The urban poor suffer many problems beyond pressing financial concerns, including those involving housing, health, and family relationships. Social welfare agencies struggle to cope with the enormity of need presented by individuals and families. The providers frequently lack a framework to guide their priorities and the delivery of services. This volume, based on the authors' close and extensive collaboration with New York's Lower East Family Union, affords a substantive, insightful, and effective approach not only to defining the services needed but also to the delivery thereof. It also examines the cognitive and emotional states which the clients bring as they seek help. Means are provided for establishing priority of needs, assessing the value of preventive services, and formulating family-specific service responses. Potential family dissolution and implicit child welfare concerns are viewed as especially critical and receives extensive constructive discussion.

Stressed, poverty-level families often approach helping agencies in a nearly exhausted condition. The needs of such clients can only be answered, and the last straw avoided, if the agencies are structured to identify the most immediate needs and to supply the understanding, supportive relationship, and the requisite practical assistance. This book, with its extensive base of experience, guides the process wisely. It offers informed hope that the awful conditions of the urban poor can be ameliorated through better planned and effective service delivery, and caring interventions.

Local nonprofit organizations are often small, loosely structured, and democratically governed, and therefore do not fit conveniently into traditional theories of organizational behavior that are rooted in administrative science and bureaucratic structure. Treating community organizations as parts of larger systems--organizational fields or ecologies and communities--this collection of papers presents various perspectives on local nonprofit organizations from the standpoint of organizational theory. The essays draw on an array of methods and theoretical approaches taken from population ecology theories of organizations, laying the foundation for the structural analysis of community organizations.

Based on open-ended interviews with adult children and children-in-law, this book documents how plain folk from the working and middle classes manage to provide care for their frail, elderly parents while simultaneously meeting the obligations of their jobs and their own immediate families.

Adult children who care for elderly parents are pressured daily trying to juggle the responsibilities of work, family, and caregiving. Deborah Merrill shows how plain folk (as one caregiver termed herself) from the working and lower middle classes manage to provide care for their frail, elderly parents while simultaneously meeting the obligations of their jobs and their own immediate families. The evidence is drawn from open-ended, in-depth interviews with adult children and children-in-law, all of whom have worked outside of the home at some point during caregiving.

Merrill examines the strategies that caregivers use to combine work and caregiving and the accommodations they make in their jobs. She also points to the pathways that lead family members to caregiving roles and how those pathways vary according to family history, gender, and in-law status. By focusing on class differences in caregiving and pointing to policy implications, Merrill has provided an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and policymakers in social work, gerontology, family studies, and social issues.

Wysong analyzes the nature and extent of the involvement of seven major health and safety professional organizations in the development of the most significant national reform effort in occupational health policy since the OSA Act of 1970: The High Risk Occupational Disease Notification and Prevention Act. The professions have long been a focus of study in sociology; however, this is the first book to examine how the interests and involvement of health professionals' organizations on a national health policy issue are linked to external interests and dynamic contextual factors. By illuminating how professional societies' policy choices are embedded within and shaped by economic and political contexts, Wysong refines prevailing new class interpretations of professionals' interests where policy reforms are concerned. This book should be of particular concern to scholars and researchers involved with medical sociology, the sociology of work, complex organizations, social change, and occupational health policy.

Eclipse of Freedom unravels the dynamics of oppression that frustrates human aspiration, highlights policy linkages that explain unwarranted misery, assesses the human damage caused by dysfunctional social policies and fragmented services, and identifies a progressive mechanism of social transformation. Brij Mohan posits social theory and the human condition in a post-material context that emphasizes peace, justice, and equality as biodiverse needs of the human family. The focus of the study is the structure of oppression: racism, sexism, ageism, classism, as well as poverty, AIDS, homelessness, and other scourges that affect the alienated underclass. Mohan rejects the New World Order as a perversion of Nietzschean logic and challenges scientists, philosophers, and policymakers to think critically and to act responsibly in search of universal freedom.

"An excellent overview of the problems and needs of the disabled. . . . The volume itself is a clear, concise well-written gathering of otherwise scattered information that should be valuable for years to come. Highly recommended for all libraries." Choice

Gender equality has been one of the defining projects of European welfare states. It has proven an elusive goal, not just because of political opposition but also due to a lack of clarity in how to best frame equality and take account of family-related considerations. This wide-ranging book assembles the most pertinent literature and evidence to provide a critical understanding of how contemporary state policies engage with gender inequalities. Examining progress in gender equality in EU member states, this thought-provoking book traces developments from the last decade and earlier regarding women's and men's relative positioning in respect of income, employment and time. Located in a critical feminist perspective, the result is a compelling overview of the gender-related achievements in the EU and continuing gaps and inequalities. As well as taking stock of where we are now, the book identifies a research agenda going forward. This seeks to revitalise the feminist social policy project, in light of key welfare state developments and intersectional inequalities in Europe and beyond. This innovative and detailed book constitutes an important contribution to debates about gender equality and policies in Europe and provides a timely reminder of the content of the gender critique of welfare states and why it is still salient.

In 1998, the Foundation for Child Development (FCD) provided Kenneth Land a grant to explore the feasibility of producing the first national composite index of the status of American children that would chart changes in their well-being over time. Important questions needed to be answered: was it possible to trace trends in child and youth well-being over several decades? Could such an index provide a way of determining whether the United States was making progress in improving its children's lives? The Index of Child and Youth Well-Being (CWI) was born from these questions. Viewing the CWI trends from 1975 to present, there is evidence that the well-being of American children lags behind other Western nations. As conditions change, it is clear that the index is an evolving and rich enterprise. This volume attests to that evolution, and what the CWI promises for understanding the progress - or lack of progress - in enhancing the life prospects of all American children.

Since its first issue in 1988, much interesting and inspiring material has been published in "Groupwork." Most of this still says much of use to today's groupworkers, and there is a steady stream of requests for reprints. We are therefore making back volumes of "Groupwork" available in volume form. Authors in this volume include leading academic figures in the field as well as practitioners working in the field. Any groupworker will find this material of enduring interest.

This is a practical guide, written by an employee compensation adviser, for accountants, lawyers and in-house advisers primarily HR, company secretarial and finance directors, as well as for parents requiring childcare. Although there are many books in the marketplace, and information generally available to parents on the subject of childcare none focus on the taxation and financial aspects of childcare from the perspective of the choices available to parents and the obligations and duties attendant upon those choices. Increasingly employers are asking what they can do to support and inform their employees who are also parents. This book provides the information which employers would wish their employees to have available to them, the benefits which can support diversity programmes and the information necessary to plan effectively for childcare, making informed decisions and to ensure the proper consideration is taken of taxation costs and opportunities and other regulatory duties such as employment law and immigration considerations. This is an invaluable source of information for parents using, or considering using, childcare. Contents The contents are arranged under the following sections: - Benefits available to parents such as Child Benefit; Benefits administered by employers such as Tax Credits; Benefits which may be offered by employers such as workplace nurseries; Employee choices including childminders and nannies. This book gives employers and their advisers providing comprehensive and detailed information on childcare opportunities. About the author: Alison Haynes has been a tax partner with Deloitte since 1998 and has more than 25 years experience in advising employers on tax and social security issues relating to their employees.

This book highlights (1) the significance of reciprocity for the maintenance of self-esteem in old age and (2) the negative implications for the well-being of dependent older people when that significance goes unrecognized and, as a consequence, opportunities to give back to society, as well as take from it, are not facilitated by those in a position to do so. The discussion draws on research undertaken in the UK and Southern India into the extent to which having the self-perception of being valued in the world is important to older people in receipt of care support and whether, in their experience, this is recognized by others. The author presents an analysis of theoretical insights from leading thinkers across a broad range of literature and from several disciplines, including social theory, social work, philosophy, and gerontology. The author also gives voice to the perspectives of those dependent older people not often heard because of marginalizing and disempowering processes that contribute to their having little opportunity to be heard in the first place. The emphasis of this book is on aspiration to a meaningful life and continuing personal growth as offering a challenge to dominant discourses the equate old age with decline.

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Winner of the 2006 Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Organized Section Best First Book Award from the American Political Science Association

Winner of the 2006 W.E.B. DuBois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists

""The Politics of Disgust" is a very thoughtful, theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich analysis of the discourse of welfare reform."
--"Political Science Quarterly"

"An important contribution to our understanding."
--"Perspectives on Politics"

aFor those concerned about inequality and democratic theory in America, Hancockas introduction alone, in which she frames the characteristics of politics of disgust, makes the book worthwhile.a
&3151;"Perspectives on Politics"

"Brilliantly conceived and executed. . .[A] stunning work of public policy that, if embraced, could radically change 'welfare'--and America--as we know it."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination"

"[A] challenging and disturbing account of the impact of stereotypes in politics. Anyone interested in the means by which the poor, the unpopular, and the alienated are kept from participating in politics to demand better treatment should read this book."
--Frank R. Baumgartner, coauthor of "Agendas and Instability in American Politics"

"[An] excellent and outstanding book; Ange-Marie Hancock has established herself without doubt as a rising star in political science."
--Gerald Horne, author of "Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire"

Ange-Marie Hancock argues that longstanding beliefs about poor African Americanmothers were the foundation for the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate that effectively "ended welfare as we know it." By examining the public identity of the so-called welfare queen and its role in hindering democratic deliberation, The Politics of Disgust shows how stereotypes and politically motivated misperceptions about race, class and gender were effectively used to instigate a politics of disgust.

The ongoing role of the politics of disgust in welfare policy is revealed here by using content analyses of the news media, the 1996 congressional floor debates, historical evidence and interviews with welfare recipients themselves. Hancock's incisive analysis is both compelling and disturbing, suggesting the great limits of today's democracy in guaranteeing not just fair and equitable policy outcomes, but even a fair chance for marginalized citizens to participate in the process.

An outstanding examination of the cross-cultural apsects in social work practice and service dealing with Hispanic elderly, in particular Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexicans. It provides a historical as well as a sociodemographic overview of the Hispanic aged, and addresses economic, cultural, and health issues affecting their quality of life. This is certainly a notable and comprehensive study of service utilization, variations in aging, politics and public policy, and foremost a collection of research writings of ethnography of Hispanic aging patterns and variabilities. Most highly recommended for public and academic libraries and for class use. LA Red/The Net A notable contribution to the literature dealing with ethnic variations in aging, this volume of interrelated original essays looks at how Hispanic elderly living in the United States are adapting to the present, maintaining links to the past, and determining the roles they may have in shaping the future. Addressing economic, social, cultural, and health issues that affect the quality of life of older Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Hispanics, the book offers both comprehensive analyses of selected topics and descriptive case studies of community life together with theoretical paradigms and practice models in the field of minority aging.

Foreword by Eric Maskin (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2007)This book is a collection of articles written by the two authors on the topic of equality of opportunity. All articles build on the idea that a just society should equalize the resources that determine the opportunities agents face in order to follow their goals. Resources are either external, like financial resources, or internal, like preferences or skills. The authors propose to define "equality of opportunity" as the combination of ethical principles of compensation and responsibility. The principle of compensation requires external resources to be used to compensate low-skilled agents (considering that inequalities due to skill differences are unjust). The principle of responsibility requires external resources to be allocated without regards to inequalities due to differences in preferences (considering that these inequalities are not unjust). The articles present different ways of combining the two principles in different economic contexts.The book offers many possible aspects of the analysis of equality of opportunity, ranging from axiomatic discussions in abstract compensation models, to the design of redistribution policies in concrete labor income taxation models.

This volume addresses the tensions between work and welfare with respect to fertility. Focusing on childbearing choices (intentions, desires) as influential predictors of future fertility, the contributors examine the importance of labour force attachment on young women's fertility plans in the context of increased labour market flexibility and differences in work-life balance policies across Europe in the early 21st century. Both high- and low-fertility societies of different welfare regimes are studied, illuminating processes of uncertainty and risk related to insecure labour force attachment and the incoherence effect in terms of women's and men's equal access to education and employment but unequal share of domestic responsibilities, constraining fertility. The synthesis of the findings shows how childbearing choices in relation to uncertainty, risk and incoherence offer a lens for understanding the capabilities of families to have and care for children in contemporary Europe. This volume contributes to the conceptual development of further research on the complex relationship between fertility, paid work and work-life balance policies.

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As the state of America's children and families continues to degenerate, the human services system struggles to render the support it was designed to provide. Despite such efforts, American families have difficulty accessing services; they are forced to navigate an incomprehensible system where quantity is often deemed insufficient and quality is compromised. Simultaneously, expenditures on human services have soared to record levels, further spurring both concerns and efforts to reform and better integrate a sadly dysfunctional system. In the first comprehensive synthesis of the history, theory, and practice of service integration, Sharon Lynn Kagan, with Peter R. Neville, explores why past efforts to reform the human service system have had only isolated triumphs and marginal impact in improving the quality of life for children and families. Tracing the history of human services in America from the colonial period to the present, the author analyzes the underlying assumptions, barriers, and strategies that have characterized the service integration movement. Drawing on history, empirical research, and intellectual theory, as well as on the personal experiences of practitioners and leaders, the author extracts principles and insights that offer new directions for future social service reform. Published in cooperation with the National Center for Service Integration

This reference book provides information on the family planning rights of minors in eleven countries in North America and Western Europe. The Adolescent Dilemma covers a minor's legal rights to abortion services and birth control. In addition, this comprehensive resource discusses sex education, sexual behavior, and the nature and extent of contraceptive practices. The introduction presents a framework for discussing minors' rights and the conclusion draws on the information provided in the book to take a brief, comparative look at the topic. Both a reference resource on family planning and a data source for cross-cultural comparisons, this book will be of interest to social service professionals at all levels.

The human right to survive and develop, a fundamental premise of the "U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child," can be attained only if adequate living conditions are secured for the child. This book reviews the significance of the physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social aspects of holistic child development called for by Article 27 of the "Convention." The editors share a vision of childhood wherein the child is accorded dignity, and opportunities exist to promote advancement of human potential. Contributors from several nations and a variety of disciplines, including psychology, law, social work, medicine, economics, and international studies, address the challenge of identifying adequate living conditions across cultures and discuss issues affecting communities and governments as they attempt to fulfill their responsibilities to children and their families. Key themes throughout the book are the significance of the child's perspective, the primacy of the family environment, the need to balance the interests of diverse cultures while reducing historical inequities, and the ecological interdependence of children, families, communities, and nations. The editors and contributors call for organized social and political action to realize the child's right to develop, including ways to measure and monitor children's well-being beyond survival.

The dominant cultural script is that the Baby Boomers have 'had it all', thereby depriving younger generations of the opportunity to create a life for themselves. Bristow provides a critical account of this discourse by locating the problematisation of the Baby Boomers within a wider ambivalence about the legacy of the Sixties.

This book traces the historical development of social policy analysis, emphasizing the factors that promoted its development, the need for social policy analysis, and the fields of application for social policy analysis.

This edited volume assesses from a variety of perspectives the policies introduced to support the development of household services across Europe. It highlights the impact of these costly policies on the creation of low quality jobs and on labour market dualisation, and questions their social and economic outcomes.

This multidisciplinary volume includes an international roster of contributors who explore how mass hysteria has emerged among people across the globe as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The contributors provide international perspectives on the effects of this "corohysteria" in areas such as education, healthcare, religion, psychology, mathematics, economics, media, racism, politics, etc. They argue the hysteria, angst, fear, unrest, and difficulties associated with the pandemic are exploited to foster political and social agendas and have led to the undermining of national and global responses to the virus.