You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Deficiencies in old age care are some of the most pressing human rights concerns in mature welfare states. This book radically challenges the ethics of viewing care as a tradeable commodity and introduces a novel framework for understanding and analysing social care through the concept of ailment. Providing examples from the British and Finnish welfare states, it demonstrates how ailment shapes societies from the micro to the macro level. Addressing the marketisation and financialisation of care, the authors bring to light increasing inequalities in care. This book argues that ailment is part of human life and society, and therefore the politics of care should begin with a politics of ailment.
This book revives the discussion on public social services and their redesign, with a focus on services relating to care and the social inclusion of vulnerable groups, providing rich information on the changes that occurred in the organisation and supply of public social services over the last thirty years in different European places and service fields. Despite the persisting variety in social service models, three shared trends emerge: public sector disengagement, ‘vertical re-scaling’ of authority and ‘horizontal re-mix’ in the supply system. The consequences of such changes are evaluated from different perspectives – governance, social and territorial cohesion, labour market, gender – and are eventually deemed ‘disruptive’ in both economic and social terms. The policy implications of the restructuring are also explored. This title will be Open Access on Elgaronline.com.
This handbook provides a meaningful overview of topical themes within family sociology as an academic field as well as empirical realities in various societal contexts across Europe. More than sixty prominent European scholars’ original texts present the field’s main theoretical and methodological approaches in addition to issues such as families as relationships, parental arrangements, parenting practices and child well-being, family policies in welfare state regimes, family lives in migration, and family trajectories. Presenting cutting-edge research on findings, theoretical interpretations, and solutions to methodological challenges, it is a timely tool for researchers, teachers, students, and family practitioners who wish to familiarise themselves with the state of family sociology in Europe.
This Handbook brings together leading interdisciplinary scholarship on the gendered nature of the international political economy. Spanning a wide range of theoretical traditions and empirical foci, it explores the multifaceted ways in which gender relations constitute and are shaped by global politico-economic processes. It further interrogates the gendered ideologies and discourses that underpin everyday practices from the local to the global. The chapters in this collection identify, analyse, critique and challenge gender-based inequalities, whilst also highlighting the intersectional nature of gendered oppressions in the contemporary world order.
In our late modern pluralistic societies, there are tensions and complementarities between a plurality of individual and social claims and activities to shape societal life and a constructive pluralism of what is known as social systems. The latter provide normative codes and powers emanating from the areas of law, religion, the family, the market, the media, education, academic research, health care, defense and politics. A better understanding and steering of this complex division of powers is crucial for the common good and for freedom and peace. In this volume, a multi-disciplinary team of experts from Germany, Italy, Australia, the UK, the USA, and South Africa bring their conceptual, empirical and historical insights to bear in three broad sections: »The moral dimension of social systems«; »The interaction of religion, law and education with political systems«; and »The moral (mal)-formation evident in case studies on the global financial crisis and social media«.
Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters argues that both aging studies and ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks and scrutinize “boundary texts” in different literary genres, which have been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives as well as from the vantage point of critical aging studies, there has been little scholarly interaction between ecocritical literary studies and aging studies to date. The contributors in this volume demonstrate the potential of specific genres to narrate relationality and age, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges of imagining changes, endings, and survival in the Anthropocene. As the first step towards putting both fields in conversation, this collection offers new pathways into understanding human and nonhuman ecological relations.
Globalisation, regionalisation, new technology, demography, voters’ expectations and re-structuring of societies are expected to influence welfare state development for years to come. This handbook analyses how different welfare state models and regimes will be able to cope with contemporary and future challenges, providing a variety of evidence based tools that make it essential reading for students, researchers and policy makers alike.
This book studies welfare systems in Europe and beyond from the standpoint of women in vulnerable positions in society. These systems are under major transformations with new models of service delivery and management, austerity measures, requirements for cost-effectiveness, marketization, and the prioritization of services. Divided into three parts: Welfare service systems (not) responding to vulnerable situations of women Women’s encounters with the welfare service system Contradictions of informal support this book considers the experiences and encounters with the service system of women in poverty, homeless women, women with substance use problems, women sentenced of crime, girls and young women in care, and refugees and asylum-seeking women. Drawing upon research and critical discussions from Finland, Canada, Israel, Slovenia, Spain and the UK, this book provides new empirical findings and critical insights, and a valuable resource for the academics and students in social work, social policy, sociology and gender studies, but also for policy makers and professionals in social and health care.
Hyvinvointityön tekijät kohtaavat erilaisissa haavoittavissa elämäntilanteissa olevia ihmisiä keskellä heidän arkeaan. Asiakkaat saattavat tarvita tukea mielenterveyden hallintaan, fyysisiin sairauksiin, raitistumisen, toipumisen ja kuntoutumisen haasteisiin tai vaikkapa vanhuuden mukanaan tuomiin vaikeuksiin. Teoksessa selvitetään, minkälaisia merkityksiä kodilla on haavoittuvuuden kohtaamisen, sanoittamisen, kokemisen ja lievittämisen paikkana. Hyvinvointityön siirtyminen laitoksista koteihin sisältää paljon mahdollisuuksia, kuten ihmisen itsemääräämisoikeuden ja yhteisöihin integroitumisen vahvistumisen. Toisaalta se saattaa kuitenkin tarkoittaa turvattomuutta, eristyneisyyttä, täyttämättömiä tarpeita ja kohtuutonta sinnittelyä arjessa. Teos on ajankohtainen puheenvuoro hyvinvointipalveluiden kehittämisestä ja hyvinvointityön tekemisen arjesta. Siinä on hyödynnetty etnometodologiaan ja ihmismaantieteeseen sitoutunutta vuorovaikutuksen tutkimusta. Aineistoina on käytetty kotikäyntien nauhoituksia, tutkijan kenttäpäiväkirjoja sekä työntekijä- ja asiakashaastatteluja.
By portraying the circumstances of people living with chronic conditions in radically different contexts, from Alzheimer’s patients in the UK to homeless people with psychiatric disorders in India, Managing Chronicity in Unequal States offers glimpses of what dealing with medically complex conditions in stratified societies means. While in some places the state regulates and intrudes on the most intimate aspects of chronic living, in others it is utterly and criminally absent. Either way, it is a present/absent actor that deeply conditions people’s opportunities and strategies of care. This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare sy...