Unfaithful Angels

In this provocative examination of the fall of the profession of social work from its original mission to aid and serve the underprivileged, Harry Specht and Mark Courtney show how America's excessive trust in individualistic solutions to social problems have led to the abandonment of the poor in this country. A large proportion of all certified social workers today have left the social services to enter private practice, thereby turning to the middle class -- those who can afford psychotherapy -- and away from the poor. As Specht and Courtney persuasively demonstrate, if social work continues to drift in this direction there is good reason to expect that the profession will be entirely engulfed by psychotherapy within the next twenty years, leaving a huge gap in the provision of social services traditionally filled by social workers. The authors examine the waste of public funds this trend occasions, as social workers educated with public money abandon community service in increasing numbers.

A personal introspective by the influential pop songwriter and performer traces his Liverpool upbringing, artistic influences, creative pursuit of original punk sounds, and emergence in the MTV world.

Infused with relevant personal narratives and photographs, Social Work and Social Welfare provides a global, human rights perspective on social welfare policies that are at the forefront of controversy in today's world (e.g. immigration policies, environmental sustainability, health care, housing, food insecurity, and income/wealth inequality). Structured around one of the concepts students struggle with the most—the research question—this book begins with how to understand the role of good questions before demonstrating how questions underpin good research designs and how social research can be framed as asking and answering questions. Perfect for undergraduate students new to methods, it teaches students how qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research can be used to answer these questions.

Unique in its use of a human rights framework, Social Work and Social Welfare goes beyond American borders to examine U.S. government policies-including child welfare, social services, health care, and criminal justice-within a global context. Guided by the belief that forces from the global market and predominant political ideologies affect all social workers in their practice, the book addresses a wide range of relevant topics, including the refugee journey, the impact of new technologies, war trauma, environmental justice, and restorative justice. As a general textbook, the content is organized to follow outlines for basic, introductory, and more advanced courses examining social welfare programs, policies, and issues.

The essays in this book discuss the evolution of the profession of social work in the twentieth century. Its specific focus is the relationship of the professional social worker to the poor. Attempting to avoid the usual retelling of the standard narrative of the social work profession, The Professionalization of Poverty provides a perspective that goes beyond the typical boundaries of liberal/conservative paradigms and suggests that social work incorporate intellectual and methodological elements compatible with both.

A novel of one desperate woman’s hopes and desires set in contemporary Prague from “a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West” (The Boston Globe). Divorced, approaching fifty, and mother to a rebellious fifteen-year-old, Kristyna is beginning to feel the strain of her bleak existence—until she finds a new sense of joy when she begins a love affair with a man fifteen years her junior But her escape into romance is far from complete. She worries about her daughter Jana, who has been cutting school, and may be using heroin—the latest plague on the city. And Kristyna’s mother has forced her to accept the personal papers of her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. At a crossroads in her life, she must find a way to put the past behind her and deal with the challenges of the present in a Czechoslovakia that is still trying to overcome years of communist oppression. In this Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima “unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern Prague and civilization in general . . . [and] fills it with mercy” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Social Work: Seeking Relevancy Beyond the Postmodern Era critically examines major issues that social work education and practice must confront if social work is to remain as a mainline profession. As a social work student or professional, you will be exposed to issues in social work that normally are not covered in mainline social work literature such as the use of hypertechnology, the disjuncture of science and social work, problems with social work theories, and the challenge of reconstructing the social work profession. This important book examines these issues and offers an analysis to assist you with taking social work into the next millennium.

Polls tell us that most Americans--whether they earn $20,000 or $200,000 a year--think of themselves as middle class. As this phenomenon suggests, "middle class" is a category whose definition is not necessarily self-evident. In this book, historian Daniel Walkowitz approaches the question of what it means to be middle class from an innovative angle. Focusing on the history of social workers--who daily patrol the boundaries of class--he examines the changed and contested meaning of the term over the last one hundred years. Walkowitz uses the study of social workers to explore the interplay of race, ethnicity, and gender with class. He examines the trade union movement within the mostly female field of social work and looks at how a paradigmatic conflict between blacks and Jews in New York City during the 1960s shaped late-twentieth-century social policy concerning work, opportunity, and entitlements. In all, this is a story about the ways race and gender divisions in American society have underlain the confusion about the identity and role of the middle class.