Throughout history, the 'welfare of the people' has been a contested area. Is it the responsibility of the state? The churches? The extended family? Organised charities or informal community groups? The Fabric of Welfare is about the many points of contact between voluntary welfare and government social services, and the complex pattern woven by these different threads. The country's welfare history is shaped by its colonial past, with the predominantly British influences transmitted by an immigrant society in the nineteenth century; by its Maori population, with a strong communal ethos; by the shaping forces of the welfare state; by two world wars and economic depression; and by both free-market policies and rapid social change in recent years. In tracing the interdependence of state and voluntary provision of welfare from 1840 to 2005, Margaret Tennant offers new perspectives on New Zealand social history. This is a rigorous analysis, but it is also a history illuminated by people. The text is illustrated with stories about the people who were moved to save, to reform, to care, to support, and the people who needed that essential sustenance. From the nun who sees a distraught woman about to throw her child into the sea, and sets out to care for 'foundlings', to city missioners, community-minded public servants, businessmen philanthropists, and the entrepreneurial organisers of floral fetes and telethons, these accounts tell us much about the history of welfare, in all its interconnections.

Helping vulnerable children develop their full potential is an attractive idea with broad common-sense appeal. However, child well-being is a broad concept, and the legislative mandate for addressing well-being in the context of the current child welfare system is not particularly clear. This volume asserts that finding a place for well-being on the list of outcomes established to manage the child welfare system is not as easy as it first appears. The overall thrust of this argument is that policy should be evidence-based, and the available evidence is a primary focus of the book. Because policymakers have to make decisions that allocate resources, a basic understanding of incidence in the public health tradition is important, as is evidence that speaks to the question of what works clinically. The rest of the book addresses the evidence. Chapter 2 integrates bio-ecological and public health perspectives to give the evidence base coherence. Chapters 3 and 4 combine evidence from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the Multistate Foster Care Data Archive, and the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being to offer an unprecedented profile of children as they enter the child welfare system. Chapters 5 and 6 address the broad question of what works. A concluding chapter focuses on policy and future directions, suggesting that children starting out, children starting school, and children starting adolescence are high-risk populations for which explicit strategies have to be formed. This timely volume offers useful insights into the child welfare system and will be of particular interest to policymakers, academics with an interest in Child Welfare Policy, Social Work educators, and Child Advocates.

This third edition deploys its distinctive model of how policies develop to include an analysis of the social policy initiatives of the Obama administration. With more graphics, updated charts, and sidebars to highlight main points, this book explains the evolution of US social policy.

This book explores how the often well-meaning routines and assumptions of a generous welfare state can reflect and even contribute to the stigmatisation of refugees and Muslims in Europe today. While the main cases are from Sweden, examples are included from the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Mark Graham examines how suspicion is woven into the fabric of welfare bureaucracies with potential adverse consequences for the people they serve. He complicates our understanding of what Islamophobia means, and how it is expressed and created, by exploring contexts in which the logic of "othering" Muslims operates, but where explicit Islamophobia itself is absent. The book starts with Swedish public-sector bureaucracies and attempts by staff to make sense of Muslim refugee clients with categories and models that reappear in wider society. It goes on to explore the logic of integration policies, official concepts of culture, Swedish multiculturalism, educational strategies in schools, and debates surrounding "genuine" and "false" refugees. In all cases, the homologies between these different socio-cultural domains are explored.

New insights for investors and business people looking to create wealth in the turbulent post-crisis world In a no holds barred expose of the 2008 financial meltdown from the inside, Ziad K. Abdelnour argues that the political and financial elites have done nothing to fix the structural problems and instead have worsened the situation. By creating more market bubbles, they are actually waging a war on the most productive members of society. For investors, business people, and entrepreneurs that need to navigate the troubled geopolitical waters of the post-crisis world, Abdelnour offers several solutions, including looking at the world anew and understanding that the federal government's primary objective is to promote the creation of an environment conducive to the creation of wealth not job creation, not bailouts, not subsidies, not expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and not providing lifetime support to those who choose not to take advantage of the innumerable opportunities that exist in this nation for them to create a better, more productive life for themselves. Written for investors that need to navigate the troubled geopolitical waters of the post-crisis world · Offers "out of the box" investment tactics and strategies to outsmart the system · Describes political and business solutions that anyone can engage in to restore freedom and prosperity The author is President and CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc., a private family office that has two major lines of business, private equity investments and advisory services, and physical commodities trading Compelling and persuasive, Economic Warfare reveals that wealth can be created in the new, post-crisis world, but investors need to understand that the rules of the game have changed.

"This ... new history tells the story of one [of] the greatest transformations in British intellectual, social and political life: the creation of the welfare state, from the Victorian workhouse, where you had to be destitute to receive help, to a moment just after the Second World War, when government embraced responsibility for people's housing, education, health and family life, a commitment that was unimaginable just a century earlier. Though these changes were driven by developments in different and sometimes unexpected currents in British life, they were linked by one over-arching idea: that through rational and purposeful intervention, government can remake society. It was an idea that, during the early twentieth century, came to inspire people across the political spectrum."--Jacket

A comprehensive examination of welfare state surveillance and regulation of single mothers in Ontario.

Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in western societies. Gosta Esping-Andersen, one of the most distinguished contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role of welfare states in the functioning of contemporary advanced western societies. Esping-Andersen distinguishes several major types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different western countries. Current economic processes, the author argues, such as those moving towards a post-industrial order, are not shaped by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. Fully informed by comparative materials, this book will have great appeal to everyone working on issues of economic development and post-industrialism. Its audience will include students and academics in sociology, economics and politics.