The Future of Fieldwork in a Market Economy
The economic reforms of the past decade have had a dramatic impact on social services. The application of market forces to the welfare sector—including competition, contestability, contracting and diminishing funding of strictly defined policy objectives—has exerted an influence on social work education. This impact has been particularly sharply felt by those engaged in supervised field practice programmes in schools of social work. In this paper, the writers outline their experiences and undertake a process of analysis and reflection with the aim of creating a shift in thinking about fieldwork which encourages the development of new models for the achievement of fieldwork goals.
Who is to Control the Practice of Social Work
In this paper we note some of the problems surrounding the conflicted issue of social work student placements. We argue that, although on an espoused level fieldwork is considered to be at the ‘core’ of social work education, there appears to be increasing difficulty in acquiring suitable and sufficient fieldwork placements. The extent of this difficulty suggests the existence of a contradiction between espoused views about social work education and the reality. We suggest that this contradiction cannot simply be explained in terms of the pressures on individual agencies or fieldwork teachers, but rather symbolises an ongoing power struggle (at a covert level) over who, or which interest groups, are to control the practice of social work. We conclude by advocating the need to debate the issues raised in our paper in open forum.
Mean field model of a game for power
Abstract Our aim is to model a game for power (equivalent to total energy) as a dynamical process, where an excess of power possessed by a player allows him to gain even more power. Such a positive feedback is often termed as the Matthew effect. Analytical and numerical methods allow to identify a set of stationary states, i.e. fixed points of the model dynamics. The positions of the unstable fixed points give an insight on the basins of attraction of the stable fixed points. The results are interpreted in terms of modeling of coercive power.