The parenting of teenagers has emerged as a key public, political and social concern in recent years and Supporting Parents of Teenagers meets the growing need for relevant resources and research findings in this area. This handbook provides a review of current policy developments, from crime and disorder legislation to youth offending teams. It addresses the practical issues of how to assess and provide support for parents and covers all aspects of the field, including parenting orders, the use of the parent advisor model, setting up a parenting teenagers group, involving fathers as well as mothers of teenagers and working with ethnic minorities. Examining the conflicting needs of young people and their parents and how best to address them, this book is an essential resource for all those working to support the parents of teenagers.

In "Reclaiming Public Housing," Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.

The three similarly designed projects were built at the same time under the same government program and experienced similar declines. Each received comparable funding for redevelopment, and each design team consisted of first-rate professionals who responded with similar "defensible space" redesign plans. Why, then, was one redevelopment effort a nationally touted success story, another only a mixed success, and the third a widely acknowledged failure? The book answers this key question by situating each effort in the context of specific neighborhood struggles. In each case, battles over race and poverty played out somewhat differently, yielding wildly different results.

At a moment when local city officials throughout America are demolishing more than 100,000 units of low-income housing, this crucial book questions the conventional wisdom that all large public housing projects must be demolished and rebuilt as mixed-income neighborhoods.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. India is a country of great diversity. The commonly used indicators of 'quality of life' (such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy) vary tremendously between the different states, rivalling international contrasts between very low performing countries and very high achieving ones. This volume of essays reflects an attempt to draw lessons from the disparate experiences within India, rather than from contrasts with the experiences of other countries. It supplements Dreze and Sen's India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, which studies what we can learn from international comparisons of policies, actions, and achievements.

When Americans conceptualize freedom, they often disproportionately focus on negative freedom, or freedom from government constraint-being told what they cannot say, which religion they cannot practice, where they cannot move, etc. By this measure, Americans are remarkably free. However, such a conceptualization of freedom is incomplete without including notions of positive freedom-possession of agency, to be able to think and act autonomously in pursuit of one's desired life. Positive freedom unlocks agency through more than the absence of something, but the presence of something else-the conditions which enable people's development of their abilities and access to crucial resources and opportunities. If we measure the freedom of Americans by positive freedom measures, we are falling behind our perceived status. In On Inequality and Freedom, a diverse group of authors discuss how a variety of contemporary American inequalities-from racial, economic, and gender, to health, environmental, and political inequalities-actually limit American freedom, regardless of how much negative freedom we possess. This book provides readers with a deeper understanding of what true freedom is and concrete steps toward restoring it.

Suitable for courses addressing community economic development, non-profit organizations, co-operatives and the social economy more broadly, the second edition of Understanding the Social Economy expands on the authors' ground-breaking examination of organizations founded on a social mission - social enterprises, non-profits, co-operatives, credit unions, and community development organizations. While the role of the private and public sectors are very much in the public light, the social economy is often taken for granted. However, try to imagine a society without the many forms of organizations that form the social economy: social service organizations, arts and recreation organizations, ethno-cultural associations, social clubs, self-help groups, universities and colleges, hospitals and other healthcare providers, foundations, housing co-operatives, or credit unions. Not only do these organizations provide valuable services, but they employ many people, and purchase goods and services. They are both social and economic entities. Understanding the Social Economy illustrates how organizations in the social economy interact with the other sectors of the economy and highlights the important social infrastructure that these organizations create. The second edition contains six new case studies as well three new chapters addressing leadership and strategic management, and human resources management. A much-needed work on an important but neglected facet of organizational studies, Understanding the Social Economy continues to be an invaluable resource for the classroom and for participants working in the social sector.

Bryan M. Evans, Stephen McBride, and their contributors delve further into the more practical, ground-level side of the austerity equation in Austerity: The Lived Experience. Economically, austerity policies cannot be seen to work in the way elite interests claim that they do. Rather than soften the blow of the economic and financial crisis of 2008 for ordinary citizens, policies of austerity slow growth and lead to increased inequality. While political consent for such policies may have been achieved, it was reached amidst significant levels of disaffection and strong opposition to the extremes of austerity. The authors build their analysis in three sections, looking alternatively at theoretical and ideological dimensions of the lived experience of austerity; how austerity plays out in various public sector occupations and policy domains; and the class dimensions of austerity. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of austerity politics and policies.

In 2000, the first social agenda in the history of the European Union was launched, and the endeavor to combat poverty came increasingly to the forefront as a specific area for EU policy cooperation and coordination. Regrettably, however, little progress has been achieved so far, either at the national or European level. On the contrary, the EU's social fabric is under major stress: convergence in national living standards has halted or reversed while progress in terms of poverty reduction in the last decades has been disappointing in most EU Member States. In Europe, despite high social spending and work-related welfare reforms, poverty often remains a largely intractable problem for policymakers and a persistent reality for many European citizens. In Decent Incomes for All, the authors shed new light on recent poverty trends in the European Union and the corresponding responses by European welfare states. They analyze the effect of social and fiscal policies before, during, and after the recent economic crisis and study the impact of alternative policy packages on poverty and inequality. The volume also explores how social investment and local initiatives of social innovation can contribute to tackling poverty, while recognizing that there are indeed structural constraints on the increase of the social floor and difficult trade-offs involved in reconciling work and poverty reduction. Academics and graduate students in comparative social policy, inclusion and anti-poverty policy, sociology, and public economics will find the book to be a particularly helpful resource in their work.

The fall-out from the economic and financial crisis of 2008 had profound implications for countries across the world, leading different states to determine the best approach to mitigating its effects. In The Austerity State, a group of established and emerging scholars tackles the question of why states continue to rely on policies that, on many levels, have failed. After 2008, austerity policies were implemented in various countries, a fact the contributors link to the persistence of neoliberalism and its accepted wisdoms about crisis management. In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 collapse, governments and central banks appeared to adopt a Keynesian approach to salvaging the global economy. This perception is mistaken, the authors argue. The "austerian" analysis of the crisis is ahistorical and shifts the blame from the under-regulated private sector to public, or sovereign, debt for which public authorities are responsible. The Austerity State provides a critical examination of the accepted discourse around austerity measures and explores the reasons behind its continued prevalence in the world.

This collection examines the human rights to social security and social protection from a women's rights perspective. The contributors stress the need to address women's poverty and exclusion within a human rights framework that takes account of gender. The chapters unpack the rights to social security and protection and their relationship to human rights principles such as gender equality, participation and dignity. Alongside conceptual insights across the field of women's social security rights, the collection analyses recent developments in international law and in a range of national settings. It considers the ILO's Social Protection Floors Recommendation and the work of UN treaty bodies. It explores the different approaches to expansion of social protection in developing countries (China, Chile and Bolivia). It also discusses conditionality in cash transfer programmes, a central debate in social policy and development, through a gender lens. Contributors consider the position of poor women, particularly single mothers, in developed countries (Australia, Canada, the United States, Ireland and Spain) facing the damaging consequences of welfare cuts. The collection engages with shifts in global discourse on the role of social policy and the way in which ideas of crisis and austerity have been used to undermine rights with harsh impacts on women.

In this fully revised third edition of Australia's Welfare Wars, Philip Mendes questions many of the key values and assumptions that determine contemporary social welfare policies, and the factors and forces that shape these policies in Australia. Rather than concentrating on the history of the welfare state, or the process of making social policy, Mendes examines welfare politics in Australia from a broad political perspective, exploring the role played by key socio-economic players and their respective ideologies in the political struggles around welfare. The book looks closely at: the influence of ideas and ideologies - such as neoliberalism, laborism, social democracy and social investment - on the welfare state how different local interest and lobby groups influence welfare policy the significant impact of economic globalisation, and global social policy trends, on Australian welfare policy debates.

Behind from the Start examines the link between America's shaming, blaming, and marginalizing of poor parents, and American policies that jeopardize the life chances of vulnerable young children, thereby maintaining the cycle of chronic poverty. Lenette Azzi-Lessing reveals how negative public and political discourse regarding poor families impacts the very policies and programs intended to support them, which have in turn failed to meet their aims. She considers the cultural and political forces that contribute to intergenerational poverty in the U.S., and the consequences for the millions of young children in families stuck at the bottom of our economy. Close to six million children ages five and under live in poverty and that number continues to grow. Research has shown that the experience of poverty in the first years of life is particularly harmful, blunting physical and brain development, increasing risk for chronic health issues and injury, and limiting lifelong capacity for learning and success. Behind from the Start reveals that what began as the War on Poverty has, over the course of the past five decades, been contorted into a War on the Poor in which the lives of America's poorest children remain heartbreakingly grim, as are their prospects for a healthy and successful future. Drawing from fields as wide-ranging as media studies, psychology, social welfare, public policy, neuroscience, and education as well as her own considerable personal experience, Lessing makes a forceful case for action to break out of this self-fulfilling cycle.

The Selected Papers of Partha Dasgupta brings together the works of one of the most distinguished economists working today. Professor Dasgupta was Knighted in 2002 for services to economics and his research interests have covered welfare and development economics, the economics of technological change, population, environmental and resource economics, the theory of games, and the economics of undernutrition.
This two-volume collection represents a body of work spanning 40 years and contains a selection of Dasgupta's most original papers on six key themes. Both volumes feature foundational papers and substantial original introductions. The articles reflect inter-disciplinary scholarship in the author's search for a unifying way to analyse the problems people face in trying to allocate resources over time, among groups, and across uncertain contingencies. Each volume opens with an extended essay explaining the motivation underlying economics; the concept of what economics is about and how modern economists move within it.
The author makes essential use of findings in anthropology, demography, ecology, geography, moral philosophy, and the environmental and nutritional sciences, but studies social phenomena through the lens of economics, to unravel the pathways by which scarce resources are produced, exchanged, and disseminated.

This study reviews the role and workings, with their strengths and weaknesses of last-resort income support (LRIS) programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It draws on a combination of household survey and administrative data for a large group of countries and detailed case studies for a smaller number of countries that span the spectrum of the income range in the region. It thus combines the value of wide, comparable multi-country work with that of in-depth, country-specific probing on key themes. The experiences of LRIS programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have demonstrated the technical feasibility of highly efficient poverty-targeted programs in the region. The detailed case studies suggest how programs can improve their coverage, control error and fraud and be implemented effectively in decentralized settings. This experience is pertinent to other regions as well, adding to the know-how for poverty targeting programs in middle and low income countries. Perhaps especially importantly, the book shows that means testing can be accomplished in settings with sizeable informal sectors and at reasonable administrative costs. The study also suggests that currently the role of last resort income support programs within the overall social protection systems of the region is often too small and that their eligibility thresholds should be revised and indexed, so that the programs continue to serve a meaningful swath of the low income households in each country. Moreover the programs can be used as the nexus to weave together a variety of income supports and services for low income households.