Suchergebnisse

This text reports on a policy shift in transition and developing countries after the mid-1980s. Looking at the experiences of nine countries and the negative effects that liberalization has had on them, the book includes policy recommendations for problems and challenges posed by globalization

Slovenia faces similar problems to other central European countries which have intro duced radical reforms of their economic and political systems. In addition, it has become an independent state. This demands efforts to establish new social, political and economic functions and causes problems such as the loss of markets in the former Yugoslavia and big resources needed to support refugees from the crisis areas. However, its export-oriented and relatively well developed economy seem to enable a soft approach to the reform of social policy. This means that there have not been drastic cuts in the welfare programmes or that the reduction of public services provision has been substituted by non-governmental, volun tary, commercial and other means.

Despite the current economic crisis facing the global economy we continue to be faced with the seeming triumph of global capitalism/ neo-liberalism. This is despite the great insecurity, difficulties and hardship that undoubtedly result for the majority of people. Social workers have to deal with many of the casualties of this system on a day-to-day basis, and I argue they require journals like CSP to provide a critical perspective on social policy issues and developments at both a practical and theoretical level. This piece highlights some of the main CSP articles which have helped one social worker in this regard over the last almost thirty years of his career.

Chapter 1. Welfare State Reforms and Their Implications for Social Work in Central and Southeast Europe -- Chapter 2. The Austrian Welfare State – a Halfway House -- Chapter 3. Social Policy and Social Work in the Czech Republic: Partners at Fragile Times -- Chapter 4. The Politics of Welfare – From Rights to Obligations: The Case of Slovenia -- Chapter 5. Social Work and Social Policy in Croatia in Times of Continuous Reforms and Crisis -- Chapter 6. Three Decades of Post-Yugoslav Tranformation(s) of Social Policy and Social Work in Serbia – Still Between Uncertainty and Failure -- Chapter 7. Social Policies and Social Services in North Macedonia: Between Ideology and Reality -- Chapter 8. Social Welfare Policy and Social Work in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Chapter 9. Social Protection in the Republic of Srpska: Conditions, Challenges and Reforms -- Chapter 10. Toward a Post-Crisis Welfare State in Central and Southeast Europe: Challenges and Perspectives.

This article offers a practical methodological 'toolkit' for creating more diverse reading lists for social policy teaching. It reports on the findings of the award-winning 'Reading List Diversity Mark Project', carried out at the University of Kent in 2018–20, which investigated how many Black, Asian and other ethnic minority authors were included on undergraduate reading lists. Through the application of critical race theory (CRT), we argue that inclusive curricula matter. We then analyse the reasons for the marginalisation of race and ethnicity in the social policy curriculum. A distinctive aspect of the project was the nature of our staff-student collaboration and we discuss how this shaped its design and outcomes. We argue that our approach could be implemented at other institutions and conclude with suggestions about how to achieve a more diverse social policy curriculum.

In this article, I analyse intragenerational income mobility and the long-term dynamics of poverty. The proposed analysis is based on the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults and covers the period from 1983 to 2011. This period encompasses major social reforms that were implemented in Quebec and Ontario in the 1990s. In Quebec, several innovative policies were implemented with the aim of promoting the integration of economically disadvantaged people into the labour market. In Ontario, the government instead relied on coercive policies to achieve the same ends. The analysis proposes to indirectly investigate the effects of these reforms on income mobility and poverty dynamics. To do this, I present a Quebec–Ontario comparative study using several distinct cohorts. Although many studies have found that income disparities and relative poverty are lower in Quebec, the data do not allow me to conclude that the policies that were implemented in Quebec have had a significant effect on social mobility or on the dynamics of poverty.

Azerbaijan's social assistance and income support schemes adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic need to be seen within the context of the existing social protection system and safety nets. While the existing system is operational and has the technical capacity to respond and deliver social policies, it has had two key shortcomings: 1) low benefit rates and 2) issues in coverage, notably the exclusion of informal employees and migrant workers. Left unaddressed ex ante, they caught the system off-guard ex post when the coronavirus pandemic broke out. As a result, although COVID-related social assistance measures (especially cash transfers) were implemented without delay and provided some immediate relief for vulnerable and affected social groups, they fell short of covering sizable sections of the population, namely informal workers and Azerbaijanis working in Russia. It is also doubtful that such assistance can improve future wellbeing of vulnerable groups, whose living standards are likely to worsen during and after the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Contemporary scholarship of the welfare state is turning strongly comparative, yielding among other fruits an increasingly rigorous comparative history. The 'social policy regime' is an analytic concept being developed to compare welfare states across time, place and types of political system. Usages to date have centred primarily on state/economy relations, giving little specific attention to gender. This paper attempts to extend the concept, identifying basic components of gender in the social policy regimes of the welfare state. Using examples from the Australian state, it suggests there are key dimensions of state/gender relations in such a regime. One dimension concerns the gender basis of legal personhood in the liberal democratic welfare state, including equality and difference in both legal authority over self and body and gender parities in obligation to contribute and right to claim the benefits of social citizenship. A second dimension concerns labour and the relation between state and economy: the key question here concerns how the sexual division of labour is institutionalised in paid employment and closely associated social policy fields such as education and child care. The third dimension of family and reproduction is already widely recognised as a strongly gendered area of social policy. Central issues in this area concern the institutionalisation of dependency in the rights and obligations of citizen entitlements and the privileging of heterosexuality over other forms of sexual relation. An adequate development of the concept of the social policy regime must also identify regimes of race and ethnicity in the institutional structures and social provisions of the welfare state. The paper concludes with discussion of some of the points of connection between class, gender and race and ethnic relations in social policy.

This book examines the racing-gendering process of policy making to show how relations of power and forms of inequality are discursively constructed and impact the lives of African American women.