Can I ask...? An alcohol and drug clinician’s guide to addressing family and domestic violence

There is a growing impetus for a more comprehensive approach to understanding and addressing family and domestic violence (FDV) across the broader welfare system. This includes an increased focus on prevention and the interrelationship between sectors such as alcohol and other drugs (AOD), child and family welfare, child protection and FDV. This change is reflected in a number of national policies related to the protection and wellbeing of children and the support provided to their families. This resource explores the relationship between AOD and FDV, with a focus on identifying how the AOD sector can better support clients who have co-occurring AOD and FDV issues, and minimise associated harms experienced by their children. Authors: Michael White, Ann Roche, Roger Nicholas, Caroline Long, Stefan Gruenert, Samantha Battams. Produced by the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction (NCETA) and Odyssey House Victoria (OHV)

Effective Job Search Practice in the UK's Mandatory Welfare-to-Work Programme for Youth

Administrative data from the UK’s main welfare-to-work programme for unemployed and disadvantaged youth is analysed to identify differences in practice between local delivery areas, and to assess their effects on off-welfare outcomes. The findings reveal important similarities in the nature of effective ‘work first’ practices between this programme and some US programmes, despite large differences in the welfare context and systems.

Organizational Commitment: Do Workplace Practices Matter?

Using nationally-representative linked employer-employee data for Britain this paper considers whether employers are able to influence the organizational commitment (OC) of their employees through the practices they deploy. We examine the association between OC and two broad groups of HRM practices emphasised in two different strands of the literature, namely "High-Performance Workplace Practices" (HPWPs) and practices associated with "Perceived Organizational Support" (POS). We consider their associations with mean workplace-level OC and individual employees' OC. Although employers may be able to engender greater OC on the part of their employees, the practices that do so are not those emphasized in the HPWP literature, with the exception of consultation and the involvement of employees in decision-taking. POS practices fare a little better but, again, the findings are far from unequivocal. Furthermore, those practices that are 'effective' in engendering higher OC such as tolerance of absence, recruiting on 'values' and allowing employees to make decisions, tend to have a fairly low incidence in British workplaces. There is, however, one finding which chimes with the ideas underpinning the HPWP literature, namely that there are returns to the use of practices in combination. Analyses of both mean workplace-level OC and individual employee OC find an independent positive association between OC and the deployment of multiple practices in combination. This evidence is consistent with practices having synergies, as emphasised in some of the HPWP literature.high performance, organizational commitment, perceived organizational support

The Impact of Careers Guidance for Employed Adults in Continuing Education

The validity of the matching estimator in programme evaluation depends on the completeness of the set of variables used for matching. When an attitudinal variable is relevant for the participation decision, but is either unmeasured or measured only after entry to the programme, estimates of effects may be biased or hard to interpret. This issue is investigated with data from an evaluation study of careers guidance for employed adults, which utilised the method of propensity score matching. Job satisfaction, measured shortly after entry to the programme, was found to be strongly associated with participa-tion, but may itself have been influenced by the early experience of careers guidance. Estimates of the impacts of guidance on several post-programme education and training outcomes are considered, both including and exclud-ing the job satisfaction measure from the participation model. Data experiments with adjusted values of job satisfaction are also performed. It is found that estimates of treatment effects are highly sensitive to these variants, and respond in a non-monotonic fashion. The implications for evaluation methodology are discussed.

Unions, Within-Workplace Job Cuts and Job Security Guarantees

Using data from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey 1998, this paper shows that unionisation increased the probability of within-workplace job cuts and the incidence of job security guarantees. As theory predicts, both are more prevalent among market-sector workplaces with higher union density and multi-unionism. Expectations that these effects would be more muted in the public sector were also confirmed.Job cuts, trade unions, job guarantees

HRM and Workplace Motivation: Incremental and Threshold Effects

The HRM-performance linkage often invokes an assumption of increased employee commitment to the organization and other positive effects of a motivational type. We present a theoretical framework in which motivational effects of HRM are conditional on its intensity, utilizing especially the idea of HRM 'bundling'. We then analyse the association between HRM practices and employees' organisational commitment (OC) and intrinsic job satisfaction (IJS). HRM practices have significantly positive relationships with OC and IJS chiefly at high levels of implementation, but with important distinctions between the domain-level analysis (comprising groups of practices for specific domains such as employee development) and the across-domain or HRM-system level. Findings support a threshold interpretation of the link between HRM domains and employee motivation, but at the system-level both incremental and threshold models receive some support.Human resource management, high performance, organizational commitment

Creativity, dialogue, and place: Vitebsk, the early Bakhtin and the origins of the Russian avant-garde

This paper attempts to avoid both the ‘Bakhtinology’ that has become the basis of the ‘Bakhtin industry’ in Russia and the Americanization of his work as a “a sort of New Left celebrator of popular culture” (McLemee, 1997) to argue for a radical contextual understanding a set of relationships among Bakhtin, Malevich, Chagall and others. The appreciation of a Bakhtinian notion of the inherently creative use of language is used as a basis for the idea of the creative university as the ‘dialogical university’. The paper begins by exploring the connections between Bakhtin, Malevich and Chagall to explore the ontological sociality of artistic phenomena. A small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917-1922 contribution to the birth of the Russian avant-garde. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bahktin’s Circle, Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS, all in fierce dialogue with one another made the town of Vitebsk into an artistic crucible in the early twentieth century transforming creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism and also to a social understanding of creativity itself