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Hough academia has the reputation of being removed from the world, in reality the worlds of the academy and politics meet frequently, and in a variety of ways--productive and unproductive. This book presents the results of the first major crossnational comparative study of academic engagement in the creation of social policy. It offers new empirical data from twelve countries across Europe, North America, and the Middle East, with each chapter providing a brief overview of social work and social work education in the country under consideration, then presenting new data on the interactions between scholars and policy makers there. --

The goal of this article is to suggest that an extended family of Mediterranean welfare states exists and that it consists of eight different nations, some of which have been ignored in the ongoing discourse on Mediterranean welfare states. More specifically, it is claimed that the extended family of Mediterranean welfare states includes Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Italy, Malta, Spain, Portugal and Turkey. The article underscores a number of features common to members of this extended family of welfare states. Finally, three overarching themes that, in the past and present, appear to underlie the commonalities of Mediterranean welfare states and that can offer potential fruitful avenues for further study will be identified and discussed. These are religion, family and the role of clientelist—particularist relations in the structuring and functioning of welfare state institutions.

This article examines work-injury programmes in different welfare states. The article's goals are to provide a better understanding of these programmes and to further develop concepts for comparison between welfare states. Work-injury programmes are a component in the social security systems of most countries throughout the world. Nevertheless, cross-national comparative research into this field of social protection has been very limited. This article undertakes a quantitative comparison of work-injury programmes in 10 different welfare states, which represent various types of welfare regimes. Decommodification and self-development are the two key concepts that serve as a basis for the comparison and indexes measuring these two concepts are constructed. The findings of the study indicate that social-democratic welfare states, followed by Australia and Israel, have workinjury programmes with the greatest potential for decommodification and self-development. By contrast, work-injury programmes in liberal welfare states such as Britain and the United States have a low decommodifying and self-development potential.

SummaryThe goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the labour movement and unemployment insurance (UI). Following a brief overview of the evolution of the approach of labour movements towards UI, the focus shifts to an analysis of a case study of the Israeli labour movement. The study traces the development of the approach of this movement towards UI during the pre-state period and following the establishment of Israel. It indicates that, while the policy adopted by the Israeli labour movement in the pre-state period was similar to that of other labour movements, the motivation differed in that the goals of the Israeli movement were primarily nationalist. In the post-independence period, the labour movement objected to the adoption of UI and prevented the introduction of this programme for two decades. The reasons for this are linked to the values and perceptions of the labour movement leadership and the legacies of policies adopted during the pre-state period.

Rather than being seen simply as social policy implementors, in recent decades there has been recognition of the unique insights that social workers can bring to policy formulation. This book offers a theoretical framework for understanding why social workers engage in policy, and the implications for research, education and practice.