Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg

Diminishing welfare : a cross-national study of social provision

Introduction: Three Stages of Welfare Capitalism by Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg More than Reluctant: The United States of America by Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg Downloading the Welfare State, Canadian Style by Patricia M. Evans Sweden: Temporary Detour or New Directions? by Helen Lachs Ginsburg and Marguerite G. Rosenthal Diminishing Welfare: The Case of the United Kingdom by Jane Millar The Triple Exceptionalism of the French Welfare State by Mark Kesselman The Dismantling of Welfare in Germany by Gerhard Backer and Ute Klammer Diminishing Welfare: The Italian Case by nrica Morlicchio, Enrico Pugliese, and Elena Spinelli Hungary: Retrenchment Amid Radical Restructuring by Phineas Baxandall Is the Japanese-Style Welfare Society Sustainable? by Masami Nomura and Kimiko Kimoto Diminishing Welfare: Convergence toward a Liberal Model? by Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg

Inspiring and Training Students for Social Action: Renewing a Needed Tradition

In social work, it is believed that certain knowledge and skills are learned more effectively through experience than through didactic classroom content. Members of the faculty of a school of social work have developed a Social Action Day to reinforce curriculum and translate into practice material about advocacy and ethical responsibilities for social action; show the breadth of social work practice; and enhance the schools sense of community. The authors share their experience to inspire other social work faculty, so that they are better able to foster student interest and passion for political action that may generate social change.

Strategic and Political Challenges to Large-Scale Federal Job Creation

This article identifies and explores means of meeting political and strategic challenges to the enactment of a federal job creation program sufficiently large and well-targeted to cope with mass unemployment. The challenges include: anti-government ideology; perceived failure of the Obama stimulus; exaggerated concern over federal deficits; shortcomings of the New Deal model for job creation; limited scope and/or sponsorship of legislative initiatives; and organizing a movement on behalf of the unemployed and large-scale job creation.

Literature and the Human Condition in Teaching and Learning

ABSTRACT The benefits of literature are countless. Social workers, however, are usually not inclined to count the teaching and practice of social work among its beneficiaries. We believe that literature is one of the ways to enrich vital components of social work knowledge, attitudes, and skills. In this article, we begin by calling attention to a historical precedent for the use of literature in social work education and practice. We then examine recent research on the impact of literature on human behavior, empathy, and critical thinking and consider its epistemological roots. Next, we review evidence from social work journals on the use of literature in teaching and practice. Having examined the relationships of literature to professional knowledge and practice, we devote most of the article to illustrating how, as social work educators, we are and can be using literature effectively in the teaching of social work.

Book Review: Changing Welfare Services: Case Studies of Local Welfare Reform Programs

Austin is the editor and author or coauthor of every chapter in Changing Welfare Services, which reports 24 case studies of welfare reform in the Bay Area in northern California. The writers view welfare reform as the impetus for promising programs and practices in the areas of service delivery, community partnerships, and organizational change. Yet these promising services may well have been developed without repeal of the entitlement to welfare for poor women and children. Austin and his coauthors report enviable cooperation among public welfare agencies, private nonprofit service providers, foundations, and universities. Because this is not the case in many jurisdictions, one wishes that the authors had identified the conditions that account for such salutary public or private partnerships in northern California. The first section of this book is on services that remove barriers to participation in the workforce and that encourage self-sufficiency—a goal that is often stated but not clearly defined in this book. The second section reports partnerships between community-based, nonprofit organizations and county social service agencies. The third section presents cases of agency restructuring. The reader is grateful for the guiding hand of an editor and senior author who presents each type of case study in a uniform format. Repeatedly, the volume calls attention to the low wages of former welfare recipients but does not relate them to gender inequality in pay. In contrast, a study of persons who left the welfare rolls in a county in the northeast called attention to a 22% discrepancy between the wages of female and male participants who were doing comparable, low-skill work and recommended that the county government seek additional ways of reducing discrimination in gender-based employment (Altman & Goldberg, 2003). Feminists will find another omission: None of the case studies mentions services to protect battered women and children who are put at risk by welfare reform, and none discusses whether and how the Family Violence Option has been implemented in these California counties. The programs reported in this book supply, for some clients and sometimes temporarily, important resources, such as transportation, child care, and affordable housing that are needed not only by former welfare

Special Issue on: The Challenge of Full Employment in the Global Economy Editorial Introduction

Low unemployment and commitment to full employment were widespread after the Second World War. Today, there is mass unemployment and weak commitment to-full employment, which is still necessary and attainable. This article discusses divergent concepts of full employment, its history and the impact of the global economy. We dispel the notion that Europes high unemployment is due to labor market rigidity, that the US model is a good alternative and that technology has made work obsolete. Unemployment, both morally unacceptable and economically irrational, weakens welfare states. The global economy makes attaining full employment more difficult but not impossible. Political and economic strategies, needed at both national and international levels, are suggested, along with possible actions by intellectuals.

Book Reviews : The Welfare of Children. By Duncan Lindsey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 404 pp.,

This review of child welfare, past and present, concludes that hysteria over the horrors of child abuse has transformed public child welfare from &dquo;a system serving a broad range of disadvantaged children into one designed primarily to protect children from battering and assault&dquo; (p. 161). A number of studies, including Lindsey’s, have found that social workers are unlikely to predict which parents who are suspect of abuse will inflict severe harm on their children and that the major determinant of children’s removal from their homes is not the severity of child abuse but unstable sources of parental income. With dark shadows over Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the finding that at-risk children whose families receive governmental income support are less likely than are those whose parents are self-supporting or economically dependent on relatives or friends to be placed in foster care should give one pause. Lindsey’s discussion of AFDC emphasizes the program’s insufficient incentives to work or remarry It is not concerned with one implication of the research-the probability that cutbacks in funds for AFDC have increased the unnecessary placement of children and will continue to do so.

29.95 (hardbound

This study asks whether the feminization of poverty the tendency of women and their families to become the majority of the poor is a phenomenon unique to the United States. Seven industrialized nations both capitalist and socialist with different degrees of commitment to social welfare are compared: Canada Japan France Sweden Poland the Soviet Union and the United States. In each of the countries the authors analyze information about women labor market conditions equalization policies social welfare programs and demographic variables. This is the first book which uses a cross-national approach to gain an in-depth understanding of the feminization of poverty in the industrialized world and to consider anti-poverty policy and strategies for women in the United States. (EXCERPT)

The Feminization of Poverty: Only in America?

motivation, management styles, and leadership, where the author draws heavily on the social psychology and management literature. Some chapters provide helpful details on how to carry out specific management functions such as financial management and budgeting, personnel, and to some extent, communication, while others offer more general discussion of the issues involved in key areas such as evaluation and the planning process. The latter chapter, for example, does not introduce techniques such as PERT or Gantt charts, which are considered basic in the field. The authors point of view is that of a generalist operating in an environment where interprofessional cooperation is essential and clinical services are paramount. He argues effectively for accountability on the part of the administrator, stressing that while committees, consumers, and others may contribute to decision making, ultimately one person must make administrative decisions. While stressing productivity and efficiency, he continually reminds the reader that providing quality service to clients must always be a major goal of the human service agency. Unfortunately, however, White tries to cover too much ground in too brief a format. Each of the topics covered needs to be dealt with in greater depth, and the reader will either come to the book with extensive prior knowledge or will probably have trouble understanding the significance of some major points. On the whole, it is evident that White has considerable knowledge about program management and is to be commended for presenting a guide to management of health and human services from the point of view of the human services professinal. The book, however, is tantalizingly brief, and, as White himself suggests, there is still room for a definitive text on the management task in the human service organization.