POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Services & Welfare
ICT for social welfare
A toolkit for managers
This book analyses the current context and use of ICT in the public and voluntary sectors, building on this to provide practical guidance for managers and staff. Assuming no technical knowledge, the book provides ideas, tools and resources to think critically and creatively about current ICT practice and to implement positive change at all levels.
The ethics of welfare
Human rights, dependency and responsibility
Britain's New Labour government claims to support the cause of human rights. At the same time, it claims that we can have no rights without responsibility and that dependency on the state is irresponsible. The ethics of welfare offers a critique of this paradox and discusses the ethical conundrum it implies for the future of social welfare.
Promoting welfare?
Government information policy and social citizenship
As citizens we need information to exercise our social rights and responsibilities. However, information provision about welfare services is patchy and the 'information poor' are often disadvantaged in access to those services. This book explores how government information policies directly influence which service users claim their entitlements.
Social Policy Review 15
UK and international perspectives
Social Policy Review 15 continues the tradition of providing a different style and approach to policy issues from that found in most academic journals and books. This volume combines issues such as globalization, Europe and pensions with examination of the current and historical contexts of social policy.
Developing user involvement
Working towards user-centred practice in voluntary organisations
The principle of service user involvement in decisions that affect them directly is now generally supported, but many voluntary organisations remain under scrutiny because of slow implementation. This report explores the processes of change in eleven voluntary organisations to draw out lessons relevant to the wider sector.
The welfare we want?
The British challenge for American reform
The welfare we want? presents a detailed and unique comparison of welfare policies in the Britain and America. A team of international experts outlines, compares and contrasts the reform strategies pursued in each country and summarises the results to date.
Comparing social policies
Exploring new perspectives in Britain and Japan
This book provides a rich background to the development of post-war social policy in Britain and Japan. Ageing, domestic violence, housing, homelessness, and health are chosen for analysis, each exploring its development process of policy and practices, current issues, and future directions.
Biography and social exclusion in Europe
Experiences and life journeys
Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation.
Europe's new state of welfare
Unemployment, employment policies and citizenship
It is often argued that the regulated labour markets, relatively generous social protection and relative wage equality of European welfare states has become counter-productive in a globalised and knowledge-intensive economy. Using in-depth analysis of employment, welfare and citizenship in a range of European states, this book challenges this view.
Love, hate and welfare
Psychosocial approaches to policy and practice
This book presents a psychosocial examination of changing relationships between service users, professionals and managers in the post-war welfare state. It challenges current emphasis on consumer rights by linking social responsibility to its psychosocial roots and theorises the links between experiences of care and development of social policy.
Active social policies in the EU
Inclusion through participation?
This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.
What future for social security?
Debates and reforms in national and cross-national perspective
It is widely assumed today that the 'welfare state' is contracting or retrenching as an effect of the close scrutiny to which entitlement to social security benefits is being subject in most developed countries. In this book, fifteen authorities from nine different countries investigate to what extent this assumption is warranted.