Social Work and a New Social Order - Challenging Neo-liberalism's Erosion of Solidarity

The world in which social work operates today is a very different world from that in which most of us took their social work training, and the changes we are facing are profound. This paper argues that these changes are not merely a regime change in social policy but that they are essentially about a re-ordering of social relationships and attempt to model them on neo-liberal ideas. In view of these pressures it is understandable that social workers often try to ignore those changes and withdraw into a private world of therapeutic relationships in which the methods they trained in are made to be still valid, or they simply go along with new service delivery designs without asking too many questions. Both reactions fail to question what the "social" can still mean in the light of these changes and how social workers can fulfil their mandate to be responsible for the social dimension of public life. Nothing less than a head-on challenge of the basic presuppositions of neo-liberalism (Willke 2003) and their manifold applications to social service delivery systems will thereby suffice.

Particle placement and the case for “allostructions”

As a reaction against derivational frameworks, Construction Grammar accords no place to regular alternations between two surface patterns. This paper argues for a more tolerant position towards alternations. With respect to the well-known placement variability of verbal particles (pick up the book / pick the book up), the author grants that there is little reason for analysing one ordering as underlying the other but goes on to show that it is equally problematic to claim that the two orderings code two different meanings (or serve two different functions) and therefore cannot be linked in the grammar as variants of a single category. The alternative offered here is to consider the two orderings as two “allostructions” of a more general transitive verb-particle construction underspecified for word order.

Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety

There has been much commentary about the re-ordering of the relations between nation state government, geographical territory, and populations in the advanced liberal democracies. This is seen as a product of: increasing demographic and cultural diversity due to legal and illegal migration; economic, cultural, and political global interdependence; footloose mobility of capital and the outsourcing of jobs to poorer countries; the growing power of international corporations and financial markets; and the growth of supra-national bodies like the European Union and The North Atlantic Free Trade Association, the World Trade Organisation, and (debatably), the UN. These developments are held to be associated with the gradual demise of the model of the increasingly secular nation state first crystallised by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This conception provided a mutual, guarantee of states’ jurisdiction over territory and populations through their legitimated attempts to monopolise the use of force. Though, the relations between these states have always been asymmetrical and often challenged (Hunter 1998).

Comments on Kevin Stenson’s ‘Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety’

It is a challenging time to be a social scientist. Many of the concepts and categories we took for granted have been revealed as temporally and geographically specific. It is now widely accepted that the nation-state is no longer the sole container for economic, political and social processes, if indeed it ever was. This is where Kevin Stenson begins his paper. He traces the re-ordering of both state and nation, highlighting recent discussions about the unbundling and rescaling of the state and outlining how increasing ethnic and cultural diversity challenge homogeneous conceptions of the nation. In Stenson’s account these are largely empirical processes that are the basis for the important questions he raises about changing understandings of publics and social order, and their implications for the local governance of community safety. He contrasts two alternative positions; the ‘universal human rights position’ which refuses to privilege the interests of majority populations, and a more ‘communitarian and nationalistic position’ which he argues is most likely to be deployed by right wing politicians and interests groups. Drawing from extensive research in the Thames Valley region of the United Kingdom, he shows how these two understandings have both shaped the local policy response to crime and disorder.

Sui Generis Rights for the Protection of Traditional Cultural Expressions Policy Implications

Within the international community there have been many calls for better protection of traditional cultural expressions (TCEs), for which classic instruments of intellectual property rights do not seem to fit. In response, at least five model laws have been advanced within the last 40 years. These are referred to as sui generis because, though they generally belong to the realm of intellectual property they structurally depart from classic copyright law to accommodate the needs of the holders of TCEs. The purpose of this paper is to provide a well-founded basis for national policy makers who wish to implement protection for TCEs within their country. This is achieved by systematically comparing and evaluating economic effects that can be expected to result from these regulatory alternatives and a related system or private ordering. Specifically, we compare if and how protection preferences of local communities are met as well as the social costs that are likely to arise from the different model laws.