The emotional organisation : passions and power

There can be little doubt that emotion has come of age in organization studies. Over the past two decades it has emerged from the margins of the field to become a legitimate sub-discipline that engages with, and deeply informs contemporary conceptions of managerial work. Few scholars have contributed more to this mainstreaming than Stephen Fineman, who has consistently championed a social understanding of emotions as both a constructed product and a constituent aspect of the emotional arenas in which they arise. This latest collection of essays richly demonstrates the maturity that this sub-discipline has now achieved. The book is threaded through with critical perspectives on emotion work that explore issues of power and voice through the lenses of postmodern, poststructuralist, and postemotional critiques. These multi-faceted analyses will be warmly welcomed by those organizational researchers who take seriously the view that emotions are here to stay

Pragmatism : a philosophy of practice

This chapter takes seriously the rich philosophical underpinnings of the American Pragmatist tradition, which is positioned here as a process and practice-based orientation that has significant potential as a way of seeing the unfolding, dynamic continuity of living organisational experience. The intellectual contributions of the Classical Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Gorger Herbert Mead, are summarised, and six key Pragmatist concepts are distilled out of this analysis: Abduction, Inquiry, Habit, Social Selves, Gestural Conversation, and Trans-action. These six concepts are offered as empirical sensitisations in the inquiries into the coordinated, performative actions that emerge in organisational settings

OUTCOMES-BASED EDUCATION: IS IT RIGHT FOR SOCIAL WORK?

Outcomes-based education (OBE) has been very much in the news lately. Graeme Bloch’sbook The toxic mix: what’s wrong with SA schools and how to fix it (2009) has receivedwidespread coverage in the press, as have the results of the National Benching Tests Project(HESA, 2009), which demonstrated that a large number of entry-level students at tertiaryinstitutions were not sufficiently competent in academic literacy, quantitative literacy ormathematics to succeed at university without substantial additional help. There are manycomplex reasons for the problems in the South African education system, but the suitabilityoutcomes-based education to address the education challenges in South Africa has beenseriously questioned

LARGE CLASSES IN SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION: A THREAT TO THE PROFESSIONAL SOCIALISATION OF SOCIAL WORK STUDENTS?

Improved access to higher education and the increase in student numbers without a simultaneous increase in resources has given rise to numerous challenges. This reflective article considers whether large classes in social work education pose a threat to the professional socialisation of students, which requires that they internalise the values, interests, skills and knowledge of social work. Professional socialisation within social work education, the threat posed by large classes, both in the classroom and field practice education, as well as some possible solutions, are considered in this article.

WHAT DO RESIDENTS OF INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS THINK SOCIAL WORKERS SHOULD DO: VOICES FROM BHAMBAYI

In 1992 the Centre for Social Work at the University of Natal established a community-based student unit at Bhambayi, an informal settlement some 25 kilometres north of the Durban city centre. Senior social work students, under the supervision of a member of the academic staff, offer a much needed social work service to this unique community. Students offer a variety of social work services. Individual casework services focus primarily on helping people to access grants and pensions and on specialist services for epilepsy, mental illness and mental handicaps. Child abuse, custody disputes and relationship problems are also dealt with. A children’s club provides a weekly meeting for primary school children and offers them the opportunity to socialise, learn arts and crafts, and to develop life skills. Community education programmes have been very successful, with the community participating enthusiastically in fun days, clean-up days and awareness programmes

The multiple temporalities of changeful organizational practice

The existing literature on organizational practice tends to underplay the influence of changeful agentic actions in strategic processes. Questions about how people exercise agency, and what types of actions might produce various types of result, remain significantly under-examined. Taking a discursive approach informed by Pragmatist thinking, we develop a theoretical argument that integrates managerial talk, agentic action, and temporality, and we extend this empirically by drawing on real-time talk in managers’ meetings. This paper contributes a multi-temporal perspective on organizational practice that weaves together the fleeting actions performed by managers’ talk, emergent sequences of actions, and retrospective reconstructions of the meanings of these actions

Mental health legislation: does it protect the rights of people with mental health problems?

The International Federation of Social Work places a concern with human rights and social justice at the core of its definition of social work. Social work values are based on “respect for the equality, dignity and worth of all people” (IFSW, 2000), and social work practice has a special concern for vulnerable and oppressed people. People with mental health problems are amongst the most vulnerable members of society and in South Africa they comprise a considerable proportion of our society. According to the South African Stress and Health Survey (Herman, Steyn, Seedat, Heeringa, Moonal & Williams, 2009), the lifetime prevalence for any mental health problems in South Africa is 30.3% and neuropsychiatric disorders rank third in their contribution to the burden of disease in South Africa (Bradshaw, Norman & Schneider, 2007).Department of HE and Training approved lis

Pragmatism : a lived and living philosophy. What can it offer to contemporary organization theory?

In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naïve and philosophically passé, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field of organization studies. Pragmatism is especially relevant to those organizational scholars who are concerned with understanding the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life. The chapter lays out the historical development of Pragmatism, recognizing the originating contributions of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Although each of these writers developed unique philosophical positions, their ideas are all permeated by four key themes: experience, inquiry, habit and transaction. The interplay between these themes informs a temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and re-constructed through experimental and reflexive processes of social engagement. We then use organizational learning theory as an example to illustrate the relevance of these four themes, contrasting the anti-dualistic stance of Pragmatism with the work of Argyris and Schön. Finally we turn to consider Weick’s organizing and sensemaking, suggesting that Pragmatism offers three potential foci for further development of these theories, namely: continuity of past and future in the present; the transactional nature of social agency; and reflexivity in social practices. Similarly we see potential for Pragmatism to productively inform the theorizing of other organizational practices such as identity work, strategy work, emotion work and idea work

Studies on the human testis in vitro

The obligatory role of pituitary luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) in the control of testicular function is well established. However there is increasing experimental evidence, largely in the rat, that quantitatively normal spermatogenesis not only requires an adequate local supply of testosterone but also the complex interactions between the various cellular components within the seminiferous tubules and interstitial compartments of the testis. The critical role of paracrine mechanisms in the testis may be reflected by the defective spermatogenesis in idiopathic male infertility where systemic levels of LH, FSH and testosterone are normal or elevated. Thus to further our understanding of the hormonal control of spermatogenesis and to define possible aetiological mechanisms in the infertile man, the study of paracrine mechanisms in the human testis is of paramount importance.The approach to study paracrine mechanisms in the human testis was to establish in vitro techniques whereby individual components of the testis were isolated and specific functional markers defined so that their subsequent interaction could be further studied in vitro. At the same time, the delineation of these 'local' parameters were related to the overall functional states of the testis as defined by circulating levels of LH, FSH, testosterone and the histological assessment of spermatogenesis.Testes were obtained at orchidectomy for prostatic carcinoma. Methods were established to examine the effect of intratesticular levels of testosterone and systemic levels of LH, FSH and testosterone on quantitative measures of spermatogenesis. For this purpose a simple iii technique which involved enumeration of spermatid nuclei in fixed testicular homogenates to determine daily sperm production was adopted. Daily sperm production in this group of ageing testes was generally lower than has been observed previously for younger men. Although intratesticular levels of testosterone varied widely there was no indication of an intratesticular deficiency of testosterone as a critical factor in subnormal spermatogenesis in the ageing testis.Inhibin, a peptide marker of Sertoli cell function was measured in human testicular extracts by bio- and radioimmunoassay. The relationship observed between FSH and both inhibin bioactivity and immunoactivity imply that the role of inhibin in the testis may be somewhat different to the classical concept of FSH feedback.A technique for the routine isolation of human Leydig cells was established. Human Leydig cells purified by Percoll density centrifugation were highly responsive to hCG, although sensitivity and receptor number were significantly lower compared to the rat. This system was used to test for the effects of putative paracrine factors on human Leydig cell function.In conclusion, a number of in vitro techniques have been established and validated which provide a basis for future investigation of seminiferous tubule and Leydig cell function in the human testis