Work Discussion


Book Description

This book provides the history, theory, and practice of work discussion as developed at the Tavistock Clinic. It describes the evolution and contemporary practice of work discussion in relation to a wide range of professional work with children, adolescents, and families.




Ask a Manager


Book Description

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together




Making Motherhood Work


Book Description

The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and social policies aren't helping. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies. Can American women look to Europe for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country. Taking readers into women's homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers' expectations depend on context and that policies alone cannot solve women's struggles. With women held to unrealistic standards, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.




What Works for Women at Work


Book Description

A mother-daughter legal scholar team “offers unabashedly straightforward advice in a how-to primer for ambitious women . . . [A]ttention-grabbing revelations” (Debora L. Spar, The New York Times Book Review) What Works for Women at Work is a comprehensive and insightful guide for mastering office politics as a woman. Authored by Joan C. Williams, one of the nation’s most-cited experts on women and work, and her daughter, Rachel Dempsey, this unique book offers a multi-generational perspective into the realities of today’s workplace. Often women receive messages that they have only themselves to blame for failing to get ahead. What Works for Women at Work tells women it’s not their fault. Based on interviews with 127 successful working women, over half of them women of color, What Works for Women at Work presents a toolkit for getting ahead in today’s workplace. Distilling over thirty-five years of research, Williams and Dempsey offer four crisp patterns that affect working women. Each represents different challenges and requires different strategies—which is why women need to be savvier than men to survive and thrive in high-powered careers. Williams and Dempsey’s analysis of working women is nuanced and in-depth, going beyond the traditional one-size-fits-all approaches of most career guides for women. Throughout the book, they weave real-life anecdotes from the women they interviewed, along with advice on dealing with difficult situations such as sexual harassment. An essential resource for any working woman. “Many steps beyond Lean In (2013), Sheryl Sandberg’s prescription for getting ahead . . . .[F]illed with street-smart advice and plain old savvy about the way life works in corporate America.” —Booklist, starred review) “A playbook on how to transcend and triumph.” —O, The Oprah Magazine




Brokerage and Closure


Book Description

Social Capital, the advantage created by location in social structure, is a critical element in business strategy. Who has it, how it works, and how to develop it have become key questions as markets, organizations, and careers become more and more dependent on informal, discretionary relationships. The formal organization deals with accountability; Everything else flows through the informal: advice, coordination, cooperation friendship, gossip, knowledge, trust. Informal relations have always been with us, they have always mattered. What is new is the range of activities in which they now matter, and the emerging clarity we have about how they create advantage for certain people at the expense of others. This is done by brokerage and closure. Ronald S. Burt builds upon his celebrated work in this area to explore the nature of brokerage and closure. Brokerage is the activity of people who live at the intersection of social worlds, who have a vision advantage of seeing and developing good ideas, an advantage which can be seen in their compensation, recognition, and the responsibility they're entrusted with in comparison to their peers. Closure is the tightening of coordination in a closed network of people, and people who do this do well as a complement to brokers because of the trust and alignment they create. Brokerage and Closure explores how these elements work together to define social capital, showing how in the business world reputation has come to replace authority, pursued opportunity assignment, and reward has come to be associated with achieving competitive advantage in a social order of continuous disequilibrium.




Accessibility and Diversity in the 21st Century University


Book Description

In higher education institutions across the world, rapid changes are occurring as the socio-economic composition of these universities is shifting. The participation of females, ethnic minority groups, and low-income students has increased exponentially, leading to major changes in student activities, curriculum, and overall campus culture. Significant research is a necessity for understanding the need of broader educational access and promoting a newly empowered diverse population of students in today’s universities. Accessibility and Diversity in the 21st Century University is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the provision of higher educational access to a more diverse population with a specific focus on the growing population of women in the university, key intersections with race and sexual preference, and the experiences of low-income students, mid-career and reentry students, and special needs populations. While highlighting topics such as adult learning, race-based achievement gaps, and women’s studies, this publication is ideally designed for educators, higher education faculty, deans, provosts, chancellors, policymakers, sociologists, anthropologists, researchers, scholars, and students seeking current research on modern advancements of diversity in higher education systems.




EBOOK: E-Learning Groups and Communities


Book Description

How can we design networked e-learning courses to ensure students participate in them and engage in quality learning outcomes? What happens in an e-learning course that is designed to foster group work and a sense of ‘community’? How can we research e-learning practice in ways that will enhance the processes of learning and teaching? This book outlines approaches to networked e-learning course design that are underpinned by a belief that students learn best in these contexts when they are organised in groups and communities. As such, the book is one of the first to provide a detailed analysis of what goes on in e-learning groups and communities. But how do students react to working in e-learning groups and communities? What determines their willingness to adopt new forms of learning in order to participate in these new courses? What actually happens in an e-learning community, and what impact does this have on students and tutors? This book examines these key questions through a variety of research approaches aimed at exploring the experience of e-learners as they participate in successful e-groups and communities. It also offers ways in which learning outcomes may be achieved in these communities and outlines the specific skills that students would develop through e-learning. E-learning Groups and Communities is essential reading for teachers, trainers, managers, researchers and students involved in e-learning courses as well as people interested in improving the quality of the learning experience.







The Practice of Enterprise Modeling


Book Description

Enterprise modeling (EM) has gained substantial popularity both in the academic community and among practitioners. A variety of EM methods, approaches, and tools are developed and offered on the market. In practice they are used for various p- poses such as business strategy development, process restructuring, as well as business and IT architecture alignment and governance. PoEM 2008, the First IFIP WG 8. 1 Working Conference on The Practice of Ent- prise Modeling, took place in Stockholm, Sweden. It is the first conference aiming to establish a dedicated forum where the use of EM in practice is addressed by bringing together researchers, users, and practitioners. The goals of PoEM 2008 were to - velop a better understanding of the practice of EM, to contribute to improved EM practice, as well as to share knowledge and experiences. The theme of PoEM 2008 was EM in different application contexts, e. g. , software development, including agile development, as well as business development, gove- ance, and change.




Managing Mental Health in the Community


Book Description

Managing Mental Health in the Community is a guide to best practice in the management of community care for people with mental health problems. A major theme is how to balance the 'triangle of care' that represents the needs and concerns of the user, carer (professional or family) and community. Rather than focusing on the mechanics of the task, this book aims to encourage reflective practice amongst staff, managers and policy-makers. The experienced practitioners who contribute not only challenge some of the assumptions prevalent in the field, but also present some tried and tested interventions used to enable users, staff and managers to function more effectively in community settings. They consider: * how community care has developed * the fundamental concepts of community care * how management is affected by practice * how care systems are designed. Managing Mental Health in the Community should be essential reading for Mental Health Practitioners, Managers, Social Workers, Policy-Makers, Organizational Consultants and all those professionals who are committed to improving the quality of mental health services provided in the community.