Suchergebnisse

This unique Reader traces the changing fortunes of community development through a selection of readings from key writers.

This book, written by three well-known educators and researchers in the social policy and development field, explores the ways in which front-line professionals, working with communities, identify and address the dilemmas inherent in the current policy context

This book, written by three well-known educators and researchers in the social policy and development field, explores the ways in which front-line professionals, working with communities, identify and address the dilemmas inherent in the current policy context.

This article identifies historical connections between adult learning, popular education and the emergence of the public sphere in Europe, exploring potential implications for adult learning and community development, drawing upon research evaluating programmes to promote community-based learning for active citizenship in UK. The research findings illustrate the relevance of the global and indeed the regional levels, when addressing concerns with active citizenship, locally. The article then moves on to examine experiences of global citizen advocacy coalitions, experiences from which participants have been drawing differing lessons about global citizenship. Finally, the conclusions raise questions about the scope for adult learning and community development in the current policy context, shaped so significantly by neo-liberal agendas. Social movements in general and popular education movements, more specifically, would seem to have vital roles to play, facilitating adult learning for critical democratic engagement with the structures of governance, locally and beyond, internationally.

English
A commitment to public service reform has been a guiding theme of Labour administrations in Britain since 1997. These modernisation policies and practices formed the context for our research, using psychosocial approaches to analyse the contradictory impacts of modernisation agendas on social development workers' motivations, professional values and the ways in which they identified and addressed ethical dilemmas in their work. Professionals responded to modernisation agendas in varying ways. While some welcomed the changes, others raised concerns, posing questions for the future about the potential impact on the motivations and values of the next generation of public service professionals.

Abstract There has been considerable recent discussion of the impact of public service reforms on the work ethics and motivations of public service workers. In this article we draw upon recent research on the ethical dilemmas facing regeneration workers in order to look more closely at the role of values in the working lives of public service professionals. Focusing on the commitment to social justice, we argue that such values find expression in two interlinked ways, as something workers have and as a process of giving value to different goods. Our research reveals that while both aspects of values are rooted in people's life experiences the second dimension is more contingent and relational. While public service reforms appear to have less impact upon workers' pregiven values, they can and do have an impact on the way in which these values find expression in attachment to different goods. To understand the effect of such reform processes on workers' motivations we therefore need a more complex conceptual framework than that provided by either simple public sector ethos/private sector ethos distinctions or by models of economic individualism offered by writers such as Julian Le Grand.