From an editorial team that includes Piven, one of the foremost academic critics of conservative ideologies and practices surrounding welfare reform (including that of Bill Clinton's), comes 22 essays that explore a wide range of political, economic, ideological, and social issues surrounding the implementation of the Orwellian-named Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 and the slashing of Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, as well as current efforts to expand upon those assaults on the social safety net. The articles are separated into sections that respectively deal with the politics and ideology of welfare reform (with Piven describing a "politics of greed"), the central issues of motherhood and sex associated with reform ideology, critiques of the stated rationales for the "Work First" ideology, welfare reform as a method of social control and repression of the poor, the effects of reform on family well-being, its impact on state and local systems, and political efforts to reverse the damage of reform. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.
Integrating archival and documentary materials with an analysis of the sources of political support for work-welfare programmes, this work examines the reasons behind the lack of effective training and work programmes for the unemployed in Great Britain and the United States.
A brief text presenting conflicts and controversies surrounding social welfare policy. This book is part of the Connecting Core Competencies Series. This series helps students understand and master CSWE's core competencies with a variety of pedagogy highlighted competency content and critical thinking questions for the competencies throughout. Essentials of Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy (a briefer version of Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy, 7/e) introduces the major social welfare policies and programs in the United States and encourages readers to think about conflicts in social welfare today. It emphasizes the current political aspects of policymaking and major social welfare programs. In this book, social welfare policy is portrayed as the ever-evolving result of public conflict over social problems, the resources Americans choose to allocate to those problems, the debate over whether these problems can best be solved through government, and the political choices involved in reaching even tentative consensus. Teaching & Learning Experience Improve Critical Thinking -- Includes critical thinking questions in margins and end of chapter review questions that 'build' on each other. Explore Current Issues -- Includes the most recent data on healthcare reform, the midterm elections, and public policy changes, and more. Apply CSWE Core Competencies -- Integrates the 2008 CSWE EPAS throughout -- highlights competencies and practice behaviors and includes expensive pedagogy. Support Instructors -- An Instructor's Manual and Test Bank, Computerized Test Bank (MyTest), Blackboard Test Item File, and PowerPoint presentations are included in the outstanding supplements package.
This book explains why countries have adopted different policies for working parents through a comparative historical study of four nations: France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States.
Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare-state politics, policy, and management. This volume offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the US, UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. An international group of scholars contribute organizational studies that shed new light on old debates about policies of workfare and activation. Peeling back the political rhetoric and technical policy jargon, these studies investigate what really goes on in the name of workfare and activation policies and what that means for the poor, unemployed, and marginalized populations subject to these policies. By adopting a street-level approach to welfare state research, Work and the Welfare State reveals the critical, yet largely hidden, role of governance and management reforms in the evolution of the global workfare project. It shows how these reforms have altered organizational arrangements and practices to emphasize workfare’s harsher regulatory features and undermine its potentially enabling ones. As a major contribution to expanding the conceptualization of how organizations matter to policy and political transformation, this book will be of special interest to all public management and public policy scholars and students.
It's hard to imagine discussing welfare policy without discussing race, yet all too often this uncomfortable factor is avoided or simply ignored. Sometimes the relationship between welfare and race is treated as so self-evident as to need no further attention; equally often, race in the context of welfare is glossed over, lest it raise hard questions about racism in American society as a whole. Either way, ducking the issue misrepresents the facts and misleads the public and policy-makers alike. Many scholars have addressed specific aspects of this subject, but until now there has been no single integrated overview. Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform is designed to fill this need and provide a forum for a range of voices and perspectives that reaffirm the key role race has played--and continues to play--in our approach to poverty. The essays collected here offer a systematic, step-by-step approach to the issue. Part 1 traces the evolution of welfare from the 1930s to the sweeping Clinton-era reforms, providing a historical context within which to consider today's attitudes and strategies. Part 2 looks at media representation and public perception, observing, for instance, that although blacks accounted for only about one-third of America's poor from 1967 to 1992, they featured in nearly two-thirds of news stories on poverty, a bias inevitably reflected in public attitudes. Part 3 discusses public discourse, asking questions like "Whose voices get heard and why?" and "What does 'race' mean to different constituencies?" For although "old-fashioned" racism has been replaced by euphemism, many of the same underlying prejudices still drive welfare debates--and indeed are all the more pernicious for being unspoken. Part 4 examines policy choices and implementation, showing how even the best-intentioned reform often simply displaces institutional inequities to the individual level--bias exercised case by case but no less discriminatory in effect. Part 5 explores the effects of welfare reform and the implications of transferring policy-making to the states, where local politics and increasing use of referendum balloting introduce new, often unpredictable concerns. Finally, Frances Fox Piven's concluding commentary, "Why Welfare Is Racist," offers a provocative response to the views expressed in the pages that have gone before--intended not as a "last word" but rather as the opening argument in an ongoing, necessary, and newly envisioned national debate. Sanford Schram is Visiting Professor of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. Joe Soss teaches in the Department of Government at the Graduate school of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. Richard Fording is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky.
A celebrated theorist examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. In Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism's flexible and precarious labor market. This is the first book of Lazzarato's in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as “immaterial labor.” The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right. Lazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (“reform”) of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming: in Foucault's words, a “floating population” in “security societies.” Lazzarato argues further that parallel to economic impoverishment, neoliberalism has produced an impoverishment of subjectivity—a reduction in existential intensity. A substantial introduction by Jeremy Gilbert situates Lazzarato's analysis in a broader context.
B> This is the leading book in social welfare policy in departments of social work, political science, administration and government. Originally written with Thomas Dye, subsequent editions by Diana DiNitto have been acknowledged as the most comprehensive orientation to social welfare available. DiNitto's approach is politically neutral; she describes the major welfare programs, including welfare, social security, disability, health insurance, and more. This new edition includes new and updated information on welfare (TANF), food stamps, managed care, disability, aging, the change from a budget deficit to a budget surplus, the latest figures on poverty, and the latest information on job training and employment. For anyone interested in public policy or social welfare.
Drawing on contemporary research and debates from different Nordic countries, this book examines how social work and child welfare politics are produced and challenged as both global and local ideas and practices.
