BU Research Blog

On Thursday BU Professor Jonathan Parker delivered a plenary address to I Convegno Internazionale ‘Social Work Education’ Innovazioni ed Esperienze (The International Conference on Social Work Education: Innovations and experiences) in Milan, Italy. Having represented the UK higher education sector when vice chair of the Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee body and drawing on wide research, knowledge and experience of the reforms in English social work education he presented the dangers of replicating England’s changes before introducing innovations that offset some of the risks.

In an effort to ‘raise the quality’ of social work education, and to respond cynically to popular pressure, successive UK Governments, particularly in England, have imposed standards and regulatory frameworks that have curtailed the capacity of universities to educate students according to their specialist interests and research areas. Rather than focusing on pedagogy, universities have allowed employer organisations to set the agenda. They have increasingly restricted their curricula and by so doing have co-created, with various governments, a social work that is predominantly concerned with protection and safeguarding. Addressing a wide audience including the current president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, Professor Annamaria Campanini, Jonathan Parker focused on the dangers of transferring these models and replicating them rather than promoting social justice and relational social work practice. He called for education that championed passion and joy in teaching and learning, was student-centred and actively challenged the corporate homogenisation of education. He suggested a focus on ethnographic practice in education, learning and onward into social work practice could offer a way forward and was needed.

Two other British academics, Professor Peter Beresford and Dr Pamela Trevithick, provided plenary sessions on service user involvement in education and relational skills. The conference was keen to learn about the innovations in and the problems of the English sector and to promote relationship skills and wisdom not the rigid application of standards that have crossed into higher education from the adoption of neoliberal market practices.

Jonathan Parker

Two papers on digital consumption co-authored by Dr Janice Denegri-Knott have been selected to appear in the Journal of Marketing Management’s new Editor’s Choice collection on digital consumption, and will be available free online until the end of November, 2016.

Redistributed consumer desire in digital virtual worlds of consumption

In this paper we discuss and illustrate how the use of software available in digital virtual worlds of consumption, including wish lists, watch lists and digital virtual goods (DVGs) interact with consumer desiring practices. We draw on a data set of three interpretative studies with technology users living in the South of England. We note the emergence of software-human desiring hybrids where various aspects of competence in and commitment to desire construction, maintenance and actualisation are distributed between subject and software, leading to new configurations of consumer desire. We bring to the fore the often neglected role of nonhuman agents in the practice of consumer desire and highlight the potential breaks caused in the assemblage of the practices unfolding in digital virtual worlds of consumption. Our study shows new ways in which consumer desire practices are re-assembled in software-human hybrids, thereby enhancing our understanding of the role of nonhuman agents (software) in consumer desire practices. It also contributes a finer understanding on how software used in the construction and actualization of desire ultimately reconfigure consumer desire practices into a management process, where the focus is not daydreaming activity or material commodities per se, but rather the software itself. Here, the software not only presents things to be desired, but also absorbs some of the skill and competence needed to conjure up desire. Ultimately these configurations appear to create breaks in the experience of desire that weaken the hold previously binding consumers to objects of desire.

The relationship between ownership and possession: observations from the context of digital virtual goods

This theoretical article highlights limitations in the current trend towards dichotomising full ownership and access-based consumption by recognising a broader, more complex array of ‘fragmented’ ownership configurations in the context of digital virtual goods (DVGs). In challenging this dichotomy, we recognise that the relationship between ownership and possession becomes particularly significant. We therefore consider how prominent DVG ownership configurations may shape the way in which possession is assembled, potentially reducing consumers’ scope of action relative to DVGs and leaving possession susceptible to disruption. Conversely, we acknowledge ways in which consumers’ continued attempts at possession may impinge upon the agency of ownership mechanisms within the market. Our analysis ultimately builds upon existing understandings of both ownership and possession, theorising their often overlooked relation in consumption.