The aim of this paper is to inform the design of individualised funding schemes via an examination of discourses and experiences of choice related to people with psychosocial disability. Mind Australia, in partnership with Deakin University, interviewed 22 individuals with psychosocial disability who are recipients of individual funding packages in three National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) trial sites across Australia. This research involved examining the policy and assumptions of choice under the NDIS, as well as the experience of undertaking choice through individualised funding arrangements which position people with psychosocial disability as consumers in a market place of service provision. The findings demonstrate that choice is an ongoing activity and that at every stage personal, programmatic and market barriers impact individuals’ capacity to maximise choice. The intent of government policy to provide choice to individual funding recipients based on an optimally functioning market place with empowered self‐actualising individuals collides with a complex reality where barriers abound at every stage of the choice making process. Enhancing choice making of people with psychosocial disability within the NDIS requires governments and services to explicitly address the personal, programmatic and market‐based barriers to choice.
Liquid Life (Polity Press, Cambridge 2005) Zygmunt Bauman is widely acknowledged as one of the major, if not the most incisive social thinker of our times. Peter Beilharz, who has written extensively on Bauman, considers him the greatest sociologist writing in English today, a sentiment that Tony Blackshaw agrees with in his obvious enthusiasm for Bauman in his book, Zygmunt Bauman. In 2005 Bauman celebrated his eightieth birthday. He continues to publish at a prodigious rate as he addresses what he argues are the urgent concerns of our times, brought about by the dissolving of the social foundations by which we construct and develop our lives. Blackshaw's work introduces the work of Bauman to the reader who has little knowledge of Bauman, but is curious to engage with his key ideas and themes, particularly those framed by the transition from his understanding of 'solid modernity' to 'liquid modernity'. The concept of 'liquidity' was first introduced by Bauman in 2000 with Liquid Modernity, and has continued through to 2005 with Liquid Life. (2006/07 sees another two 'liquid' offerings from Bauman appearing in the bookstores -Liquid Fear and Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty).The concept of 'liquidity' encapsulates what Bauman refers to as the fluid nature of modernity, in which we have moved from an era which attempted to create a stable 'solid order', to the current soft, flexible order which seeks to ensure all options remain open. In a 'liquid modernity', engagement tends be short term and less committed, and so we risk descending into a world relying less and less on solidarity and responsibility. We are left with what Bauman regards as the main contradiction of liquid modernity -the right to self-assertion, yet the decreasing capacity to control the social settings which render individualism possible, creating growing inequality, insecurity and distrust.As I write, Bauman has published thirty-five titles in English since 1972. He has shifted his work in recent times to a broader and popular audience outside the academy as he seeks to address the central issues of everyday existence today. Bauman remains a thinker who values the role of sociology highly and is sceptical of intellectual work that does not seek to address existence as lived, grappling with the issues which are central to people's lives. Liquid Life continues the trend of Bauman's books since his retirement. Keith Tester has argued that Bauman's 'post-postmodernity' works are concerned with having a broader appeal that reach an audience beyond the usual readers of European social thought. Tester claims the books achieve this by posing critical questions through a style that moves away from a linear narrative to something more 'fragmentary and fractured', to highlight contemporary life experiences and concerns of a wider general readership. Bauman has spent a major part of his working life fulfilling the demands of academia, yet his loyalties and sympathies have been with the outcasts and the powerless, along with the daily strugg...
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.