This book bears testimony to the value of a progressive form of academisation of social work education in most European countries, including former communist countries which had to re-establish social work education. It also manifests the confidence of contributors in belonging to a serious academic discipline, and the fruitfulness of bringing research 'home' from neighbouring disciplines such as sociology, psychology, social policy, or pedagogy into the mainstream of social work. The contributions to this book converge on a small number of core issues for contemporary social work. These are methodologically the conceptualisation of different and interacting dimensions of diversity, and practically the defence of professionalism and discretion against encroachment by neo-liberal ideologies and cost-cutting regulations. In so doing, this underscores that theory matters in social work. Authentic social work research can demonstrate that social work practice has no reason to shy away from basing itself on evidence and being professionally accountable as long as its notion of evidence recognises and does justice to the complexity of social problems and acknowledges the value of inter-subjectivity in producing useable and ethically grounded evidence. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Social Work.

Written by leading authorities in the field, this challenging book addresses complex issues of ethnicity and racial discrimination in ways that encourage further debate and analysis. Its main theme is that social work has been and remains, deeply implicated in racist policies and practices that have been locality specific, but that racism is also recognizable across borders as a phenomenon that appears everywhere. At the same time, the book focuses on innovative theories and practice which seek to promote an emancipatory social work which sets itself the goal of eradicating social injustice - particularly that applying to race. The contributors come from a wide range of countries and describe their experiences in tackling racism in social work at the levels of both theory and practice. This provides an impressive range of perspectives which cover models of social work created by people who have had to live with racism and find ways of overcoming it as well as those who have struggled to become able to express their own ethnicity without oppressing others. The concluding message of the book is a positive one - people can create a world that goes beyond racial divides by accepting, validating and celebrating diversity while at the same time recognizing that people share many commonalities with others which can be used to establish egalitarian relationships, realize social justice and communicate effectively with each other.

This book bears testimony to the value of a progressive form of academisation of social work education in most European countries, including former communist countries which had to re-establish social work education. It also manifests the confidence of contributors in belonging to a serious academic discipline, and the fruitfulness of bringing research 'home' from neighbouring disciplines such as sociology, psychology, social policy, or pedagogy into the mainstream of social work. The contributions to this book converge on a small number of core issues for contemporary social work. These are methodologically the conceptualisation of different and interacting dimensions of diversity, and practically the defence of professionalism and discretion against encroachment by neo-liberal ideologies and cost-cutting regulations. In so doing, this underscores that theory matters in social work. Authentic social work research can demonstrate that social work practice has no reason to shy away from basing itself on evidence and being professionally accountable as long as its notion of evidence recognises and does justice to the complexity of social problems and acknowledges the value of inter-subjectivity in producing useable and ethically grounded evidence. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Social Work.

Written by leading authorities in the field, this challenging book addresses complex issues of ethnicity and racial discrimination in ways that encourage further debate and analysis. Its main theme is that social work has been and remains, deeply implicated in racist policies and practices that have been locality specific, but that racism is also recognizable across borders as a phenomenon that appears everywhere. At the same time, the book focuses on innovative theories and practice which seek to promote an emancipatory social work which sets itself the goal of eradicating social injustice - particularly that applying to race. The contributors come from a wide range of countries and describe their experiences in tackling racism in social work at the levels of both theory and practice. This provides an impressive range of perspectives which cover models of social work created by people who have had to live with racism and find ways of overcoming it as well as those who have struggled to become able to express their own ethnicity without oppressing others. The concluding message of the book is a positive one - people can create a world that goes beyond racial divides by accepting, validating and celebrating diversity while at the same time recognizing that people share many commonalities with others which can be used to establish egalitarian relationships, realize social justice and communicate effectively with each other.

This book presents a unique analysis of the learning derived from East-West contacts in social work and reflects on the discipline's inalienable trans-national dimensions, of high actuality in the face of the re-emergence of nationalisms. The fundamental transformations in Europe subsequent to the revolutions of 1989 had a profound impact on social work in terms of raising sharply the profession's relationship with politics. The exchanges between western schools of social work and the emergent academic partner institutions in former Communist countries formed a valuable testing ground for the essential principles and competences of social work in terms of their universal scientific basis on the one hand and their regard for cultural and national values and contexts on the other. The chapters in this contributed volume focus on lessons derived from fundamental social and political transformations, highlighted by East-West encounters and intra-national divisions, and thereby have important messages for mastering impending transformations in the light of the global COVID-19 health crisis. They demonstrate how cultural and social divisions can be addressed constructively with direct implications for training and practice in dramatically changing contexts: Lithuanian social work's claim to professional autonomy vs. authoritarianism in popular and political culture Social work between civil society and the state - lessons for and from Hungary in a European context When Europe's East, West, North and South meet: learning from cross-country collaboration in creating an international social work master programme Nordic-Baltic cooperation in social work researcher education: A Finnish perspective on the impact on scientific, historical and linguistic similarities and differences Intra-national similarities and differences in social work and their significance for developing European dimensions of research and education Social work, political conflict and European society: reflections from Northern Ireland European Social Work After 1989: East-West Exchanges Between Universal Principles and Cultural Sensitivity is an invaluable resource for social work educators; social work practitioners confronted with national and international divisions; students of social work, of social administration and policy; and any policy researcher with a comparative focus.

This book discusses complex motivational conditions and strategies on macro, meso, and micro levels promoting reflectivity in interpersonal professional practice.  The increasing demands made on practitioners in social and health services, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to great uncertainty over how to find "the right response" to complex expressions of need and how to account for ethical professional decisions in view of prevailing strategies of 'risk reduction' and managerial accounting. Reflectivity has been recognised as being of central importance for guiding practitioners towards situationally differentiated and accountable practice. However, it is a complex process made up not only of different psychological components and their interplay with educational and organisational contexts, but also of multilevel interactions and purely situational conditions that can have positive or negative effects. The individual and team reflectivity can be learned and supported through various educational and managerial opportunities, sensitively guided personal and professional experiences and specific patterns of interaction which are reviewed in the book.   Reflective supervision in the workplace plays a pivotal role in enabling individual and team reflective processes. However, there are also social and organisational factors that can hinder the development of individual and team reflectivity. The particular value of this publication is that the authors focus on complex research findings from several consecutive studies and critically review and discuss the conditions for reflectivity from various perspectives and with the background of rich academic literature and research. Their research-derived empirical and analytical insights were submitted to managers and educators, and effective and realistic strategies and methods to enhance different levels of reflectivity in students and practitioners were discussed and are summarised in this volume. Among the topics covered: The significance of reflectivity in professional social and health care in relation to changing socio-political contexts  Gender aspects of reflectivity in the social and healthcare field Operationalisation of reflectivity for research by personal, team and organisational scales  Cultural and communicational patterns of interaction enabling professional reflective processes Enhancing Professionality Through Reflectivity in Social and Health Care is pertinent reading for professors of professional academic training programmes for social workers, nurses, supervisors, trainers in non-formal learning settings, students, and managers of social and health services with an interest in enhancing organisational cultures.

This volume is devoted to innovation with a special focus on its two sides, namely creation and destruction, and on its role in the evolution of capitalist economies. The first part of the book looks at innovation and its effects on economic performance, addressing issues of motives, behavioral rules under uncertainty, actor properties, and technology characteristics. The second part concentrates on potential consequences of innovative activities, in particular structural change, the "innovation-mediated" effect of skill-oriented policies on regional performance, the destructive effects of innovation activities, and the question whether novelty is always good. The role of innovation in the evolution of capitalism itself is discussed in the third part.

This volume is devoted to innovation with a special focus on its two sides, namely creation and destruction, and on its role in the evolution of capitalist economies. The first part of the book looks at innovation and its effects on economic performance, addressing issues of motives, behavioral rules under uncertainty, actor properties, and technology characteristics. The second part concentrates on potential consequences of innovative activities, in particular structural change, the "innovation-mediated" effect of skill-oriented policies on regional performance, the destructive effects of innovation activities, and the question whether novelty is always good. The role of innovation in the evolution of capitalism itself is discussed in the third part.

Usually, the first edition of a book still contains a multiplicity of typographic, con ceptional, and computational errors even if one believes the opposite at the time of publication. As this book did not represent a counterexample to this rule, the current second edition offers a chance to remove at least the known shortcomings. The book has been partly re-organized. The previously rather long Chapter 4 has been split into two separate chapters dealing with discrete-time and continuous time approaches to nonlinear economic dynamics. The short summary of basic properties of linear dynamical systems has been banned to an appendix because the line of thought in the chapter seems to have been unnecessarily interrupted by these technical details and because the book concentrates on nonlinear systems. This appendix, which mainly deals with special formal properties of dynamical sys tems, also contains some new material on invariant subspaces and center-manifold reductions. A brief introduction into the theory of lags and operators is followed by a few remarks on the relation between the 'true' properties of dynamical systems and their behavior observable in numerical experiments. Additional changes in the main part of the book include a re-consideration of Popper's determinism vs. inde terminism discussion in the light of chaotic properties of deterministic, nonlinear systems in Chapter 1. An investigation of a simultaneous price-quantity adjustment process, a more detailed inquiry into the uniqueness property of limit cycles, and a short presentation of relaxation oscillations are included in Chapter 2.

"Is the business cycle obsolete?" This often cited title of a book edited by Bronfenbren ner with the implicit affirmation of the question reflected the attitude of mainstream macroeconomics in the 1960s regarding the empirical relevance of cyclic motions of an economy. The successful income policies, theoretically grounded in Keynesian macroec onomics, seemed to have eased or even abolished the fluctuations in Western economies which motivated studies of many classical and neoclassical economists for more than 100 years. The reasoning behind the conviction that business cycles would increasingly be come irrelevant was rather simple: if an economy fluctuates for whatever reason, then it is almost always possible to neutralize these cyclic motions by means of anticyclic demand policies. From the 1950s until the mid-1960s business cycle theory had often been consid ered either as an appendix to growth theory or as an academic exercise in dynamical economics. The common business cycle models were essentially multiplier-accelerator models whose dependence on particular parameter values (in order to exhibit oscillatory motion) suggested a rather improbable occurrence of persistent fluctuations. The obvi ous success in compensating business cycles in those days prevented intensive concern with the occurrence of cycles. Rather, business cycle theory turned into stabilization theory which investigated theoretical possibilities of stabilizing a fluctuating economy. Many macroeconomic textbooks appeared in the 1960s which consequently identified business cycle theory with inquiries on the possibilities to stabilize economies by means of active fiscal or monetary policies."

This book presents a unique analysis of the learning derived from East-West contacts in social work and reflects on the discipline's inalienable trans-national dimensions, of high actuality in the face of the re-emergence of nationalisms. The fundamental transformations in Europe subsequent to the revolutions of 1989 had a profound impact on social work in terms of raising sharply the profession's relationship with politics. The exchanges between western schools of social work and the emergent academic partner institutions in former Communist countries formed a valuable testing ground for the essential principles and competences of social work in terms of their universal scientific basis on the one hand and their regard for cultural and national values and contexts on the other. The chapters in this contributed volume focus on lessons derived from fundamental social and political transformations, highlighted by East-West encounters and intra-national divisions, and thereby have important messages for mastering impending transformations in the light of the global COVID-19 health crisis. They demonstrate how cultural and social divisions can be addressed constructively with direct implications for training and practice in dramatically changing contexts: Lithuanian social work's claim to professional autonomy vs. authoritarianism in popular and political culture Social work between civil society and the state - lessons for and from Hungary in a European context When Europe's East, West, North and South meet: learning from cross-country collaboration in creating an international social work master programme Nordic-Baltic cooperation in social work researcher education: A Finnish perspective on the impact on scientific, historical and linguistic similarities and differences Intra-national similarities and differences in social work and their significance for developing European dimensions of research and education Social work, political conflict and European society: reflections from Northern Ireland European Social Work After 1989: East-West Exchanges Between Universal Principles and Cultural Sensitivity is an invaluable resource for social work educators; social work practitioners confronted with national and international divisions; students of social work, of social administration and policy; and any policy researcher with a comparative focus.

This volume gives an account of the fundamental developments transforming social work in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century. A European standard of social work has already emerged, but models for future European social work are absent. Therefore, the compendium gives an overview of the current transformation process for the first time, discussing the visible and invisible changes and mapping out where social work is positioned in the emerging post-welfare states. Contents include: A General Introduction: Transforming Perspectives. Social Work in Europe and European Social Work * Analytical Perspectives: Social Work in Europe and European Social Work in Post-Welfarist Contexts * Professional Perspectives: Main Approaches of Social Work in Europe and European Social Work * Positions: New Theoretical and Methodological Discourses of Social Work in Europe and European Social Work * Future Perspectives of Social Work in Europe and European Social Work * Social Work's Contribution to a Social Europe. [Subject: Social Work, European Studies]

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1997 International Symposium on Operations Research (SOR' 97) held at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Sep tember 3-5, 1997. The symposium was organized under the auspices of the two German societies on Operations Research, namely the Deutsche Gesellschajt fur Operations Research (DGOR) and the Gesellschajt fur Mathematik, Okonomie und Operations Research (GMOOR). During their annual business meetings, the DGOR and GMOOR members unanimously decided that their societies should be assimi lated by the newly founded Gesellschajt fur Operations Research (GOR). The SOR' 97 meeting was attended by 521 participants from 31 countries. The presentation of 360 papers was organized in 16 sections, each of which also saw semiplenary lectures by prominent invited speakers. Plenary lectures by J.K. Lenstra and P. Mertens as well as a panel discussion on the role of new communication media represented major academic events of the symposium. 131 papers were submitted for publication in the present volume. The space limitation and the advice of the section chairpersons only allowed for the inclusion of 85 contributed papers in the proceedings. Additionally, written versions of seven semiplenary lectures could be included in the volume. The abstracts of all 360 papers presented at the symposium can be obtained in electronic form from the WWW at http: //www.wiwLuni-jena.de/sor97.html."