No description available.

A case study in the politics of social provision, this dissertation uncovers the origins of a legal dispute between directors of a charitable trust and its female beneficiaries during the Progressive Era. In 1919 the poor women of Brattleboro, Vermont, legatees of the Thomas Thompson Trust, sued the Boston-based charity for mismanagement and demanded increased benefits and a role in monitoring trust allocations. An examination of charity case records, legal testimony, and local resources reveals the roots of their collective action in the experience of getting help. At a time when reformers were reconstructing charity to accommodate the shift from a moral to scientific approach to poverty, the case reveals the gender and class relations that shaped social policy. Highlighting the perspective of charity clients, the study shows how both providers and the needy constructed charity policy. Over the course of two decades, interaction among charity administrators, middle-class women, visiting nurses and poor, mostly native-born white women resulted in a medical definition of female poverty. Increased access to medical care and health education led beneficiaries to fashion a definition of female worthiness that combined recognition of their wage-earning with protection and support for ill health and old age. The shift from a moral to physical explanation of female poverty strengthened poor women's claims to direct relief while it encouraged charity administrators to develop health programs and to cultivate public support. Despite an alliance with civic leaders seeking local control over charitable funds, poor women failed to attain legal recognition of their claims, but they nonetheless modified trust policy. The redefinition of female poverty as a medical problem bolstered women's sense of entitlement and expanded health services for the poor and working-class community. Improved access to health experts, however, did little to resolve poor women's economic difficulties and helped undermine their sense of self-sufficiency as they adapted to middle-class assumptions about female weakness and invalidity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Social Work." Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-113).

Review of Review of Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present: v.1, Part A: Population; v.2, Part B: Work and Welfare; v.3, Part C: Economic Structure and Performance; v.4, Part D: Economic Sectors; v.5, Part E: Governance and International Relations. Susan B. Carter et al Cambridge. 2006. 5v, 0521817919, $825.00

Following the 2008/9 global financial crisis and ensuing economic uncertainty, the roll out of austerity politics has seen significant welfare retrenchment and a recalibration of the state-citizen relationship which can arguably be characterised by a process of punitive Neoliberalism. Nevertheless, the impacts of austerity politics are proving to be geographically uneven: spatially, there is significant evidence that the northern and western parts of Britain, particularly towns and cities therein, are especially prone to the punitive impacts of neoliberal austerity politics, while socially, some parts of society (e.g. the young, the disabled) find themselves exposed to the worst effects of austerity. Conducted under the period of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat UK Coalition Government (2010-2015) this thesis starts by considering the degree to which punitive austerity policies are economically necessary or driven by political ideology. Alongside this it determines whether austerity politics is a (re)new(ed) approach to welfare provision and the state-citizen relationship. The empirical parts of the thesis examine the tactics and strategies utilised by those conducting (the state), implementing (welfare providers and employers), and recipients (people and employees) of welfare-to-work policies, before considering what adaptations, innovations, co-operation, resistance and coping strategies are being employed by these stakeholders in response to austerity politics. In the final part, I argue that whilst many of the neoliberalised policies devised by the Coalition Government have been a renewal and reinvention of those already in place, this is part of a broader trend which is marked by the emergence of a more punitive Neoliberalism associated with a work-first welfare regime.

This thesis is submitted for the award of PhD by publication. It comprises four interconnected, published research papers linked by a contextualising narrative. The publications are all peer-reviewed research articles published between 2012 and 2017 in relevant UK journals. I am the sole author of three of the papers and first author of one paper. My thesis considers how social workers make sense of complex and uncertain information in child welfare and protection social work. My first paper considers the how an understanding of human judgement and sense-making can influence social worker's capacity of child-focused thinking. My synthesis of the literature indicated that social workers' styles of judgement are strongly bounded or influenced by external factors such as complexity of information and time available to make decisions. It is this "bounded" model of rationality which I have employed to provide the theoretical and conceptual framework for this thesis. I have included two papers exploring data which I collected in a non-participatory ethnographic study of social workers' sense-making in a local authority children and families team. These papers represent a valuable contribution to current understandings of social work sense-making. This naturalistic study identified a number of key themes and processes in sense-making which are directly relevant to developing and maintaining best practice. The final paper was developed over the period of my PhD studies. The paper builds on existing research and develops theories of bounded rationality into a conceptual model which I have referred to as an "Ecology of Judgement" for child welfare and protection social work. By modelling the complex interplay between the mind of the social worker and the information environment in which they are operating the model has utility in practice development and research.

No description available.

Familienpolitik bezeichnet ein Politikfeld im Wohlfahrtsstaat, dessen Ziel es ist, das Zusammenleben in Familien im Lebensverlauf mit Hilfe von Zeit, Geld und Infrastruktur zu unterstützen. Die Definition von Familie hat sich ebenso wie das Politikfeld stetig gewandelt. Aus Perspektive der (intersektionalen) Geschlechterforschung lassen sich verschiedene historische Phasen seit Gründung der Bundesrepublik beschreiben. Von besonderer Bedeutung ist der paradigmatische Wandel der Familienpolitik seit der Jahrtausendwende: Im Zuge dessen etablierten sich zunehmend ein volkswirtschaftlicher Begründungszusammenhang für Familienpolitik und die Verknüpfung von Elternschaft mit Erwerbstätigkeit.

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit dem Thema "Hilfe zur Arbeit" nach dem BSHG. Grundsätzlich zielen alle mit Hilfe zur Arbeit im Zusammenhang stehenden Paragraphen des BSHG auf (Re-)Integration der Hilfeempfänger in den ersten Arbeitsmarkt und die Aktivierung der Selbsthilfekräfte. Unter Berücksichtigung der Zumutbarkeitskriterien geht die Bundesregierung von knapp einer Million benötigter Arbeitsplätzen aus, um alle in Frage kommenden Empfänger von laufender Hilfe zum Lebensunterhalt in den Arbeitsmarkt zu integrieren. Die Schaffung und Akquise dieser Arbeitsplätze sind Aufgaben der Kommunen. Die vorliegende Studie spiegelt wieder, wie die Städte Dresden, Leipzig und Chemnitz die Paragraphen 18 bis 20 und 25 des BSHG bis zum Jahr 2000 in ihre Praxis umsetzten und welche Schlüsse sich daraus für das Gelingen einer beschäftigungsorientierten kommunalen Sozialpolitik unter lokalen Bedingungen ableiten lassen. Im von mir untersuchten Zeitraum führten alle drei Städte Maßnahmen der "Hilfe zur Arbeit" durch. Jede der Kommunen entwickelte eigene Konzepte zur Umsetzung der gesetzlichen Vorgaben. Zusammenfassend stelle ich fest, dass die Chancen auf einen Arbeitsplatz im Bereich des ersten Arbeitsmarktes, neben der direkten Einstellung mit Hilfe von Lohnkostenzuschüssen, im Anschluss an Maßnahmen mit Arbeitsvertrag am größten sind. Voraussetzung ist allerdings, dass der Hilfeempfänger ein Jahr sozialversicherungspflichtig beschäftigt war. Ich komme also mit Hilfe meiner Studie zu dem Ergebnis, dass "Hilfe zur Arbeit" nach dem BSHG für die Sozialhilfeempfänger lediglich eine äußerst geringe Chance darstellt, einen Arbeitsplatz auf dem ersten Arbeitsmarkt zu bekommen. Keinesfalls handelt es sich hierbei um eine wirkliche Chance und gleich recht nicht um ein Instrument, welches in der Lage ist Massenarbeitslosigkeit zu bekämpfen. Die Mehrzahl der Hilfeempfänger findet auf diesem Weg keine Arbeit auf dem ersten Arbeitsmarkt.