This book proposes what, to many professionals in the child welfare field, will appear a radically different explanation for our society's decisions to protect children from harm and for the significant drop in substantiated child abuse numbers. At the center of this conceptual and analytic approach is the contention that social outrage emanating from horrific and often sensationalized cases of child maltreatment plays a major role in CPS decision making and in child outcomes. The ebb and flow of outrage, we believe, invokes three levels of response that are consistent with patterns of the number of child maltreatment reports made to public child welfare agencies, the number of cases screened-in by these CPS agencies, the proportions of alleged cases substantiated as instances of real child abuse or neglect, and the numbers of children placed outside their homes. At the community level, outrage produces amplified surveillance and a posture of "zero-tolerance" while child protection workers, in turn, carry out their duties under a fog of "infinite jeopardy." With outrage as a driving force, child protective services organizations are forced into changes that are disjointed and highly episodic; changes which follow a course identified in the natural sciences as abrupt equilibrium changes. Through such manifestations as child safety legislation, institutional reform litigation of state child protective services agencies, massive retooling of the CPS workforce, the rise of community surveillance groups and moral entrepreneurs, and the exploitation of fatality statistics by media and politicians we find evidence of outrage at work and its power to change social attitudes, worker decisions and organizational culture. In this book, Jungian psychology intersects with the punctuated equilibrium theory to provide a compelling explanation for the decisions made by public CPS agencies to protect children.
Fifteen years ago, New Jersey became the first of over twenty states to introduce the family cap, a welfare reform policy that reduces or eliminates cash benefits for unmarried women on public assistance who become pregnant. The caps have lowered extra-marital birth rates, as intended but as Michael J. Camasso shows convincingly in this provocative book, they did so in a manner that few of the policys architects are willing to acknowledge publicly, namely by increasing the abortion rate disproportionately among black and Hispanic women.In Family Caps, Abortion, and Women of Color, Camasso (who headed up the evaluation of the nations first cap) presents the caps history from inception through implementation to his investigation and the dramatic attempts to squelch his unpleasant findings. The book is filled with devastatingly clear-cut evidence and hard-nosed data analyses, yet Camasso also pays close attention to the reactions his findings provoked in policymakers, both conservative and liberal, who were unprepared for the effects of their crude social engineering and did not want their success scrutinized too closely. Camasso argues that absent any successful rehabilitation or marriage strategies, abortion provides a viable third way for policymakers to help black and Hispanic women accumulate the social and human capital they need to escape welfare, while simultaneously appealing to liberals passion for reproductive freedom and the neoconservatives sense of social pragmatism.Camasso's conclusions will please no one along the political spectrum, making it all the more essential for them to be studied widely. A classic example of what can happen to research and the researcher when research findings become misaligned with political goals and strategies, Family Caps, Abortion and Women of Color is sure to foment a contentious but vital discussion among all who read it.
How big of a role have national cultures--the collection of values, beliefs, attitudes and preferences--played in the formation of social and economic identities? If substantial, can these identities impact work related attitudes and impact personal decision as specific as the preferred type of job or even the choice of seeking employment at all? At a time when Millennials and Generation Z'ers are facing prodigious employment challenges, it is more timely than ever to examine the ways culture, especially cultural transmission from older to younger generations facilitate (hinder) influence labor force attachment and even the work ethic itself. Caught in the Cultural Preference Net examines work-related beliefs, attitudes and preferences that characterize the value orientations of three generational families in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, India and the United States. These six countries have developed significantly different forms of capitalism ranging from the social democratic form in Sweden to the relatively unfettered, free market capitalism in the United States. Michael J. Camasso and Radha Jagannathan investigate whether these cultural and economic contexts have resulted in enduring attitude and preference structures or if these values and preferences have been changing as economic conditions in a nation have changed. These two experts focus a great deal of their attention on the roles that parents and grandparents have in socializing Millennials into the world of work and if this influence trumps the often competing influences of education, labor market and peers. The book is organized around three lines of inquiry: (1) Do some national cultures possess value orientations that are more successful than others in promoting economic opportunity? (2) Does the transmission of these value orientations demonstrate a persistence irrespective of economic conditions or are they simply the results of these conditions? (3) If a nation's value orientation does indeed impact economic opportunity, does it do so by influencing an individual's preferences? To answer this third question, Camasso and Jagannathan conduct a cross-national, multi-generational stated preference experiment--one of the very few ever attempted. The resulting book reveals substantial cultural stability across generations in some of the six capitalist democracies and substantial intergenerational change in others. The implications of this differential impact for national employment strategies are explored as are the implications for a global economy distinguished by abundant, well-paying service jobs for youth.
Fifteen years ago, New Jersey became the first of over twenty states to introduce the family cap, a welfare reform policy that reduces or eliminates cash benefits for unmarried women on public assistance who become pregnant. The caps have lowered extra-marital birth rates, as intended but as Michael J. Camasso shows convincingly in this provocative book, they did so in a manner that few of the policys architects are willing to acknowledge publicly, namely by increasing the abortion rate disproportionately among black and Hispanic women. In Family Caps, Abortion, and Women of Color, Camasso (who headed up the evaluation of the nations first cap) presents the caps history from inception through implementation to his investigation and the dramatic attempts to squelch his unpleasant findings. The book is filled with devastatingly clear-cut evidence and hard-nosed data analyses, yet Camasso also pays close attention to the reactions his findings provoked in policymakers, both conservative and liberal, who were unprepared for the effects of their crude social engineering and did not want their success scrutinized too closely. Camasso argues that absent any successful rehabilitation or marriage strategies, abortion provides a viable third way for policymakers to help black and Hispanic women accumulate the social and human capital they need to escape welfare, while simultaneously appealing to liberals passion for reproductive freedom and the neoconservatives sense of social pragmatism. Camasso's conclusions will please no one along the political spectrum, making it all the more essential for them to be studied widely. A classic example of what can happen to research and the researcher when research findings become misaligned with political goals and strategies, Family Caps, Abortion and Women of Color is sure to foment a contentious but vital discussion among all who read it.
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