Social Welfare Responses in a Neoliberal Era

by

Author	:
Publisher	: BRILL
Total Pages	: 313
Release	: 2018-11-26
Genre	: Political Science
ISBN	: 9004384111

GET BOOK

Listen to the podcast about Cory Blad's chapter in this book 'Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era'. This book seeks to explore welfare responses by questioning and going beyond the assumptions found in Esping-Andersen’s (1990) broad typologies of welfare capitalism. Specifically, the project seeks to reflect how the state engages, and creates general institutionalized responses to, market mechanisms and how such responses have created path dependencies in how states approach problems of inequality. Moreover, if the neoliberal era is defined as the dissemination and extension of market values to all forms of state institutions and social action, the need arises to critically investigate not only the embeddedness of such values and modes of thought in different contexts and institutional forms, but responses and modes of resistance arising from practice that might point to new forms of resilience.

Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era

by Peter A. Hall

Author	: Peter A. Hall
Publisher	: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages	: 417
Release	: 2013-04-22
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1107034973

GET BOOK

What is the impact of three decades of neoliberal narratives and policies on communities and individual lives? What are the sources of social resilience? This book offers a sweeping assessment of the effects of neoliberalism, the dominant feature of our times. It analyzes the ideology in unusually wide-ranging terms as a movement that not only opened markets but also introduced new logics into social life, integrating macro-level analyses of the ways in which neoliberal narratives made their way into international policy regimes with micro-level analyses of the ways in which individuals responded to the challenges of the neoliberal era. The product of ten years of collaboration among a distinguished group of scholars, it integrates institutional and cultural analysis in new ways to understand neoliberalism as a syncretic social process and to explore the sources of social resilience across communities in the developed and developing worlds.

Workers and Welfare

by Michelle L. Dion

Author	: Michelle L. Dion
Publisher	: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Total Pages	: 329
Release	: 2010-02-28
Genre	: Political Science
ISBN	: 0822973634

GET BOOK

After the revolutionary period of 1910-1920, Mexico developed a number of social protection programs to support workers in public and private sectors and to establish safeguards for the poor and the aged. These included pensions, healthcare, and worker's compensation. The new welfare programs were the product of a complex interrelationship of corporate, labor, and political actors. In this unique dynamic, cross-class coalitions maintained both an authoritarian regime and social protection system for some seventy years, despite the ebb and flow of political and economic tides. By focusing on organized labor, and its powerful role in effecting institutional change, Workers and Welfare chronicles the development and evolution of Mexican social insurance institutions in the twentieth century. Beginning with the antecedents of social insurance and the adoption of pension programs for central government workers in 1925, Dion's analysis shows how the labor movement, up until the 1990s, was instrumental in expanding welfare programs, but has since become largely ineffective. Despite stepped-up efforts, labor has seen the retrenchment of many benefits. Meanwhile, Dion cites the debt crisis, neoliberal reform, and resulting changes in the labor market as all contributing to a rise in poverty. Today, Mexican welfare programs emphasize poverty alleviation, in a marked shift away from social insurance benefits for the working class.

Neoliberalism, Nordic Welfare States and Social Work

by Masoud Kamali

Author	: Masoud Kamali
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 388
Release	: 2018-04-17
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1351620215

GET BOOK

How have three decades of neoliberalism affected the Nordic welfare states as well as the organisation, education and practices of social work in those countries? During recent decades the welfare states of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have gone through dramatic changes infl uenced by the political triumph of neoliberalism. This has led to both the electoral success of extreme right and mainstream neoliberal parties, and to the neoliberal ideological transformations of social democratic parties. The neoliberal doctrine of making governance cheaper has thus been made the focus of governance and has led to increased marginalisation and social problems. This is the first book to comparatively explore the role of neoliberal reforms on social work and social policy across the Nordic welfare states. The richly theoretical and empirical chapters explore and illustrate the consequences of the dominance of neoliberal policies and provide an analysis of the effects of globalisation, glocalisation, welfare nationalism, symbolic violence and forced migration. The book provides valuable insights into the shortcomings of retreating welfare states in a time of increasing glocal social problems. Neoliberalism, Nordic Welfare States and Social Work should be considered essential reading for critical social work education. Students, scholars, educators and researchers of Nordic countries and beyond have much to learn from this book.

Divorce, American Style

by Suzanne Kahn

Author	: Suzanne Kahn
Publisher	: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages	: 336
Release	: 2021-05-28
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 081225290X

GET BOOK

"This book examines feminist divorce reformers, their relationship with the broader feminist movement, and their lasting effects on the American social welfare regime. It shows how the two distinctive qualities of the American welfare state-its gendered nature and its public/private nature-combined to encourage the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage's use as policy tool. The linking of access to economic benefits to marriage, begun early in the development of the American social insurance system, shaped political identity and activism in the 1970s and has continued to do so into our current political moment. The result has not only affected policy questions directly relating to marriage but also limited the possibilities for expanding America's social welfare provisions. As a gateway to full economic citizenship, marriage has always served as an institution that protects and perpetuates class privilege"--

Neoliberalism

by Alfredo Saad-Filho

Author	: Alfredo Saad-Filho
Publisher	: Pluto Press (UK)
Total Pages	: 296
Release	: 2005-02-03
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	:

GET BOOK

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history.

Post-Pandemic Welfare and Social Work

by Goetz Ottmann

Author	: Goetz Ottmann
Publisher	: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages	: 239
Release	: 2023-08-04
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1000921573

GET BOOK

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a critical juncture in the development of the welfare state affirming its importance for its citizens’ economic, health and wellbeing, and safety, especially for its most vulnerable populations. It demonstrated that the crisis preparedness that is crucial for an effective protection of its citizens, the ultimate purpose of the welfare state, unquestionably exceeds the narrow horizon of a corporatised welfare industry with its singular focus on the maximisation of profit for the elites and cost containment for the government. Social workers need to engage with the contradictions and tensions that spring from underfunded welfare services and engage in the political struggle over a well-resourced welfare state. Contributors to this book take on this challenge. By tracing the various contradictions of the pandemic, the contributors reflect on new ways of thinking about welfare by exploring what to keep, what to challenge and what to change. By highlighting important challenges for a social justice-focused response as well as exploring the many challenges exposed by the pandemic facing social work for the coming decades, contributors critically outline pathways in social work that might contribute to the shaping of a less cruel and more capable welfare state. Using case-studies from Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Canada, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, China and the United States, the book features 19 chapters by leading experts. This book will be of interest to all social work scholars, students and practitioners, as well as those working in social policy and health more broadly.

Family Values

by Melinda Cooper

Author	: Melinda Cooper
Publisher	: Princeton University Press
Total Pages	: 416
Release	: 2017-02-01
Genre	: Political Science
ISBN	: 194213004X

GET BOOK

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

Social Work During COVID-19

by Timo Harrikari

Author	: Timo Harrikari
Publisher	: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages	: 204
Release	: 2023-04-28
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1000875229

GET BOOK

This book focusses on social work in the time of COVID-19. Social workers, their clients, and the organisations they represent have been affected by the pandemic in multiple ways. The pandemic and various efforts to curb the viral outbreak, such as face masks and lockdowns, have forced social workers to adapt to a ‘new normal’, launch new practices, mobilise social support and networks remotely, and above all, defend the most vulnerable populations. This requires an understanding of how social work and its clients are prepared for, capable to respond to, and further, to recover from a societal crisis and human disasters, like a coronavirus pandemic. Divided into three parts, it provides a wealth of knowledge related to social work in different local and cultural contexts during the period of the global pandemic. With experienced social work researchers across a diversity of settings, contexts, and research traditions, the book is reflective of the ‘glocal’ response of social work. Offering new perspectives on challenges social workers have faced in dealing with the pandemic, it makes critical and timely insights into the innovations and adaptations in social work responses, with a strong empirical basis. It will be of interest to all social work scholars, students, and practitioners.