Rehabilitation frames: How offenders understand and navigate the penal-welfare nexus in Chinese community corrections

Medical Director Responsibilities for Outpatient Cardiac Rehabilitation/Secondary Prevention Programs

Every day, community corrections staff make complex decisions in an uncertain environment, affecting their workload, supervisees, and public safety. These micro-level decisions have the cumulative potential to influence the overarching goals of the organization as well as probationers themselves. While focal concerns theory is a well-developed explanation of decision-making in courts and policing, within the community corrections context, scholars have only applied the framework to specific reforms or decisions. Using ethnographic data from a community corrections agency and a grounded theory approach we extend the focal concerns perspective, and uncover how and why frontline supervisors and officers diverge from an array of policies. A spectrum of policy divergence themes emerge suggesting collective action between staff and policies. Findings reveal emergent rationale for why staff make micro-level divergent decisions, and how the collective action of officers and frontline supervisors serves as tempered divergence, ultimately altering the implementation and fidelity of policy.

The various modes in which individuals relate to the collectivity of a group have been fruitfully explored in research on group dynamics. The present paper applies a phenomenological interview approach to understand how this dynamic relationship plays out among design students in a collaborative design situation. Through deep-interviews with the members of a temporary design group, a number of dimensions for this relationship were uncovered. These individual-group characteristics related to instrumentality of engagement, experience of ambivalence and threat and finally to the process of individualization in which the group enabled an individual “design self”. After having presented the theoretical underpinnings and the empirical results of this study, the paper ends with suggesting a synthesis perspective of the individual-group relation in collaborative design.

Child abuse is a severe global problem associated with various negative consequences. It is therefore important that the services received at Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) are perceived as positive as possible by children affected by abuse. Preliminary research indicates that CACs are successful in terms of providing coordinated, professional services. However, existing research has primarily focused on service and criminal justice system outputs, rather than documenting the experiences of the target group: i.e., children undergoing the CAC proceedings. The present study seeks to investigate the children’s experiences of the forensic procedures in a CAC. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 15 children undergoing case proceedings at a Danish CAC. The overall experiences of the children of the forensic interview and forensic medical examination were documented. Additionally, five overall themes were constructed using Thematic Analysis: Localities and surroundings, Relational and communicative work, Ambivalent experiences, Need of information and overview, and Missing out on everyday life. The findings of the current study underline the importance of the physical environment of the CAC, the need of information and overview as well as strong relational and communicative skills among professional as core elements in establishing positive encounters with the CAC. Furthermore, the results indicate how negative experiences of visiting a CAC are not necessarily directly linked to the CAC but may be a result of the children experiencing missing out on well-liked everyday activities. Altogether these results are important to consider when planning future CAC visits to support the well-being of the child.

The modern criminal justice system includes community corrections, which play a preventive role in lowering recidivism among offenders. However, some offenders continue to commit crimes during community corrections. This research focuses on community corrections in Chinese community policing practice, particularly offender recidivism. The study collected a total of 500 questionnaires from offenders in the provincial administrative regions of northern China, which included first offense status, psychological status, and recidivism behavior. The study found that most recidivists are usually arrested for “drunk driving”, which may be related to their ability to exercise self-restraint, and that alcohol may contribute to their deviant behavior. Another important finding relates to young recidivists, who may have difficulty securing employment during community corrections and thus use crime again to gain income. In general, this study explores the offender population in Chinese community corrections practice and discusses the factors within it that influence offender recidivism. This may support law enforcement agencies in further evaluating the effectiveness of community corrections, and may provide new information for understanding community corrections in China.

This article uses ethnographic and interview data to explore how halfway house and community corrections staff in a women’s halfway house in the northeastern region of the U.S. police women’s sexuality and the ensuing complications of being queer and under supervision. In this setting, women are required to create a Reentry Home Plan that is approved by Community Corrections Officers, putting into tension some women’s newly emerging queer identity and/or nonnormative relationship schema that they see as “healthier” and more stable than heterosexual relationships, with Probation or Parole Officers’ heteronormative ideals that disapprove nontraditional home plans. This study shows how these women negotiate a marginalized sexual identity and resist biased forms of heteronormative surveillance that extend beyond the legislative parameters of community corrections supervision. It also illustrates the tensions between correctional staff, who view residents’ nonnormative relationships as potential sources of risk, and the supervised women, as they develop community release plans.

The recent establishment of Chinese community corrections (CCC) has drawn considerable attention to the question of why offender rehabilitation remains unfulfilled in China, a phenomenon known as the “rehabilitation disjuncture.” Yet, the peculiar organizational logic of the CCC, which structures offender-officer relations and frames their interactions, has received little explicit attention regarding its relationship to the rehabilitation gap. Drawing on ethnographic data from Chinese urban community corrections settings, the study examines the organizational structure, culture, and processes that cause the operation of CCC to deviate from the rehabilitation ideal. The analysis reveals that excessive formalism, an obsession with security, and narcissistic image-building permeate the daily rehabilitation work of correctional teams, collectively undermining the institutional commitment to benevolent care and thus compromising offender well-being. The article concludes with the argument that to truly achieve the welfarist goal, the organizational processes that underpin the practical implementation of offender rehabilitation cannot be neglected.

This paper integrates a theoretical framework based on dynamic capabilities and relational perspective to provide a comprehensive understanding of the antecedents and outcomes of supply chain resilience. First, it discusses the antecedents of supply chain resilience and the internal relationships among antecedents combining dynamic capabilities and relational perspective. Second, it discusses the mechanism of supply chain resilience on sustainable operational performance (sustainable market performance and sustainable quality performance). Finally, based on organizational information processing theory, it proposes and explores the moderating effects of supply side disruption, facility disruption and catastrophic disruption on the relationship between supply chain resilience and sustainable operational performance. The conclusions enrich and develop the antecedents and outcomes of supply chain resilience, reveal the influencing factors of supply chain resilience from dynamic capabilities and relational perspective, and reveal the value of supply chain resilience to operational performance from the perspective of sustainability, providing a breakthrough for disruption mitigation strategies and enhance the confidence of managers in designing supply chain resilience; supply chain disruption types are included in the outcomes framework of supply chain resilience, which further provides theoretical guidance for enterprises to quickly recover normal operation from supply chain disruption shocks.

The recent formalization of Chinese community corrections (CCC), with its explicit emphasis on the professional provision of rehabilitative services to offenders, signals Chinese policymakers striving to create a penal modernist project. It also instigates antagonism between justice and service-oriented professionals, who seek to assert and carve out respective jurisdictions over rehabilitative work. There is a dearth of research touching on the ways in which potential tensions, or contractionary professional identities, are managed in practice. Drawing on a set of ethnographic and interview data gleaned from a large Chinese city, which pioneered and implemented the professional model of community corrections, this study examines the negotiation of professional power and interprofessional dynamics in rehabilitative work. The analysis suggests that during professional contestation, CCC actors deploy strategies to maintain identity boundaries, while making compromises and ceding jurisdictional authority to the opposing group. The negotiated order is accomplished in this hybridized institutional field, primarily through variegated demands of professionals involved for capacity enhancement, legitimacy reinforcement, or pragmatic survival. A symbiotic, but continually fractious, configuration is thus forged, blurring professional boundaries and breeding reciprocal benefits that sustain collaboration. Implications for ameliorating CCC's rehabilitative work are discussed.

ABSTRACTThe recent establishment of Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) has been heralded as a lenient turn in China's criminal policy, and a welfarist approach to promoting the well‐being of offenders through state‐sponsored rehabilitation services. Despite growing research on the operational meaning and functions of the CCC, the effect of offenders' participation in rehabilitation on their satisfaction with justice has yet to be adequately explored. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with offenders in community corrections, and guided by the procedural justice framework, this study examines the lived experiences of offenders and the impact of their participation in rehabilitation on their perceptions of justice. The analysis reveals that offenders experience a process of what we call “manufacturing compliance,” navigating complex bureaucratic requirements derived from the state's priority of maintaining stability. This calls into question the presumed therapeutic effect of offenders' involvement in the CCC and further suggests an unintended negative impact of unmet expectations. The implications of these findings for the administration of the CCC as a genuine channel of penal welfare are discussed.

BackgroundRehabilitation medicine plays an integral part in attainment of optimal functioning after injury or disease. The National Rehabilitation Policy of South Africa (NRP) (2000) highlights the need for access to professional health care services, redistribution and optimal utilisation of resources and research in the field of disability and rehabilitation. The government further ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (2007), which validate the urgency in advancing the agenda of persons with disabilities. This paper outlines the methodological plan for evaluating rehabilitation services in the Western Cape, South Africa against the aims and objectives of the NRP as well as its principles and concepts. The evaluation process further focused on specific articles in the CRPD that were aligned with disability, health and rehabilitation.Methods/DesignA mixed-method design was used to evaluate the alignment of rehabilitation services with the NRP in the Western Cape. Four rehabilitation study settings were selected to ensure that both inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation levels of care were covered at different contexts (rural and peri-urban). The sites were checked for the most prevalent rehabilitation-related conditions to ensure the identification of suitable instruments for measuring rehabilitation outcomes. Each study setting was linked to two researchers with one exploring the rehabilitation organizational structure of the sites and the other exploring the client outcomes after receiving rehabilitation services. Patients were evaluated at baseline and discharge, within seven days after admission and seven days prior to discharge. The evaluation was based on the rehabilitation organizational capacity to provide patient-oriented rehabilitation and the measurement of rehabilitation outcomes. Kaplan’s framework of organisational capacity was used in the context of each study setting. For the measurement of service users’ outcomes, the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health was used (ICF). Standardised outcome measures were adopted for the domains of impairment, activity and participation. The World Health Organisation Community-Based Rehabilitation guidelines were used as guiding principles and concepts as suggested in the NRP.DiscussionThis is a groundbreaking methodological exploration that offers both study methods and instruments to measure rehabilitation services at both in-patient and out-patient rehabilitation services.

In this study, we examine a real-life case from a Finnish early primary school classroom and elaborate how the teacher and student(s) together create space for heterogeneous ways of being in the classroom that support their social and emotional competences and well-being. Our study offers conceptual tools and knowledge to support teachers in harnessing heterogeneity in classrooms – to embrace the ‘stranger’ in both the student and the teacher – to develop pedagogical interaction in challenging classroom contexts. Based on the study, we propose a map for embracing challenging situations in heterogeneous classrooms through a transformative teaching stance. Central dimensions of the map are (i) the dialectical nature of fostering learning in an institutional context, (ii) its embodiment in co-regulative processes in students and teachers as experiences of ambivalence and edge-emotions and (iii) sources of support for teachers to sustain a transformative teaching stance. Implications for supporting SEL with a view on teachers’ well-being are discussed.

PurposeDifferences in digital adoption between firms call for a clearer conceptualization of digital marketing capabilities (DMCs). The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to offer a conceptualization of DMCs from a relational dynamic capabilities perspective and (2) to explore performance outcomes of DMCs for international firms, taking into account firm size and entrepreneurial orientation.Design/methodology/approachA survey on a sample of 167 international firms is used and analyzed using hierarchical regression.FindingsDMCs contribute positively to performance. Firms with greater entrepreneurial orientation leverage DMCs more effectively and have better performance. Small firms with strong digital capabilities perform as well as medium-sized firms. Large firms perform marginally better than small and medium-sized firms.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper complements previous IB studies that only study customer-related or supplier- and channel-related IT adoption. It is based on a more holistic conceptualization of DMCs, and draws on market sensing, customer-linking, customer retention, supplier relationship and channel bonding capabilities. It offers new empirical evidence for the positive impact of DMCs on firm performance. It also contributes to small and medium-sized enterprise and digital entrepreneurship literature by comparing the performance outcomes of DMCs for different size firms with varying degrees of entrepreneurial orientation.Practical implicationsThis study provides implementable measures of DMCs. The findings encourage firms to develop entrepreneurial orientation alongside DMCs.Originality/valueThis paper presents DMCs as relational dynamic capabilities and shows the moderating effect of entrepreneurial orientation and firm size on the DMCs–performance relationship.

In 2003, the Chinese government began the use of community corrections to guide the reeducation and reform of offenders. Scholarly research within the field of community corrections has since begun, but the development of Chinese community corrections research is still in its infancy. There is little information about offenders and community corrections’ institutional organization and staffing. There is a dearth of comprehensive studies on the administrative process of community corrections, particularly pretrial investigation, transition of offenders, supervision, and a reward and punishment system. Thus, this study explored these flaws and omissions through research on offender profiles and the supervisors responsible for the development of Chinese community corrections.

The recent establishment of Chinese community-based corrections (CCC) signals Chinese reformers’ ostensible embrace of the rehabilitation ideal and a looming lenient turn in Chinese criminal justice policy. While a growing literature has studied the operational effects, social functions and political significance of CCC, little attention has been paid to the performative aspect or symbolic significance of China’s efforts at offender rehabilitation through community correctional processes. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in parole settings of two Chinese cities, we show how the CCC’s rehabilitative work practically operates as a form of performative governance, shedding light on the strategies and processes used by penal actors to achieve rehabilitative performance. In routine rehabilitative practices, justice officials typically collaborate with service professionals and/or parolees to forge a team performance—either by staging the fulfilment of indicators or by engaging in glorifying rituals. The study contends that when the implementation of rehabilitation is geared towards serving the interests of the state and is preoccupied with meeting bureaucratic ends, while ignoring the voices and precarious situations of offenders, the CCC enterprise of providing correctional services becomes a symbolic performance rather than a substantive accomplishment. The implications of the study for research and policy are discussed.