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In last decade of the 20th century, in both the United States and Europe, there was a move toward the introduction/strengthening of activation requirements as an eligibility condition to minimum income (MI) benefits. Since then, a number of developments have taken place. Based on evidence from the United States, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the Czech Republic, this book captures the direction and significance of these developments. The book makes two broad contributions to the literature. First, the book shows that the periof between 2000 and 2008, is marked by two parallel trends. The first concerns the strengthening of the role of the market in the governance of activation. The second trend concerns the strengthening of efforts to adjust the delivery of activation services to the needs and characteristics of MI recipients (i.e., the individualization of service delivery). There are, however, some important variations, with some countries veering toward the strengthening of the role of the market (“marketizers”) and others adopting for a broader approach (“comprehensive reformers”). Then, taking a longer view, that covers developments in the activation strategy from the first set of reforms in the 1980s until the present, the book also shows that whilst the first wave of reforms pursued a strategy emphasizing the strengthening of participants’ human resources, the second wave, resulted in a a close to uniform move toward Work First. The current crisis has, so far, resulted in further curtailments of rights.

International migration has reached new heights since the 1960s. Altogether, some 215 million people live in countries other than their countries of birth, and according to surveys, another 700 million say they would leave their homes and move to another country if they could. Nations—both sending and receiving—have responded to this growing international migrant flow with new laws and domestic programs. In receiving countries, these include laws and programs to control entry, encourage high-skilled immigration, develop refugee policy, and speed assimilation. In sending countries, governments are implementing and experimenting with new policies that link migrant diasporas back to their home countries culturally or economically—or both. This volume contains a series of thoughtful analyses of some of the most critical issues raised in both receiving and sending countries, including US immigration policy, European high-skilled labor programs, the experiences of migrants to the Gulf States, the impact of immigration on student educational achievement, and how post-conflict nations connect with their diasporas.

Poverty, increased inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda in Western Europe, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession that hit the global economy in 2008, but also as a consequence of a seemingly structural trend towards increased inequality that began some time ago. How can we explain this increase in inequalities? In this book, it is argued that social and labor market policies contribute to shaping the forms and extent of the new inequalities and divides that challenge European societies. Growing inequality is related to processes of dualization, i.e. a widening, deepening, or the creation of new insider-outsider divides. The processes of division in the realms of labor markets, social policy and political representation are strongly linked. Dualization is certainly not the only driver of increasing inequality, but because of the encompassing development evidenced in this book, dualization appears one of the most important current trends affecting developed societies. However, the extent and forms of dualization observed vary greatly across countries. The comparative perspective of this book provides insights into why some countries witness lower levels of insider-outsider divides, whereas for others, they have become a core characteristic. Most importantly, the comparisons presented in this book point to the crucial importance of politics and political choice in driving and shaping the social outcomes of deindustrialization. Governments “cope” in different ways with deindustrialization. Hence, while increased structural labor market divides can be found across all countries, governments have a strong responsibility in shaping the distributive consequences of these labor market changes. Insider-outsider divides are not a straightforward consequence of deindustrialization, but rather the result of policy, i.e. of political choice.

This book examines local responses to political and economic crises in Germany and the UK. In Germany, the influx of refugees has thrown into question state capacity to cope with crisis and the acceptability of religious diversity. In the UK, policymakers have framed austerity measures as the most appropriate response to economic crisis, instigated initially by the financial crisis in 2007-8. However, in contrast to the far more visible, often rightwing, protests against the political establishment, local social activists have worked across different ethnic and religious groups to address social problems. The initiatives range from food banks to debt advice to helping some of the most vulnerable families and individuals overcome challenging life situations. Some are secular and others faith-based, though often, faith is related to individual motivation and possesses very little influence on the service itself. The emphasis instead is on collaborative activism, where organisations and individuals come to depend upon each other for mobilising resources and overcoming problems, an effort that in turn promotes trust and understanding across the diverse participants. This activism suggests new engagement with citizenship, which refers as much to participation in community-based, inclusive action to improve local quality of life as it does to individual rights. The volume brings together German and British academics to show how in both countries, concepts of individual, community, and citizenship are changing in an era of political and social division and persistent economic inequality.

This book provides a comprehensive portrait of the status and unique assets of baby boomers of color. It argues that quality data on the individual status of specific racial populations is lacking and that this leads to inadequate programs, policies, and services. It goes on to say that the absence of data is a testament to the invisibility of baby boomers of color in society and that this deeply affects the practice of social work and the work of other helping professions that require culturally sensitive approaches. Using specific data, the book grounds an understanding of boomers' financial, medical, and emotional needs within a historical, socioeconomic, cultural, and political context. It focuses on older African Americans, Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, and addresses issues of financial security, employment stability, housing, and health care, which are often complicated by linguistic and cultural differences. Rather than treat baby boomers of color as a financial burden on society and its resources, it recognizes their strengths and positive contributions to families and communities. It offers tailored recommendations for meeting the challenges of a growing population.

The Black Power movement has often been portrayed in history and popular culture as the quintessential “bad boy” of modern black movement-making in America. Yet this impression misses the full extent of Black Power's contributions to U.S. society, especially in regard to black professionals in social work. Relying on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, this book follows two groups of black social workers in the 1960s and 1970s as they mobilized Black Power ideas, strategies, and tactics to change their national professional associations. Comparing black dissenters within the National Federation of Settlements (NFS), who fought for concessions from within their organization, and those within the National Conference on Social Welfare (NCSW), who ultimately adopted a separatist strategy, it shows how the Black Power influence was central to the creation and rise of black professional associations. It also provides a nuanced approach to studying race-based movements and offers a framework for understanding the role of social movements in shaping the non-state organizations of civil society.

Most current social welfare policies aim to ameliorate immediate problems or injustices, but they do little to foster human development or support the potential of people within marginalized communities. How can we more effectively use public policy to foster human development? How can we overcome the injustice of contemporary society and give people across the social and class spectrum equal opportunities to flourish? This book offers case studies and analyses of a number of different existing approaches to these questions, presenting newly conceptualised strategies for developing and implementing effective policies for fostering human development at the local, national, and international levels. It examines the discrepancies and obstacles that actual policies present to what a capability approach can do in social policy practice. The goal is to stimulate debate on how to overcome barriers in a variety of existing social policy scenarios.

This book provides descriptions and comparative analyses of the now complex and highly varied arrangements for the care of children, disabled and older people in Europe, set within the context of changing labour markets and welfare systems. It includes analyses of the modernisation of informal care and new forms of informal care, topics often neglected in the literature. Issues of gender, family change, social integration and citizenship are all explored in a series of chapters that report on original empirical, cross-national research. All contributors are high-ranking experts involved in the COST A13 Action Programme, funded by the European Union.

There have been major shifts in the framework of social policy and welfare across Europe. Adopting a multi-level, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach, this book develops a critical analysis of policy change and welfare reform in Europe. It applies a dynamic and change-oriented perspective to shed light on policy changes that are often poorly understood in the welfare literature, and contributes to a further development of the theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding social change. Using citizenship as a focus, several dimensions of change are analysed simultaneously: changes in the discipline of social policy itself; the changing character of social problems; changes in social policy and citizenship; and the emergence of new forms of social integration. The book also speculates on how different dimensions of change are interlinked.

One of the United States' great promises is that all children will be given the opportunity to work in order to achieve a comfortable standard of living. That promise has faded profoundly for American children who have grown up in poverty, particularly black and Hispanic children, and many of the deepening fault lines in the social order are traceable to this disparity. In recent years the promise has also begun to fade for children of the American middle class. Education and hard work, once steady paths to economic success, no longer lead as far as they once did. But that does not have to be the case, as this volume shows. America can provide true opportunity to all its children, insuring them against a lifetime of inequality; and when it does, the walls dividing the country by race, ethnicity, and wealth will begin to crumble. Long a voice for combating child poverty, the author takes a balanced approach that begins with a history of economic and family policy, from the Great Depression and the development of Social Security, and moving onward. He details the extent of economic inequality in the U.S., pointing out that this wealthiest of countries also has the largest proportion of children living in poverty. Calling for reform, the author proposes several viable universal income-security policies for vulnerable children and families, strategies that have worked in other advanced democracies and which also respect the importance of the market economy. They aim not just to reduce child poverty, but also to give all children meaningful economic opportunity. Just as Social Security alleviates the sting of poverty in old age, asset-building policies can insulate children from the cumulative effects of disadvantage and provide them with a strong foundation from which to soar.

This book builds upon and advances the comparative analysis of child protection systems that was conducted in the mid-1990s and presented in the ground-breaking book Combatting Child Abuse: International Perspectives and Trends (Gilbert, 1997). Chapters provide a detailed analysis of how the systems have changed during the period with a particular focus upon: • What are the criteria which define child maltreatment? • Who is responsible for reporting suspected cases of maltreatment? • What are the processes for enquiring into the reports? • How are the allegations of maltreatment substantiated, and what is the state’s response? Each chapter also considers two broader and key questions: • What have been the major issues and trends since during the period? • What have been the significant changes in the wider political and social contexts and how have these influenced child welfare and child protection? It becomes clear that all the countries have witnessed considerable change and the Conclusion summarizes the main themes. While there are important similarities in the changes experienced there are also important differences. In the process the chapters identify important developments in the two alternative orientations to the problem identified in Combatting Child Abuse – the child protection and family service orientations and the emergence of a new and significant orientation a child-focused orientation.

The story of China’s spectacular economic growth is well known. Less well known is the country’s equally dramatic, though not always equally successful, social policy transition. Between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s---the focal period for this book---China’s central government went a long way toward consolidating the social policy framework that had gradually emerged in piecemeal fashion during the initial phases of economic liberalization. Major policy decisions during the focal period included adopting a single national pension plan for urban areas, standardizing unemployment insurance, (re)establishing nationwide rural health care coverage, opening urban education systems to children of rural migrants, introducing trilingual education policies in ethnic minority regions, expanding college enrolment, addressing the challenge of HIV/AIDS more comprehensively, and equalizing social welfare spending across provinces, among others. Unresolved is the direction of policy in the face of longer-term industrial and demographic trends---and the possibility of a chronically weak global economy. Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition offers scholars, practitioners, students, and policymakers a foundation from which to explore those issues based on a composite snapshot of Chinese social policy at its point of greatest maturation prior to the 2007 global crisis.

This book, the second title in the Rethinking Community Development series, starts from concern about increasing inequality worldwide and the re-emergence of community development in public policy debates. It argues for the centrality of class analysis and its associated divisions of power to any discussion of the potential benefits of community development. It proposes that, without such an analysis, community development can simply mask the underlying causes of structural inequality. It may even exacerbate divisions between groups competing for dwindling public resources in the context of neoliberal globalisation. Reflecting on their own contexts, a wide range of contributors from across the global north and south explore how an understanding of social class can offer ways forward in the face of increasing social polarisation. The book considers class as a dynamic and contested concept and examines its application in policies and practices past and present. These include local/global and rural/urban alliances, community organising, ecology, gender and education.

With the Conservative Party breaking new ground in forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, this book examines the development and content of the Conservatives' approaches to social policy and how they inform the Coalition's policies. Chapters cover the development of Conservative Party social policy and specific policy areas.

Which underlying problems pose the greatest threat to British society in the twenty-first century? A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified poverty, alcohol, drugs and gambling among the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. The findings have now been brought together in this fascinating book. Individual chapters range across the political spectrum but the book also reports the results from a web survey and consultation with groups whose voices are less often heard. The results suggest that while some evils — like poverty — endure as undisputed causes of social harm, more recent sources of social misery, such as an alleged rise in selfish consumerism and a perceived decline in personal responsibility and family commitment, attract controversy.

The poverty rate is one of the most visible ways in which nations measure the economic well-being of their low-income citizens. To gauge whether a person is poor, European states often focus on a person's relative position in the income distribution to measure poverty while the United States looks at a fixed-income threshold that represents a lower relative standing in the overall distribution to gauge. In Europe, low income is perceived as only one aspect of being socially excluded, so that examining other relative dimensions of family and individual welfare is important. This broad emphasis on relative measures of well-being that extend into non-pecuniary aspects of people's lives does not always imply that more people would ultimately be counted as poor. This is particularly true if one must be considered poor in multiple dimensions to be considered poor, in sharp contrast to the American emphasis on income as the sole dimension. The book provides detailed discussions of specific issues from a European perspective followed by commentary from American observers. The volume considers current standards of poverty measurement in the European Union and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, challenges in extending those measures to account for the value of the provision of in-kind and cash benefits from the government, the interaction of poverty measures with social assistance, non-income but monetary measures of poverty, and multi-dimensional measures of poverty.

This book explores the experiences of informal home carers in the different welfare systems of the former West Germany and East Germany, and Britain. It is innovative in using a biographical case study approach to compare caring situations and caring strategies in the three different societies. The detail and variety of the case studies show how particular social and welfare patterns give rise to recognisable ‘cultures of care’. The book shows how the social relations of caring are structured within and outside the home environment, offers a research tool to take into account the significance of informal networks, uses separate analysis of ‘lived’ and ‘told’ life stories to highlight personal processes of continuity and change in meeting the challenge of caring, and links individual caring strategies to the structural features of welfare societies. European comparative research creates opportunities for fresh thinking about social policy, showing best practice and piecing together the strengths of each system. The findings of this book underline the significance of caring within social policy agendas and the need to extend and change the parameters of comparative social policy beyond a fixation on social insurance. The book adds to the debates about the need to ‘strengthen the social’ and to build a creative sense of moral agency in welfare systems.

This book aims to shed new light on recent poverty trends in the European Union, responses by European welfare states, and how progress can be made to realize a decent income for all. The text analyzes the effect of social and fiscal policies before, during, and after the recent economic crisis and studies the impact of alternative policy packages on poverty and inequality. Furthermore, the discussion elaborates on how social investment and local initiatives of social innovation can contribute to tackling poverty. There are reasons for both optimism and pessimism. The book argues that there are indeed structural constraints on the increase of the social floor and difficult trade-offs involved in reconciling work and poverty reduction. Differences across countries are, however, very large. This suggests that there is ample room for maneuver for policy makers. There is also no evidence of a universal deterioration of social protection. Nonetheless, we observe a persistent and almost general inadequacy of minimum income protection for jobless households, pointing to structural challenges for realizing a decent minimum income for all. To overcome these challenges, unavoidably, efforts to raise the wage and the social floor should be increased significantly almost everywhere. The book highlights that to do so, country-specific policy mixes should be designed.

This book examines the welfare of disabled people during the welfare state of the 1940s to the later 1970s. The welfare state seemed to promise universal health and welfare for all, but originally excluded millions of disabled people. With the rediscovery of poverty in the dynamism of the 1960s, it was commonly held that new and sweeping provisions would result in the full inclusion of disabled people in the welfare state and society. This appeared to have been achieved with the creation of extensive cash benefits in 1975, but these were ineffective and appeared just before the rolling back of the state and a renewed focus on the free market and a competitive society under the Thatcher governments. The book is the first to contextualise historically disability in the welfare state and under each government of the period. It adds disability policy to state of knowledge on the Labour and Conservative parties, the media and advocacy,the Trades Unions Congress, and the personal social services. It provides the first major analysis of the Disablement Income Group, one of the most powerful pressure groups in the 1960s, as well as an original analysis of the 1972 Thalidomide crisis using public documents previously unavailable under the thirty-year closure rule for public documents.

Since World War II, development projects have invested more than two trillion dollars towards health services, poverty alleviation, education, food security, and environmental initiatives around the world. Despite these efforts, 20 percent of the world still lives on less than $1.50 a day and the environment within which all live declines dramatically. There are clear limits to what further investments at this rate can achieve. This book advances the thesis that a more effective and universal foundation for social change and environmental restoration is not money, but human energy. Using this approach Tibet recovered from being nearly deforested to having over 40 percent of its land area protected under conservation management. Using principles outlined in this book mothers in northeast India implemented a package of life-changing actions that halved child mortality. They parallel the way New York City has created a citywide conservation program over three-and-a-half centuries. Each of these examples is particular to its time and place, yet a shared set of principles is at work in all of them. Improving the quality of life for a community starts by strengthening successes already operating. It involves local knowledge and a relatively simple set of principles, tasks, and criteria designed to empower communities. This account demonstrates how a comprehensive process for social change harnesses the energy of a community and scales it up with a rising number of participants becoming invested in increasingly high-quality work. The book provides practical guidelines for creating profound and sustained social change that begins in individual communities and grows to scale.