Politics of social work and social policy

This article examines Philippine social work under martial law. The article begins with an account of the assault on human rights under the Marcos regime. It then outlines
the response of the mainstream professional community to
the challenges under martial law and the implications for contemporary social work practice.

Course Description: This course discusses the development and structure of the welfare state from a comparative historical and political sociological perspective. Locating the welfare state within the broader context of the development of capitalism as a world systemic phenomenon, the course traces the scholarly discussions on the causes of the welfare state development and the functions of the welfare state. The course discusses the structural (economic or demographic) and political determinants of welfare state development, putting greater emphasis on the latter. As such, political legitimacy, electoral competition, political containment of unrest and political mobilization of popular support will be considered as critical factors shaping welfare policies. In a sense, the course is on the politics of welfare state. It will analyze the development of modern welfare states in the west and in developing countries, with a specific emphasis on so-called emerging markets. Welfare states in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey will be analyzed. In addition, the course will also pose more technical questions including the policy specific characteristics of existing welfare regimes.

In one of the first volumes to address social work practice with this emergent and often marginalized population, practitioners and scholars specializing in transnational issues develop a framework for transnational social work practice. They begin with the historical and environmental context of transnational practice and explore the psychosocial, economic, environmental, and political factors that affect at-risk and vulnerable transnational groups. They then detail practical strategies, supplemented with case examples, for working with transnational populations utilizing this population's existing strengths. They conclude with recommendations for incorporating transnational social work into the curriculum.

There is a significant blind spot in social work ethics and values which requires our attention. In previous articles (Webb & McBeath, 1989, 1990) it has been observed that mainstream ethics in social work, and particularly the British Association of Social Workers 'Code of Ethics', is dominated by a Kantian duty-bound ethics with its emphasis on "respect for persons", "people as ends in themselves" and the notion of "self determination". The blind spot we are thinking of is in giving over proper attention to a civic humanist tradition with its concentration on the common good. The fact that social work has failed to articulate an ethical tract in terms of the common good is not only suprising given its long and sustained history but also worrying because its absence leaves social work open to the criticism that the liberal Kantian preoccupations rest on a perverse mode of individualism which cannot be reconciled with the more sociologically and progressively oriented values of empowerment and anti discrimination. From a Scottish perspective we show how considerations of the common good not only better serve the principled purpose of a social work ethics but of equal importance that there is a persuasive lineage in the history of Scottish Enlightenment ideas which has a necessary and contingent relation to the social work context. These ideas rest on the eighteenth century civic humanist thought of Scottish writers such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar and William Robertson. In conclusion we suggest that attempts to reconstruct the significance of the common good is a difficult task but the greater emphasis now given to the concept of virtue ethics in social work (McBeath & Webb, 2002; Banks, 2008) has the potential to assist this process. Such a communitarian perspective contends that there is an essential correspondence between the character of the citizen and the common good of the community. A social work for citizenship, in promoting the common good, needs, therefore, to encourage practices of cooperation, friendship, openness, reciprocity and a parity of participation in society (Fraser, 2000; Davies, Gray & Webb, 2014).

"Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy: A Participatory Public Policy Process

Highlights and Key Findings:

• This chapter is an analytic narrative of how Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy was written. This empirically grounded policy story offers a practical example for others to follow.
• A municipal Ethical Purchasing Policy is one way local communities can contribute to ethical trade efforts aimed at avoiding tragedies like the 24 April 2013 garment factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, that killed 1,129 workers.
• Vancouver’s Ethical Purchasing Policy was written by a city task force comprising two city councilors, two city managers, and representatives of several businesses, unions, and civil society organizations with expertise on international labour standards, Fair Trade certification, and ethical purchasing of global commodities.
• Participation by city managers was key because policies solely crafted by city council might not take into account the practicalities of implementing a new policy while still following existing policies. Including city managers led to successful implementation and ensured the policy saved the city money.
• Participation by community members lent legitimacy to the city’s policy and helped ensure that the policy met international ethical trade norms for union-made garments and Fair Trade certified agricultural commodities including coffee, tea, and chocolate.

On 17 February 2005, Vancouver became the first Canadian municipality to adopt an Ethical Purchasing Policy (EPP) pertaining to union-made garments and Fair Trade certified coffee, tea, and chocolate. The EPP was crafted with a high level of participation by businesses, unions, and civil society organizations. The policy’s social justice ethos stands out in an ongoing era of neoliberal retrenchment of progressive public policies. Other Canadian cities, such as Calgary, Alberta, have since followed Vancouver’s lead in ethical purchasing. Vancouver’s EPP was written by a city task force that included two city councilors, two city managers, and representatives of several businesses, unions, and civil society organizations with expertise on international labour standards, Fair Trade certification, and ethical procurement through global commodity chains. This chapter is an institutional ethnography that focuses on the policy writing process and the standardized processes that comprise public participation, public decision-making, and public administration.

The chapter is empirically grounded in seven semi-structured interviews of 30 to 150 minutes in length with the two city councilors that chaired the policy writing process, two city managers (interviewed a second time together) that oversaw the implementation of the process, one of which participated in writing the policy, and a Fair Trade activist and a union organizer that participated in the writing process. These interviews were complemented with participant observation and textual analysis. Participant observation was conducted both in real-time in activist meetings and in city council meetings and reflexively from my experience as a Canadian Fair Trade activist-researcher. The interviews and observational work helped identify key texts for analysis, including the EPP and the connected Supplier Code of Conduct (SCC), council meeting minutes, minutes of standing committees of council, reports to council by city managers, and a critical analysis of the policy written by the Maquila Solidarity Network, a Toronto-based anti-sweatshop advocacy group. The research took place from January 2006 to August 2007 as part of a larger study in which I was involved alongside sociologist Dorothy E. Smith for a community-university research alliance called "Rural Women Making Change."

This paper proposes to critically examine the LGBTphobic comments of social workers against the content of the video For Social Work there is no "gay cure", created by the Brazilian Federal Council of Social Work (CFESS). Thus, based on the theoretical and methodological principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this research investigates how the construction of meanings of the arguments made in those prejudiced posts proceeds. CDA proposes to describe, interpret and disseminate how forms of power, domination and social inequality are (re)produced in discursive practices, in their socio-political and cultural contexts. More particularly, this study turns its attention to the rhetorical appeals of ethos and pathos observed in those statements that were favorable to the proposition of therapies for sexual (re)orientation ("gay cure"), thus reproducing the hate speech, stigmatization and discrimination against the human rights of the members of the gender and sexuality diverse community. The findings can be arranged into five analytical categories: the cis-hetero-compulsory rhetoric, the "freedom of thought" rhetoric, the "right to choose" rhetoric, the neoconservative rhetoric and the religious rhetoric.

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RESUMO. Este trabalho propõe examinar criticamente os comentários LGBTfóbicos de assistentes sociais contrários ao conteúdo do vídeo Para o Serviço Social não existe "cura gay", criado pelo Conselho Federal de Serviço Social. Desse modo, fundamentando-se nos preceitos teórico-metodológicos da Análise Crítica do Discurso (ACD), a presente pesquisa investiga como se processa a construção de sentidos dos argumentos desferidos nessas postagens preconceituosas. A ACD propõe descrever, interpretar e divulgar como as formas de poder, a dominação e a desigualdade social são (re)produzidas nas práticas discursivas, em seus contextos sociopolíticos e culturais de funcionamento. Mais particularmente, este estudo volta sua atenção aos apelos retóricos do ethos e do pathos observados nesses enunciados que se mostraram favoráveis à proposição das terapias de (re)orientação sexual ("cura gay"), reproduzindo, assim, o discurso de ódio, estigmatização e discriminação contra os direitos humanos dos membros da comunidade sexodissidente. Os achados podem ser dispostos em cinco categorias analíticas: a retórica cis-heterocompulsória, a retórica da "liberdade do pensamento", a retórica do "direito de escolha", a retórica neoconservadora e a retórica religiosa.

Este artigo procura sintetizar o estado da arte das políticas públicas destinadas a promover uma sociedade mais inclusiva, e em que as pessoas com deficiências ou incapacidades façam parte de um projecto partilhado por todos com mais cidadania e qualidade de vida.

The Social Work Department are seeking to appoint a new lecturer to join a highly successful and ambitious group of social work academics. We are committed to the delivery of an excellent student experience and the continued development of an ambitious research agenda. The role holder will contribute to the delivery of learning, teaching and assessment across the qualifying programmes in social work. There is an expectation that the applicant will have a background in social work education and a demonstrable research profile and / or evidenced potential to make a contribution to social work research.

Estudiantes del Departamento de Trabajo Social de la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Río Piedras, crearon este video como un proyecto especial del curso TSOC 4305, Politicas de drogas desde un Modelo de Salud Publica.  Su proposito es impactar y transformar la opinión publica sobre los trastornos de sustancias y fortalecer la abogacía en pro de un cambio de política pública.  El video incluye la marihuana como un tema de relevancia para la poblacion joven a quienes el paradigma prohibicionista les ha hecho mas dano que la marihuana.  Incluyen, ademas, su preocupacion por la situacion ante drogas duras y proponen un cambio de paradigma para lidiar con el fenomeno de las drogas, en favor del paradima salubrista.

This paper focuses on a special and vulnerable group amongst young people, so called: NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training).  Between the NEET young people in Hungary, two groups can be divided according to their status:  they can be registered by the local Employment Department (ED), or, for some reason, they decide not to be registered.
In this analysis, the author draws attention to the first sub-group; to those who are registered by the local ED in a Hungarian city, called Szeged.  The town is the third largest one in terms of its population.  The study analyses the registered NEETs’ educational qualifications between 2009 and 2014.  The data base is provided by the local ED.
Although researches on NEET young people have not had a long past in Hungary however, it is known that one of the characteristics of NEETs is low level of education.  It is also known from other related studies that the lower the level of education is the harder for a young person to enter into the primary labour market.
The analysis supports the above statement.  On the other hand, the study would like to highlight that not only those NEET young people are at a considerable risk who have the lowest level of education (or do not even) however, those also at a vulnerable position who have secondary school level.  This level of education is divided into five different categories by the Hungarian education system.  The first two categories (technical skill-oriented educations) provide only professions.  The second two categories (vocational and technical school) provide both, professions and school leaving examinations.  While the fifth category (high school), which predestines the student for further studies, gives only school leaving examination.  The study shows that the numbers of those registered NEETs who have vocational school level education, in other words, have a profession and school leaving examination are almost the same with those who have the least level of qualification or even do not have any qualifications. 
Considering these data, it should be important to make further studies on this phenomenon in order to understand our educational system in a better way which might lead the professions to find a better condition for Hungarian youngsters to avoid becoming NEET.

Key words: NEET; vulnerable young people; education system in Hungary; levels of education;

This article explores the experiences of individuals who work with men who are violent, focusing in particular on the differential gendered impacts of this area of practice. Violence intervention is widely recognized as work that is difficult, demanding and, frequently, confronting. It is less often recognized that such work is not only experienced differently by men and women, but significantly, that it may weigh more heavily, with impacts that are both broader and more profound, on the women working in this area. Building upon an understanding of the gendered nature of work and the workplace, this research reveals the distinctively gendered nature and impact of work with men who are violent, highlighting the complex interplay of gendered individuals, in the gendered workplace, in relation to a specifically gendered activity, that of men's violence.

Todo lo cubre, la imagen de que se trabaja febrilmente por modernizar al país. La voluntad de los grupos tecnocráticos del gobierno aparece 'como avanzando sobre economía, política e incluso ideología. Las cúpula de importantes fuerzas de la sociedad mexicana colaboran para difundir, con elementos compulsivos, la idea.

Líderes de los sectores social: público y privado transmiten a sus respectivas áreas de influencia, el imperativo, de que, o se tornan más eficientes sus modalidades de producción de bienes y servicios, o sucumben. Fenecerían, aseguran, no debido a un castigo divino, sino por algo mucho más terrenal: la presión de la cúspide del gobierno, combinada con la acción del numéricamente reducido pero cualitativamente poderoso grupo de sus aliados.

Patrick Kyanda is currently working as an independent Political and Social Analyst with the BBC,The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. It is headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, and is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world. I guest audience current affairs programs and Newsmagazine. Shows. I am an admirer of Nelson Mandela. Abdul Nasser and many other great states men. I am also an activist, a Soial analyst, a business advisor entrepreneural advisor.

A postcolonial feminist social work (PCFSW) perspective is an essential theoretical framework with which to analyze global food insecurity and proposed solutions to this urgent social problem. In this article, the PCFSW perspective is elaborated, and the arguments of two groups of global stakeholders that identify women’s empowerment and gender equity as crucial to the solution are presented and analyzed. The analysis concludes that food sovereignty aided by agroecology is most suited to social work as it is grounded in the concerns of peasant women, the group most affected by food insecurity and the proposed policies to combat this problem.