available to the discerning manager ‐ at a price.

That someone can make you feel good is a quality in itself. There has been much talk within British government circles, for example, about “the feel‐good factor”, which is constantly reminding us that it is just around the corner! Whether or not we can believe in this is another matter, but it certainly displays an awareness that making other people feel good can have positive benefits for you also. How this can be achieved will differ depending on your particular line of business. Having a good quality product does not in itself guarantee success as service quality must also be taken into account. This is where the feel‐good factor comes into play. It is all very well, for example, going to a restaurant to have a top‐class meal (in that the food was good), only to have it thrown at you. Quality, therefore, must not be seen as a separate entity, but more as a package deal.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the International Journal of Manpower is split into seven sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Human Resource Management; Career Planning & Recruitment; Women/Dependant Care; Health & Safety ; Education & Training ; Industrial Relations & Participation ; Redundancy.