Designing a public governance model suitable for a particular task often lacks an empirical basis for change and the criteria for evaluation. Hence, the paper analyses the case law following from the ...decisions of social work centres (SWC) in Slovenia in order to gain insight in the lawfulness of their work as a key component of the rule of law and thus pinpoint the optimal framework for improvements. Using quantitative and qualitative analyses of 213 higher court judgments issued in the course of five years, the paper examines, by means of content analysis, which elements of the rule of law are the most problematic in practice. There is special emphasis on lawfulness and equality in substantive terms and on fair trial in procedural terms. The case law following from the SWC cases in the highest courts in Slovenia is quite consistent, but it does reveal certain gaps. These gaps need to be bridged on both regulatory and implementation levels in terms of clearer and yet not too rigid rules, recognition of participative procedural standards, and more flexible organisation. The case law thus indicates options for legislative changes and administrative reforms of the Slovene welfare system and beyond.
The growing shortage of skilled social workers, accompanied by an ageing population and the increasing number of fragile, elderly individuals that require social services, poses a serious challenge ...for our society. The magnitude of this problem is seen in the various predictions hypothesizing that, globally, there is likely to be a shortfall of millions of social workers for the successful provision of social services. To make matters worse, there are not enough social work students to fill that void, whereas the existing employee turnover is another serious concern for the social work field. Policy makers in many countries do not yet understand the pattern of growing needs and have no tool to forecast the future increase in educational requirements for creating a pool of adequately skilled social workers. In addition to this, understanding the patterns of workforce entrance and exit for social workers and the dynamics of transition becomes important for national policy and decision makers. In our paper, we build on current research about knowledge management in social work settings to demonstrate that knowledge management can have a positive impact in helping to fulfil the important role of social work in any ageing society. With our research, we contribute to the underdeveloped literature about knowledge management in the public sector and especially in social work settings and to the knowledge-based view of the organization. We present a multiple decrement model of social workers’ entrance and transition from social work student and social worker trainee to fully productive social worker, to their exit, whether by changed profession, retirement or death. We argue that the availability of social workers in a national economy depends on the development and operationalization of appropriate policies, where knowledge management can be influential. Our model allows measuring the quality of the national policy system related to the social work profession, something which has not been achieved yet, and shows how knowledge management solutions can positively influence the whole field of social work. We apply an objective measuring tool, grounded in an already developed actuarial–mathematical method. Our case relies on the collection and analysis of relevant data found in publicly available statistical reports for Slovenia. Existing data enables us to provide assumptions on how to better forecast the transition of social workers.
Knowledge affects all aspects of the economy, but digitalization probably represents the most ubiquitous of its appearances. This book analyzes, from a constructive point of view, some of its ...applications, extracting lessons to maximize its utility and exporting its use to other sectors. It also shows the caveats of its applications, allowing managers to learn its difficulties and how to overcome them from real-life cases. All the information is presented in an academic and rigorous way and represents an excellent starting point to study the effects of digitalization for both practitioners and researchers.
Our research was intended for finding the characteristics and condition of the scope of exposure of Slovenian secondary school students to domestic violence. The research made on the sample of 1087 ...secondary school students (the average age was 15.7 years) from all Slovenian regions in 2011 has shown that 40.2 % of secondary school students included in our sample are exposed to domestic violence; among them only 3 % reported domestic violence to the corresponding institution. An important obstacle for seeking help and reporting violence is the ability to recognise violence and the problem of discovering violence outside of the privacy of the family circle. Therefore the connections between different institutions: schools, social work centres, health care, the police, the prosecution and judicature are very important; rising the awareness of the entire public is also very important. An important braking factor which influences the prevention and detection and solving the problem of domestic child and adolescent abuse exposure are definitely stable cultural beliefs and family stereotypes.
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