The changing of the guard: groupwork with people who have intellectual disabilities

This paper considers the impact of service systems on group activities. It describes an inter-professional groupwork project facilitated by a social worker and a community nurse. The project provided an emancipatory experience for a group of adults who had intellectual disabilities. The group was charged with the task of reviewing and updating the recruitment and interview processes used by a 'Learning Disability Partnership Board', when employing new support workers. The paper begins with a brief history of intellectual disability and provides a context to the underpinning philosophical belief that people should be encouraged and supported to inhabit valued social roles no matter what disability they may have. It then identifies the ways in which the sponsoring health, education and social care services impacted on the creation and development of a groupwork project. It might have been expected that the nature of the intellectual disability would have been the major influence on group process. However the paper reveals that organisational constraints had a significant impact on group functioning. Issues including, staffing budgets and transport contracts impacted on group process and function. The results of the project show how, with adequate support, people with intellectual disability can make important decisions that have long-reaching impacts on the services

Structuring of Genre Repertoire in a Virtual Research Team

Genres are considered \u201cas socially recognized types of communicative actions that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular social purposes\u201d (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994, p. 542). This paper investigates the evolution of an e-mail-based genre repertoire and questions whether it is related to the degree of complexity associated to different tasks and to the phases of group development. The analysis has been carried out by studying the case of an international research team involved in a European project that principally collaborates through e-mail and other CMC technologies in order to execute different kinds of tasks