Regional Welfare System Developments in Russia:Community Social Services

Micro-level studies of welfare service developments are largely absent from the literature on Russian social policy issues, which tends to concentrate on macro-level social security arrangements. This paper highlights the emergence of community-based social services in the post-1991 era, examining their development in two provincial Russian cities, based on an empirical study carried out in 1998. The paper adds to a growing literature which seeks to understand "welfare systems" from the perspective of welfare services as opposed to a social security or policy-based approach. It takes a user-group perspective on the services by looking at their use by, and relevance for, disabled children regarded as having learning difficulties, and their families. The empirical data indicate the shape of "new" services in the field sites, the means by which such institutions were maintained and their integration into the welfare sphere as a whole. Their development and maintenance at the local level is explained in part by socio-economic, political and administrative factors in these regions. By highlighting the various factors that help to maintain welfare provision and drive change at the local level, the case studies indicate the possible shape of future welfare developments in Russia as a whole.     

Keeping the Faith: The Impact of Human Services Restructuring on Catholic Social Welfare Services

Church related agencies are major providers of community services in Australia (Lyons, 2001:34‐35). While the history of church related welfare service provision is not well known in Australia it is asserted that many have a long tradition of outreach and service provision to marginalised groups regardless of the government social policy of the day (ACSWC, 2000; Mendes, 2003). This paper examines the current environment of human services restructuring and the impact of the shift to contractualism on one church related provider: Catholic social welfare provision in Australia. It explores the significance of the church's social teachings and history on concerns that service innovation, diversity and advocacy are currently under threat. Finally it calls for greater appreciation of the distinctive contribution of church related agencies and what they have to offer in service delivery and as contributors to the social policy discourse.     

Objectives,Role and Functions of Social Welfare Services in Sweden

The assumption in the 1930s that poverty was the cause of all social problems was clearly not borne out in the Swedish experiment in creating social security through massive insurance and other programmes. The public debate from the middle of the 1960s has therefore been concerned with an examination and re-definition of the aims of social policies. The perception of the role and functions of the social welfare services consequently changed. In 1974 a Parliamentary Commission published its report on the principles the services should follow in the future. The report emphasizes that the social welfare services have a definite role in the restructuring of society, and it spells out ways in which this aim can be achieved.     

Privatisation and Welfare Services

This paper traces some of the persistent criticisms which have attended welfare provision in Australia and many other western industrialised nations over the past twenty years. Clearly, the most concerted attacks on the welfare system have come from the radical Right, who are becoming more adept at manipulating and hijacking the language and sentiments of supporters of welfare. The paper argues that the welfare crisis debate, of which privatisation has become an important component, has deceptively seized upon a particular, and simplistic, interpretation of economics and the economy of welfare, as a means of unfurling a broader ideological position on social and economic policy. The rhetoric of the ‘rational’ Right can have no legitimate place in the restructuring and improvement of welfare provision in Australia. It is essential to the continued development of the welfare system, that the ‘backlash’ proposals of the Right be comprehensively rejected, and exposed for their destructive capacity. Efforts to reverse the ideological shift created by the ‘New Right’, need to consciously reclaim and reinstate concepts of social justice and equity on the social policy agenda.     

社会工作方法在残疾人福利服务中的应用

我国残疾人社会福利政策涉及残疾人事业的各个领域,而残疾人的特殊困难决定了落实残疾人福利政策并非易事。基于残疾人福利服务工作具有与健全人服务不同的特殊性和复杂性,应将残疾人社会工作作为残疾人福利服务的重要手段,不断实践社会工作方法以适应残疾人服务的发展。本文从论证残疾人社会工作对康复服务的重要意义切入,提出应持续不断发展残疾人社会工作对残疾人的服务和扶助,发展制度化和常规化的残疾人社会工作,逐步解决残疾人及其家庭面临的特殊困难,最终使残疾人更广泛地享受各项残疾人服务的实惠。     

Opposition in Social Interaction amongst Children: Why Intellectual Benefits Do Not Mean Social Costs

Occasions where children oppose each other have been claimed to convey intellectual benefits through their association with justification and resolution. They have been claimed to promote social rejection through their association with aggression. Because it is inconceivable that intellectual benefits imply social costs, either the relation amongst opposition, justification, resolution, and aggression is weaker than claimed, or children differ in their use of justification, resolution, and aggression during opposition. To explore these possibilities, 49 triads, comprising children aged 4 to 7 years, were videotaped while they engaged in free play and structured activities. The children varied in gender and temperament, and the triads varied in gender composition. Justification, resolution, and aggression were all relatively frequent in oppositional contexts. However, the use of justification and resolution during opposition was clearly separated from the use of aggression. Gender, temperament, age, and gender composition of triad were all relevant to the oppositional behaviour that children displayed.     

Children in Need and their Families: Outcomes of Referral to Social Services

Jane Gibbons. Social Work Development Unit. University of East Anglia. Norwich NR4 7TJ. Summary The Children Act provides a clear remit to local authoritiesfor the provision of services to children in need and theirfamilies. Increased service provision needs to be supportedby evaluation of effectiveness. The paper describes an attemptto develop instruments for this purpose. In a sample of 122families containing children under 14 who were referred to socialservices departments, indicators of family needs, services receivedand their outcomes were used to examine whether services werematched to needs; and whether they had any effect on familyproblems in the short term.     

Castles in the Air: Welfare Services for Ex-prisoners

Prison aftercare in New Zealand has a history of haphazard planning and fragmented policy implementation, and a recent governmental review of penal policy recognized the inadequate provisions currently made for prisoners' re-establishment in the community. The research reported in this paper has shown that, at a local level, a considerable degree of confusion and ignorance exists among people presumed to have knowledge in the field of prison aftercare. This shortfall of knowledge and lack of cohesion among existing services must be taken into account before effective policy changes aimed at improving prison aftercare can be implemented.     

Social Work,Social Welfare,and Research:

No abstract available for this article.     

Developmental Social Policy,Social Welfare Services and the Non‐profit Sector in South Africa

The potential and challenge of constructing a democratic developmental welfare state through synergistic state‐civil society relations is the focus of this article. The author argues that while South Africa's pluralist approach, involving a leading role for the state in partnership with voluntary organizations, is a viable policy option to address the country's developmental challenges, anomalies between policy proclamations and actual practice raises questions about the efficacy of the partnership model and the gendered nature of welfare provision. Key governance issues and challenges, namely financial policies and institutional capability, underlie current failures in the delivery of welfare and care services, resulting in the non‐realization of these constitutionally guaranteed social rights. Further public action is needed to remedy the situation. Non‐profit organizations can advocate for policy reforms and challenge the instrumental nature of state‐civil relations and the abrogation of state responsibility for welfare services in contemporary South Africa.     

Planning Australia's Health and Welfare Services

The report of the Health-Welfare Task Force to the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration brings together for the first time a great deal of useful information about health and welfare services in this country. However, restricted definitions of health and welfare compounded by strict adherence to a structuralist model of society leads to a predictable set of proposals for the planning, delivery and financing of services in a federal structure. It is to be hoped that the recommendations for greater research efforts and for increased community participation will be given enthusiastic support at all levels of welfare organization.     

Confused and Confusing: Services for Mentally Handicapped Children

Fifty-two families with mentally handicapped children under five describe their confusing experiences with a variety of professionals and officials. Such confusion can be explained partly by the reluctance of different agencies and government departments to co-operate with one another and by the dominance of the medical profession in services for the handicapped. But the main cause of the chaotic health and welfare arrangements lies in politicians' indifference, as expressed by their apparent free-for-all, private-market attitudes to the planning of services.     

Subverting Social Policy on the Front Line: Agencies of Resistance in the Delivery of Services

An understanding of policy implementation issues in many of the core fields of social policy requires attention to the mode of service delivery that is characteristic of those fields: face‐to‐face interaction between frontline service staff and service users. A focus on implementation as interaction between these groups reveals the significance of ‘agency’ to the analysis of why and how certain social policy outcomes occur – and in particular why outcomes may sometimes be different from those anticipated by formal policy objectives. This article considers how the agency of workers and users shapes the processes of mediation, negotiation and adaptation that occur in different service delivery contexts, and identifies ways in which resistance to intended policy outcomes, and to the practices expected to deliver them, is formed and expressed. Drawing on a wide range of empirical research material, the article shows how agencies of resistance produce outcomes that are uncertain, fragile and contested, and whose effect can be the subversion of formal policy intentions.     

Activation,Public Employment Services and their Clients: The Role of Social Class in a Continental Welfare State

This article fills a gap in the existing literature by investigating how public employment service (PES) staff actually deal with their clients under a continental regime of activation. The results reported here are based on interviews both with PES staff and their unemployed clients in Germany. We argue that due to its Bismarckian origins as an insurance‐based system of ‘unemployment protection’, Germany's system of unemployment compensation is attractive not only for the marginalized, but also for core workers. As a result, PES staff deal with clients from very heterogeneous class backgrounds. We demonstrate that social class is a significant factor in client outcomes, and that earlier research has perhaps overemphasized the role of frontline staff as ‘street‐level bureaucrats’. While staff do have considerable power, the result of the encounters between the administration and clients also depends on the capabilities of the clients, which, in turn, are strongly related to social class.     

Worlds of Welfare Services: From Discovery to Exploration

A recent thread of debate in social policy research has been the ‘discovery’ of welfare services. Previous comparative studies in this field have been largely erratic and have led to different results. This ambiguity is mainly due to flaws inherent in the data sets. In order to overcome these problems, this article uses an alternative approach of operationalizing welfare services. Employment patterns in the welfare sector provide a holistic picture of welfare services regarding quantity, kind, and organization. Cluster analysis leads to a four‐cluster structure that bears high resemblance to the conventional welfare regime typology by Esping‐Andersen and its subsequent advancements. These findings are set in the context of the welfare regimes literature in order to enhance our understanding of the functioning of welfare regimes. The study suggests that the ideological orientation of the welfare state is a good starting point for a holistic framework of welfare regimes combining the transfer and the service component.