This books focuses on co-design, and more specifically, on the various forms co-design might take to tackle the most pressing societal challenges, introducing public-interest services as the main application field. To do so, it presents an extensive study conducted within a particular community of residents in Milan: this is a social innovation story integrated into the discipline of service design, which simultaneously deepens the related concepts of co-design, co-production and co-management of services. Drawing upon this experience and further studies, the book presents the idea of a collaborative infrastructure and its related infrastructuring process in ten steps, in order to explore the issues of incubation and replication of services and to extensively investigate the creation of those experimental spaces in which citizen participation is fostered and innovation in the public realm is pursued. Lastly, the book develops other lines of reflection on co-design seen, for example, as a form of cultural activism, as an instrument for building citizenship, and as a key competence for the public administration and thus as a public service itself. The idea of co-design as a way to regenerate the practices of democracy is a recurring theme throughout the book: co-design is a process that seeks to change the state of things and it is intentionally presented as a long and complex path in which the role of designer is not only that of a facilitator, but also that of a cultural operator who contributes with ideas and visions, hopefully fostering a real cultural change.

Although social legislation in the United States is always in the tradition of social reform rather than fundamental social change, the 1960s are considered a progressive period because of the union of government and societal obligations; class consciousness was aroused, and the redistribution of power and resources were salient issues. In Civil Rights and the Social Programs of the 1960s, Marcia Bok describes the background, analyzes the process of decision making, and traces the passage of selected landmark decisions of the 1960s. She tracks the changes that have occurred in this legislation in the last two decades, and discusses the current and possible future status of social policies and programs.

The legislation examined is chosen for its diversity and reflection of Great Society programs, and includes: The Civil Rights Act, 1964; The Community Mental Health Centers Act, 1963; The Economic Opportunity Act, 1964; Medicare and Medicaid, 1965; and Head Start, 1965. Bok considers the concepts of equality and social justice as the bases for the social legislation discussed, and includes analysis of historical, political, and legal aspects of the civil rights movement and concurrent events.

From bandage to the bioreactor, this book looks at five different device technologies from inception to healthcare practice, drawing on medical sociology, science and technology studies and political science. It examines "evidence," regulation and governance processes, and diverse stakeholders in innovating the technologies that shape health care.

During the past 15 years, artists have established a remarkable record of innovation and success in institutional settings. Their work with hospital patients, prisoners, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and others has shown that the arts can have a significant positive impact on the lives of these people. This book recounts the histories of 22 institutional and community arts programs across the country pioneering this approach through activities such as creative writing and the performing and visual arts. Consisting largely of first-hand accounts, the book demonstrates how the creative processes have been used to address and solve some of society's most pressing problems. Included are case studies, research, and descriptions of the wide variety of artistic, educational, and therapeutic approaches utilized by each of the 22 programs. Also described are many of the financial and political strategies used to build and sustain support for these unlikely endeavors. This work will provide valuable insights for artists, educators, social service providers, and community leaders.

This edited collection provides the first in-depth analysis of social policies and the risks faced by young people. The book explores the effects of both the economic crisis and austerity policies on the lives of young Europeans, examining both the precarity of youth transitions, and the function of welfare state policies.

Welfare Rights and Social Policy provides an introduction to social policy through a discussion of welfare rights, which are explored in historical, comparative and critical context. At a time when the cause of human rights is high on the global political agendathe authorasks why the status of welfare rights as an element of human rights remains ambiguous. Rights to social security, employment, housing, education, health and social care are critical to human well-being. Yet they are invariably subordinate to the civil and political rights of citizenship, they are often fragile and difficult to enforce, and because of their conditional nature they may be implicated in the social control of individual behaviour.

Government supported junk social science-or sanctified snake oil as Sarnoff terms it-exists in all policy arenas along the entire political spectrum, as policy advocates seek to justify the continuation of ineffective programs and to block alternative solutions. This form of junk science is particularly dangerous and wasteful in terms of tax dollars because professional confirmation, media investigation and government support lend it an unwarranted imprimatur of validity. Sarnoff argues that it confuses the public and convinces them to support programs as ends in themselves, rather than determining whether or not such efforts actually achieve purported goals.

Ineffectiveness, incompetence, lack of technology, ideology masquerading as policy, and even outright fraud serve to perpetuate the general confusion. This situation is exacerbated by the proliferation of media attention, much of it unmonitored for accuracy or bias. Sanctified snake oil, Sarnoff contends, spawns industries that drain public resources and attention from real, serious cases and distort public perceptions of the magnitude of the issues involved. This study sheds new light on this muddle and offers recommendations which will make it more difficult for junk science to represent itself as legitimate social policy.

Lofty sentiments notwithstanding, the United States has consistently sought to exclude impoverished immigrants from entering the country on the grounds that many become dependent on social welfare institutions. Leif Jensen thoroughly explores the nature of poverty and public assistance utilization among immigrants to the United States during the years 1960 to 1980. Among the questions he explores are: Has there been an increase in the level of poverty and the degree of public assistance utilized by immigrants to the United States during the past twenty years? How do these levels compare to those for native-born Americans and across key racial and ethnic groups? How do individual and family characteristics affect the propensity of families to be poor or to receive public assistance? Following an introduction to the study as a whole, Jensen presents theoretical issues that bear on differences in poverty and welfare use. He reviews U.S. immigration history with particular emphasis on those aspects that are relevant to poverty and the receipt of public assistance. The chapters that follow review methodological issues, then present the results of Jensen's empirical analysis; two chapters focus on poverty at the family level and two consider public assistance utilization. These chapters build a conceptual background for a multivariate model of poverty at the family level. Because the mere propensity to receive public assistance is only one aspect of the welfare burden imposed by a particular group, the author also examines the absolute amount of public assistance received. Finally, he synthesizes the key findings of his empirical analysis, drawing conclusions regarding the pervasiveness of poverty and actual public assistance receipt among new immigrants. Jensen's thorough analysis and provocative conclusions make this book essential reading for those interested in sociology, demography, economics, and political science.

The American Way is incompatible with the U.S. experience of post-World War II capitalism. National and individual self-determination are collapsing in the face of profit-seeking, social compulsions, and the imperatives of global competition. Iain Hay states that the illusion of free choice and the misguided rhetoric of individualism remain: they mask new realities of compulsion and collectivism. This cultural contradiction is thoroughly analyzed by Hay from an unusual, outside perspective through an investigation of the development of medical liability insurance and its implications for tort law reform and health care provision in the United States.

"Money, Medicine, and Malpractice in American Society" transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries to provide a straightforward account of circumstances giving rise to particular forms of legal, medical, and social regulation in the United States. Hay explores the roots of change in medical and legal regulation in the United States through an inquiry into medical malpractice and health care costs in the ever-changing domestic and worldwide arena. It provides the first comprehensive association of American medical liability issues, health care spending, and post-War national and international contexts. This book will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and doctors as it provides a useful framework for understanding legal and medical change associated with medical liability and its insurance.

The authors challenge psychological perspectives on happiness and subjective wellbeing. Highlighting the politics of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, case studies across continents explore wellbeing in relation to health, children and youth, migration, economics, religion, family, land mines, national surveys, and indigenous identities.

Foreword by Randy E. BarnettIn 2012, the United States Supreme Court became the centre of the political world. In a dramatic and unexpected 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts voted on narrow grounds to save the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Unprecedented tells the inside story of how the challenge to Obamacare raced across all three branches of government, and narrowly avoided a constitutional collision between the Supreme Court and President Obama. On November 13, 2009, a group of Federalist Society lawyers met in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., to devise a legal challenge to the constitutionality of President Obama's legacy",his healthcare reform. It seemed a very long shot, and was dismissed peremptorily by the White House, much of Congress, most legal scholars, and all of the media. Two years later the fight to overturn the Affordable Care Act became a political and legal firestorm. When, finally, the Supreme Court announced its ruling, the judgment was so surprising that two cable news channels misreported it and announced that the Act had been declared unconstitutional. Unprecedented offers unrivaled inside access to how key decisions were made in Washington, based on interviews with over one hundred of the people who lived this journey,including the academics who began the challenge, the attorneys who litigated the case at all levels, and Obama administration attorneys who successfully defended the law. It reads like a political thriller, provides the definitive account of how the Supreme Court almost struck down President Obama's unprecedented" law, and explains what this decision means for the future of the Constitution, the limits on federal power, and the Supreme Court.

When you are responsible for another person's physical needs, your own needs are often neglected. After caring for her spouse, who for ten years suffered from a rare, debilitating disease, Kay Marshall Strom is able to bring a voice of experience and compassion to this important topic. She shows you how to

• find spiritual support
• maintain balanced relationships
• decide when caregiving at home is no longer possible
• work out your financial situation
• understand the impact of long-term caregiving on the whole family
• deal with your personal losses

Mandel's comprehensive study provides an integrated, explanatory analysis of the new global security environment, which he terms "the global playground," and the consequent blossoming of ominous flows or "deadly transfers." It includes an analysis of the behavior of rogue states, terrorist groups, transnational criminal organizations, and deviant individuals. Mandel begins with a discussion of the general nature of the emerging global situation and the transborder activities that occur within it, then turns to an overarching analysis of the intractable causes, pernicious consequences, and futile cures associated with these ominous transnational flows. Such activities include clandestine conventional arms, illegal human migration, illicit drugs, hazardous materials, lethal diseases, and information disruption. Both national and international organizations are fundamentally weak when it comes to dealing with such transfers. In contrast to the prevailing view that more deterrence-oriented coercion is necessary to stop these flows, this study suggests that a bottom-up approach involving changes in mass attitudes is crucial. It does not shy away from pointing directly at potential areas of security dysfunction at all levels of policy making. In taking a largely theoretical rather than case-specific approach to exploring these issues, it hopes to avoid the usual laundry list of shocking anecdotal incidents to develop a broader understanding of the new security dilemmas confronting us all. Finally, in demonstrating the futility of existing remedies and in suggesting an alternative, preliminary set of ideas to cope with these transactions, Mandel attempts to give security policy makers a widerarsenal of options from which to choose.

Care is no longer a private concern. In the era of high modernity, characterized by population aging, family fragmentation and the entry of women into the paid workforce, it has become a major public issue. This important text offers a systematic, comparative analysis of the sociology, philosophy and emergent practices of care in the context of the political economy of post-industrial societies.

The ethics of care has flourished in recent decades yet we remain without a succinct statement of its core theoretical commitment. This study argues for a simple care ethical slogan: dependency relationships generate responsibilities. It uses this slogan to unify, specify and justify the wide range of views found within the care ethical literature.

This volume highlights some of the challenges in delivering effective environmental health interventions, and presents examples of emergent theories and case studies that can help close the gap between intent and impact. These include impact crediting systems, objective evidence gathering tools, and social businesses that service environmental health. The case studies presented cross disciplines, scales, organizational and national boundaries and can defy easy categorization. A water project may be designed for a health impact, but financed with a climate change tool, and leverage high tech cell phone sensors. A cookstove program may be primarily concerned with employment and capacity building, but balance environmental and health concerns. Presently, the impact of interventions may not always be aligned to the intent sought. In this book, readers will discover alternative ways to move the mindset of funders and implementers toward pay-for-performance models of humanitarian and environmental interventions. Undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, global health, appropriate technology, international development and development engineering would benefit from these increasingly non-traditional case studies that challenge commonly accepted presentations of poverty reduction and social enterprise.

European welfare states are currently under stress and the 'social contracts' that underpin them are being challenged. First, welfare spending has arguably 'grown to limits' in a number of countries while expanding everywhere in the 1990s in line with higher unemployment. Second, demographic change and the emergence of new patterns of family and working life are transforming the nature of 'needs'. Third, the economic context and the policy autonomy of nation states has been transformed by 'globalization'. This book considers the implications of these challenges for European welfare states at the end of the twentieth century with interdisciplinary contributions from first-rate political scientists, economists and sociologists including Paul Ormerod.

This study synthesizes and summarizes the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that suggest that competition works remarkably well to reduce costs and improve efficiency and innovation, even in an arena where competition has typically been ignored--government-financed services. The arguments and data marshaled here, drawn primarily from the American experience, portray the substantial benefits to consumers and taxpayers that can result from efforts to increase competition in commercial services previously operated as government monopolies.

Competition in Government-Financed Services will help fortify the efforts of competition advocates, both in the United States and in the emerging market economies of Eastern Europe and the developing world, to get on with the job of strengthening competition and opening their systems to market forces.

This book explores the role and impact of the settlement house movement in the global development of social welfare and the social work profession. It traces the transnational history of settlement houses and examines the interconnections between the settlement house movement, other social and professional movements and social research. Looking at how the settlement house movement developed across different national, cultural and social boundaries, this book show that by understanding its impact, we can better understand the wider global development of social policy, social research and the social work profession.

As many social inequalities widen, this is a crucial survey of local authorities' evolving role in health, social care and wellbeing. Health and social and public policy experts review structural changes in provision and procurement, and explore social determinants of health including intergenerational needs and housing. With detailed assessments of regional disparities and case studies of effective strategies and interventions from local authorities, this collaborative study addresses complex issues (Wicked Issues), considers where responsibility for wellbeing lies and points the way to future policy-making. The Centre for Partnering (CfP) is a key outcome of this innovative review along with Bonner's previous work Social Determinants of Health (2017).

Social assessment for projects in China is an important emerging field. This collection of essays - from authors whose formative work has influenced the policies that shape practice in development-affected communities - locates recent Chinese experience of the development of social assessment practices (including in displacement and resettlement) in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors - social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups - examine projects from a practitioner's perspective. Real-life experiences are presented as case-specific praxis, theoretically informed insight, and pragmatic lessons-learned, grounded in the history of this field of development practice. They reflect on work where economic determinism reigns supreme, yet project failure or success often hinges upon sociopolitical and cultural factors.

The purpose of this book is to break a number of the conventions of research texts by writing an academic text on methodology as a case study of building case studies, one that cites classic works in the field and contains autobiographical considerations throughout its account, one that narrates the conscious process of designing a framework from the range of philosophies that were involved in chronicling this topic.

In the burgeoning literature on welfare regimes and typologies, this comparative study offers a stimulating new perspective. Kaufmann, the doyen of the sociology of social policy in Germany, emphasizes norms, culture and history, in contrast to political economy approaches. Comparing Britain, Sweden, France and Germany, Kaufmann highlights the "idiosyncrasy" of each welfare state: countries are compared with regard to their state traditions and the relationship between state and civil society; their national "social questions"; their economic systems, including the unions and labour law; social security and redistribution; and their personal social services and education. The socio-cultural approach enables Kaufmann to show that not all modern states are welfare states. Some are just "capitalism" (the USA), others are "socialism" (the former Soviet Union). In this light, the (essentially North-West European) welfare state is portrayed as a third way between capitalism and socialism.