SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Work

This book summarises and builds on current knowledge and research about direct payments in the UK and considers developments in other European countries. It identifies good practice in the area and explores the implications of direct payments, both for service users and for social work staff.

Current policy encourages 'partnerships' between statutory organisations and professionals; public and private sectors; with voluntary organisations and local communities. But is this collaborative discourse as distinctive as the government claims? These claims are critically examined, using evidence from a wide range of welfare partnerships.

The NHS and Community Care Act (1990) specifically emphasises the health and social care needs of disabled people from minority ethnic communities, urging local authorities to be culturally sensitive to individual needs. This report examines what a culturally sensitive service looks like from the users' perspective.

Social Policy Review is an annual selection of commissioned articles focusing on developments and debates in social policy. Social Policy Review 14 reviews a varied and interesting selection of social policy developments in Britain and internationally, and sets current policy developments in a broader context of key trends and debates.

Evaluating New Labour's welfare reforms builds on the analysis of bestselling 'New Labour, New Welfare State?' (The Policy Press, 1999) to examine the Government's welfare policies to the end of its first term. It moves beyond a descriptive account to provide an evaluative perspective on New Labour's welfare reforms.

It is widely assumed today that the 'welfare state' is contracting or retrenching as an effect of the close scrutiny to which entitlement to social security benefits is being subject in most developed countries. In this book, fifteen authorities from nine different countries investigate to what extent this assumption is warranted.

This best practice guide to providing information for users of multi-agency services for disabled children is an invaluable resource for professionals, parents and carers.

This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.

This book presents a psychosocial examination of changing relationships between service users, professionals and managers in the post-war welfare state. It challenges current emphasis on consumer rights by linking social responsibility to its psychosocial roots and theorises the links between experiences of care and development of social policy.

Housing Matters presents evidence to support and inform change in policy and practice to ensure that the housing needs of disabled children and their families are better met.

Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation.

It is often argued that the regulated labour markets, relatively generous social protection and relative wage equality of European welfare states has become counter-productive in a globalised and knowledge-intensive economy. Using in-depth analysis of employment, welfare and citizenship in a range of European states, this book challenges this view.