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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.

Evidence-based policymaking has, in recent decades, become a focus of program innovation in social care, engaging foundations, universities, as well as state and federal governments. Rigorous research, epitomized by randomized controlled trials, has become the benchmark for demonstrating efficacy and efficiency in social programming. Building Better Social Programs situates evidence-based policymaking with respect to the welfare state, describes key organizations driving the evidence-based movement, and proposes innovations designed to extend benefits to the working class. Interviews with leaders in the movement animate the discussion. Building Better Social Programs will be essential reading for faculty, program managers, foundation program officers, and research students.

In this book, the authors focus their attention on the role that culture, that collection of values, beliefs, attitudes, and preferences responsible for creating national identities, has played and continues to play on individuals’ decisions when they are in or about to enter the labor market. At a time when millennials face many employment challenges and Generation Z can be expected to encounter even more, a clearer understanding of the ways cultural transmission could facilitate or hinder productive and rewarding work would appear to be both useful and well-timed. The book’s title—Caught in the Cultural Preference Net: Three Generations of Employment Choices in Six Capitalist Democracies—conveys the authors’ aim to determine if work-related beliefs, attitudes, and preferences have remained stable across generations or if they have become pliant under changing economic conditions. And while millennials serve as the anchoring point for much of our discussion, they do not neglect the significance that their parents from Generation X (b. 1965–1982) and their baby boomer parents (b. 1945–1964) may have had on their socialization into the world of work. The book is organized around three lines of inquiry: (a) Do some national cultures possess value orientations that are more successful than others in promoting economic opportunity? (b) Does the transmission of these value orientations demonstrate persistence irrespective of economic conditions or are they simply the result of these conditions? (c) If a nation’s beliefs and attitudes do indeed impact opportunity, do they do so by influencing an individual’s preferences and behavioral intentions? The authors’ principal method for isolating the employment effects of cultural transmission is what is referred to as a stated preference experiment. They replicate this experiment in six countries—Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, India, and the United States—countries that have historically adopted significantly different forms of capitalism. They not only find some strong evidence for cultural stability across countries but also observe an erosion in this stability among millennials.

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.

In the midst of unprecedented attention to gender-based violence (GBV) globally, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement, this book provides a new analysis of how higher education cultures can be transformed. It offers reflections from faculty, staff, and students about how change has happened and could happen on their campuses in ways that go beyond implementation of programs and policies. Building on what is already known from decades of scholarship and practice in the United States, and more recent attention elsewhere, this book provides an interdisciplinary, international overview of attempts to transform higher education cultures to eradicate GBV. Change happens because people act, usually with others. At the heart of transformative efforts lie collaborations between faculty, staff, students, activists, and community organizations. The contributors to the book reflect on what makes for constructive, effective collaborations and how to avoid the common mistakes in working with others to end GBV. They consider what has worked to challenge the reluctance—or outright hostility—they have encountered in their work against GBV and how their collaborations have succeeded in transforming the ways GBV is considered and dealt with. The chapters focus on experiences in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, France, and India to examine different approaches to tackling GBV in higher education. They reveal the cultural variations in which GBV occurs as well as the similarities across cultures. Together, they demonstrate that, to make higher education a safe environment for all, nothing short of a transformation is required.

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 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.

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.

The book is the Europe volume in an international series on income, wealth, consumption, well-being, and inequality. It focuses on the European Union (EU) and its member countries and other European countries that are in close association with it. The book provides an overview of economic and social trends in the countries and in country groupings. It takes the long-term process of European integration as a starting point. It addresses policy areas pertaining to certain aspects of inequality and the European social model in thematic chapters. It makes a specific point to look at the EU not as a conglomerate of individual countries but as an economic and political entity whose parts are closely interlinked politically and economically. It considers commonalities and differences in institutions and policies as they might impact the situation not just in one country but in the Union as a whole. The EU experience during the Great Recession and the Euro Crisis strongly show that developments in one country or a group of countries can harm not only well-being in an individual country but in the Union more broadly. The chapters often take a novel approach in the analysis of social trends and policies and identify major policy challenges for EU and national policymakers.

Most Americans are insulated from the poor; it is hard to imagine the challenges of poverty, the daily fears of crime and victimization, the frustration of not being able to provide for a child. Instead, we are often exposed to the rhetoric and hyperbole about the excesses of the American welfare system. These messages color our perception of the welfare problem in the United States and they close the American mind to a full understanding of the complexity of family poverty. But who are these poor families? What do we know about how they arrived in such desperate straits? Is poverty their fate for a lifetime or for only a brief period? Faces of Poverty answers these questions as it dispels the misconceptions and myths about welfare and the welfare population that have clouded the true picture of poverty in America. Over the course of a year, the author spent numerous hours as a participant-observer with five women and their families, documenting their daily activities, thoughts, and fears as they managed the strains of poverty. We meet Ana, Sandy, Rebecca, Darlene, and Cora, all of whom, at some point, have turned to welfare for support. Each represents a wider segment of the welfare population, ranging from Ana (who lost a business, injured her back, and temporarily lost her job, all in a short period of time) to Cora (who was raised in poverty, spent ten years in an abusive relationship, and now struggles to raise six children in a drug-infested neighborhood). As the author documents these women's experiences, she also debunks many of the myths about welfare: she reveals that welfare is not generous (welfare families remain below the poverty line, even with government assistance); that the majority of women on welfare are not long-term welfare dependents; that welfare does not run in families; that “welfare mothers” do not keep having children in order to increase their payments (women on welfare have, on average, two children); and that almost half of all women on welfare turned to it after a divorce. At a time when welfare has become a hotly debated political issue, Faces of Poverty gives us the facts. The debate surrounding welfare will continue as each of the 50 states struggles to reform their welfare programs, and this debate will turn on the public's perception of the welfare population. The author offers insight into each of the reforms under consideration, and starkly demonstrates their implications for poor women and children. She provides a window into these women's lives, portraying their hopes and fears, and their struggle to live with dignity.

Social workers were involved in all aspects of the removal, incarceration, and resettlement of the Nikkei, a history that has been forgotten by social work. This study is an effort to address this lacuna. Social work equivocated. While it did not fully endorse mass removal and incarceration, neither did it protest, oppose, or explicitly critique government actions. The past should not be judged by today’s standards; the actions and motivations described here occurred in a period rife with fear and propaganda. Undergoing a major shift from its private charity roots into its public sector future, social work bounded with the rest of society into “a patriotic fervor.” While policies of a government at war, intractable bureaucratic structures, tangled political alliances, and complex professional obligations all may have mandated compliance, it is, nevertheless, difficult to deny that social work and social workers were also willing participants in the events, informed about and aware of the implications of that compliance. In social work’s unwillingness to take a resolute stand against removal and incarceration, the well-intentioned profession, doing its conscious best to do good, enforced the existing social order and did its level best to keep the Nikkei from disrupting it.

Marking 50 years since the passage of the Fair Housing and Civil Rights Acts, this collection both builds on and departs from two generations of scholarship on urban development and inequality. The volume’s contributors provide historical context for patterns of segregation in the United States and present arguments for bold new policy actions ranging from the local to the national. Evidence for the negative effects of segregation and concentrated poverty in America’s cities now exists in abundance. Poor and underrepresented communities in segregated urban housing markets suffer diminished outcomes in education, economic mobility, political participation, and physical and psychological health. Many of the aggravating factors underlying this inequity have persisted or even grown worse in recent decades. Yet the level of energy and attention devoted to them by local and national policymakers has ebbed significantly from the levels that inspired the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. This book refocuses our attention on achievable solutions by providing not just an overview of this timely subject but a roadmap forward, as the twenty-first century assesses the successes and failures of the housing policies inherited from the twentieth century. Instead of introducing new theories or empirical data sets describing the urban landscape, the book’s editors have gathered the field’s first collection of prescriptions for what ought to be done. Topics discussed include community development, the Community Reinvestment Act, education triage, housing choice vouchers, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, mixed-income development, and tax increment financing.

Fifteen years ago, New Jersey became the first of over twenty states to introduce the family cap, a welfare reform policy that reduces or eliminates cash benefits for unmarried women on public assistance who become pregnant. The caps have lowered extra-marital birth rates, as intended but as this book shows they did so in a manner that few of the policy’s architects are willing to acknowledge publicly, namely by increasing the abortion rate disproportionately among black and Hispanic women. This book presents the caps history from inception through implementation to the investigation and the dramatic attempts to squelch the author’s unpleasant findings. The book contains clear-cut evidence and data analyses, yet also plays close attention to the reactions the author’s findings provoked in policymakers, both conservative and liberal, who were unprepared for the effects of their crude social engineering and did not want their success scrutinized too closely. The book argues that absent of any successful rehabilitation or marriage strategies, abortion provides a viable third way for policymakers to help black and Hispanic women accumulate the social and human capital they need to escape welfare, while simultaneously appealing to liberals passion for reproductive freedom and the neoconservatives sense of social pragmatism.

Using a case example of how Pennsylvania Blue Shield trained, hired, and retained several hundred welfare recipients on its work force, this book offers a success story and a broad discussion of welfare reform, public policy, and corporate social responsibility. It also offers a practical explanation of the specific steps needed to establish such a program, including corporate tax incentives, business and government collaborations, and the special needs of welfare recipients. The book demonstrates that it is possible for corporate America to combine bottom-line goals with socially responsible goals.

The grand challenges are an effort—led by the social work profession—to address 12 major challenges for American society with innovative, evidence-informed, and socially-focused approaches. In essence, this volume offers a social agenda for America—one that begins with understanding that social factors are fundamental to the progress of humanity and that development of civil and peaceful social relationships have been the basis for human progress. These social factors also help explain the challenges that we now face including homelessness, major health disparities, family violence, social isolation, climate change, massive incarceration, extreme economic inequality, unequal opportunity and justice, and long lives that too often lack productivity. This volume bring analysis of these challenges but, more significantly, also brings ideas about how to make measurable progress in a decade and how we can better bring existing advances to scale. The Grand Challenges emphasize bringing different professions together to work on these problems and to help create innovative new interventions that will bring greater social cohesion; development of individuals, families, and communities, and social responses that foster society’s strength.

An overview of international human rights and social justice, this introductory text focuses on current global problems of pressing concern for social workers. It addresses topics such as healthcare, violence against women, war and conflict, forced labor and child soldiers, in a manner which encourages students to think critically about such problems, research the issues, and get involved with organizations that are working on them. The content contains narratives of individuals suffering from these social problems, as well as suggestions for what students can do to create change: both now and what they will be able to do as professionals. The author analyzes problems in their cultural contexts in order to help the reader understand how they developed, why they persist, and what the local and international responses — both governmental and non-governmental — have been.