Work in Progress: Social Work, the State and Europe

Social work has had varying relationships with the nation state both over time and between different countries. From its early stages the occupation had both state sanctioned and voluntary streams. Its international dimension has been enhanced in the European context through policy and funding measures over the past few decades. During this period we have also seen the rise of globalising trends leading to questions about the ongoing powers of nation states. This paper examines some aspects of the relationship between social work and the state, taking into account the emergence of European and also international policies and frameworks. The paper focuses initially on migration as an example of a common trend; an area of policy with both national and European dimensions; and a field in which social professionals are engaged to varying degrees. Secondly, it considers the progress of the ‘professional project’ in Europe, using developments in five countries to illustrate some of the issues associated with ‘professionalization’. European and international frameworks may lead to some convergence in national understandings of the key roles of social workers and an enhanced sense of professional identity across nation states, despite very different starting points and current forms of organisation.

Common Social Work Education Standards in the Nordic Countries - opening an issue

The article analyses the option of common Nordic Standards for social work education in these countries. The option is viewed through the lens of trends in education in the different countries. In the article the notion of an Integrated Field Model is used to indicate the starting point for a common model of education. This model covers the field characteristics of Denmark and Norway and their current move towards a more research-based education. It also covers the research characteristics of education in Finland, Iceland and Sweden and their current move towards a new field connection based on research-oriented education. Some thoughts on international requirements on comparability and compatibility in this setting are addressed in the final section.

Making research works visible and stimulating a research milieu in the field of social work - The European Resource Centre for Social Work Research (CERTS)

The project to create a European Resource Centre for Social Work Research (CERTS) has been agreed in December 2001 by the General Research Board of the European Commission within the framework programme 'Accompanying Measures for the improving the Human research potential and the Socio Economic Knowledge Base'.

Structural Problems in the Development of Social Work in Central Europe under Transformation. The Case of Poland

Socio-economic transformation the countries of Central Europe are undergoing since 1989 has brought new developments in social welfare systems of this region. Social work, which was in the countries of the region during its communist past either non-existent or superficial activity, has become treated as an instrument of social welfare systems there. The collapse of authoritarian regimes in the region clearly inducted political leaderships there to opt for transition to Western style civil society. Hence an adoption of social work seemed to be natural choice for the countries in the region.

Care for Children in Botswana: The Social Work Role

The world over is experiencing an increase in the numbers of children who need care. The existence of children in need of care is not peculiar to contemporary Botswana society, it also prevailed in traditional Tswana society. What has changed is the volume of children who need care, and the resources available for their care. Like other African countries, Botswana is going through a process of rapid social, economic and cultural change. One of the characteristics of this change is the disintegration of the extended family. Consequently, the extended family can no longer cope with both the quality and quantity of care that children in need of care require (Botswana Human Development Report/BHDR 2000).

Semiotic Analysis in the Study of Social Work

Research and professional practices have the joint aim of re-structuring the preconceived notions of reality. They both want to gain the understanding about social reality. Social workers use their professional competence in order to grasp the reality of their clients, while researchers’ pursuit is to open the secrecies of the research material. Development and research are now so intertwined and inherent in almost all professional practices that making distinctions between practising, developing and researching has become difficult and in many aspects irrelevant. Moving towards research-based practices is possible and it is easily applied within the framework of the qualitative research approach (Dominelli 2005, 235; Humphries 2005, 280). Social work can be understood as acts and speech acts crisscrossing between social workers and clients. When trying to catch the verbal and non-verbal hints of each others’ behaviour, the actors have to do a lot of interpretations in a more or less uncertain mental landscape. Our point of departure is the idea that the study of social work practices requires tools which effectively reveal the internal complexity of social work (see, for example, Adams & Dominelli & Payne 2005, 294 – 295). The boom of qualitative research methodologies in recent decades is associated with much profound the rupture in humanities, which is called the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). The idea that language is not transparently mediating our perceptions and thoughts about reality, but on the contrary it constitutes it was new and even confusing to many social scientists. Nowadays we have got used to read research reports which have applied different branches of discursive analyses or narratologic or semiotic approaches. Although differences are sophisticated between those orientations they share the idea of the predominance of language. Despite the lively research work of today’s social work and the research-minded atmosphere of social work practice, semiotics has rarely applied in social work research. However, social work as a communicative practice concerns symbols, metaphors and all kinds of the representative structures of language. Those items are at the core of semiotics, the science of signs, and the science which examines people using signs in their mutual interaction and their endeavours to make the sense of the world they live in, their semiosis. When thinking of the practice of social work and doing the research of it, a number of interpretational levels ought to be passed before reaching the research phase in social work. First of all, social workers have to interpret their clients’ situations, which will be recorded in the files. In some very rare cases those past situations will be reflected in discussions or perhaps interviews or put under the scrutiny of some researcher in the future. Each and every new observation adds its own flavour to the mixture of meanings. Social workers have combined their observations with previous experience and professional knowledge, furthermore, the situation on hand also influences the reactions. In addition, the interpretations made by social workers over the course of their daily working routines are never limited to being part of the personal process of the social worker, but are also always inherently cultural. The work aiming at social change is defined by the presence of an initial situation, a specific goal, and the means and ways of achieving it, which are – or which should be – agreed upon by the social worker and the client in situation which is unique and at the same time socially-driven. Because of the inherent plot-based nature of social work, the practices related to it can be analysed as stories (see Dominelli 2005, 234), given, of course, that they are signifying and told by someone. The research of the practices is concentrating on impressions, perceptions, judgements, accounts, documents etc. All these multifarious elements can be scrutinized as textual corpora, but not whatever textual material. In semiotic analysis, the material studied is characterised as verbal or textual and loaded with meanings. We present a contribution of research methodology, semiotic analysis, which has to our mind at least implicitly references to the social work practices. Our examples of semiotic interpretation have been picked up from our dissertations (Laine 2005; Saurama 2002). The data are official documents from the archives of a child welfare agency and transcriptions of the interviews of shelter employees. These data can be defined as stories told by the social workers of what they have seen and felt. The official documents present only fragmentations and they are often written in passive form. (Saurama 2002, 70.) The interviews carried out in the shelters can be described as stories where the narrators are more familiar and known. The material is characterised by the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. The levels of the story and the telling of the story become apparent when interviews or documents are examined with the use of semiotic tools. The roots of semiotic interpretation can be found in three different branches; the American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics in Paris and the so called formalism in Moscow and Tartu; however in this paper we are engaged with the so called Parisian School of semiology which prominent figure was A. J. Greimas. The Finnish sociologists Pekka Sulkunen and Jukka Törrönen (1997a; 1997b) have further developed the ideas of Greimas in their studies on socio-semiotics, and we lean on their ideas. In semiotics social reality is conceived as a relationship between subjects, observations, and interpretations and it is seen mediated by natural language which is the most common sign system among human beings (Mounin 1985; de Saussure 2006; Sebeok 1986). Signification is an act of associating an abstract context (signified) to some physical instrument (signifier). These two elements together form the basic concept, the “sign”, which never constitutes any kind of meaning alone. The meaning will be comprised in a distinction process where signs are being related to other signs. In this chain of signs, the meaning becomes diverged from reality. (Greimas 1980, 28; Potter 1996, 70; de Saussure 2006, 46-48.) One interpretative tool is to think of speech as a surface under which deep structures – i.e. values and norms – exist (Greimas & Courtes 1982; Greimas 1987). To our mind semiotics is very much about playing with two different levels of text: the syntagmatic surface which is more or less faithful to the grammar, and the paradigmatic, semantic structure of values and norms hidden in the deeper meanings of interpretations. Semiotic analysis deals precisely with the level of meaning which exists under the surface, but the only way to reach those meanings is through the textual level, the written or spoken text. That is why the tools are needed. In our studies, we have used the semiotic square and the actant analysis. The former is based on the distinctions and the categorisations of meanings, and the latter on opening the plotting of narratives in order to reach the value structures.

Cultural Heritage Online? Settle It in the Country of Origin of the Work

This article examines the conditions under which a system of extended collective licensing (ECL) for the use of works contained in the collections of cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) participating in Europeana could function within a cross-border basis. ECL is understood as a form of collective rights management whereby the application of freely negotiated copyright licensing agreements between a user and a collective management organisation (“CMO”), is extended by law to non-members of the organisation. ECL regimes have already been put in place in a few Member States and so far, all have the ability to apply only on a national basis. This article proposes a mechanism that would allow works licensed under an ECL system in one territory of the European Union to be made available in all the territories of the Union. The proposal rests on the statutory recognition of the “country of origin” principle, as necessary and sufficient territory for the negotiation and application of an ECL solution for the rights clearance of works contained in the collection of a cultural heritage institution, including orphan works.

How do indirect measures of evaluation work? Evaluating the inference of prejudice in the Implicit Association Test

There has been significant interest in indirect measures of attitudes like the Implicit Association Test (IAT), presumably because of the possibility of uncovering implicit prejudices. The authors derived a set of qualitative predictions for people's performance in the IAT on the basis of random walk models. These were supported in 3 experiments comparing clearly positive or negative categories to nonwords. They also provided evidence that participants shift their response criterion when doing the IAT. Because of these criterion shifts, a response pattern in the IAT can have multiple causes. Thus, it is not possible to infer a single cause (such as prejudice) from IAT results. A surprising additional result was that nonwords were treated as though they were evaluated more negatively than obviously negative items like insects, suggesting that low familiarity items may generate the pattern of data previously interpreted as evidence for implicit prejudice.

Aeromonas salmonicida subsp. salmonicida in the light of its type-three secretion system

Aeromonas salmonicida subsp. salmonicida is an important pathogen in salmonid aquaculture and is responsible for the typical furunculosis. The type-three secretion system (T3SS) is a major virulence system. In this work, we review structure and function of this highly sophisticated nanosyringe in A. salmonicida. Based on the literature as well as personal experimental observations, we document the genetic (re)organization, expression regulation, anatomy, putative functional origin and roles in the infectious process of this T3SS. We propose a model of pathogenesis where A. salmonicida induces a temporary immunosuppression state in fish in order to acquire free access to host tissues. Finally, we highlight putative important therapeutic and vaccine strategies to prevent furunculosis of salmonid fish.

Work Experiences and Well-Being in the First Years of Professional Work in Switzerland: A Ten-Year Follow-Up Study

The ÆQUAS (a German acronym for “Work Experiences and Quality of Life in Switzerland”) study followed young workers in five occupations over their first ten years in the labor market. Participants of the study reported on working conditions and well-being at five occasions. Overall, resources at work as well as well-being, health and personal resources remained stable or increased. Concurrently, task-related stressors increased as well. This result may reflect career progress (e.g., gaining more responsibilities may be accompanied by increasing time pressure) but development in task-related stressors as well as resources may also be related to specific occupations. Several trajectories had their turning point after the first or second year of being in the labor market, which may reflect a successful professional socialization. Even though a substantial number of participants did change their occupation over these ten years (with benefits for their well-being), development over the first ten years after vocational training implies a successful transition into labor market.

Anisotropic diffusion at the field scale in a 4-year multi-tracer diffusion and retention experiment – I: Insights from the experimental data

Abstract Claystones are considered worldwide as barrier materials for nuclear waste repositories. In the Mont Terri underground research laboratory (URL), a nearly 4-year diffusion and retention (DR) experiment has been performed in Opalinus Clay. It aimed at (1) obtaining data at larger space and time scales than in laboratory experiments and (2) under relevant in situ conditions with respect to pore water chemistry and mechanical stress, (3) quantifying the anisotropy of in situ diffusion, and (4) exploring possible effects of a borehole-disturbed zone. The experiment included two tracer injection intervals in a borehole perpendicular to bedding, through which traced artificial pore water (APW) was circulated, and a pressure monitoring interval. The APW was spiked with neutral tracers (HTO, HDO, H2O-18), anions (Br, I, SeO4), and cations (Na-22, Ba-133, Sr-85, Cs-137, Co-60, Eu-152, stable Cs, and stable Eu). Most tracers were added at the beginning, some were added at a later stage. The hydraulic pressure in the injection intervals was adjusted according to the measured value in the pressure monitoring interval to ensure transport by diffusion only. Concentration time-series in the APW within the borehole intervals were obtained, as well as 2D concentration distributions in the rock at the end of the experiment after overcoring and subsampling which resulted in �250 samples and �1300 analyses. As expected, HTO diffused the furthest into the rock, followed by the anions (Br, I, SeO4) and by the cationic sorbing tracers (Na-22, Ba-133, Cs, Cs-137, Co-60, Eu-152). The diffusion of SeO4 was slower than that of Br or I, approximately proportional to the ratio of their diffusion coefficients in water. Ba-133 diffused only into �0.1 m during the �4 a. Stable Cs, added at a higher concentration than Cs-137, diffused further into the rock than Cs-137, consistent with a non-linear sorption behavior. The rock properties (e.g., water contents) were rather homogeneous at the centimeter scale, with no evidence of a borehole-disturbed zone. In situ anisotropy ratios for diffusion, derived for the first time directly from field data, are larger for HTO and Na-22 (�5) than for anions (�3�4 for Br and I). The lower ionic strength of the pore water at this location (�0.22 M) as compared to locations of earlier experiments in the Mont Terri URL (�0.39 M) had no notable effect on the anion accessible pore fraction for Cl, Br, and I: the value of 0.55 is within the range of earlier data. Detailed transport simulations involving different codes will be presented in a companion paper.