ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2035-6146
Current Organisation
UNSW Sydney
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Public Administration | Counselling, Welfare and Community Services | Social Policy | Policy and Administration
Structure, Delivery and Financing of Community Services | Children's/Youth Services and Childcare |
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, Sydney
Date: 2020
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2017
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.1728576
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2012
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-06-2007
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-05-2019
DOI: 10.1111/CFS.12580
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2012
Abstract: Does being self-employed, as opposed to being an employee, make a difference to how parents with young children can balance work and family demands? Does self-employment facilitate more equal gender isions of labour? This article uses the Australian Time Use Survey to identify associations between self-employment and mothers’ and fathers’ time in paid work, domestic labour and childcare and when during the day they perform these activities. The time self-employed mothers devote to each activity differs substantially from that of employee mothers, while fathers’ time is relatively constant across employment types. Working from home is highly correlated with self-employment for mothers, implying the opportunity to be home-based is a pull factor in mothers becoming self-employed. Results suggest mothers use self-employment to combine earning and childcare whereas fathers prioritize paid work regardless of employment type. Self-employment is not associated with gender redistribution of paid and unpaid work, although it facilitates some rescheduling.
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney
Date: 2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-09-2018
DOI: 10.1111/ASWP.12151
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 28-04-2017
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 31-07-2023
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746423000155
Abstract: China adopted neoliberal approaches to improve the supply of quality social services in the early 2000s. How did the Chinese government manage the financial and quality risks of increasing the provision via government purchasing and how did it differ from other countries? The article examines the policy trajectory of early childhood education and care in China and Australia on this question. Policy analysis of the effect of purchasing on the cost to government and quality of services shows how both countries used subsidy arrangements to engage non-profit and private providers to expand supply. When faced with market risks, they both tightened regulations, but China differed in the speed and strength of their response, restricting the proportion of private providers. The findings have implications for understanding the risks of relying on market forces in other social service sectors, and how policy can effectively respond.
Publisher: Policy Press
Date: 17-06-2009
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-07-2012
Publisher: Social Policy Research Centre, Sydney
Date: 2020
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-08-2015
Publisher: Centre for Social Impact and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Australia., UNSW Sydney
Date: 2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-08-2021
DOI: 10.1111/GWAO.12742
Abstract: Senior leaders are usually understood to be ideally positioned to drive the organizational changes needed to promote workplace gender equality. Yet seniority also influences leaders' values and attitudes, and how they interpret evidence of inequalities, determine organizational priorities, and design and implement remedies. This article examines leaders' perceptions of workplace gender equality using system justification theory to explain survey data from Australia's public sector ( n = 2292). Multivariate analysis indicates that male and female leaders more positively rate the gender equality climate in their agencies, compared with lower‐level staff, and that male leaders show most propensity to defend the status quo. Findings call into question the effectiveness of change strategies that rely on leadership and buy‐in of those whose privilege is embedded in existing arrangements, and problematize dominant organizational approaches casting senior leaders as effective change agents for gender equality. The article helps to explain gendered power dynamics, which produce and sustain organizational inequalities and make workplace equality so hard to achieve, and points to ways to strengthen practical approaches to promote equality in organizations.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-11-2019
Abstract: Delivering services in partnership with government is commonly considered a source of financial stability for charities and other nonprofits. However, in liberal welfare states, government funding may also heighten financial risks, where it exposes charities to competition, austerity, and rising service demand. In these contexts, publicly funded charities’ capacity to withstand financial shock is an important consideration in implementing sustainable government programs. To deepen knowledge about the factors contributing to financial capacity among charities receiving government funding, this article analyzes the financial reserves of 4,542 Australian charities engaged by government to deliver social welfare services. Logistic regression shows how younger charities, larger charities, and those with high dependence on government funding have lower odds of holding adequate reserves, indicating poorer short-term financial capacity. The findings draw attention to potential risks associated with outsourced government service delivery, while highlighting which charities most need to strengthen their financial capacity.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 29-04-2015
Abstract: This article examines a component of job quality which is particularly important for human service workers: the level of control they have over their work. Having control over work goals and tasks enables frontline workers to respond appropriately to the needs of the people they serve, so contributes to service quality and client outcomes, as well as employee wellbeing. However, much research has contended that job control is under threat in human service contexts, largely as a result of new public management. We examine these claims and contribute new data showing that levels of job control in the human service workforce have indeed been under pressure in recent years. From 2003 to 2012, Australia’s human service workforce did not experience the increase in job control experienced by other workers. In the education industry, levels of job control fell significantly. We discuss these trends in the context of debates about the impact of new public management on frontline human service work and challenges of securing the future provision of good quality services.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-06-2022
DOI: 10.1177/02610183211020693
Abstract: Despite significant efforts to end it, violence, abuse and neglect continue to contribute to preventable harms and deaths among people using disability services. To explore why these harms persist and what is needed to prevent them, we examine the safety-related attitudes and practices among frontline staff delivering services in the context of an in idualized funding scheme, Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Analysis of survey data (n=2341) showed almost half of frontline disability workers were aware of harms affecting clients in the past year, and three in five felt their employers’ safety and incident reporting protocols were inadequate. Workers’ accounts of barriers to performing their safeguarding roles underline how government’s meta-regulatory approach is enabling provider organizations to prioritise financial concerns and tolerate high safety risks. We argue that advancing the rights of people with disability to be safe from harm whilst engaged in social services requires changes in their external regulatory environments and in structures of power between workers and managers, so that policy, funding and regulatory settings enable appropriate local safety practices to flourish.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 30-08-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 16-09-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 31-01-2008
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-04-2021
DOI: 10.1002/AJS4.162
Abstract: 2020 was a year like no other, with the COVID‐19 virus upending life as we know it. When governments around the world imposed lockdown measures to curb the spread of COVID‐19, advocates in the domestic and family violence (DFV) sector recognised that these measures were likely to result in increases in violence against women, particularly intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV can take many forms, including physical, emotional, psychological, financial, coercive controlling behaviours, surveillance and isolation tactics. Lockdown conditions provide fertile ground for the exercise of coercive control by encouraging people to stay at home, limiting social interactions to household members, reducing mobility and enabling perpetrators to closely monitor their partner's movements. However, media reports and awareness of IPV are generally dominated by a focus on physical violence and lethality, which are easily defined and measured. By contrast, coercive control as a concept is difficult to operationalise, measure and action in law, policy and frontline interventions. This paper discusses the challenges inherent in measuring coercive control and engages with current debates around the criminalisation of coercive control in NSW. Such reflection is timely as the conditions of COVID‐19 lockdowns are likely to lead to an increase in coercive controlling behaviours.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2022
DOI: 10.1016/J.CHIABU.2022.105657
Abstract: Governments in multiple countries have established redress schemes to acknowledge institutional responsibility for child maltreatment to provide survivors with access to compensation, counselling and apologies and to prompt better practice to prevent child maltreatment. Establishing a National Redress Scheme was recommended by Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Scheme commenced in 2018 and will run for a decade. This study sought to understand the ways survivors have experienced applying for redress under the National Redress Scheme, and how Scheme processes could be improved for survivors. Participants were 322 survivors of child sexual abuse who had applied for redress or considered doing so during the first two years of the Scheme's operation. Two thirds (68%) were aged 55 or over and over half (55%) were men. To provide feedback about their experiences and perceptions of the National Redress Scheme, participants completed closed and open-ended survey questions. Only a minority rated the Scheme as either good (16%) or very good (11%). Survey comments provide insight into the ways waiting has contributed to survivors' negative experiences of the Scheme. Survivors waited for the Scheme to be established, for institutions to opt-in, for decisions, and for direct personal responses. Waiting compounded uncertainty and was retraumatising for survivors. Some avoided seeking redress due to likely delays and risks of retraumatisation. Australia's National Redress Scheme is an ambivalent policy innovation which can both facilitate support and exacerbate harm. The design of redress schemes should pre-emptively address their potential to generate harm, including by recognising that rapid responses are essential to procedural justice, and particularly important for older survivors of child sexual abuse.
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 11-2018
DOI: 10.1332/239788218X15411706368334
Abstract: Using a case study of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme, this article examines the role of prices in in idualised funding schemes. It argues that prices were set too low to cover the full costs of disability support, placing pressure on relationship-building and other tasks required for high-quality care. We argue that the use of prices as mechanisms for cost containment in in idualised funding schemes is predicated on the undervaluation of care. Our analysis can inform discussion among scholars, activists, policymakers and others about the design and impact of in idualised funding, and the challenge of fully valuing care under market-based approaches.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-2013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 27-01-2023
DOI: 10.1177/09500170211058024
Abstract: In many liberal welfare states, market-based reforms aimed at enhancing competition and choice in disability services have necessitated extensive regulatory reforms to ensure quality service provision. This article explores how the changing regulatory environment surrounding an in idualised funding scheme is transforming frontline disability work. Drawing on data from a survey of 2341 Australian disability support workers, the article contributes to sociological understandings of market regulation by foregrounding the importance of frontline workers’ labour to the regulation of social service markets. Various regulation-related tasks and duties are identified which, while practically embedded among the client-focused components of care work previously documented, are analytically distinct from them. This category of undertheorised, unrecognised, often unpaid work is referred to as ‘regulatory labour’. The article illuminates the mechanisms through which workers enact and resist regulatory processes and help absorb market risks and failures in ways previously underexplored in theories of marketised social care.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 07-2021
DOI: 10.1093/BJSW/BCAB105
Abstract: COVID-19 rapidly altered patterns of domestic and family violence, increasing the complexity of women’s needs, and presenting new barriers to service use. This article examines service responses in Australia, exploring practitioners' accounts of adapting service delivery models in the early months of the pandemic. Data from a qualitatively enriched online survey of practitioners (n = 100) show the ways services rapidly shifted to engage with clients via remote, technology-mediated modes, as physical distancing requirements triggered rapid expansion in the use of phone, email, video calls and messaging, and many face-to-face interventions temporarily ceased. Many practitioners and service managers found that remote service delivery improved accessibility and efficiency. Others expressed concerns about their capacity to assess risk without face-to-face contact, and were unsure whether new service modalities would meet the needs of all client groups and reflect best practice. Findings attest to practitioners' mixed experiences during this period of rapid service innovation and change, and underline the importance of monitoring emerging approaches to establish which service adaptations are effective for different groups of people, and to determine good practice for combining remote and face-to-face service options in the longer term.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-12-2020
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2017
DOI: 10.1002/AJS4.1
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 08-06-2020
DOI: 10.1093/BJSW/BCAA030
Abstract: Violence against social workers and other social service practitioners is prevalent across countries and service delivery settings, often accepted as implicit in working with vulnerable clients. A corresponding scholarly focus on workplace violence, and the factors that affect it, is, however, still developing. This is particularly stark in the domestic and family violence (DFV) and sexual assault (SA) sectors. To address this gap, this article explores the extent and impact of practitioners’ exposure to workplace violence, and the mix of work and organisational factors that predict it. Analysis of survey data from Australian DFV and SA practitioners (N = 903) enables a focus on the two main sources of workplace violence: violence from clients and violence from colleagues. Both types of violence were found to be prevalent, gendered and associated with emotional strain and intention to leave. We argue that in DFV and SA sectors, which respond to multiple forms of gendered violence, understanding the multifaceted nature of workplace violence, and the structural arrangements that underpin it, is necessary for planning strategies to prevent and address it.
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Date: 29-11-2011
Publisher: Macquarie University, UNSW Sydney and RMIT University, Sydney
Date: 2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 28-05-2012
Abstract: Despite decades of intervention to promote equal pay, the gender wage gap in Australia persists. A key explanation is that equal pay strategies have had limited capacity to address the subtle, historical undervaluation that keep wages low in highly feminized areas of employment, especially where care work is performed. In this article, we examine a recent attempt to address the undervaluation of care work through a test case of the expanded equal remuneration clause in the Fair Work Act 2009. A highly feminized area of employment, the social and community services industry proved a strategic context for the case. We discuss three significant aspects of the case: the recognition given to the undervaluation of care work the ergent interests of non-government sector employers and business associations and strong contestation over who should pay, arising from the government’s third-party role as purchaser of social and community services.
Publisher: ANU Press
Date: 15-09-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2018
Abstract: Working at home has conventionally been understood as a formal, employer-sanctioned flexibility or ‘telework’ arrangement adopted primarily to promote work–life balance. However, work at home is now most commonly performed outside of normal working hours on an informal, ad hoc basis, to prepare for or catch up on tasks workers usually perform in the workplace. Scholarly assessment of this type of work has been sparse. To fill this gap, we undertook secondary analysis of a large data set, the Australian Public Service Employee Census, to explore the personal and organisational factors associated with middle-level managers regularly taking work home to perform outside of and in addition to their usual working hours. We conceptualise this as ‘supplementary work’. The analysis shows how supplementary work is a flexibility practice associated with high workloads and poor organisational supports for work–life balance, distinguishing it from other forms of home-based work. Whereas previous studies have not found gendered effects, we found women with caring responsibilities had higher odds of performing supplementary work. These findings expand understandings of contemporary flexibility practices and the factors that affect them, and underline the need for more nuanced theories of working at home.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-08-2023
DOI: 10.1177/02610183231185766
Abstract: Paid work promises pathways to financial security and wellbeing for families, yet variable scheduling and low pay can interfere with the routines and rhythms of family life, and contribute to caregiving challenges and stress. Using qualitative data from a survey of retail workers, this article shows how Australian employment policies have enabled flexibility practices to be strongly oriented around the needs of employers, reducing employees’ resources for care. We develop the concept of ‘care theft’ from employees’ accounts of the ways flexible scheduling and low pay converge to transform and deplete their temporal, financial and ethical resources for care. As an extension of ‘time theft’ and alternative to in idualised notions of ‘work-family balance’, care theft helps make visible the ways employment practices strip resources for care from working people, and shift risk to low-income families and communities.
Start Date: 12-2016
End Date: 12-2022
Amount: $285,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity