This volume discusses a broad range of human welfare problems associated with and stemming from social issues, natural resource deficiencies, environmental hazards, vulnerability to climate change, and sustainability challenges. The chapters form a framework centered around the concept of social morphology, i.e. the role of humans in shaping society, and associated human-nature interactions which inform the ability to achieve sustainable welfare and well-being. The book is divided in six sections. Section I contains the introductory chapters where the book explores shifting interfaces between environment, society, and sustainability outcomes. Section II discusses contemporary issues of social welfare, and covers sustainable approaches in geo-heritage and ecotourism. Section III addresses the roots of various social conflicts and inequalities in relation to overpopulation, poverty, illiteracy, employment concerns, and human migration. Section IV highlights social security and areas of social deprivation, including urban affordability, gender equality, and women's health. Section V covers social issues resulting from natural hazards and disasters. Section VI concludes the book with a discussion of the way forward for social sustainability. The book will be of interest to students, researchers, policy makers, environmentalists, NGOs, and social scientists.

This book presents an original contribution to the study of care and care work by addressing pressing issues in the field from a Latin American and intersectional perspective. The expansion of professional care and its impacts on public policies related to care are global phenomena, but so far the international literature on the subject has focused mainly on the Global North. This volume aims to enrich this literature by presenting results of research projects conducted in five Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay -, and comparing them with researches conducted in other countries, such as France, Japan and the USA. Latin America is a social space where professional care has expanded dramatically over the past twenty years. However, unlike Japan, USA and European countries, such expansion took place in a context of heterogeneous and poorly structured markets, in societies which stand out for its reliance on domestic workers to provide care work in the household as paid workers, in both formal and informal arrangements. CareandCareWorkers: A Latin American Perspective will be a useful tool for sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, gerontologists and other social scientists dedicated to the study of the growing demand for care services worldwide, as well as to decision makers dealing with public policies related to care services. "Society cannot function without the unpaid (and poorly and informally paid) work of caregivers. Having the data - and this book presents this data - allows public policy to be based on the realities rather than on the prejudices, habits, or structural injustices of a previous time about gender roles, class, ethnicity, race, migrant status. (...) This volume not only presents the data, then, but also shows how some countries have begun to innovate to provide solutions to the problem that some people are overburdened by care while others do little of it. (...) Scholars and activists in Latin American countries lead the way in showing both how resistance remains and how to innovate. So the rest of the world has much to learn from this volume." - Excerpt from the Foreword by Professor Joan C. Tronto

This book provides an overview of the history, current state and future prospects of 22 residential child and youth care and education systems as they were at the time of writing. The book concentrates on Europe and North America. While not a formal comparative study, the contributors follow uniform guidelines thus enabling the reader to draw parallels between the various systems. Despite enormous cultural and social differences, similarities between the systems seemed greater than dissimilarities. The book also demonstrates how considerable progress had been made worldwide in the 25 years up to publication. The book is a companion volume to "Recent Changes and New Trends in Extrafamilial Child Care: An international perspective," also published by Whiting and Birch.

From housing, pensions and family benefits, to health care, unemployment insurance and social assistance, the welfare state is a key aspect of our lives. But social programs are contested political realities that we can't hope to understand without locating them within the "big picture."

This book provides a concise political and sociological introduction to social policy, helping readers to grasp the nature of social programs and the political struggles surrounding them. It takes a broad comparative and historical viewpoint on the United States, using an international perspective to contextualize American social policy within the developed world. Provocative and engaging, it offers insight into a wide range of social policy issues such as: welfare regimes, welfare state development, the politics of retrenchment and restructuring; the relationship between social programs and various forms of inequality; changing family and economic relations; the role of private social benefits; the potential impact of globalization; and debates about the future of the welfare state.

"What is Social Policy?" will be stimulating reading for upper-level students of sociology, political science, public policy, and social work.

"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature I've come across in years."
-Bill McKibben
The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. "A Paradise Built in Hell" is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

How do local communities effectively build peace and reconciliation before, during and after open violence? This trailblazing book gives practical examples, from the Global North, the former Soviet bloc and Global South, on communities addressing conflict in divided and contested societies. The book draws on a range of critical perspectives and practitioner analyses. The diverse case studies demonstrate the considerable knowledge, skills, commitment, courage and relationships within local communities that a critical community development approach can support and encourage. Concluding with activists' perspectives on working with the challenges of violence, the book offers insights for both an understanding of the root causes of conflict and for bottom-up peacebuilding.

Controversial social problems currently facing Americans are addressed in these 12 astute bibliographic essays that synthesize the literature on the issues and outline strategies for locating additional information. A few of the issues covered are media and popular culture; public policy and government; law and the administration of the justice system; poverty, welfare, and unemployment; child care and elder care; hunger and nutrition; homelessness; and children and the changing American family. The essays provide thoughtful examinations of the issues, discuss possible resolutions, and present lists of resources for further study. An essential purchase for college and university libraries, this work is also appropriate for high school libraries and medium to large public libraries. It can be used as a supplementary text for sociology, social work, public policy, family studies, education, and nursing courses that involve the study of contemporary social issues, and as a handbook by practitioners i

Juridification refers to a diverse set of processes involving shifts towards more detailed legal regulation, regulations of new areas, and conflicts and problems increasingly being framed in legal and rights-oriented terms. What impact do these international and national regulations have upon vulnerable groups in terms of inclusion, exclusion and social citizenship? The nature and effects of current juridification processes are hotly debated amongst social scientists and legal scholars.Bringing empirical analysis and multidisciplinary, comparative perspectives to the previously fragmented and largely theoretical debate on juridification in the welfare state, this book asks key questions such as: To what extent do international human rights norms secure basic welfare services to vulnerable groups?; How do different regulations affect democratic participation?; What is the role of professionals in the distribution of welfare services? Researchers, students and academics with an interest in law, human rights, social policy and the role of professionals in the welfare state will find much of value in this book. Contributors: H.S. Aasen, S. Bothfeld, L. Brandt, B. Bringedal, S. Bygnes, K. Baeroe, C. Cappelen, T. Eidsvaag, K.J. Fredriksen, O. Ferraz, R. Gargarella, S. Gloppen, E. Le Bruyn Goldeng, A. Kjellevold, S. Kremer, I.R. Lundeberg, A.-M. Magnussen, K. Mjaland, O. Maestad, E. Nilssen, L. Rakner, P. Stephens, H. Stokke, W. van Rossum

Young people are often at the forefront of democratic activism, whether self-organised or supported by youth workers and community development professionals. Focusing on youth activism for greater equality, liberty and mutual care - radical democracy - this timely collection explores the movement's impacts on community organisations and workers. Essays from the Global North and Global South cover the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental activism and the struggles of refugees. At a time of huge global challenges, youth participation is a dynamic lens through which all community development scholars and participants can rethink their approaches.

This work assesses the possibilities and limitations of reducing poverty among families with children by increasing the work effort of the adults in those families. Following a historical review of family poverty since 1995, the authors present several policy simulations, including increased employment, a higher minimum wage, more generous tax credits, a child allowance, and reduced childcare or medical expenses. Specific policy proposals-including the proposals of the Biden Administration-are assessed using four criteria: reducing child poverty; equitable treatment of the poorest groups; promotion of self-sufficiency; and cost-effectiveness. The authors conclude that while no single policy is able to reduce family poverty by half while meeting the other criteria, several combinations of policies have the potential to do so.

Citizens of all societies age both as biological beings and as members of households in the open community. Through joining a series of essays and survey analyses, John Mogey has constructed a book that examines the way aging affects those who are growing older as well as the institutions of their society. To study the relationships between aiding the elderly and the aging process, two very different societies--the United States and Hungary--were chosen for comparison. In both societies, support for the elderly comes from formal institutional programs as well as informal family arrangements, and it seems equally true in both cases that the elderly get most of their support through kinship assistance. Throughout the book, the focus remains on the need to encourage the persistence of the kinship system, and the necessity of public programs to actively support the maintenance of households. The volume is structured in three distinct sections: Households, Amity, and Lifestyle; Individuals, Kinship, and Networks; and Kinship, Lifestyle, and Policy. In each section, essays concentrate on the usual operations within communities that have elderly people in them, drawing data from the United States, Hungary (including information from a unique empirical study in Budapest), and six other countries. The essays also address the variety of demands that the kinship system places on public programs. Aiding and aging are common structural problems in all modern societies, and although each society will develop different policy solutions, all will use elements from the structures described in this collection. The book will be an important resource for courses in social work, social gerontology, andsociology, as well as an important addition to university and public libraries.

What should South Korean offices look like in a post-hierarchical world? In Supercorporate, anthropologist Michael M. Prentice examines a central tension in visions of big corporate life in South Korea's twenty-first century: should corporations be sites of fair distinction or equal participation? As South Korea distances itself from images and figures of a hierarchical past, Prentice argues that the drive to redefine the meaning of corporate labor echoes a central ambiguity around corporate labor today. Even as corporations remain idealized sites of middle-class aspiration in South Korea, employees are torn over whether they want greater recognition for their work or meaningful forms of cooperation. Through an in-depth ethnography of the Sangdo Group conglomerate, the book examines how managers attempt to perfect corporate social life through new office programs while also minimizing the risks of creating new hierarchies. Ultimately, this book reveals how office life is a battleground for working out the promises and the perils of economic democratization in one of East Asia's most dynamic countries.

This book presents social welfare functions as a unified multidisciplinary framework for various resource allocation problems. By measuring the impact of local decisions on broader society, social welfare functions enable "socialized" decisions and thereby produce an emergent property that "global" balance and welfare emerge from "local" welfare-maximizing behaviors. Social welfare functions are originally used in economics to quantify income welfare, jointly considering average and inequality to arrive at better measures of welfare than average alone. Wishing the readers to find opportunities for their problems of interest, this book introduces research results of social welfare functions applied in five different engineering applications, defining welfare metrics pertaining to the characteristics of the application. The "energy welfare" in wireless sensor network measures richness of distributed sensors in energy. The "preparedness welfare" in emergency medical services quantifies the preparedness level of an entire service area by aggregating preparedness levels of individual zones. The "preference welfare" in intelligent shared environments represents the opinions of real people for groups. The "resource welfare" in multi-robot task allocation quantifies the efficiency of utilizing distributed resources across robots. The "utility welfare" in complex cyber-physical systems quantifies the impact of local resource sharing decisions on the broader task communities.

Have globalization pressures and neo-liberal ideas led to convergence in how countries respond to welfare claimants? Through ethnographic case studies of social assistance offices in the United States, Germany and Sweden, "Agents of the Welfare State" demonstrates persistent diversity in how states structure needs assessment and activation efforts, contrasting a bureaucratic, flat-grant system in the U.S., with German and Swedish programs in which individualized assessment is a core organizational task. It shows how responsiveness in these European programs is institutionalized through nationally distinct legal foundations, professional traditions, and resource networks, while revealing how resource scarcities threaten to erode these capabilities.

This book examines the many ways in which the New Deal revived Texas's economic structure after the 1929 collapse. Ronald Goodwin analyzes how Franklin Roosevelt's initiative, and in particular, the Work Progress Administration, remedied rampant unemployment and homelessness in twentieth-century Texas.

This is a comprehensive handbook on the relationship of air pollution to incineration. Incineration is becoming the predominant method of dealing with many of our waste products and its most significant envi ronmental impact is on the air. This book includes information on emissions as well as on equipment design. Two chapters deal with the regulations governing incinerator emissions as well as the thermal destruction of hazardous wastes. Four chapters describe the nature of the emissions generated by the incin eration process. These particulate, gaseous, and odor emissions, are hazardous as well as deleterious to public well-being and aesthetics. Also included is a complete and timely discussion of dioxin generation and discharges. Three chapters describe the incineration equipment in general use today and methods of calculating gas flows and air discharges from these systems. Five chapters discuss the types of gas cleaning equipment available with sizing information and expected efficiencies. The nature of the gas cleaning process is discussed in detail. Criteria for selection of the opti mum system for a particular application is also included. The dispersion of an atmospheric discharge to the surrounding areas and/or communities is a vital concern in assessing the nature of that discharge and its impact, or potential hazards. A chapter is devoted to a relative simple method of estimating atmospheric dispersion."

The only book to focus on implementing public policy, this state-of-the-art text offers a comprehensive and lively account of the major insights found in implementation theory and research. Its exploration of the field provides a reflective overview of work in the study of policy implementation worldwide. In doing so, the book reconceptualizes the policy process to highlight the essential role those implementing policy have in moulding, shaping and directing policy during their work. Realizing policy goals may be the key to ballot box victory, while policies perceived as failures may symbolise declining trust and confidence in government and politics. As such, implementing policy is as crucial to the actors in power as it is for democracy. Policymakers respond to challenging problems in highly dynamic and pressurised contexts. From the global pandemic to climate change, financial regulation to education, effective policy has never been more important to governments and society - and the role of street-level bureaucrats in implementing policy never so crucial. This is the seminal work in the field, used by thousands worldwide. Now fully revised and updated, the 20th anniversary edition includes substantial changes and additions. This edition features two entirely new chapters on the consequences of populism and the latest street-level bureaucracy research, as well as extensive examination of comparative cross-national work and a refined and more explicit conceptualization of implementation in terms of its role in governance throughout. The book concludes with an all-new chapter exploring emergent issues on implementation in practice and on the research agenda. The text is essential reading for anyone interested in public policy, social policy, public administration, public management and governance.

This book explores the development of state welfare in Taiwan, focusing on the interconnection between capitalist development and state welfare from 1895 to 1990, using an integrated Marxist perspective to which the capitalist world system, state structure, ideology, and social structure are considered simultaneously. It argues that neither citizenship nor welfare needs were the concern of Taiwanese social policies. A decline in legitimacy and risen social movements forced the state to expand welfare, namely the National Health Insurance, in the 1980s.

Why is it that many large public projects run out of control in terms of scope, budget and time? How can it be explained that urban regeneration programs are highly successful in one neighborhood but fail to deliver in an adjacent neighborhood? Why is it that public policies can return unexpected and sometimes even unwanted outcomes, despite meticulous planning? Why is public decision-making such a complex affair? The world is an erratic place, full of surprises, some of which are wanted and others are unwanted. Public decision-making in this world is like punching clouds: considerable energy is put into the punching but the cloud goes its own way, despite the punches. Recent ideas and insights from the complexity sciences improve our understanding of the intricate nature of public decision-making. This book offers a bridge between the study of public decision-making in the domain of Public Administration on the one hand, and the complexity sciences on the other hand. It is aimed at (doctoral) students and scholars in Public Administration who are curious about how the complexity sciences can inform the analysis and understanding of public decision-making. The book introduces important concepts such as systems, non-linear dynamics, self-organization and coevolution, and discusses their relevance to public decision-making. It also proposes a case-based research method for researching this complexity. Lasse Gerrits, Ph.D. is associate professor in Public Administration at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and member of the research group Governance of Complex Systems.

This much-needed volume fills an overlooked gap in adult safeguarding - the digital arena - in providing a comprehensive overview of policy and practice in supporting vulnerable adults online. Providing an essential analysis illustrated by recent court rulings and case studies, the authors advocate for the effective support of adults with learning disabilities and/or mental capacity issues in their digital lives without compromising their privacy and participation rights. The text balances a theoretical exploration of the tensions between participation and protection, legislation, human rights, professional biases and social wrongs. It encourages a critical approach in adopting both a practical and realistic understanding for policy makers, professionals and students in social work, law and adult social care.

Incorporating insights from political economy and behavioural psychology, this radical book provides an up-to-date account of the dilemmas facing social policy this decade: where did we go wrong, and what we can do about it? Ian Greener reconsiders one of the leading analyses by Jessop of the relationship between the economic and the political, combining it with insights from behavioural science. Covering the economy, healthcare, education and social security, detailed case studies show that the tensions and contradictions in present policy stem from the relationship between government and corporations and a resulting growth in inequality. The author presents a new, unified and effective framework to consider where social policy has come from, where it is now, and what what can we do about it? This book is ideal for those who want the bigger picture of politics and social policy, including advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of social policy, welfare studies, politics, or other social science disciplines.

In this cutting edge collection authors examine risk thinking in a range of policy and practice contexts, including special needs education, digital exclusion, domestic violence and abuse, child protection and youth work. Four key interlinking themes emerge from the chapters. The first is how, within a neoliberal context, risk agendas can be used to justify and normalise the rationing and targeting of services. The second theme demonstrates that the use of such agendas can in themselves redefine what is constituted as social problems, and how they are understood and responded to in practice. Thirdly, it is clear welfare practice itself is being re-structured and re-theorised to adapt and conform to the new definitions and understandings that risk thinking has brought about. Finally, the fourth theme illustrates how the use of risk as a negative organising discourse is not inevitable but, in different contexts, can create positive outcomes for service users, practitioners and society.

This book provides important philosophical insights concerning the kind of creatures we are such that we can experience something we understand as well-being, with these insights then being applied to various areas of social policy and welfare practice. The author defends what he calls The Ontology of Well-Being Thesis (TOWT), addressing ontological questions about the human condition, and how these questions are fundamental to issues concerning what we might know about human well-being and how we should promote it. Yet, surprisingly, these ontological questions are often side-lined in academic, political, and policy and practice based debates about well-being. Addressing these questions, head-on, six features of the human condition are identified via TOWT: human embodiment, finiteness, sociability, cognition, evaluation, and agency. The main argument of the thesis is that these features reveal the conflicting character of human experiences, which can, in turn, have a profound bearing on our experience of well-being. Notably, it is our conflicting experiences of time, emotion, and self-consciousness, which can potentially help us experience well-being in complex and multi-dimensional ways. The author then applies these insights to various social policies and welfare practices, concerning, for example, pensions, disability, bereavement counselling, social prescribing within health settings, the promotion of mental health, and co-production practices. This book is of importance to philosophers, social policy analysts, and welfare practitioners and is also relevant to the fields of psychology, sociology, politics, and the health sciences.