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Osallisuustyö välineenä heikossa asemassa olevien vallan lisäämiseen
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The social work profession requires a body of scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of interventions; yet, the social work scientific community could benefit from strengthening its contribution to the profession's body of evidence. Through twenty qualitative interviews with social work professors who are employed at four-year academic institutions (referred to as “social work academics”), this study explored how academics define social work research and how they perceive research to inform practice. The data were analyzed along the six steps of thematic analysis, resulting in 13 themes and six sub-themes in relation to the definition of research activity and social work research, the extent to which research informs practice, and the barriers and facilitators to research informing practice. The findings revealed that social work continues to lack a clear definition of research and produces research that only minimally influences practice, often due to the pressure for social work academics to research and publish in support of their career trajectory within academia versus writing for practitioners. The social work profession should take action to address and further research the research-practice disconnect by establishing a clear definition and aims of social work research, and training academics in effective research-to-practice translational methods.
In this chapter, I examine why projectification has become so prominent in the context of EU policy making and the major sociological implications of the EU’s move to project funding since the 1980s. I argue that projectification is an attractive tool for the European Commission, the major executive agent of EU policy making, which has gained political influence despite a position of limited
political authority. Accordingly, the European Commission expended huge efforts in developing project funding as a policy tool when it first established its own approaches towards European policy implementation. However, as I will show, while project funding was mainly designed to bring European policy initiatives “closer to the citizens”, the project approach in EU funding policy comes at the cost of increased standardisation and specialisation of policy mplementation.
Janus. Sosiaalipolitiikan ja sosiaalityön tutkimuksen aikakauslehti. Vol 23, nro 2, 2015. https://journal.fi/janus/article/view/51250
This volume is about the challenges with institutionalizing arrangements for local participatory governance. Theoretically, methodologically and empirically, its authors deal with attempts to establish procedures and norms for government-sponsored direct participation between citizens and local officials in making and implementing local-level public policies, and they all elaborate and explore the same basic argument: the institutionalization problem has to do with the relation between the ideas, institutions and practices of participatory governance, on the one hand, and the idea, institutions and practices of representative democracy, on the other.
There have been waves of enthusiasm for citizen participation before. I discuss several features that make the current one distinctive: Its scale and scope, its reliance on modes of collaboration made familiar by digital media, its dependence on coalitions of actors, within and outside the state, for its effects, and its professionalization in techniques of facilitated discussion. I focus on the latter, exploring how professionals’ understandings of the aims and limits of participation sometimes conflict with those of participants. More broadly, I argue for a better understanding of how models of participation diffuse across institutional settings and with what effects.
Participatory governance, grounded in the theory of participatory democracy more generally, offers a theory and practices of public engagement through deliberative processes. This chapter first takes up the interrelated questions of citizen competence, empowerment, and capacity-building as they relate to participatory governance, and then turns to its impact on service delivery, social equity, and political representation, including the distribution of power. These implications are seen to depend in significant part on participatory designs. The chapter presents the prominent theory of "empowered participatory governance", which offers principles for design. These points are further illustrated by pointing to several experiences with participatory governance, in particular the cases participatory budgeting in Brazil and the people's planning project in Kerala, India. The chapter also raises the question of the relation of citizens and experts in participatory governance and the possibility of new forms of collaborative expertise.
* Prologue A Generous Revolution * The Kennedy Transition * The System Is to Blame * Implementing the Elite Wisdom Being Poor, Being Black: 19501980 * Poverty * Employment * Wages and Occupations * Education * Crime * The Family * The View from 1966 Interpreting The Data * The Scoial Scientists and the Great Experiment * Incentives to Fail I: Maximizing Short-Term Gains * The Destruction of Status Rewards Rethinking Social Policy * What do we want to Accomplish? * The Constraints on Helping * Choosing a Future