This article explores trust in children&rsquo ; s relationships with professionals in the context of safeguarding concerns. With exception, existing research with children about trust in professionals often fails to unpick trust. Using sociological conceptualisations of trust, most often considered in relation to adults, this article unravels this complex concept. It arrives at a conception of trust as socially situated, an attribute of relationships, and a combination of interpretation (knowledge and experience) and faith. This conceptualization of trust is examined in the context of interview accounts from children that were aged 8&ndash ; 10 in an English primary school. Interviews invited their perspectives on three fictional vignettes about peer conflict, domestic abuse, and child sexual abuse. My analysis, although small-scale, argues that focusing on the process of trust in children&rsquo ; s professional relationships and the social, cultural, political, and relational contexts that shape this process, is a lucrative way to gain enhanced understandings of how trust is generated and what facilitates and undermines trust. It sheds light on children&rsquo ; s interpretations of existing relationships and imagined interactions with professionals, revealing the knowledge that they hold and what they do not yet, or cannot know, and how this knowledge (or lack of) influences their trust. This analysis is socially situated attending to children&rsquo ; s biographies, which offers insights that provide good grounds for improving children&rsquo ; s relationships with professionals.
Abstract OBJECTIVE Analyzing the relationships among professionals and between professionals with managers and users based on the user embracement analyzer. METHOD A qualitative study incorporating the theoretical-methodological reference of institutional analysis. The data were produced through focus groups and organized from transcription, transposition and reconstitution. Seventeen (17) focus group sessions were conducted involving six municipalities and health professionals from various backgrounds. RESULTS 137 professionals participated in this study. User embracement has been carried out with the aim to organize spontaneous demand. Doctors have not been directly involved, although they have the final say. Intermediate nursing deals with the users and nurses perform important negotiation work among the network sectors. The receptionists and the community agents develop the first approach to the users, forwarding them to nursing to negotiate the service. Managers hope to avoid complaints by attending everyone. Users take advantage of party politics and of the media for services when there is no access. CONCLUSION User embracement is an analyzer, since it produces visibility and readability of the relations being produced in health services, and when analyzed can lead to denaturalizing these actions.
Debates over the relationship between professional practice, professional standards and professional identity have been a feature of Australian and international educational and political discourse for the last two decades (Ball, 1997; Bodman, Taylor & Morris, 2012; Doecke, Howie & Sawyer, 2006; Power, 1994; Sachs 2001). The discourse is replete with neo-liberal claims about educational reform that supposedly benefits everyone. It invariably includes appealing rhetoric about greater transparency, democratic participation, individual choice, and the freedom for individuals within the system to express themselves openly. Much research has shown that these claims are belied by the increasingly dominant regimes of performativity (Ball, 2003) and audit cultures (Avis, 2003; Power, 1994) that seek to standardise and narrow educators' professional practice. In their quest for professional recognition, teachers and teaching communities are obliged to engage with the twin banner of standardisation and accountability as a measure of whether young Australians are meeting important educational outcomes. Yet, the literature shows that teachers in Australia have engaged with their working practices in different ways (see Gannon, 2012; Parr, 2010). This inquiry investigates how a small number of (mostly) experienced educators in Australia have engaged with this rhetoric and this neo-liberal policy making. It explores and reflects on the actions and professional choices they have made in their day to day professional lives, and the attitudes and emotions that have underpinned these actions. Adopting institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005, 2006) as an important dimension to this research, I map out how educators, individuals and groups act and are acted upon across time and space, drawing attention to the complex negotiations they undertake in their particular educational sites. The study involves interviews with twelve secondary school teachers (most of them with more than 20 years' experience, but some beginner teachers, too) and school leaders in Melbourne and overseas. A multifaceted narrative, this thesis is also informed by references to literature in the fields of philosophy, autobiography (Florio-Ruane, 200 I), poetry, and literary fiction as well as the expected literature in educational theory. One element that draws this perhaps disparate range of literature together is my interest, as both a literature teacher and a researcher, in language. Language, with its creative and educational possibilities, and also its power to control and contain, is centre-stage in this study. Through close attention to the language I use, I make explicit the impact on the research of my own professional and personal background (Mackenzie & Knipe, 2006) and this same close attention to language enables me to explore how my activities, feelings and experiences hooked me into "extended social relations" (Smith, 2004, p. 5) in my work in the classroom and in conducting this research. I explore these institutional relations and practices reflexively through journal entries and autobiographically as part of the "memory work" of this study (Haug et aI., 1987). 3 A key focus of this study is to explore the extent to which emotion is an important dimension of the intellectual, critical and relational practices of teachers. This exploration is underpinned by socio-cultural (e.g., Ball, 2003) and dialogic (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981) theory. I challenge traditional psychologistic studies that see emotion located in the individual, a 'natural' phenomenon that one must learn to 'control' (e.g., Boler, 1999; Rose, 1998). This study critically and reflexively teases out some ofthe consequences of practitioners engaging in their work, rather, with a degree of "emotionality" (Denzin, 1984). Expression of feelings may often be considered 'inappropriate' in neo-liberallandscapes and political agendas that are pre-occupied with standardised learning outcomes and professional performance (see Zembylas, 2003). When teachers repress their feeling, they learn - sometimes at great emotional cost - how to self-regulate emotions and know which ones may be expressed and which may not. While this study shows some examples of this, it also shows the potential for the relational and emotional dimensions of teaching to re-form subjectivities and 're-embody' professional practice. The research accentuates the diverse local, contextual and social factors that shape teachers' everyday work in ways that challenge neo-liberal politics of standardisation, regulation and technicism. It illustrates how in any open and democratic society the social world can be "a site of debate" (Smith, 2004, p. 27), opening up for engagement with all members of a professional community the mUltiple views and intellectual positions that exist in that community. As the narratives from the participants in this study reveal, in educational settings which understand and appreciate the complex interplay of intellectual, emotional and relational dimensions of teachers' work, teachers are best able to commit to a vision of participating, caring and learning. They can forge trusting professional relationships and collaboratively work together to create rich and robust professional practice and professional learning that ultimately benefit their students and the futures they hope to build.
The Polish political and media systems changed dramatically after the 2015 parliamentary elections. The Law and Justice Party gained power and started to restructure the conditions for political communication – journalists, press secretaries and politicians. However, despite structural and organisational changes within public service media, journalists keep working and reporting about political events. This chapter presents the relationships between Polish journalists and their political sources – both politicians and press secretaries. The interviews show a mutual dependency between politics and the press, where both sides recognise the need for formal as well as informal relationships. The nature of the relationship varies with the political climate: when the political situation becomes complicated, politicians become less accessible and press secretaries block the information flow. As a result, journalists in Poland prefer direct contact with politicians and/or other complementary sources of information. The respondents further emphasised the need for a professional relationship and adhering to professional norms. ; Go to the full book to find a version of this chapter tagged for accessibility.
Young informal carers (YICs) are non-professional young individuals providing care and support in various forms, usually to immediate family members, afflicted from a diverse range of both long- and short-term health conditions. Although there is significant knowledge about the information needs of adult carers in general, information needs and information seeking characteristics of the YICs community is understudied and are different. This study aims to identify the information needs of young informal carers communicated over the internet and understanding their information seeking characteristics through a three-stage qualitative content analysis of posts written by YICs on two notable internet forums. The analysis of 323 posts dated between March 2010 and April 2019 finds YICs needs are categorised by two types of online expression of needs, situational and information. Situational needs are illustrations of current difficult conditions and information needs are direct requests for information. Under situational and information needs, we identify four types of needs expressed: personal and professional growth, health (self and caree), finance and relationships. Additionally, the findings indicate 94.36% posts in the sample as situational needs, which depict the uncertainty experienced by YICs under caring circumstances. The findings can assist government organisations and charities by improving the indexing of advice pages of their websites appropriate to the young informal carers' search words, better availability of information and advertising, in addition to building quality mobile applications or digital support tools.
The study explored principal-teacher relationships in four Junior High schools in the Sekyere South District of Ashanti in Ghana. One of the things that government, policy-makers and educators in Ghana rarely or never discuss is the value and significance of human connections - the relationships in schools. The focus of the study was to uncover the significance of developing and sustaining a high-quality relationship between principals and teachers for effective leadership and performance. Again, the study projects a broader conception of leadership, one that shifts away from the traditional thinking approach where the figure-head is seen as ultimately responsible for the school outcomes, to involve all staff members as a collective responsibility pro-cess. The qualitative case study adopted semi-structured one-to-one interviews to collect data from one principal and a teacher from each of the four schools selected. The data was analyzed through a content analysis approach. The results revealed that a quality exchange relationship between principals and teachers has a significant influence on cooperation, commitment and performance to both principals and teachers. The results also showed that working together in a cordial relationship and in a more democratic environment brings long-lasting dividend for the school and the learners. But these vital elements are mostly hampered by the mundane procedures, dictatorial decisions, strict supervision of the directorate of education and some principals. This had not only negatively affected the principals' and teachers' work roles and exchange relationship, but teaching and learning as well. These traditional behaviors have also created fear, pressure and resentment in teachers, and prevent them from sharing innovative ideas and being committed to school activities. The interpretation of this study was purely engrained in the respondents' context. The study recommends a further study in a larger scale to ascertain the affect and effect of the results or the hypothesis revealed. Perhaps it might be good if further discussion can be done on enhancing a quality exchange relationship among principals, teachers, circuit supervisors and the directorate of education. Effective leadership occurs as a result of building a quality relationship with the leader and the led.
Organizational control and environmental influences on organizational behavior are central themes in organization studies, yet little effort has been made to bring them together. In this paper we seek to contribute to filling this gap by investigating and conceptualizing environmental influences on organizational control. The paper examines patterns of organizational control and their environmental couplings through three parallel case studies of public universities in three European countries. We provide a systematic characterization of the space of configurations of control in professional knowledge-intensive organizations along the two axes of centralization of power and formalization of social relationships. We show that environmental characteristics do matter for the contestation and selection of control models. Finally, we unpack and conceptualize the synergetic influence of three environmental characteristics (institutional pressures, resource environment, and external social relationships) as providing sources of legitimacy and power for specific control regimes.
In: Broadhurst , K & Holt , K 2010 , ' Partnership and the limits of procedure: Prospects for relationships between parents and professionals under the new Public Law Outline ' Child and Family Social Work , vol 15 , no. 1 , pp. 97-106 . DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2206.2009.00648.x
The beginning and the first years of teaching can be viewed in various ways. For example, the image of a triangle with the person's teaching in one of its vertices. As a person, the novice teacher has a particular vision of his work and a sense of mission or task. The beginning teacher feels more capable in some areas than others and with a confidence variable with respect to its initial preparation (although this perception may change with the first experiments). From the other sides of the triangle together towards this new professional messages that come from the context of work and messages of social and political context relating to education, quality or otherwise of their initial preparation and what they should or should not make teachers. In their place of work, in concrete form, is facing demands or conflicts, receives support, and asks questions that do not always have the answer. The beginning teacher welcomes, rejected, interpreted and reinterpreted these experiences as a sort of re-shaping the professional identity that maybe he thought he had acquired in their initial training. In this, no different from other professionals faced with his first work experiences, but those living in more complex by the interweaving of relationships that will demand accountability with students, parents, peers, authorities and his own social environment of friends, and possible by the diversity of expectations regarding their work, both personal and from others.
A rich literature explores the potential benefits of public management directly engaged with the public to develop and implement programs with emphasis on the enhanced quality of public programs and the strengthening of democratic practices. Yet the two dominant models of public management over the past century have distanced public managers and the public. The "principal agent model" emphasizes direct accountability to elected officials, while the "expertise" model emphasizes the application of professional judgment on behalf of the public. The important dimensions of democratic governance—direct accountability to elected officials, the exercise of professional judgment, and direct public participation—are not mutually exclusive. This paper develops an alternative model of public management, "inclusive management," that demonstrates all three concerns.
Building professional learning communities (PLC) has become a widely recognized strategy for school development and for student achievement. Four Finnish comprehensive schools were identified as being ready to be PLCs in a previous quantitative study, and the purpose of this study was to investigate practices of PLCs in these schools. In this paper, we used data from qualitative multiple-case study, which investigated practices of leadership, culture, teacher collaboration, professional learning, and development. The results showed that the principals had played the main role in the progression of schools as PLCs. Principals were described as visionary leaders who had started positive progression, shared the leadership, and created commitment to common goals. The results indicated also that a change of leaders can have a positive effect. Decision-making processes were participative, inclusive, democratic, and collaborative, aiming for a satisfactory level of consensus. Relationships among staff were reported as being based on mutual trust and openness, and members were encouraged to express their opinions. Common responsibility of students, peer support, encouragement, and co-teaching were practiced. Co-teaching practices were identified as an effective form of collaborative work-embedded professional learning which is related to the core principles of professional learning communities. Structural conditions were reported as barriers to schools' development as PLCs. ; Peer reviewed
AIMS: To reflect on the situation of nurse managers, examining their professional relationships and additional working duties during the second COVID‐19 wave. DESIGN: Cross‐sectional online survey with open questions. METHODS: Nurse managers from different healthcare institutions, for example, hospitals and nursing homes, were included. Data collection took place from November 2020 to March 2021. Open questions were analysed with qualitative content analysis. RESULT: In total, 321 managers took part. With regard to professional relationships, four main themes were identified: cooperation, cohesion, communication and consequences. While cooperation and cohesion in the nursing and the interprofessional team were predominantly considered positive, communication was seen as challenging. Additional work duties arose in relation to fulfilling regulatory requirements, managing personnel and carrying out both organizational and informational tasks. Consequences of the pandemic were mentioned in two thematic categories (professional relations and additional work duties). Participants referred to a loss of image, a reduction in job satisfaction and mental stress. CONCLUSION: The regulation of certain tasks by the central authority, such as the enrolment of employees to manage the use of personal protective equipment, would make the managers' duties simpler. This would enable them to direct their attention towards their teams and provide necessary support in other parts of their profession. IMPACT: What problem did the study address? Nursing managers are important members of the nursing team and faced particular challenges during the pandemic. Nevertheless, their perspectives are rarely presented in research. What were the main findings? Overall, communication was perceived as good, and cohesion was strengthened during the pandemic. However, heavy burdens were placed on nursing managers due to the numerous additional tasks. On whom will the research have an impact? Facility managers and government representatives are ...
What would a professional development experience rooted in the philosophy, principles, and practices of restorative justice look and feel like? This article describes how such a professional development project was designed to implement restorative justice principles and practices into schools in a proactive, relational and sustainable manner by using a comprehensive dialogic, democratic peacebuilding pedagogy. The initiative embodied a broad, transformative approach to restorative justice, grounded in participating educators' identifying, articulating and applying personal core values. This professional development focused on diverse educators, their relationships, and conceptual understandings, rather than on narrow techniques for enhancing student understanding or changing student behaviour. Its core practice involved facilitated critical reflexive dialogue in a circle, organized around recognizing the impact of participants' interactions on others, using three central, recurring questions: Am I honouring? Am I measuring? What message am I sending? Situated in the context of relational theory (Llewellyn, 2012), this restorative professional development approach addresses some of the challenges in implementing and sustaining transformative citizenship and peacebuilding pedagogies in schools. A pedagogical portrait of the rationale, design, and facilitation experience illustrates the theories, practices, and insights of the initiative, called Relationships First: Implementing Restorative Justice From the Ground Up.
The post-9/11 US torture program brought attention to the critical roles of health professionals generally and of psychologists more particularly in the modern administration of torture. Over a decade of controversy in the American Psychological Association (APA) and an independent investigation finding APA collusion with the Bush administration's torture and coercive interrogation programs led to 2015 policies restricting the activities of psychologists in national security interrogations and illegal detention sites like Guantanamo. This controversy expanded to evaluation of a broader set of issues regarding the ethical roles of psychologists in furthering military and intelligence operations, or what has become known as operational psychology. Controversy over the extent to which operational psychology activities are consistent with psychological ethics has expanded since 2015 with critics calling for policies restraining operational psychologists from involvement in activities that cause greater than trivial unstipulated harm, lack informed consent, or are absent plausible independent ethical monitoring (due, for instance to information classification). Operational psychologists have pushed back against any constraints on their actions other than US law and government regulations. This debate also raises a broader issue, are there limitations on the extent to which we as members of democratic societies can tolerate the use of psychological science and expertise to manipulate unwitting people?
The post-9/11 US torture program brought attention to the critical roles of health professionals generally and of psychologists more particularly in the modern administration of torture. Over a decade of controversy in the American Psychological Association (APA) and an independent investigation finding APA collusion with the Bush administration's torture and coercive interrogation programs led to 2015 policies restricting the activities of psychologists in national security interrogations and illegal detention sites like Guantanamo. This controversy expanded to evaluation of a broader set of issues regarding the ethical roles of psychologists in furthering military and intelligence operations, or what has become known as operational psychology. Controversy over the extent to which operational psychology activities are consistent with psychological ethics has expanded since 2015 with critics calling for policies restraining operational psychologists from involvement in activities that cause greater than trivial unstipulated harm, lack informed consent, or are absent plausible independent ethical monitoring (due, for instance to information classification). Operational psychologists have pushed back against any constraints on their actions other than US law and government regulations. This debate also raises a broader issue, are there limitations on the extent to which we as members of democratic societies can tolerate the use of psychological science and expertise to manipulate unwitting people?
