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Power and translation in social policy research
Abstract
Globalisation has increased the demand for policy transfer but also raises problems. There are international organisations that advocate common approaches to policy and better communication means that policy makers are more aware of what is going on in other countries. At the same time attempts to transfer policy highlight real differences in history and culture and what they mean for power relations. Within this context the development of large cross national data sets is growing fast. These mainly quantitative data are virtually all produced by governments or quasi governmental organisations. They embody top down power relations and belong to the scientific tradition of social research that assumes that terms can be translated exactly, even though the difficulties of doing so are recognised. The result is data sets that have enormous potential for social science but that are open to serious abuse unless it is realised that they minimise historical and cultural differences and reinforce dominant hierarchies.
... In this project, efforts were made to approach a set of statements that were linguistically equivalent and retained the same meaning in Norwegian and Spanish. Nevertheless, language is contextually constructed, and as suggested by several researchers, the notion of one correct translation of a text may be an illusion, as language is not solely a matter of synonym and syntax (Larkin et al., 2007;Nikander, 2008;Pösö, 2014;Temple & Young, 2004;Wilson, 2001). ...
The overall aim of this project was to gain extended insights into social workers’ perspectives of children in child protection work in Chile and Norway. Q methodology was applied to meet this aim, as it is suitable for exploring and comparing subjective perspectives. The findings are based on the perspectives of 38 social workers (21 in Chile and 17 in Norway). This project adopts an exploratory design, and during the research process, I discovered that a review of previous research on social workers’ perspectives of children in child protection work was lacking from the literature. Hence, the second aim of this project was to fill a research gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive portrayal of child protection social workers’ constructions of children through an integrative review. The body of this dissertation contains three research papers. Paper 1 explores child protection social workers’ practices and ideas about children and childhood in existing research. Findings are based on an analysis and synthesis of 35 empirical articles. Papers 2 and 3 present findings from the Q methodological study. While Paper 2 focuses on the perspectives of children among social workers in Chile (n=21), Paper 3 has a comparative approach to study the perspectives of children among social workers in Norway and Chile (n=38). The findings show that social workers in Norway are inclined to see children’s independence, while social workers in Chile tend to see children as relationally and structurally conditioned. Conducting an analysis and synthesis of previous research enabled a juxtaposition of findings from Chile and Norway against what was found in the integrative review. A key finding of the review is that children generally were understood in light of psychological knowledge such as developmental psychology, attachment theories and individualistic psychology. Less focus was directed towards contextual knowledge of children such as children’s neighbourhoods, friends and teachers and variation among children. A predominance of studies in the review were from U.K. or other Northern European countries. Hence, a key question that transpired from looking at findings across the three papers is whether the independent child is a predominant understanding of children among child protection workers in Northern European countries. There is still a lack of research, particularly in English, on social worker perspectives in Latin America. An important focus for future research should be to explore whether the perspective emphasising the relational and structural child that was reflected among the social workers in Chile transcends to a more general level among social workers in Chile and possibly to other Latin American countries. If these findings are identified in more large-scale studies, they may contribute to the building blocks of empirical and theoretical understandings, for example, regarding current knowledge on child protection systems. Moreover, such findings may extend the knowledge of how children’s rights are balanced among social workers internationally. This project contributes to extending previous knowledge by illuminating perspectives of children in child protection work among social workers in different welfare contexts. The perspectives identified in this study indicate different ways of seeing children which may orient social workers’ attention towards some aspects and away from others, particularly regarding the independent versus relational child. These orientations may have significant implications for interpretations and decisions made in child protection work.
... Translation from one language to another can be considered on a continuum from the uncontested to the highly contested - (Wilson, 2001) The above scenario shows the importance of shared language in research settings. In cross-cultural research, a lack of shared language can cause inequities in power relations. ...
Reflexivity, an important component of qualitative inquiry generally, gains additional significance in community-based participatory research (CBPR). The varying partnerships among researchers, community partners, and community members are strengthened when a co – learning, reflective model is applied. The use of reflective field notes can be a powerful tool to help achieve this end. In this article, we describe the dynamics of community-engaged research team where members applied a co-learning model to reflect upon their positionality in the community and in research. Using reflective field notes examined through a narrative approach to the PI’s time in the field, we assess these positionalities through the relationships between CBPR work and power relations. The reflective practice embedded in the CBPR process brought these power relations to our attention. We then turned to the literature on power relations to better understand what was occurring in the study. The current case details the additional complexity that occurs when issues of language, translation, gender, and culture are introduced. Thus, this paper is a reflective analysis of a bilingual researcher’s experience in the field specific to cross-cultural CBPR work.
... Policy transfer describes the process by which policy makers use policy in different countries to develop policy in their own. Globalization in general has 'increased the demand for policy transfer' (Wilson, 2001b). Globalization increases the opportunities for policy transfer and policy transfer itself facilitates globalization (Evans and Davies, 1999: 371). ...
Global influences and demographic changes are leading policy makers in less developed countries to look to more developed regions for policy and service ideas. Policy and services ideas may then be `borrowed' via processes such as policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996). This article explores the establishment of day care for people with dementia in Kerala, India. During the development of this service policy, information and practice ideas were transferred from different countries, particularly the UK. During the transfer of information and also within the following processes of implementation and enactment of policy, translation processes take place. In order to understand these translation processes, this article describes the development of day care in Kerala and compares its current functioning with that of similar day care centres in the UK. The concept of translation is found to illuminate and explain the process of service development in Kerala and could be used elsewhere to explain examples of policy and practice development.
Key messages: This paper maps the intersection between the broad literature of 'policy transfer'-including policy diffusion, mobility and translation, lesson-drawing and fast policy-and the substantive field of housing in order to record temporal, spatial and thematic trends. Searches were performed in five databases and resulted in 845 references. By examining titles, keywords, abstracts and full-texts, this sample was reduced to a most relevant set of 137 references which have engaged deeply and conceptually with the six 'policy transfer's keywords and a set of 110 references where engagement was moderate. The analysis noted that 'policy transfer' and 'policy diffusion' precede the other concepts, the former being UK-dominant and the latter US-dominant. 'Policy mobility' brings the most recent and fastest growing body of literature, reflecting the 'mobility turn' in social sciences. The paper also reflects on some methodological challenges and their implications to the mapping output, such as linking aims to keywords and Boolean strings, database selection, broad versus narrow searches, inclusive versus selective reference types and coding for thematic subfields. 2 Mapping the literature of 'policy transfer' and housing
This research brings to light the Polish context of a post-socialist, post-transformation society of peasant roots and high religiosity which greatly contributes to the comparative criminological scholarship. The purpose of this doctoral research is to explore how a small number of Polish people understand punishment and justice, and how their narratives inform the viability of restorative approaches to justice. In so doing, this research recognises the value of lay opinion in the discussion of punishment and justice, and approaches punishment and justice as social activities, which echoes the argument that stories about crime and punishment are entangled with people’s daily routines, and as a result are lodged in their cultural imagination (see Garland & Sparks, 2000). The socialist past, hasty transition from socialism to democracy and from a centrally-planned to free market economy has influenced participants’ perceptions of the justice administration and the institutions involved in these processes. Lay Polish people shall be seen as Homo post-Sovieticus, whose perceptions of punishment and justice need to be analysed along with the legacy of the previous socialist system as well as post-1989 changes. Participants’ perceptions of the Polish criminal justice system, the Polish police and unpaid work assist to understand a number of factors that might influence the development of restorative justice in the Polish context. The findings of this study also encourage broadening the scope of the restorative justice discussion and examining its preconditions against wider sociological and criminological discourses on punishment and justice. Although the relationship might be defined as ‘uneasy’, restorative justice, since its conception, is interwoven with the two. One of restorative justice’s central hopes was to establish an alternative system of crime resolution that would eliminate the infliction of pain. However, the trajectory of restorative practices and demonstrates that the functioning of a majority of them is dependent on the criminal justice agencies and that there is a need to address better the notion of punishment in restorative encounters.
This article addresses the process of translation, necessary in the present social work academic and practice communities, as a form of transformation of knowledge. It is argued that knowledge is transformed in the translation process on the terms set by the language into which it is translated. As the English language is the lingua franca of the present academic and other international communities, it is the English language that sets the criteria for translation. In social work, which is conventionally seen as context-bound, the translation process includes some loss of the original particularities. The Finnish child welfare system is used as an example. It is demonstrated how complicated, if not even absurd, the translations may be. The English terms, related to a different child welfare ideology and history, do not meet the essence of the Finnish welfare-focused child welfare system. Instead of fluent translation, robust translations are suggested as the way forward. The robust, foreign-sounding translations would recognise the context-bound particularities. Yet, the challenge is how to find a communicative balance between fluent and robust translation.
In this article, the authors examine the implications of extending calls for reflexivity in qualitative research generally to cross-language research with interpreters. Drawing on the concept of 'borders', they present two research projects to demonstrate the need to locate the interpreter as active in producing research accounts. They extend the concept of 'border crossing', relating this to identity politics and the benefits of making the interpreter visible in research.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE NATION-STATE INTO A ‘COMPETITION state’ lies at the heart of political globalization. In seeking to adapt to a range of complex changes in cultural, institutional and market structures, both state and market actors are attempting to reinvent the state as a quasi-‘enterprise association’ in a wider world context, a process which involves three central paradoxes. The first paradox is that this process does not lead to a simple decline of the state but may be seen to necessitate the actual expansion of de facto state intervention and regulation in the name of competitiveness and marketization.
The book is divided into two parts, reflecting stages in the gender planning process. Part 1, focusing on the conceptual rationale for gender planning in the Third World, examines feminist theories and WID/GAD debates in terms of their relevance for gender planning. The chapters cover: assumptions related to family structure and division of labour within the household; the concept of gender interests and their translation into planning terms as gender needs; and the interrelationship between different macroeconomic development models and policy approaches to Third World women. Part 2 looks at the gender planning process and the implementation of planning practice. It firstly characterises the emerging planning tradition of gender planning, and outlines its methodological tools, procedures and components. The next chapters focus on institutionalisation, operational procedures, and the role of training in gender awareness. The concluding chapter places gender planning in a wider political context, examining current Third World women's organisations and movements. -M.Amos
Workshop on Advanced Data Storage / Management Techniques for High Performance Computing
This paper attempts to define the held of demography, identify the demographer, assess the extent to which demography is a social science and relate it to the other social sciences. It examines how changes in the outside world affect what demographers do and what they publish. As benefits Population Studies's 50th anniversary, the role of journals, and especially of this journal is examined. The early role of the journal and of its longtime two editors in defining the field is discussed. The interface between demography and the other social sciences is examined, as is the extent to which demographers publish in journals other than specialist population ones.
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