Jumped or pushed: what motivates NHS staff to set up a social enterprise?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the motivations behind public sector spin outs, focusing on the Right to Request policy, which enabled NHS staff to set up their own social enterprises to deliver healthcare services.\ud \ud Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on empirical data gathered from 16 in-depth interviews with individuals who had led a Right to Request proposal.\ud \ud Findings – Motivations to spin out of the NHS into a social enterprise were often “empathetic” in nature, built around the good of the service for staff and users. Alongside this, some felt “pushed” out of the NHS as a result of government restructuring policy, with social enterprise offering the only hope to survive as an organisation.\ud \ud Research limitations/implications – The study captures a particular point in time and there may be other perspectives that have not been included.\ud \ud Social implications – The paper is of use to academics, policy makers and practitioners. It provides an important contribution in thinking about how to motivate public sector staff, especially those from a health profession, to consider spinning out into social enterprises.\ud \ud Originality/value – The paper is the first to look at the motivations of healthcare spin outs through the Right to Request programme. The findings are related to previous literature on social entrepreneurship within public sector settings.\u

Residential Instability and the McKinney-Vento Homeless Children and Education Program: What We Know, Plus Gaps in Research

Reviews the literature on the effects of homelessness and residential instability on academic performance and describes the program designed to mitigate them. Calls for better data collection on the affected children's outcomes and the program's impact

Making water privatisation illegal: new laws in Netherlands and Uruguay

Both Uruguay and Netherlands are legislating to make privatisation of water illegal. This report describes the processes and discusses the context of international laws

Pedestrian circulations: Urban ethnography, the mobilities paradigm and outreach work

This article considers the intersection of urban ethnography, Interactionism and the mobilities paradigm. In its course, we develop a discussion of mobilities as a social order, replete with constraints, conditions and contradictions, in dialogue with Goffman’s understanding of interaction order and, more specifically, his remarks on territories and social relations. We draw on ethnographic work undertaken with a team of ‘outreach’ professionals tasked to care for the street homeless in the UK city of Cardiff. The team enact their duty of care through a repeated patrolling of the city centre, in the course of which they aim to encounter clients and engage them in the provision of immediate services and in planning for support that might meet their needs in the longer term. Outreach workers are street-level bureaucrats then, in a literal sense; they work out of doors and on the move, and lack the sureties of office space – their clients, for their part, lack the sureties of fixed abode. In this context, outreach workers must move through and make use of everyday city space, as they find it; they must also find their clients – searching them out repeatedly, wherever they might turn out to be. The article describes searching and patrol as distinctive mobility practices, and combines this description with reflections on ways to move beyond the sedentary tendency in Goffman’s (and others’) work. We close by recommending the everyday as locus of inquiry for considerations of the future city and, indeed, for directions of future travel for a mobilities-oriented street-level ethnographic inquiry

Mobilities at work: care, repair, movement and a fourfold typology

In this article, we make a conceptual and typological contribution to studies of work and mobility and mobile work. We do so by describing the physical, pedestrian mobilities of a team of care workers as they look out for homeless clients in the UK city of Cardiff. Conceptually, and in conclusion, we engage with Goffman’s essay, published in Asylums, on the ‘vicissitudes of the tinkering trades’ and consider the ways in which mobility further and differently complicates already difficult care work. By way of this one empirical case – drawn from a sustained ethnographic engagement with the team – we develop a fourfold typology. We intend this typology as something to be tried out, put to use and shared across different work settings. We offer it as a means of illustrating the ways in which mobility and work and the work of movement might relate to one another. And also how work, and care work in particular, and movement are differently figured in relation to the environment. We also intend the typology as a means of developing a conceptual distinction between (work) practices that take place on the move and mobile (work) practices proper

Are your lights off? Using problem frames to diagnose system failures

This paper reports on our experience of investigating the role of software systems in the power blackout that affected parts of the United States and Canada on 14 August 2003. Based on a detailed study of the official report on the blackout, our investigation has aimed to bring out requirements engineering lessons that can inform development practices for dependable software systems. Since the causes of failures are typically rooted in the complex structures of software systems and their world contexts, we have deployed and evaluated a framework that looks beyond the scope of software and into its physical context, directing attention to places in the system structures where failures are likely to occur. We report that (i) Problem Frames were effective in diagnosing the causes of failures and documenting the causes in a schematic and accessible way, and (ii) errors in addressing the concerns of biddable domains, model building problems, and monitoring problems had contributed to the blackout

Rethinking Leadership: The Changing Role of Principal Supervisors

In the fall of 2012, the Council of the Great City Schools launched a two-part study of the ways principal supervisors are selected, supported, and evaluated in major school districts across the country. The first part involved a survey administered to district staff serving as principal supervisors in the fall of 2012. The second part of the study involved site visits to the six districts participating in The Wallace Foundation's Principal Pipeline Initiative -- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Denver Public Schools, Gwinnett County Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, the New York City Department of Education, and Prince George's County Public Schools. This report provides a summary of findings from both the survey and site visits. Part I presents a description of the organizational structure and general features of the various principal supervisory systems, including the roles, selection, deployment, staffing, professional development, and evaluation of principal supervisors, as well as the preparation, selection, support, and evaluation of principals. Part II provides recommendations for building more effective principal supervisory systems. Based on the survey results and observations from the site visits, these recommendations identify those structures and practices that are most likely to result in stronger school leaders and higher student achievement

Charge dissipative dielectric for cryogenic devices

A Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) is disclosed comprising a pair of resistively shunted Josephson junctions connected in parallel within a superconducting loop and biased by an external direct current (dc) source. The SQUID comprises a semiconductor substrate and at least one superconducting layer. The metal layer(s) are separated by or covered with a semiconductor material layer having the properties of a conductor at room temperature and the properties of an insulator at operating temperatures (generally less than 100 Kelvins). The properties of the semiconductor material layer greatly reduces the risk of electrostatic discharge that can damage the device during normal handling of the device at room temperature, while still providing the insulating properties desired to allow normal functioning of the device at its operating temperature. A method of manufacturing the SQUID device is also disclosed