Social Work - Textbooks

How is social work shaped by global issues and international problems and how should it address them? Taking a radical perspective, this book reveals what we can learn from different approaches from across the globe.

This book considers how normative assumptions about the meanings, practices and relationships of care are embedded in our everyday lives. It explores ways in which these shape our sense of self and the nature of our relations. It also examines how social policy and welfare practices construct relations and give or deny them meaning and validity.

Social work and poverty: A critical approach provides a timely review of the key issues facing social workers and service users in working together to combat poverty, covering key areas including access to food, obesity and drug use.

What is Professional Social Work? is a now classic analysis of social work as a discourse between three aspects of practice: social order, therapeutic and transformational perspectives. It enables social workers to analyse and value the role of social work in present-day multiprofessional social care.

New Labour's modernisation agenda has produced an avalanche of change that has posed formidable challenges for everyone involved in social work, whether as service users, practitioners or managers. "Modernising Social Work" provides a radical appraisal of the far-reaching changes in their theoretical, historical and policy contexts.

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.

An important contribution to topical debates about social work education and the identity of the profession, drawing lessons from the recent history of social work to identify how and why it has lost its privilege and influence.

The challenges faced by those rationing scarce health care resources have intensified recently. In an accessible style, this book tackles this challenge by exploring the latest thinking and practice on priority setting methods.

This substantially revised edition of a highly topical text applies a critical approach to themes introduced in the first edition including economic development, heath and housing, and draws upon theory from Marx and Bourdieu to offer a clearer understanding of community in capitalist society.

Using real social work case examples, Organisational behaviour for social work unites the well-established study of behaviour in organizations with the special, and sometimes unusual, organizational settings of social work 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 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.