Social Work - Textbooks

This textbook covers the key concepts, themes and issues relating to human growth and development in adults. It examines key topics and issues within professional practice with adults and their families and covers a wide range of practice areas, fuses essential theory with practical application and provides a wide range of learning features.

One of the few resources available to provide an overview of human need as a key concept in the social sciences, this accessible and engaging second edition models existing practical and theoretical approaches to human need while also proposing a radical alternative.

Informed by sociological theory and recent empirical analysis, the new edition of this classic textbook is an accessible account of the major social divisions that structure social life. Written by experts, it covers an unrivalled range of social divisions, diversity and inequalities. This is an invaluable sourcebook for social science students.

This brilliant book is a great guide for students undertaking their first piece of independent research. Regular critical reflection is an invaluable tool for helping you gain new insights, deal with practical issues as they arise and develop your understanding. This book gets you started in the habit of using a research journal.

This illuminating book offers a fresh and contemporary guide to the field of sociology. By demonstrating the versatility of the sociological imagination, the authors reveal the ways in which thinking sociologically can help us understand the personal, social and structural changes going on in the world around us.

A fully updated edition of this bestselling textbook offers a radical approach to community development taking theories of Gramsci and Freire into the current context. The focus is on putting theory into action for those training, working or managing any social justice practice.

In this clear and systematic book covering the both general practice concepts and theoretical insights, best-selling author Malcolm Payne shows you how to work with the main social work theories and practice techniques and pinpoint their strengths and limitations.

This valuable book provides a comprehensive introduction to politics in social work, unifying the themes of political ideology and social construction across several areas of social work practice, including emerging areas of practice.

There is a growing recognition of the importance of networking for the vitality and cohesion of community life. Now in its third edition, and substantially updated, this textbook combines practical experience and theory for people working with and for communities.

This new edition for advanced students and practitioners is substantially updated to reflect the changes in the field since the publication of the first edition and contains multiple additional chapters discussing new and emerging topics for those in the fields of social work, education and health care.

This third edition looks at how several decades of feminist social action have changed women’s place in the world today and updates some of the perennial challenges facing women globally to engage with new issues, including digital exclusion, sustainable development and environmental justice.

Fully revised and expanded to encompass the most up-to-date theory, policy and practice, this comprehensive text considers the different aspects of multi-agency working within criminal justice, bringing together probation, policing, prison, social work, criminological and organizational studies perspectives.