This book offers a clear and coherent guide to working with families for practitioners and students in social work, health, counselling and related professions. It brings together recent thinking on the historical and contemporary constructions of the family in such a way as to provide a helpful framework for practitioners working in a variety of settings in the field. It offers up-to-date information on political, legislative and theoretical frameworks, and it reviews and illustrates a wide range of approaches and practice skills for working with families with different problems in different contexts.

Conventional wisdom argues that welfare state builders in the US and Sweden in the 1930s took their cues from labor and labor movements. Swenson makes the startling argument that pragmatic social reformers looked for support not only from below but also from above, taking into account capitalist interests and preferences. Juxtaposing two widely recognized extremes of welfare, the US and Sweden, Swenson shows that employer interests played a role in welfare state development in both countries.

"The text is filled with good advice, practical examples, and provides a strong grounding in TFM, as well as its theoretical underpinnings. It is useful for students and practitioners alike. The text is accessible and well-written. . ."
--RESOLVE, Family Mediation Canada

"This is an important text, making complex ideas easily accessible and thought provoking. It will certainly become essential reading for family mediation practitioners and of interest to therapists. . . "
--Magazine for Family Therapy & Systemic Practice, UK

Therapeutic Family Mediation is a practice-based text grounded in a therapeutic family mediation (TFM) model created by the authors. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the model, complete with clinical examples and practice strategies. The authors include a detailed review of the model's five stages, accompanied by a discussion of theoretical underpinnings, practice techniques, the mediation of parenting and financial plans, the importance of cultural diversity, and research trends based on a thorough review of the literature. Contemporary issues associated with family mediation in the 21^st century are employed to illustrate the model in action with a full-length case presentation.

• Guides the reader through the authors' five-step model: Intake/Assessment, Pre-Mediation, Negotiation, Termination, and Follow-Up
• Outlines the use of parenting plans and financial plans
• Explores patterns of conflict and monetary issues
• Explains the process of drafting contracts
• Provides the tools necessary for assisting high-conflict couples and culturally diverse couples

Designed as a practical hands-on manual or text for students and professors of social work, Therapeutic Family Mediation will also prove highly useful to mental health practitioners, legal professionals and mediators, couples going through divorce, and community workers specializing in family services.

Howard H. Irving, Ph.D., is a professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Social Work, and cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law. He was the Co-Director of the Joint Law and Social Work Program. Dr. Irving has been a practicing family mediator for the last 25 years. In the past few years, he has developed an international reputation, giving courses and speeches in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Hong Kong.

Michael Benjamin, Ph.D., is a family sociologist, with specialized training in family mediation and family and marital therapy. He has been involved in family mediation for the past 20 years as a theorist, researcher, trainer, teacher, author, and practitioner, both privately and through the family court. Dr. Benjamin practices as a marital and family therapist, a custody and access assessor, and a research consultant.

Pardeck and his contributors approach the topic of family health from a macro perspective. Family health is a holistic approach to treatment embracing aspects of family functioning not typically considered in other more traditional approaches to assessment and treatment. They place particular emphasis on the ecological context in which the family functions, including the neighborhood, community, and other larger social systems. Family health is defined as the development of, and continuous interaction among, the physical, mental, emotional, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of the family, that result in the holistic well-being of the family and its members. The chapters in the book are guided by a number of key premises, including (a) Family health social work practice is grounded in a biopsychosocial approach to assessment and treatment; (b) Family health is based in a systems-ecological approach to assessment and intervention because of the role that various systems play in the well-being of the family; (c) Family health views the family system as the most important system for promoting the growth and development of the person; (d) Family health social work practice requires close collaboration between social work practitioners and other professionals. Based on these basic premises, Pardeck focuses on the macro level issues of family health practice that include community intervention, policy and program development, and program administration. The book is an important resource for social work professionals, scholars, students, and other researchers involved with social work practice and human services.

High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, "American Project" is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex. Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenants' thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives. "American Project" explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

Aspalter asserts that the belief that the development of high standard welfare states is primarily based on the ideology that pro-welfare, mostly leftwing, parties dominate welfare state literature and common thought in the Western world. Instead, in this examination of the welfare states of East Asia, Aspalter and his contributors show that they grew as naturally as they did in most Western countries, but that the reasons for this are other than pro-welfare ideologies. The five welfare states--Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore--are residual welfare states with low levels of welfare benefits and provision when compared to extended welfare states in Western Europe. While East Asian welfare states have experienced a hefty increase in welfare provision that has been regulated or provided by the state since the early 1970s, all five were set up and expanded by conservative governments with clear anti-welfare ideologies.

The case studies provided by Aspalter and his contributors suggest that welfare state development in East Asia is caused to a large extent by social protests in general, and, for welfare in particular, by competition in democratic elections, and by the changing role of women. Social and demographic factors, such as the rise of the age structure of the population, do not cause welfare state expansion in the first place. They cause street protests, and street protests convince all kinds of governments--if they rule out the use of force--to implement social welfare. Moreover, politicians, who are afraid to lose elections, also take up welfare issues, which they would not do without electoral competition between candidates and parties. As Aspalter makes clear, governments do not have to wait until major protests occur or until they have lost an election in order to promote social welfare. The anticipation of such an event is sufficient. This book provides new insights on the development of welfare systems that will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and other researchers involved with social welfare, East Asian studies, and comparative politics.

This textbook analyses the changing nature of public policy over the last thirty years, looking at the impact of governance and offering a theoretically and critically informed account of the changing nature of the state. The text also draws on a wide range of interviews conducted with Conservative and Labour ministers, civil servants and pressure group representatives, providing solid primary empirical material with which to illuminate each of the chapters.

With the end of the 20th century, Dixon and Scheurell decided it was an opportune time to critically assess what governments have achieved with their plethora of public social welfare policies. While Marxist socialists, democratic socialists, social democrats, and reluctant collectivists were all eager, at various times, to construct their vision of the ideal society, the idea of state welfare was slow to take root. As Dixon and Scheurell point out, at the turn of the century, only a handful of industrializing countries were willing to grapple with the problems of poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. Two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, sensitized many societies to the human, social, and even political costs of un-met social welfare needs. Thus, the milieu needed for the birth of state welfare came into existence, first in Western Europe, then in Australasia, followed by North and South America and, finally, in parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

The state welfare dream was that citizenship would guarantee every individual a secure lifestyle, with a minimum degree of insecurity, and the wherewithal to develop to the greatest possible extent as individuals and as members of society. It is, Dixon and Scheurell argue, the most significant set of social institutions developed in the 20th century. Admittedly, it is one that had within it the seeds of its own potential destruction--the vicious circle of growing welfare dependency, increasing state control, deepening poverty, and the emergence of an intractable underclass--that has legitimized calls for the individualization of the social. Undoubtedly, this collection of essays on key states, charting the rise and fall of state welfare, examines a monumental 20th century event and will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students involved with social welfare issues, as well as policy makers and concerned citizens.

The mass entry of women into the labor market, the decline of the male breadwinner norm and the rise of the dual-earner family have all profoundly transformed the societies of the Western industrialized world. This book argues that childcare has become increasingly "defamilized" or collectivized as mothers have joined the labor market, causing significant impact on welfare policies. As a result, the complex relationship between family change and policy reform calls for a rethinking of the relationship between the welfare state, labor markets and working parents. Rather than concentrating on the changing models of motherhood, Leira advocates the need to consider the effects of the gendered division of work and welfare on fathers' opportunities to be supported as carers for children.

Analyzing the critical juncture of family-centered policy and practice, this book places the universal institution of the family in a global context. By including a conceptual framework as well as practice components, the authors offer an original multimodal approach toward understanding family-centered policy practice from an international perspective. It provides grassroots strategies for activists and practical guides for both students and practitioners and includes cutting-edge interpretations of the impact of globalization on families, social workers, and other helping professionals and advocates.

In the United States, it is rare that people of different races and social classes live together in the same housing developments and neighbourhoods. The Gautreaux programme, one of the most innovative and extensive court-ordered desegregation efforts ever, in which thousands of low-income, African-American families voluntarily moved from Chicago's inner city to mostly white, middle-class suburbs, was specifically designed to help redress this problem. This is the story of this unique experiment in racial, social and economic integration that began in 1976 and ended only last year. The book tells of the Gautreaux families' initial discomfort and of the discrimination they felt. Yet it also relates how, against the odds, their lives changed for the better, in employment and education, exploding the notion that poor, inner-city blacks cannot escape the "culture of poverty". Today, with vouchers and certificates replacing public housing, the Gautreaux success story is the most valuable record of the possibilities and limitations of mobility programmes.

With 50 percent new material, this third edition breaks this complex topic into key elements, examining the roots of the problem, programs that address it, current research, and public perceptions of homelessness. American Homelessness covers who the homeless are and why they are in such a situation; important events that have contributed to the problem; and a who's who of homelessness activism including people such as MacArthur Fellow Robert M. Hayes, the former securities lawyer who filed the landmark New York City right-to-shelter case in l979. It also includes a chronology; facts and statistics; key documents and reports; a discussion of the International Bill of Rights; a directory of organizations, associations, and government agencies; and an annotated bibliography. Documents include European legislation on homelessness, the International Bill of Rights, and the Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements Includes a directory of organizations, associations, and government agencies-national, federal, and international

While society may applaud middle and upper class women who decide to stay home to raise their children, there exists a decided abhorrence for single mothers, welfare queens, who collect public funds but do not work. Here, Hart challenges traditional notions of welfare mothers by providing first-hand accounts of poor urban mothers and revealing the life-affirming and moral aspects of their motherwork--a form of subsistence work, involving many tasks that incorporate the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life. Though the mothering work these women do is vilified in public discourse as unnecessary and unwanted, the author contends that the ethical and epistemological dimensions of life-affirming work--a key component of motherwork--not only structure social-political activism but also educational efforts that are oriented towards radical change. Concrete experiences of motherwork, policy analyses regarding welfare reform, efforts oriented towards educational and epistemological border-crossings, and collective struggles for social change are examined here in a larger theoretical, political-economic framework.

Pulling together the many strands of different theoretical fields addressing issues related to critical/transformative pedagogy, community activism, and forms of unpaid work, this unique work calls for the unlearning of ways of thinking and feeling which uphold prejudices and life-threatening social-political hierarchies. While the public may sneer at women who choose to accept welfare in order to stay home to raise their children, these mothers must continue to perform this invisible work in order that their children may break the cycle of poverty in which they are entrenched. The author examines ways in which these mothers organize and carry out educational efforts and political work in the context of extreme poverty and against the harsh criticisms of an unforgiving public. Ultimately, Hart hopes to convince the public of the inherent importance of motherwork and break down the prejudices that have worked against the urban poor and single mothers.

The idea of "competitive flexibility" fostered by open market economics has deeply eroded the established social security systems of the developed nations. The confidence of wage-earners, who depend on an administrative "safety net" to protect them from loss of income, has virtually disappeared. Social exclusion and poverty have become inescapable threats for the average worker. It was to tackle this important issue that the European Institute of Social Security (EISS), a leading multidisciplinary research group dedicated to exploring the frontiers of social security, met in June 2000 in Goteborg in Sweden. Twenty members of the Institute prepared papers for delivery at the conference, all of which are now printed in this book. These papers include discussion of such elements as the following: the shift in emphasis from compensation for loss of income to a more preventive approach based on income security; measures against social exclusion enacted by the European Union; the meaning of the term "employability" as revealed in EU Member States' National Action Plans (NAPs); the growing pressure on beneficiaries to "perform" rather than "conform"; the interplay in international law between human rights and social security; labour market participation according to gender and educational level; labour market participation among families with young children; the promise of a "federal" social security system in Europe; and objective standards versus "moral hazard" in labour market insurance. Various reform initiatives (including the controversial debate on private sector funding) are also covered.

This report considers a number of important issues including the reform in the national social security system, pension regime for government workers, funded pension plans to supplement the national social security system, and funded plans to guarantee pension benefits or to supplement them. It examines the inter-linkages and balance between them as well as suggesting remedies.

A quarter century of trickle-down economics has failed. Economic inequality in the United States has dramatically increased. Many, alas, seem resigned to this growing chasm between rich and poor. But what would happen, ask Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott, if America were to make good on its promise of equal opportunity by granting every qualifying young adult a citizen's stake of eighty thousand dollars? Ackerman and Alstott argue that every American citizen has the right to share in the wealth accumulated by preceding generations. The distribution of wealth is currently so skewed that the stakeholding fund could be financed by an annual tax of two percent on the property owned by the richest forty percent of Americans. Ackerman and Alstott analyze their initiative from moral, political, economic, legal, and human perspectives. By summoning the political will to initiate stakeholding, they argue, we can achieve a society that is more democratic, productive, and free. Their simple but realistic plan would enhance each young adultis real ability to shape his or her own future. It is, in short, an idea that should be taken seriously by anyone concerned with citizenship, welfare dependency, or social justice in America today.

With her analysis of the thirty-year campaign to reform and ultimately to end welfare, Gwendolyn Mink levels a searing indictment of anti-welfare politicians'assault on poor mothers. She charges that the basic elements of the new welfare policy subordinate poor single mothers in a separate system of law. Mink points to the racial, class, and gender biases of both liberals and conservatives to explain the odd but sturdy consensus behind welfare reforms that force the poor single mother to relinquish basic rights and compel her to find economic security in work outside the home. Mink explores how and why we should cure the unique inequality of poor single mothers by reorienting the emphasis of welfare policy away from regulating mothers to rewarding the work they do. Every mother is a working mother, the bumper sticker proclaims, but the work mothers do pays no wages. Mink argues that women's equality depends on economic support for caregivers'work. Welfare's End challenges the ways in which policymakers define the problem they seek to cure. While legislators assume that something is wrong with poor single mothers, Mink insists that something is wrong with a system that invades their rights and negates their work. Showing how welfare reform harms women, Mink invites the design of policies to promote gender justice.

Each of the 50 states offers benefit programs to its veteran residents, but many veterans and their families are not aware of the various options. Despite the wide variation in the benefits programs from one state to another, veterans can generally find programs that specifically address their needs in their resident state. This guidebook is the only easy-to-use reference to provide veterans, their families, and those interested in veterans' issues with a simple guide to the various programs available through the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to entries on each of the states, the book concludes with an appendix giving a brief synopsis of federal benefit programs.

Schorr provides an informed examination of the sources of welfare reform, its successes and considerable failures, and the economic and social forces that shaped the 1996 welfare reform. He summarizes developments in the history of welfare that led to an overwhelming public call for reform. Having participated in many of these developments as a high government official and as a policy practitioner, Schorr brings a unique perspective to these issues.

Assessment of accomplishments and damage rests on reports, research, and extensive data. Concluding that the 1996 legislation was the wrong way to go, Schorr explores underlying policy issues; Should all mothers be required to work at all times? How do we define poverty? How are wages related to welfare?--to frame solutions. In the process, Schorr underscores why welfare recipients are not a population distinct from the working poor population; that low wages, poor welfare, and our unequal distribution of income are tightly linked; and that reforming welfare will require major economic and social changes. Schorr offers a chilling forecast of the society we will have if we continue on our current course and, as an alternative, outlines deeply changed, more constructive policies. Must reading for scholars, students, and policy makers as well as those in the general public concerned with social welfare policies.

Schorr provides an informed examination of the sources of welfare reform, its successes and considerable failures, and the economic and social forces that shaped the 1996 welfare reform. He summarizes developments in the history of welfare that led to an overwhelming public call for reform. Having participated in many of these developments as a high government official and as a policy practitioner, Schorr brings a unique perspective to these issues.

Assessment of accomplishments and damage rests on reports, research, and extensive data. Concluding that the 1996 legislation was the wrong way to go, Schorr explores underlying policy issues; Should all mothers be required to work at all times? How do we define poverty? How are wages related to welfare?--to frame solutions. In the process, Schorr underscores why welfare recipients are not a population distinct from the working poor population; that low wages, poor welfare, and our unequal distribution of income are tightly linked; and that reforming welfare will require major economic and social changes. Schorr offers a chilling forecast of the society we will have if we continue on our current course and, as an alternative, outlines deeply changed, more constructive policies. Must reading for scholars, students, and policy makers as well as those in the general public concerned with social welfare policies.

The United Mine Workers of America epitomized the New Deal concept of "junior partner" in the corporate economy, whereby unions made some concessions to management in return for better salaries and benefits. This book tells how that union's welfare and retirement fund blazed a trail in industrial benefits and served as a barometer of labor relations in the post-World War II era--and how union leaders and changes in the industry eventually undermined the program.
The UMWA Welfare and Retirement Fund functioned as a privatized version of Social Security and pioneered the idea that medical insurance providers had the right to exercise control over their beneficiaries' treatment. Richard Mulcahy--a scholar who grew up near the western Pennsylvania coal fields--draws on Fund records, participants' private papers, and interviews with staff members to present the first complete story of the Fund's health care and pension system from its creation in 1946 to the termination of medical service in 1978.
A Social Contract for the Coal Fields tells how John L. Lewis made the creation of a miners' welfare fund an all-consuming issue in his negotiations with coal companies, and of the struggle that ensued between Lewis and the coal operators for control of the Fund. Mulcahy covers the Fund's successes and reveals the problems it had in fulfilling the social contract forged between miners, union, and management.
While the Fund's creation anticipated the rise of the social order implicit in the New Deal, the demise of its medical program anticipated both the end of that order and the labor movement's general decline during the 1980s. Mulcahy's assessment of this innovative plan shows the significance of such labor-management arrangements as it provides insight into where national social policy may currently be heading.
The Author: Richard P. Mulcahy is an associate professor of history and political science at the University of Pittsburgh at Titusville and is a fellow of the Center for Northern Appalachian Studies of St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Evidence-Based Counselling and Psychological Therapies assesses the impact of the international drive towards evidence-based health care on NHS policy and the provision of the psychological services in the NHS.
An outstanding range of contributors provide an overview of evidence-based health care and the research methods that underpin it, demonstrating its effect on policy, provision, practitioners and patients. Their thought-provoking chapters look at a variety of relevant issues including:
* generating and implementing evidence
* cost-effectiveness issues
* practical guidelines
* practitioner research
Evidence-Based Counselling and Psychological Therapies is essential for mental health professionals and trainees concerned with this movement which is having, and will continue to have a huge impact on the purchasing, provision and practice of health care.

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Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition, and a health economist take on this challenge. They offer health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn from nine guiding principles. The authors conclude that policymakers need to achieve a balance, both assuring social solidarity through universal access to basic health services and expanding individual choice and responsibility through voluntary supplemental insurance.

Much could be gained from the privatization of social security--but can the gains actually be delivered? Dixon, Hyde, and their contributing authors take a balanced look at where we are now, and where we seem to be moving, on the issues of social security privatization and come up skeptical. There will be tradeoffs, but will the benefits outweigh the costs? Their volume examines a variety of settings in Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa, where the marketization of social security appears most hotly contested. As a contribution to this new, energetic gobal policy discourse, the book will be of special interest to policymakers in the public and private sectors, and particularly in organizations where concerns about the growing cost of employee benefits have become critical.

Dixon, Hyde, and the others start by showing how the concept of social security has changed dramatically over the last 20 years--not just in the United States but throughout the world. The collectivist ideology that has long underpinned social security policy has been challenged by the emergence of an ideology of individualism. But can one presume that the desires of government to privatize are driven purely by the need to achieve neoliberal policy goals by that means? Too simplistic, say the contributors. Marketization offers the promise of reduced dependency on the state, reduced public expenditure and thus lower taxes, enhanced competitiveness internationally, more efficient delivery of social security services, and other advantages--but whether these promises would be kept seems to depend on a variety of factors. Among them, explored in this volume, are the level of development and sophistication of the capital markets, the degree of market competition that can be achieved and sustained, and the capacity of the state to develop and implement governance mechanisms to ensure that private providers act in the public interest. The volume also examines two daunting challenges to governments: how to design a set of regulations that can protect the public interest in perpetuity, and how to resist the calls for government subsidies to support the economic rent expectations of privatized providers. The contributors and editors develop these and other points concisely and readably, and in doing so offer important lessons from the experiences of others worldwide.

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.