The Australian Association of Social Workers and social policy debates: a strategy for the future?

It has been argued that the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) not only has a mandate, but also an important role to play in influencing social debates for the benefit of the users of social services and, further, that as a professional association, it is ideally positioned to do so. However, the AASW has been criticised for failing to meet this mandate and have any lasting impact on the formulation of social policy. In the present article, the author considers the process by which the AASW engages in social policy debates and speculates on the historical, cultural, and structural factors that may impede its ability to do so. From this analysis, strategies are suggested for the AASW to increase its impact on the formulation of social policy.

Accommodating culture and cultural diversity in online teaching

The term 'culture' has been in common use for a long time. However there is no universally accepted definition and hence it is important to define clearly what culture means in a particular research context. The research reported here is part of a project undertaken at a large Australian university in late 2005. The overall aim of the project was to identify the characteristics of culture and cultural diversity, and to consider how these manifested themselves when teaching and learning in an online environment. The article reports on particular outcomes from the second stage of the project. This involved conducting focus groups with experienced academics and educational developers of online units. The aim was to gain an understanding of culture and cultural difference in the online environment and to consider what strategies were effective in teaching a culturally diverse cohort of online students. The findings from the focus group sessions were benchmarked with other external faculty. The cultural factors of ethnicity and language, attitudes to educational learning, education and prior learning, learning styles and socio-economic background were well supported by the external faculty. However the factors of religion and gender were not supported. Practices for accommodating such cultural differences amongst students within the online class are presented.

Leadership, culture and employee deceit : the case of the National Australia Bank

The National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia's largest banks, announced losses in 2004 of AUD$360 million due to unauthorised foreign currency trading activities by four employees who incurred and deceptively concealed the losses. The NAB had in place risk limits and supervision to prevent trading desks ever reaching positions of this magnitude. However, the risk management policies and procedures proved ineffective. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the deceit, via a content analysis of official investigative reports and other published documents, to determine the extent to which the Bank's culture and leadership may have influenced the rogue traders' behaviour. The findings suggest that cultural issues, and the role played by the Bank's leaders, were influential in creating a profit-driven culture that ultimately impacted the Bank's foreign exchange operating activities.

Writing, digital culture and English curriculum

In their out-of-school lives, young people are immersed in rich and complex digital worlds, characterised by image and multimodality. Computer games in particular present young people with specific narrative genres and textual forms: contexts in which meaning is constructed interactively and drawing explicitly on a wide range of design elements including sound, image, gesture, symbol, colour and so on. As English curriculum seeks to address the changing nature of literacy, challenges are raised, particularly with respect to the ways in which multimodal texts might be incorporated alongside print based forms of literacy. Questions focus both on the ways in which such texts might be created, studied and assessed, and on the implications of the introduction of such texts for print based literacies. This paper explores intersections between writing and computer games within the English classroom, from a number of junior secondary examples. In particular it considers tensions that arise when young people use writing to recreate or respond to multimodal forms. It explores ways in which writing is stretched and challenged by enterprises such as these, ways in which students utilise and adapt print based modes to represent multimodal forms of narrative, and how teachers and curriculum might respond. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to teaching and assessment by bringing writing to bear as the medium of analysis of, and response to, multimodal texts.

Social indicators and social development

This paper concerns the use of social indicators to improve social development and the happiness of populations. A distinction will be drawn between the traditional indicators of wealth and health and the new subjective social indicators. These latter measures concern the subjective side of life quality, or happiness, which in contemporary science is more commonly referred to as subjective wellbeing (SWB). The SWB construct is described within the theoretical context of SWB homeostasis. This is a proposed management system which has the role of maintaining a positive view of the self. It will be described how the homeostatic system can be challenged by hardship and defended by a variety of resources. Recommended forms of SWB measurement will be considered. It is concluded that both objective and subjective social indicators should be consulted by policy makers in order to plan the most effective initiatives to enhance population wellbeing.

Tourism, globalization, social externalities, and domestic welfare

One of the impacts of globalisation has been the growth in tourism and mobility of capital. This paper examines the welfare effect of tourism on the host economy with imperfect competition. Three channels that affects domestic welfare by tourism are: social externalities accompanied with tourists, the terms of trade effect via rises in the non-tradable prices, and the resource movement effect to the manufacturing sector. Owing to the positive terms-of-trade effect and/or the beneficial resource movement effect, the optimal levels of tourism occur at the situations that tourists bring negative social externalities to the economy.

`He hath the French pox` : stigma, social value and social exclusion

Goods and resources are finite, and social forces heavily pattern their distribution. One of the principal mechanisms for shaping the distribution of resources is by regulating entitlement to community membership itself. By restricting groups' membership of community, so access to social goods and resources diminishes, which in turn has a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the excluded groups. It is argued here that community membership is determined on the basis of the perceived social value of groups and individuals and stigmatisation is the marking of individuals and groups who are 'unworthy' of social investment. Using the notion of reciprocity we show how groups may be stigmatised and socially excluded as a mechanism for protecting limited social resources from exploitation. This perspective provides an empirically testable framework for the understanding of stigma and social exclusion that goes beyond the largely descriptive work that currently populates the field. We illustrate the process of stigmatisation and social exclusion and discuss how this suggests new styles of intervention, as well as new directions for research.

Knowledge enhancement in the change process : social marketing and attitude change leading to improved environmental behaviour

The complexity of relationships between social change and natural resource management has generated interest in the identification of indicators that might provide more streamlined means of monitoring and planning control programmes. This case study highlights the marketing paradigms of benchmarking and social marketing in a not-for-profit governmental environment. Publicly funded programs that require individual and community participation need to be marketed with a view to optimising involvement and commitment of the various stakeholders. A mail survey with a representative sample of 608 respondents was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a social marketing program. This study highlights the use of social marketing in a program to overcome an environmental issue by a governmental agency. Changing attitudes and beliefs takes time and often the target audience may not even know they have a problem that needs fixing. This process influences the focus of the social marketing effort which might be organised into three phases: • Raise awareness and knowledge.   •Change attitudes.  • Encourage action. The research conducted in this study illustrates how the various stages in the social marketing process were achieved through knowledge enhancement in an environmental management case study.

You Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me: Covenant in Faith and History

In this paper I have attempted to explore "covenant" in faith and history, as it extends throughout the entire framework of the Bible and the entire history of the people who produced it. With such a monstrous topic, a comprehensive analysis of the material could take a lifetime to do it justice. Therefore, I have taken a very specific approach to the material in order to investigate the evolution of covenant from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) to the Christian Scriptures (New Testament). I have made every effort to approach this thesis as a text-based, non-doctrinal discussion. However, having my own religious convictions, it has, at times, been difficult to recognize and escape my biases. Nevertheless, I am confident that this final product is, for the most part, objective and free from dogmatism. Of course, I have brought my own perspective and understanding to the material, which may be different from the reader's, so there may be matters of interpretation on which we differ, but c 'est fa vie in the world of religious dialogue. The structure of this paper is symmetrical: Part I examines the traditions of the Torah and the Prophets; Part II, the Gospels and Paul's letters. I have balanced the Old Testament against the New Testament (the Torah against the Gospels; the Prophets against Paul) in order to give approximately equal weight to the two traditions, and establish a sense of parallelism in the structure of my overall work. A word should also be said about three matters of style. First, instead of the customary Christian designation of time as B.C. or A.D., I have opted to use the more modem B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) notations. This more recent system is less traditional; however, more acceptable in academic and, certainly, more appropriate for a non-doctrinal discussion. Second, in the body of this paper I have chosen to highlight several texts using a variety of colors. This highlighting serves (1) to call the reader's attention to specific passages, and (2) to compare the language and imagery of similar texts. All highlighting has been added to the texts at my own discretion. Finally, the divine name, traditionally vocalized as "Yahweh," is a verbal form of the Hebrew "to be," and means, approximately, "I am who I am." This name was considered too holy to pronounce by the ancient Israelites, and, the word adonai ("My LORD") was used in its stead. In respect of this tradition, I have left the divine name in its original Hebrew form. Accordingly, should be read as "the LORD" throughout this paper. All Hebrew and Greek translations, where they occur, are my own. The Greek translations are based on the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible.

Weight and place: a multilevel cross-sectional survey of area-level social disadvantage and overweight/obesity in Australia

Objective: To estimate variation between small areas in adult body mass index (BMI), and assess the importance of area level socioeconomic disadvantage in predicting BMI.

Methods: We identified all census collector districts (CCDs) in the 20 innermost Local Government Areas in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, and ranked them by the percentage of low income households (<$400/week). In all, 50 CCDs were randomly selected from the least, middle and most disadvantaged septiles of the ranked list and 4913 residents (61.4% participation rate) completed one of two surveys. Multilevel linear regression was used to estimate area level variance in BMI and the importance of area level socioeconomic disadvantage in predicting BMI.

Results: There were significant variations in BMI between CCDs for women, even after adjustment for individual and area SES (P=0.012); significant area variation was not found for men. Living in the most versus least disadvantaged areas was associated with an average difference in BMI of 1.08 kg/m² (95% CI: 0.48–1.68 kg/m²) for women, and of 0.93 kg/m² (95% CI: 0.32–1.55 kg/m²) for men. Living in the mid versus least disadvantaged areas were associated with an average difference in BMI of 0.67 kg/m² (95% CI: 0.09–1.26 kg/m²) for women, and 0.43 kg/m² for men (95% CI: -0.16–1.01).

Conclusion: These findings suggest that area disadvantage is an important predictor of adult BMI, and support the need to focus on improving local environments to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in overweight and obesity.

A new roadmap to life: media, culture, and modernity in the United Arab Emirates

Critical to the vision of a new United Arab Emirates is an educated, skilled workforce that fuels the intelligent growth needed in a knowledge-based economy. As the country begins developing its version of that economy, the mediated, transparent environment fundamental to this process will carry with it new visions of (and possibilities for) living life. If peaceful change is to be achieved, a transitional generation faces the conundrum of adapting the best that modernity can offer while retaining the best of tradition. As have others, this study suggests two things: that (1) media literacy, growing in part from education, is correlated with urbanization and a changing infrastructure, and that (2) media in all its forms is inseparable from the outcome of this drive to modernization.