Apostol Apostolov’s research while affiliated with University of Oxford and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (8)


Imaginary epistemic objects in integrated children's services
  • Article

February 2009

·

35 Reads

·

3 Citations

Society and Business Review

·

·

·

[...]

·

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the problem of achieving “organizational justice” for children within integrated children's services. Justice is understood, following Byers and Rhodes discussion of Levinas as respecting the “unique and indivisible” character of a given child. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical material reported here is drawn from a large study of interagency working in children's services in the UK. Data are taken from Developmental Work Research sessions. Methodological details are outlined in Daniels et al. and Leadbetter et al. Findings – The key finding discussed here is that in order to balance the outcome measures used in children's services, participants use a further abstraction “the outcome of improved outcomes”. The logical and practical consequences of this abstraction are analysed. Originality/value – The paper offers an empirically grounded contribution to conceptual debates about otherness and ethics in organization. In particular, it argues that a concern for the other need not preclude a high level of concrete categorization and minute target setting. The philosophical debate is seen to be “resolved” in practice.




Leading and Managing Collaborative Practice: The Research. ESRC Seminar 3 Proceedings. Research Paper 16.
  • Book
  • Full-text available

October 2007

·

85 Reads

Download

Learning in and for multi‐agency working

July 2007

·

1,783 Reads

·

102 Citations

This study addresses the challenges faced by organisations and individual professionals, as new practices are developed and learned in multi‐agency work settings. The practices examined in the paper involve working responsively across professional boundaries with at‐risk young people. The paper draws on evidence from the Learning in and for Interagency Working Project, a four year ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme study of inter‐professional learning which has examined the challenges involved in what Victor and Boynton (199827. Victor , B. and Boynton , A. 1998. Invented here: maximizing your organization’s internal growth and profitability, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. View all references) term co‐configuration work. In the context of professional collaboration for social inclusion, co‐configuration involves on‐going partnerships between professionals and service users to support young people’s pathways out of social exclusion. This work demands a capacity to recognise and access expertise distributed across local systems and to negotiate the boundaries of responsible professional action with other professionals and with clients. The paper outlines the activity theory derived theoretical platform adopted by the project and describes the intervention methodology that is being developed, as we study the learning challenges identified by children’s services practitioners in UK local authorities.


Figure 1. Historical forms of work (adapted from Victor and Boynton, 1998)
A Cultural-Historical Interpretation of Resilience: the implications for practice

April 2007

·

288 Reads

·

37 Citations

Outlines Critical Practice Studies

Recent attempts at preventing the social exclusion of vulnerable children in England have been driven by notions of resilience which centre primarily on changing children so that they may be better able to cope with adversity. Drawing on the concepts of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we suggest that the idea of resilience should be expanded to include developing a capacity to act on and reshape the social conditions of one’s development. We use evidence from two studies of practices in recent re-configurations of children’s services in England to examine whether practitioners are seeing resilience in these terms. We present examples of work which embody these views but suggest that they are not easily incorporated into practices where expertise is centred on care and clear communication. The care and communication model of practice reflects the emphases given to evolutionary notions of child development while a CHAT view of resilience reflects Vygotsky’s concerns with a dialectic between individuals and the social situations of their development.


Professional learning within multi-agency children's services: Researching into practice

March 2007

·

134 Reads

·

44 Citations

Background This article is concerned with professional learning within multi-agency settings. Since the publication of the government document Every child matters in 2003, professionals involved in working with children and young people have been moving into newly organized services that are required to deliver improved services for vulnerable children and their families. Although new ways of professional working are described in the plethora of government guidance that has followed Every child matters, there has been little examination of how this is being achieved in different teams around the country.Purpose This paper describes a current national research project, ‘Learning in and for Inter-agency Working’, which is investigating new ways of learning that develop, while teams of professionals work together around children and young people who are at risk of social exclusion.Programme description The research project is theoretically based and draws upon sociocultural and activity theory research to understand the practices that develop within the different agencies involved. The paper describes the derivation of the theory and the particular aspects of activity theory that are central to the project. In particular, the use of developmental work research (DWR), as the method of intervention with a number of local education authorities, is described and explained.Sample Some of the early work undertaken within phases 3 and 4 of a five-stage project which began in 2004 and ends in 2007 is described. Five different inter-agency teams of professionals working as part of Children's Services, from different geographical locations in England are the participants in the study.Design and methods The research uses activity theory to structure a series of DWR workshops with members of the multi-agency teams. Ethnographic data, including observations and interviews, are collected and form the subject-matter of the workshops.Results The data gathered are used to facilitate workshops where participants discuss their developing working practices and plan changes. The reporting phase of the project, where the findings across all sites will be analysed and summarized is not until mid-2007. However, early themes emerging from the research are included in the paper. These themes include: issues around co-location and co-working, evolving of professional identities, discussion of divisions of labour and professional expertise. These are described and illustrated using data from the research project.Conclusions As this is still ‘work in progress’ no firm conclusions can be drawn. However, it has become clear that new ways of thinking about professional working with children and families is necessary as old ways of working do not necessarily provide better outcomes for children.


Citations (5)


... Recent UK debates and studies explore the intersections of interprofessional working, leadership and cultural change in schools and children's services (Forbes and Watson 2009, Forbes and Watson in press). Warmington et al. (2009) recognise the emergence of distributed expertise; and Brown (2009) focuses on systemic issues in public sector reform related to service integration in schools/education. At the micro-level of school-leader identity, knowledge, and skills, Crow (2009) notes implications for interprofessional practice and leadership behaviour of the development of leadership identities that move beyond technicist knowledge and skills towards values and practices of interprofessional collaboration. ...

Reference:

Leadership distribution culturally? Education/speech and language therapy social capital in schools and children’s services
Learning Leadership in Multiagency Work for Integrating Services into Schools
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2009

... In the context of change and systems of distributed expertise (Edwards, Apostolov, Dooher, & Popova, 2008), there is a need for conventional health care teams to work closely with social sectors (Thistlethwaite, 2012). Busy work schedules and the lack of close proximity for social workers and nurses working as co-location team members in Hong Kong's acute hospital settings create a barrier to their relationship building and team cohesion (Oandasan et al., 2009). ...

Working with extended schools to prevent social exclusion
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2008

... Furthermore, the abuse is silenced as an internal problem to avoid harming the social status and dignity of other family members, and the identity of the perpetrator is covered (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 1999). In light of the lack of studies examining the barriers to seeking support among YAW, it is essential to study the patterns in which YAW use formal services, mainly since this population may have unique barriers to using social services as being both women and an ethnic minority (Edwards and Apostolov, 2007). Hence, we focussed here on how YAW in Israel perceive the barriers to support following the abuse they had experienced in childhood. ...

A Cultural-Historical Interpretation of Resilience: the implications for practice

Outlines Critical Practice Studies

... In the studies conducted by Barret et al. (2017), Daniels et al. (2007) and Tse et al. (2015), a positive relationship has been reported between the properties of physical space, the methodology used and the influence of both on the teachinglearning process of students. According to Maxwell (2016), the adaptation of spaces favors the development of positive emotions, greater integration and better values among the students. ...

Learning in and for multi‐agency working

... Gameson et al., 2003) and socio-cultural (cf. Leadbetter et al., 2007) philosophies. Fallon et al. (2010) proposed that psychological frameworks have helped clarify understanding of the role of the EP, highlighting the contribution to psychological, interactionist, constructionist, and ethical understanding of practice. ...

Professional learning within multi-agency children's services: Researching into practice
  • Citing Article
  • March 2007