Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis brought mountains of legislation and guidance to coerce or encourage people to stay at home and reduce the spread of the virus. During peak lockdown in the United Kingdom (UK) regulations defined when people could or could not leave their homes. Meanwhile guidance on social distancing advised people to stay within ‘households’. This paper explores the legislation under lockdowns in the UK from March to October 2020 and the implications for women’s gendered caring roles. The regulations and guidance assumed that households were separate units and ignored the interdependencies which exist between households and between individuals and wider society. The continuing focus in the lockdown regulations has been on households as autonomous, safe, adequate and secure. This overlooks the interdependency of human life, gendered aspects of caring and the inequalities of housing and living conditions, highlighted by feminist scholarship.
Women fare less well than men across all academic disciplines: they are less likely to be promoted, they earn less, and many more professors are men. There has, however, been little analysis to date of the experience of women in social work education, a discipline that has historically had higher representation of female staff and students. This study set out to explore women in the social work academy through a case-study of social work education in Scotland. A mixed methods approach was used, including a review of relevant literature; an online survey of women and men academics in social work education; and semi-structured interviews with female social work leaders, past and present. The study found that women in the social work academy faced the same pressures as other women in higher education; some of these pressures were also shared by men. Most significant, however, was the extent to which women in social work academia experienced twin challenges, firstly, as female academics and secondly, as female social work academics in a discipline that struggles for recognition in the academy. We conclude that this makes for a contradictory and, at times, ambiguous experience for women as they navigate the gendered academy. (199)
There has been a flurry of recent government initiatives concerning how citizens should be able to take up grievances against the state. In the fields of health and social care, people have been expected to use internal complaints procedures to resolve grievances. Research in this area suggests that there have been problems with the existing complaints procedures and there has been particular criticism of the 'second-tier' review stage in both health and social care. This has led to the introduction of more independent means of review. Different models of review have been developed in England, Wales and Scotland. Based on a review of recent policy documents and legislative instruments, this article looks at recent changes and proposals and considers the relative merits of the different models in the three administrations.
This article looks at internal complaints procedures and considers the role of independent elements in procedures which are designed to be simple, informal and low cost. Taking the example of local authority community care services as a case study, the article discusses research which looked at the views of complainants, potential complainants and those who run the procedure. Most people do not make formal complaints at all and very few people seek an independent review of their complaint. When they do seek such a review, they expect it to be transparently independent of the body complained about. The article concludes that the current system of local authority complaints review panels or committees does not provide the independent element that complainants seek. Complaints procedures are often contrasted with more formal appeal procedures but a recent report by the National Audit Office considers that the distinction between complaints and appeals is unhelpful, arguing that what we need is a combined system for 'getting things put right ' (2005, p. 7). In a sense the local authority complaints procedure for community care services provides this already: since there is no appeal mechanism, all grievances about local authority community care services must be dealt with initially through internal complaints procedures. This looks like an ideal system for 'getting things put right' without the trappings and expense of formal mechanisms. It provides a useful case study for investigating the expectations of complainants.Purely internal mechanisms for resolving citizen's grievances have value in allowing relatively easy participation and encouraging grievances to be heard at a level close to where the problem arose. They should also enable organisations to learn from their mistakes and improve services in the future. They provide a means of 'proportionate dispute resolution' (Department for Constitutional Affairs 2004, p. 6). However, as Le Sueur argues, although a mechanism aimed at 'nipping disputes in the bud has a commonsense attraction that is hard to resist ' (2007, p. 327), there is a danger that other important values are lost. Here, Le Sueur is pointing to the conflict between different 'models of justice' and arguing that where this conflict arises 'legal' values should be valued more highly in order to protect citizens' rights (p. 335). Adler (2006) shows that models of justice provide a guide to understanding criticisms of particular dispute mechanisms. Adler argues that 'legal models', which rely on values such as independence and due process, contrast with alternative models of justice where other qualities are valued, such as following bureaucratic rules, providing information to management or ensuring that 'consumer' views are listened to. Adler considers that complaints mechanisms do not usually fall within the legal model of justice and are more likely to be used to promote consumerism in public services (Adler 2006). * Email: Jackie.gulland@stir.ac.uk 2 Consumerism has also been described as giving...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.