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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social welfare & social services > Welfare & benefit systems
The growing proportion of older people in Western countries means that the proper provision of suitable care facilities is of increasing importance. This timely new book is based on solid practical research carried out over 12 years in over 300 different establishments, and offers a conceptual framework for evaluating group residences for older adults, and new procedures for measuring their quality. It also proposes guidelines for designing new facilities as well as improving existing facilities.
This collection of twelve essays reviews the history of welfare in Britain over the past 150 years. It focuses on the ideas that have shaped the development of British social policy, and on the thinkers who have inspired and also contested the welfare state. It thereby constructs an intellectual history of British welfare since the concept first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The essays divide into four sections. The first considers the transition from laissez-faire to social liberalism from the 1870s, and the enduring impact of late-Victorian philosophical idealism on the development of the welfare state. It focuses on the moral philosophy of T. H. Green and his influence on key figures in the history of British social policy like William Beveridge, R. H. Tawney, and William Temple. The second section is devoted to the concept of 'planning' which was once, in the mid-twentieth century, at the heart of social policy and its implementation, but which has subsequently fallen out of favour. A third section examines the intellectual debate over the welfare state since its creation in the 1940s. Though a consensus seemed to have emerged during the Second World War over the desirability and scope of a welfare state extending 'from the cradle to the grave', libertarian and conservative critiques endured and re-emerged a generation later. A final section examines social policy and its implementation more recently, both at grass roots level in a study of community action in West London in the districts made infamous by the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, and at a systemic level where different models of welfare provision are shown to be in uneasy co-existence today. The collection is a tribute to Jose Harris, emeritus professor of history in the University of Oxford and a pioneer of the intellectual history of social policy. Taken together, these essays conduct the reader through the key phases and debates in the history of British welfare.
In this book Lesley Jacobs challenges the view, now prevalent in North America and Western Europe, that the primary function of a nation's social policy should be to provide support only for the poorest people instead of social services accessible to all its citizens. In an interesting and distinctive argument he develops and defends the idea that access to basic rights such as education, health care, adequate housing, and income support can provide a solid moral foundation for redistributive state welfare programmes, maintaining that any nation which purports to take rights to basic liberties seriously must also be fully committed to the principles of the welfare state. Dr Jacob's thesis addresses a pressing political and philosophical problem at the heart of the policies and structure of the modern state.
Praise for "THE BATTLE FOR SOCIAL SECURITY" "A fast-paced read which shows why, as my grandfather said, we
need some 'safeguards against misfortune in this man-made world of
ours.' In this world where Social Security is under attack, this
book is a must-read to be able to refute the people who want to
dismantle it." "Thorough, compelling, and engagingly written, The Battle for
Social Security is essential reading for anyone wondering whether
our nation's most successful domestic program is sustainable in the
twenty-first century. Altman delivers the knockout punch to private
accounts and other proposals to radically reform Social Security,
while showing the way to truly strengthen Social Security within
the principles that have guided this vital institution since its
inception." "I love Social Security like my mother's cookies--it embodies
our best ideals for America. Now it is the job of younger
generations to carry the vision forward. That means knowing where
Social Security came from. If you want a history with action, read
The Battle for Social Security. I enthusiastically endorse
it." "As Nancy Altman proves, there is no reason why history and
policy analysis have to be dull. Her new book on Social Security,
aimed principally at the non-expert is fun to read, while telling
the important story with accuracy and insight. It is a must-read
for all who would understand the current ideological struggle,
'from FDR's vision to Bush'sgamble.'" "Nancy Altman's comprehensive history of Social Security
provides a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at America's
political and legislative process. This is a must-read for the
policy leaders who will now determine Social Security's future.
Altman breathes new life into the players and politics, both past
and present, that have made Social Security the success it is
today." "Altman's book was written with a general audience in mind, but
it provides, with first-rate scholarship, much that is new for
scholars of the American welfare state. The Battle for Social
Security is a well-crafted, fascinating, and thought-provoking
history of a social insurance program that affects all Americans. I
highly recommend it for both audiences, expert and lay."
This paper presents findings from a module in the HSRC's 2006 South African social attitudes survey that was designed by the Centre for the analysis of South African social policy at the University of Oxford. Respondents were asked for their views on issues relating to the importance of work and the relationship between social grants and employment. The findings demonstrate a strong attachment to the labour market among the unemployed, support for more financial assistance for poor people including those who are unable to find work, and no evidence that social grants in South Africa foster a 'dependency culture'. The human sciences research council's urban, rural and economic development research programme (URED) uses a multi-disciplinary approach to promote integrated urban and rural development in southern Africa and across the continent. Poverty reduction is the unifying, overarching theme and purpose of URED's work, and the programme's activities coalesce around the themes of - poverty and rural development; infrastructure and service delivery; urban change and migration; and human development, tourism, and climate change. The analysis presented in this monograph is part of an ongoing collaboration between URED and the Centre for the analysis of South African social policy at the University of Oxford in relation to poverty and social policy in contemporary South Africa.
This book explores the incentives and effects of modern welfare policy, contrasted with outcomes of global basic income pilots in the past seventy years. The author contends that paternalistic and counterproductive eligibility rules in the modern American welfare state violate the human dignity of the poor and make it nearly impossible to escape the "poverty trap." Furthermore, these types of restrictions are absent from expenditures aimed at middle and upper-income households such as mortgage interest deductions and tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Case examples from the author's years as a front-line social worker and interviews with basic income pilot recipients in Ontario, Canada, are woven throughout the book to better illustrate the effects of the current system and the hidden potential of more radical alternatives such as a universal basic income.
Mediating Divorce: A Step-by-Step Manual is written for family law attorneys and therapists who need a comprehensive resource for facilitating the divorce mediation process. Written by Marilyn S. McKnight and Stephen K. Erickson, two widely known pioneers in the field of divorce mediation, this useful guide will show how to implement the techniques needed to be an effective divorce mediator. It includes helpful information for understanding and working through the emotions experienced by people going through a divorce.
The traditionally, and wrongly, imagined vulnerabilities of the welfare state are economic. The true threats are demographic and political. The most frequently imagined threat is that the welfare state package reduces the level and growth of GDP. It does not, according to broad historical patterns and non-experimental panel econometrics. Large-budget welfare states achieve a host of social improvements without any clear loss of GDP. This Element elaborates on how this 'free lunch' is gained in practice. Other threats to the welfare state are more real, however. One is the rise of anti-immigrant backlash. If combined with heavy refugee inflows, this could destroy future public support for universalist welfare state programs, even though they seem to remain economically sound. The other is that population aging poses a serious problem for financing old age. Pension deficits threaten to crowd out more productive social spending. Only a few countries have faced this issue well.
A Step-by-Step Guide for Working with Violent Clients Renowned family therapist Cloe Madanes presents a therapy of social action, a proven model of therapeutic intervention developed for professionals who work with violent men. At the very heart of this approach is the conviction that the offAnder is fully responsible for his actions. As evidence of this core belief, a therapy of social action requires the offAnder to acknowledge his violent actions, demonstrate authentic repentance, make amAnds to the victim, and find acceptable alternative behaviors.
In the 1949 Housing Act, Congress declared a decent home and a
suitable living environment for every American family our national
housing goal. Today, little more than half a century later, upwards
of 100 million people in the United States live in housing that is
physically inadequate, unsafe, overcrowded, or unaffordable.
This book explores two fundamental shifts in the paradigms of governance in Western bureaucracies: the widespread use of privatization, private firms and market methods to run core public services, and the conscious attempt to transform the role of citizenship from ideals of entitlement and security to new notions of mutual obligation, selectivity and risk. Mark Considine examines a key service of the modern welfare state unemployment assistance--to explain and theorize the nature of these radical changes. He has undertaken extensive research in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand--four countries which have been among the boldest reformers within the OECD, yet each adopting distinctively different models and programs.
RELATE (originally the National Marriage Guidance Council) is probably the largest and most successful service of its kind in the world. For over 50 years, helping many hundreds of thousands of couples and individuals, it has developed an approach to couple counselling that is based on acknowledgment of the uniqueness of individual clients and their relationships, a respect for their autonomy and cultural differences, and a commitment to counselling with empathy, genuineness and warmth. The authors of this book are excellently qualified to provide this unique account of the RELATE Approach in action: both were trained by RELATE, both have very substantial counselling experience, and both have supervised the work of other RELATE counsellors for several years. The ever-changing characteristics of relationships and family life are fully recognised in the RELATE Approach, which helps clients to find their solutions to difficulties of family life, transitions, separation, divorce, sexuality, gender and identity, by helping them to find meanings in the patterns of their relationships, and to make sense of emotions, thoughts and actions in themselves and their partner. This book is designed to enrich and stimulate the work of counsellors working within a wide range of counselling models and traditions. This is not a prescriptive manual but rather an informed guide to the RELATE Approach, which includes many illustrative examples and (invented) case studies. The RELATE Approach still depends upon the counsellor’s repertoire of counselling skills, but offers a three-stage counselling model (exploration, understanding, action) made operational within the format of brief, time-limited therapy. "The counsellors with RELATE and its predecessor, the Marriage Guidance movement, were the founders of counselling as we know it today. The approaches to counselling which they have developed have wide application. Butler and Joyce write very well and I found this book clear and full of good ideas for clinical practice. I can confidently recommend the book to all who care for couples in relationships." C. Murray Parkes OBE, MD, FRCPsych "A useful introduction to RELATE’s three-stage model of couple counselling and some of the concepts on which it is based." Christopher Clulow, Director of the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute
Is neoclassical economics dead? Why have the biggest industrial economies stagnated since the financial crisis? Is the competitive threat from China a tired metaphor or a genuine danger to our standard of living? Lord David Sainsbury draws on his experience in business and government to assemble the evidence and comes to some startling conclusions. In Windows of Opportunity, he argues that economic growth comes not as a steady process, but as a series of jumps, based on investment in high value-added firms. Because these firms are engaged in winner-takes-all competition, rapid growth in one country can indeed come at the expense of growth in another, contrary to the standard models. He suggests a new theory of growth and development, with a role for government in 'picking winners' at the level of technologies and industries rather than individual firms. With the role of industrial policy at the centre of the Brexit debate, but a significant intellectual gap in setting out what that policy should be, this book could not be more timely.
The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own destruction In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.
A direct, informed approach involving all family members An invaluable guide for enhancing your skills when working with families in which child abuse has occurred. Systemic Treatment of Families Who Abuse addresses both the symptoms and precipitating issues of child abuse and neglect, and also
The author discusses how the treatment of child abuse differs from generic treatment, and stresses the necessity for systemic interventions for everyone: abusers, abused, and nonabused family members.
A serious consideration of the debate on social security reform that is taking place in many countries around the world. Professor Seidman advocates the concept of 'funded social security' as a middle position between pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) social security and privatized social security, and constitutes a politically strategic alternative. His analysis covers two distinct components, fund accumulation and portfolio diversification. The concept of funded social security uses a mix of payroll taxes and portfolio investment income to finance benefits. With funded social security, the government contracts with private investment firms to manage the portfolio of the social security trust fund. It is entirely a defined-benefit plan without any individual defined-contribution accounts; each retiree's benefit is linked by a legislated formula to the retiree's own wage history. The benefit is an annuity - an annual benefit that continues as long as the retiree (or spouse) lives - and is automatically adjusted annually for inflation.
Why have social spending levels and social policy trajectories diverged so drastically across labour-abundant Middle Eastern and North African regimes? And how can we explain the marked persistence of spending levels after divergence? Using historical institutionalism and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods Social Dictatorships: The Political Economy of the Welfare State in the Middle East and North Africa develops an explanation of social spending in authoritarian regimes. It emphasizes the importance of early elite conflict and attempts to form a durable support coalition under the constraints imposed by external threats and scarce resources. Social Dictatorships utilizes two in-depth case studies of the political origins of the Tunisian and Egyptian welfare state to provide an empirical overview of how social policies have developed in the region, and to explain the marked differences in social policy trajectories. It follows a multi-level approach tested comparatively at the cross-country level and process-traced at micro-level by these case studies.
This book analyzes the impacts on peoples' lives of the largest antipoverty social program in the world: the Brazilian Bolsa Familia Program. Created by the government of former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Bolsa Familia has been for a time the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world, serving more than 50 million Brazilians who had a monthly per capita income of less than USD 50. The program is regarded as one of the key factors behind the significant poverty reduction Brazil experienced during the first decade of the 21st century. Bolsa Familia is neither a credit scheme nor a loan. It is a program of civic inclusion: it aims to help citizens meet their most basic needs and sometimes just to survive. Its goal is to create citizenship, not to merely train the entrepreneurial spirit. Having this in mind, the authors of this book spent five years (2006-2011) interviewing more than 150 women registered in the program to see how the cash transfers impacted their everyday lives. The authors concluded that the program produces significant social impacts in the beneficiaries' lives by increasing their levels of moral, economic and political autonomy, promoting citizenship. Money, Autonomy and Citizenship - The Experience of the Brazilian Bolsa Familia will be of interest to both academic researchers and public agents involved with the study, development and implementation of public policies aimed at reducing poverty and promoting social justice.
A timely and incisive look at austerity measures that succeed-and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. In this masterful book, three of today's leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Looking at thousands of fiscal measures adopted by sixteen advanced economies since the late 1970s, Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt. It shows that spending cuts have much smaller costs in terms of output losses than tax increases. Spending cuts can sometimes be associated with output gains in the case of expansionary austerity and are much more successful than tax increases at reducing the growth of debt. The authors also show that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and provide new insights into the recent cases of European austerity after the financial crisis. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging subjects, Austerity charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.
How did Americans come to quantify their society's progress and well-being in units of money? In today's GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the "health" of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.
Why have both Great Britain and the United States been unable to
create effective training and work programs for the unemployed?
Desmond King contends that the answer lies in the liberal political
origins of these programs. Integrating extensive, previously
untapped archival and documentary materials with an analysis of the
sources of political support for work-welfare programs, King shows
that policymakers in both Great Britain and the United States have
tried to achieve conflicting goals through these programs.
In the last 50 years the gap in labour productivity between Europe
and the US has narrowed considerably with estimates in 2005
suggesting a EU-US labour productivity gap of about 5 per cent.
Yet, average per capita income in the EU is still about 30% lower
than in the US. This persistent gap in income per capita can be
almost entirely explained by Europeans working less than
Americans.
Recent policies have replaced direct government funding for teaching with fees paid by students. As well as saddling graduates with enormous debt, satisfaction rates are low, a high proportion of graduates are in non-graduate jobs, and public debt from unpaid loans is rocketing. This timely and challenging analysis combines theoretical and data analysis and insights gained from running a university, to give robust new policy proposals: lower fees; reintroduce maintenance awards; impose student number caps; maintain taxpayer funding; cancel the TEF; re-build the external examiner system; restructure the contingent-repayment loan scheme; and establish different roles for different types of institutions, to encourage excellence and ultimately benefit society.
An international and historical look at how parenting choices change in the face of economic inequality Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden to China and Japan, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti look at how economic incentives and constraints-such as money, knowledge, and time-influence parenting practices and what is considered good parenting in different countries. Through personal anecdotes and original research, Doepke and Zilibotti show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success. Economics has transformed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and '70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Growing inequality has also resulted in an increasing "parenting gap" between richer and poorer families, raising the disturbing prospect of diminished social mobility and fewer opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In nations with less economic inequality, such as Sweden, the stakes are less high, and social mobility is not under threat. Doepke and Zilibotti discuss how investments in early childhood development and the design of education systems factor into the parenting equation, and how economics can help shape policies that will contribute to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Love, Money, and Parenting presents an engrossing look at the economics of the family in the modern world.
Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred-so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between. In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable-not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States. |
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