Karen Rae Taylor Ritzer is inspired by life and her experiences. Through a lens unique to her, she observes her surroundings with the quiet intensity that only a poet understands. In a second collection of poems, Ritzer reflects on diverse topics that include the familiarity and trust that comes with a lasting love, times of indecision or strife, the darker side of the human mind, two friends who drifted apart, the insights gathered from the blessing of growing old, the dawn that creeps in again after a long night, the lessons learned during a card game, and much more. Poetically Speaking is a volume of free verse that lyrically explores many subjects and emotions as a woman vividly reflects on her personal experiences, others around her, and life itself.
Karen Rae Taylor Ritzer is inspired by life and her experiences. Through a lens unique to her, she observes her surroundings with the quiet intensity that only a poet understands. In a second collection of poems, Ritzer reflects on diverse topics that include the familiarity and trust that comes with a lasting love, times of indecision or strife, the darker side of the human mind, two friends who drifted apart, the insights gathered from the blessing of growing old, the dawn that creeps in again after a long night, the lessons learned during a card game, and much more. Poetically Speaking is a volume of free verse that lyrically explores many subjects and emotions as a woman vividly reflects on her personal experiences, others around her, and life itself.
Social work has always been a contested activity and its status as an academic discipline remains uncertain. There is currently renewed interest in the theoretical and research dimensions of social work, at a time when significant changes in the broad social, political and economic context in which practice takes place require a re-evaluation of social work's role and a re-examination of its identity. This timely book brings together leading social work academics to examine the state of social work at the beginning of the 21st century. With their focus on the relationships between research, theory and practice, they reflect critically on the nature of social work as a discipline in higher education and the importance of this to the profession as a whole. The book represents an exploratory conversation among social work academics about the current state and future aspirations of the discipline and the profession. It aims to stimulate wider debate about the dominant constraints and opportunities for social work in the 21st century.
Immersion is about the extreme sport of marathon swimming. Drawing on extensive (auto)ethnographic data, Immersion explores the embodied and social processes of becoming a marathon swimmer and investigates how social belonging is produced and policed. Using marathon swimming as a lens, this foundation provides the basis for an exploration of what constitutes the 'good' body in contemporary neoliberal society across a range of sites including charitable swimming, fatness, gender and health. The book argues that the self-representations of marathon swimming are at odds with its lived realities, and that this reflects the entrenched and limited discursive resources available for thinking about the sporting body in the wider social and cultural context. The book is aimed primarily at readers at undergraduate level and upwards with an interest in sociology, the sociology of the body, the sociology of sport, gender and the sociology of health and illness.
Learning More About It Exercises SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS: THE ECONOMY Essay 20 Welfare Is Ruining This Country A frequently expressed opinion when talk turns to welfare reform is that too many people are on the dole and too many recipients have other options. In this essay, we review some of the least understood dimensions of welfare and explore exactly where welfare moneys are going. Learning More About It Exercises Essay 21 Immigrants Are Ruining This Nation?Why don?t you go back where you came from?? This angry cry seems to be getting more and more familiar as the United States faces the highest levels of immigration in its history. Is immigration ruining this nation? This essay reviews the historical impact and future trends of immigration in the United States. Learning More About It Exercises SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS: MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY Essay 22 Technology Is Taking Over Our Lives This essay examines new communication technologies and explores their role in contemporary social life. We begin by considering the ways in which technology has changed the development of community and intimacy. We explore as well the impact of new technologies on our definitions of social relations, social actors, and the public and private spheres. Learning More About It Exercises SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS: EDUCATION Essay 23 Education Is the Great Equalizer Conventional wisdom tells us that educating the masses will bring equal opportunities to people of all races, ethnicities, and genders. In this essay, we explore the truth of this claim and review the progress we have made in bringing a quality education to all. Learning More About It Exercises SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS: RELIGION Essay 24: We Are One Nation Under God God bless America ... it?s an invocation frequently heard across the U.S. Yet, in light of our country?s long standing commitment to the separation of church and state, God bless America is also a prayer that can make some uncomfortable. Are we united or divided with regard to the place of God in our nation? This essay explores the issue. Learning More About It Exercises Conclusion: Why Do Conventional Wisdoms Persist? The Positive Functions of Conventional Wisdom Conventional Wisdom as Knowledge In Closing Learning More About It References Glossary / Index.
This book scrutinizes how contemporary practices of security have come to rely on many different translations of security, risk, and danger. Institutions of national security policies are currently undergoing radical conceptual and organisational changes, and this book presents a novel approach for how to study and politically address the new situation. Complex and uncertain threat environments, such as terrorism, climate change, and the global financial crisis, have paved the way for new forms of security governance that have profoundly transformed the ways in which threats are handled today. Crucially, there is a decentralisation of the management of security, which is increasingly handled by a broad set of societal actors that previously were not considered powerful in the conduct of security affairs. This transformation of security knowledge and management changes the meaning of traditional concepts and practices, and calls for investigation into the many meanings of security implied when contemporary societies manage radical dangers, risks, and threats. It is necessary to study both what these meanings are and how they developed from the security practices of the past. Addressing this knowledge gap, the book asks how different ideas about threats, risk, and dangers meet in the current practices of security, broadly understood, and with what political consequences. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, anthropology, risk studies, science and technology studies and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at: https://www.routledge.com/Translations-of-Security-A-Framework-for-the-Study-of-Unwanted-Futures/Berling-Gad-Petersen-Waever/p/book/9781032007090 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Bedtime is a time to slow down after a long day and get ready to dream. In our dreams, we can go anywhere and do anything. Would you like to go to Disneyland? No need to fly on a plane; use your arms to fly instead. After Disneyland, why not go to far off Australia? Then, visit the North Pole and watch the Northern Lights. See things you’ve never seen when you close your eyes at night. In sleep, let your imagination run wild and visit amazing places all around the world. In the morning, you’ll wake up rested with wonderful stories to tell.
This title was first published in 2002. Call centres are a type of service work that stand at the interface between corporations and consumers. They exemplify more general tendencies present within service work. They also have a particular public image - being associated in the public mind with low skilled and regimented work. This volume presents contributions from British and German management academics and industrial sociologists based on primary research on call centres in both countries. The contributions cover the genesis and development of call centres as a new form of organization, or indeed a new industry; the rationalization and control strategies of organizations that establish call centres; and the nature of service work and service interactions. The findings of this volume challenge the common public image of call centres and finds that call centre employment is in fact very diverse. So, for example, skilled advising and consulting services are often performed over the phone. Along with the sometimes skilled nature of call centre work, work organization and working conditions vary as well. The text also seeks to contrast the British and German experience of call centre work and employment. In Germany clerical work has traditionally been embedded in the specific traditions of co-operative industrial relations that define the German model. Call centres present a strategic challenge to this model, and the expansion of call centres has been at the forefront of changes aimed at making employment more flexible in Germany. This work offers a choice of country cases, which permit a comparison of service employment within both a liberal capitalist and a socially embedded economy.
The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism—and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practices—as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions—as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically "correct" route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the "the product" in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays "the work of communication" as simultaneously about how work in the "new economy" revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this book’s goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems.
Over the past two decades, rates of adult and childhood obesity in the developed world have risen sharply. By the year 2000, 65% of the United States population were overweight, 30% of these obese. Whilst medical treatment has tended to focus on individual habits of diet and exercise, this approach does little to account for globally increasing levels of obesity, and the external, environmental factors that may be responsible. This in-depth study assembles the evidence for a geographical explanation of current obesity trends, and is the first work to examine the ways in which environment and living conditions promote an imbalance of energy intake over energy expenditure. The book calls upon the expertise of geographers, nutritionists, epidemiologists, sociologists and public health researchers, resulting in a broad, multidisciplinary analysis of this important health issue. Cover graphic designed by Georgia Witten-Sage.
The Routledge Handbook of Social Care Work Around the World provides both a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of the current research in this subject. It is the first handbook to cover social care work research from around the world, including both low- and middle-income countries as well as high income countries. Each of the 22 chapters are written by experts on long-term care services, particularly for older people and cover key issues and debates, based on research evidence, on social care work in a specific country. They look at perspectives of social care work from the macro level: the structural conditions for long-term care, including demographic challenges and the long-term care policy, the meso level: the level of provider organizations and intermediaries, and the micro level: views of care workers, care users, and unpaid informal carers. Furthermore, they discuss a number of topics central to discussions of care work including marketization, personalization policies, policy implementation under austerity, the provision of social care work whether through public services, or private arrangements, or mixed types, funding, the feminization of social care and the new role that technology, and robots can play in care work. By drawing together leading scholars from around the world, this book provides an up to the minute snapshot of current scholarship as well as signposting several fruitful avenues for future research. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, social workers, social policy-makers and human service professionals.
First published in 1999, in the light of recent moves towards deprofessionalisation and instrumentalism, Karen Lyons has conducted extensive research into the challenges facing social work training as a higher education discipline. Here, these challenges are located in a discussion of wider changes in both higher education and the personal social services, and are also linked to debates about professional education and the nature of knowledge. The analysis is based on original data and includes reference to pedagogical and cultural factors, and to internal and external policies which might make social work viable or vulnerable in the higher education context. This multi-disciplinary perspective reflects a characteristic of social work study itself - a quality which might be seen as either problematic or as a strength. The book concludes that, while the future scale and form of the social work subject area lie partly outside the control of social work educators, they have a key role to play in the development of the discipline. This includes the promotion of research, which should underpin the creation of knowledge and inform professional practice in the changing field of personal social services.
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