Wider Social Value Research Articles

Relationships Matter: The Social and Economic Benefits of Community Playgroups

Community playgroups have been a feature of Australia’s early childhood education and care landscape for at least forty years. Research in this field has focused on the developmental benefits of playgroup participation for children. However, as a playgroup member interviewed for this study said, that tells only half the story of playgroups’ benefits. The other half – and the focus of this report – describes the benefits of participation for parents and carers, and the spillovers or wider social value that this generates. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, this research contributes to knowledge and advocacy gaps by critically appraising:• the contribution of playgroups to the landscape of social care• their adaptive response to changing social and economic trends• their role in developing social capital and acting as a catalyst for parents and carers to engage with other social settings, and• their contribution to the informal or non-market economy.The findings of this study emphasise the point developed by social capital theorists that relationships matter. However, the report also reveals some structural weaknesses and constraints that may impede playgroup participation and the contribution of playgroups to community capacity building. These include:• constraints around the finances, leadership and training support of playgroups• variable participation across cultural, linguistic and faith groups• gaps in information provision about playgroups.

Fashion, Media and the Elite: Ethnography of the Exploitation of the Slovenian Transitional Media Promenade

The article is an attempt to represent a particular social practice, which has, due to its currency and ubiquity in the media as of late, gained a surprisingly naturalized legitimacy within the Slovenian mediascape. After Slovenia gained its independence in 1991, two parallel processes could be observed. On the one hand, the state itself was searching for a new identity which it could project both inward and outward, it was looking for a way to communicate the national tale of itself through numerous ruling discourses of politics, economy, tourism, sports and culture. On the other hand, the transitional ruling class and the emergent social force of postsocialist rich, chosen and owners needed new elements in the process of social differentiation. Fashion became one of the reinvented refuges or simply “discoveries” of the new Slovenian political, economic and media elite, which used the media to establish a visual order of transitional social differentiation. At the core of fashion as a mode of social distinction is a ceremonialized and spectacularized display of cultural differences within a society. Elites have been caught in the social obligation of constant invention of novelty, in order to create the necessary social difference from the non-elite or the masses. Namely, difference itself has no wider social value if there is no one to notice or desire it. This article methodologically authenticates the conclusions through the analysis of specific media perceptions and an ethnography conducted among actors on these levels: producers of fashion as social distinction (the elite) vs reproducers of fashion as social distinction (the media) vs consumers of fashion as social distinction (the audience).