Community aged care case managers transitioning to consumer directed care: more than procedural change required

Consumer directed care (CDC) is increasing in community aged care. However, limited information is available to successfully transition social workers and other case managers to their new role. This paper reports on a case study of six senior case managers who supervised staff in three Australian community-aged care agencies as they transitioned from agency directed care to consumer directed care. A change management framework was used to analyse the qualitative data collected in 12 semistructured interviews. A key finding is that changes in values, attitudes, and organisational culture are needed before staff can fully implement CDC principles of service user self-determination, empowerment, and choice. Process changes needed to assist staff transition to CDC are: using a change management strategy that maximises certainty; monitoring and responding to feelings of anxiety through ongoing consultations; and providing ongoing education and support in group sessions.

Local population preferences toward restoring ecosystem services of a wetland in Thailand

This study reports the findings of a choice experiment designed to explore local population preferences toward wetland ecosystem restoration of Bung Khong Long Wetland in Thailand. By addressing ecological, socioeconomic and cultural dimensions of ecosystem services, the findings provide policy-makers with a richer insight into the interconnections among ecological, socioeconomic and cultural systems in explaining the value of ecosystem services. Gaining an understanding of the trade-offs associated with different interests in ecosystem uses in this community has the capacity to promote wetland management and enhance land use planning. The choice experiment application entails selecting attributes and their levels and developing an experimental design to create the choice sets or hypothetical scenarios for welfare assessment via the questionnaire. The study is based on household level data collected from 780 randomly drawn respondents living around the lake and the data are analysed using the Random Parameter Logit Model with interactions. The findings indicate that the local population derives positive and significant values from the restoration of wetland ecosystem services, indicating caution is needed in the decision-making processes involving sensitive environments faced with competing uses. Socioeconomic and attitudinal characteristics of respondents are important factors influencing willingness to pay, implying community preferences are important in the effectiveness of environmental conservation efforts in this community. The cultural values associated with the wetland are significant suggesting that incorporating culture preferences may be a key factor in supporting wetland conservation.

Hip to be hyper: the subculture of excessively local news

Local news is nothing new, but there is an unmistakable hype around its reinvention in the digital age through the hyperlocal phenomena. This article applies the lens of subculture theory to move beyond questions related to who produces hyperlocal news, how to pay for it and its democratic potential, to focus on its social and cultural values and meanings. In doing so, it engages with the normative and political economy approaches that dominate this niche of journalism studies. We argue that a cultural approach can generate much-needed critical perspectives on the significance of what we term “excessively local news” and the future of mainstream journalism in this globalized world. In the process, it challenges media scholars and practitioners who cleave to traditional hierarchies of value about what hyperlocal news is and should be, even at the risk of being unfashionable in the digital age.