Marriage is the foundation of the family and of society. Yet many of us find it difficult to keep our marriages alive and well. So many marriages today end in tears that young people often wonder whether they should marry at all. Mehri Sefidvash's Coral and Pearls looks at some of the reasons why relationships fail to thrive and offers practical suggestions for keeping our marriages vibrant, joyous and intact: * What we can do to keep our love for our partner alive * How we can develop mature love * How we can create a spiritual bond with our partner.

A helpful guide for all those now mediating family disputes, as well as for those who hope to become family mediators.

This is the first in a Series of five manuals produced by the Social Security Department of the ILO to provide the reader with information on all the major elements of social security, including the principles, administration, financing, pension schemes and social health insurance. This manual provides an introduction to social security, explaining what social security is and who it protects. It also takes a look at the range of benefits provided by social security schemes, explains briefly how those schemes are financed and administered, and deals with International Labour Standards in relation to social security issues. Other manuals in this series: - Administration of social security (Vol. II) - Social security financing (Vol. III) - Pension schemes (Vol. IV) - Social health insurance (Vol. V)

An account of the legal battle to open up New Jersey's suburbs to the poor, looking at the views of lawyers on both sides of the controversy. It is a case study of judicial activism and its consequences and an analysis of suburban attitudes regarding race, class and property.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, America's system of workers' compensation insurance was in trouble. As medical costs grew and benefits and compensable injuries expanded, costs of this insurance skyrocketed. In response, the states imposed price controls, but those controls caused unforeseen - and negative - consequences. The authors define the problems, trace the regulatory responses, and analyze the effects of rate regulation. Their study illuminates how rate regulation set up to control the cost of workers' compensation insurance reduced incentives for safety and cost control and subsidized high-risk activities and firms at the expense of others.

The Welfare and Retirement Fund of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) is widely acknowledged as the most innovative effort at group health care in the United States in the twentieth century. Ivana Krajcinovic describes the establishment, operation, and demise of the Fund that brought mining families from the backwater to the forefront of medical care in less than a decade.

The UMWA was one of the first unions to take advantage of conditions created by World War II to bargain for employer-financed health benefits. Spurning convention, the UMWA not only retained control of health benefits but also utilized then unorthodox managed care principles in arranging for the care of its members. Perhaps even more remarkable, the union designed the Fund to care for a beneficiary group with extremely high demands. Initially poor and neglected, miners were encumbered by the additional health burdens of a hazardous industry.

Krajcinovic analyzes the success of the Fund over nearly three decades in providing high-quality cost-effective care to miners and their families. She also explains the irony of its dismantlement at the very moment when its innovations gained currency among mainstream commercial plans.

This volume explains why there is bipartisan interest in US privatisation of public housing and how it can be accomplished.

In this book comparative analysis is given of the way governments and social security systems reacted to the challenges facing established social security systems - and also social security systems to be established - in the context of the end of the XXth century: globalization and the changes it has brought in the perception and possibilities of establishing or maintaining the welfare state. The selection of countries is due to both scientific criteria - it has been decided to start with western industrialized countries - and non scientific ones: the availability of specialists in selected countries. It is clear therefore that, even if restricted to western industrialized countries, the sample of countries which are studied here are not representative of all the main systems of social security. Countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands are clearly missing for those readers who are looking for a broad description of existing systems. Looking at the different chapters of this book, a rather diverse and broad overview of problems and solutions are given, adapting social security systems to the environment of the XXIst century.

This 1997 book examines the income distributional experience of fifteen developed economies - representing a wide range of social and economic strategies - over the past two decades. Experts from each of the countries have carefully documented the pattern of distributional change in individual earnings and household income in their countries and analysed the driving forces behind these changes. Separate chapters are devoted to the experiences of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, West and former East Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The authors examine the effects on the inequality of household income of the development of individual earnings, unemployment, inflation, public sector transfers and taxes, and demographic changes.

The need for social safety nets has become a key component of poverty reduction strategies. Over the past three decades several developing countries have launched a variety of programs, including cash transfers, subsidies in-kind, public works, and income-generation programs. However, there is little guidance on appropriate program design, and few studies have synthesized the lessons from widely differing country experiences. This report fills that gap. It reviews the conceptual issues in the choice of programs, synthesizes cross-country experience, and analyzes how country- and region-specific constraints can explain why different approaches are successful in different countries.

This remarkably ambitious work relates changes in scientific and medical thought during the Scientific Revolution (circa 1500-1700) to the emergence of new principles and practices for interpreting language, texts, and nature. An invaluable history of ideas about the nature of language during this period, The Word of God and the Languages of Man also explores the wider cultural origins and impact of these ideas. Its broad and deeply complex picture of a profound sociocultural and intellectual transformation will alter our definition of the scientific revolution. James J. Bono shows how the new interpretive principles and scientific practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries evolved in response to new views of the relationship between the "Word of God" and the "Languages of Man" fostered by Renaissance Humanism, Neoplatonism, magic, and both the reformed and radical branches of Protestantism. He traces the cultural consequences of these ideas in the thought and work of major and minor actors in the scientific revolution--from Ficino and Paracelsus to Francis Bacon and Descartes. By considering these natural philosophers in light of their own intellectual, religious, philosophical, cultural, linguistic, and especially narrative frameworks, Bono suggests a new way of viewing the sociocultural dynamics of scientific change in the pre-modern period--and ultimately, a new way of understanding the nature and history of scientific thought. The narrative configuration he proposes provides a powerful alternative to the longstanding "revolutionary" metaphor of the history of the scientific revolution.

First World Hunger examines hunger and the politics of food security, and welfare reform (1980-95) in five 'liberal' welfare states (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA). Through national case-studies it explores the depoliticization of hunger as a human rights issue and the failure of New Right policies and charitable emergency relief to guarantee household food security. The need for alternative integrated policies and the necessity of public action are considered essential if hunger is to be eliminated.

Few American social programs have been more unpopular, controversial, or costly than Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Its budget, now in the tens of billions of dollars, has become a prominent target for welfare reformers and outraged citizens. Indeed, if public opinion ruled, AFDC would be discarded entirely and replaced with employment. Yet it persists. Steven Teles's provocative study reveals why and tells us what we should do about it. Teles argues that, over the last thirty years, political debate on AFDC has been dominated by an impasse created by what he calls "ideological dissensus"-an enduring conflict between opposing cultural elites that have largely disregarded public opinion. Thus, he contends, one must examine the origins and persistence of elite conflict in order to fully comprehend AFDC's immunity to the reform it truly needs-the kind that unites the elements of order, equality, and individualism central to the American creed. One of the first studies to analyze AFDC from a "New Democrat" position, Whose Welfare? sheds new light on the controversial role of the courts in AFDC, the rise of welfare waivers in the mid 1980s, the failure of the Clinton welfare plan, and the victory of block-granting over policy-oriented welfare reform. Teles, however, goes beyond mere critical analysis to advocate specific approaches to reform. His thoughtful call for compromise built around the centrality of work, individual responsibility, and opportunity offers a means for dissolving dissensus and genuine hope for changing an outdated and ineffectual welfare system. Based on interviews with participants in the AFDC policymaking process as well as an unparalleled synthesis of the voluminous AFDC literature, Whose Welfare? will appeal to a wide array of welfare scholars, policymakers, and citizens eager to better understand the tumultuous history of this problematic program and how it might fare in the wake of the fall elections.

This text analyses the effects on insurance markets and consumers, of proposals to require community rating in all health plans.

In 1967, leaders of the Boston establishment decided to open the city's neighbourhoods by making mortgage funds available to blacks who wanted to build or buy houses there. But this goal was to be achieved by the "private understanding" that these mortgages would be available only in Boston's established Jewish neighbourhoods, such as Mattapan. This policy quickly wiped out the tightly knit Jewish areas in Dorchester and nearby Roxbury, once home to 90,000 Jews. Tragically, few of the new black residents of the area acquired adequate housing, security or education for their families, and the Jewish community was betrayed by its nominal leaders, at the cost of the destruction of historical neighbourhoods. In this book, the authors aim to provide insight into the reasons why this incident took place.

Why is the United States the only advanced industrial democracy today without a national health insurance program? Laham aptly examines the reasons for the current health crisis and assesses the prospects for long-term solutions. Students, teachers, policymakers, activists, and citizens at-large will learn from this comprehensive historical analysis of the political and economic problems that have blocked needed reforms and of the debates and proposals through 1993 which argue for positive change.

What factors contribute to family violence and how can they be identified early so that future violence can be prevented? Addressing these and related issues, the papers in this volume are a testimony to the rapid expansion of research, theory and practice in the family violence field.

Leading researchers and clinicians explore the roots of family violence, including both physical and sexual abuse, and examine assessment, treatment and prevention. Topics addressed include whether children or the elderly are at greater risk, and the role of substance abuse in family violence.

By offering a comparative, institutional analysis of how state-supported pensions for the elderly developed in Britain, Canada and the United States, Anna Shola Orloff aims to make a contribution to understanding the growth of modern social welfare policies. It is not enough, Orloff demonstrates, to simply examine socioeconomic factors in the growth of the welfare state. She argues that welfare policies are also shaped by the political institutions and processes that are the legacy of state formation and expansion in particular nations. Orloff explains why, when and how poor relief was replaced by modern social insurance legislation and pensions for the elderly in the first three decades of the 20th century. She analyses the long-term social and political transformation that laid the basis for modern social politics: the spread of waged work, the development of new liberal ideologies and the expansion and transformation of state administrative capacities. Combining original historical research with the analysis of secondary sources, Orloff's work is an example of the use of comparative and historical methods in answering questions about macropolitical transformation, such as the origin of the welfare state. ""The Politics of Pensions"" outlines an original, interdisciplinary approach that should appeal to a wide variety of readers: political sociologists interested in the state, social workers and specialists in old age policy, and comparative researchers of all disciplines engaged in research on the welfare state.

The breakdown of the family has been blamed for many of today's societal ills. Are there effective ways to support a family with problems (neglect, substance abuse, terminal illness, etc.), prevent its break up, and make a positive change? How effective has the Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) been at solving these kinds of family problems and situations? What about families that don't respond to IFPS programs? Do the programs differ in their effectiveness? Through an exploration of these issues, knowledgeable contributors offer their own experiences as a basis for tracing the evolution of IFPS and of the advances that have been made in the field. Advancing Family Preservation Practice covers such topics as the evolution of family preservation and the theories that guide it, child protective services, clinician-support worker teams, and the relative effectiveness of family preservation services with neglectful families. Aimed at helping evaluators, practitioners, and administrators incorporate what has been discovered in IFPS practice, Advancing Family Preservation Practice is an important resource for those involved in the development, implementation, and evaluation of family programs. "The issues [covered in Advancing Family Preservation Practice] are very relevant to the debates that are going on across the country among administrators, advocates, and legislators, as states are struggling to balance budgets with fewer federal dollars and skyrocketing costs for mandated health and social welfare programs. Support for "preventive services" will only continue to be available if these programs can be shown to be both successful in preventing family dissolution and cost-effective. Advancing Family Preservation Practice provides the most extensive documentation to date on potential program benefits of intensive family preservation services using program descriptions and research findings from established practice centers across the country. Policymakers and practitioners need to read this book. Faced with the task of providing a safe alternative to foster care for children who have been abused or neglected, the material compiled in this text is essential to a realistic assessment of potential outcomes for children and families at high risk." --Linda Heisner, Director Office of Family & Children's Services, Maryland Department of Human Resources, Baltimore "This is a scholarly, down-to-earth book for all those who serve children and their parents. Bold, imaginative and practical, this volume crosses those disciplinary lines that separate social work, medicine, nursing, psychology, law, and education; and it captures how paraprofessionals function as supervised "experts" in transmitting the hands-on knowledge from all these disciplines into front-line, state-of-the-art, home-centered services for children at risk of losing their parents and their vitality. This book is a vital resource because it packs hard-earned empirical knowledge into an upward spiral of rediscovering and innovating community-based, home-centered services for disadvantaged children and their parents; and for those dedicated adults who have the competence and the passion to serve them." --Albert J. Solnit, M.D., Sterling Professor Emeritus, Yale University and Commissioner, Department of Mental Health, Connecticut

"Hannah Kliger has provided an important service to historians... " Journal of American Ethnic History

..". Hannah Kliger has provided a valuable primary source for studying immigrant Jewry and has argued forcefully for the resiliency and adaptability of ethnic institutions as mechanisms for Jewish adaptation and survival." American Jewish Archives

Struggling to cope in a strange land, immigrants in the early years of this century gathered with compatriots from their old hometowns and with family for their social life and to form support systems. Here is an illuminating portrait of community life among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, as seen by participants in landsmanshaftn (hometown associations) and family circles. Prepared in the 1930s through the WPA-sponsored Yiddish Writer s Group, this revealing document is published here for the first time."

"The best way of handling the question of how much to give the poor, politicians have discovered, is to avoid doing anything about it at all," note Paul Peterson and Mark Rom. The issue of the minimum people need in order to live decently is so difficult that Congress has left this crucial question to the states --even though the federal government foots three-fourths of the bill for about 15 million Americans who receive cash and food stamp benefits.

The states differ widely in their assessment of what a family needs to meet a reasonable standard of living, and the interstate differences in welfare benefits cannot be explained by variations in wage levels or costs of living. The states with higher welfare benefits act as magnets by attracting or retaining poor people. In the competition to avoid becoming welfare havens, states have cut welfare benefits in real dollars by more than one-third since 1970. The authors propose the establishment of a minimum federal welfare standard, which would both reduce the interstate variation in welfare benefits and stem their overall decline.

Peterson and Rom develop their argument in four steps. First they show how the politics of welfare magnets works in a case study of policymaking in Wisconsin. Second, they present their analysis of the overall magnet effect in American state politics, finding evidence that states with high welfare benefits experiencing disproportionate growth in their poverty rates make deeper welfare cuts. Third, they describe the process by which the current system came into being, identifying the reform efforts and political crises that have contributed to the centralization of welfare policy as well as the regional, partisan, and group interests that have resisted these changes. Finally, the authors propose a practical step that can go a long way toward achieving a national welfare standard; then assess it's cost, benefits, and political feasibility.