Social work and end-of-life care: reviewing the past and moving forward

This paper reviews the professional literature with respect to the social work profession's involvement in end-of-life care. The search process was conducted by entering key words in various combinations to electronic databases. Eligible articles were required to address one of the following: roles and activities of social workers in providing end-of-life care; core principles valued by social workers in the provision of end-of-life care; and barriers to provision of effective end-of-life care. The literature from 1990 through July 2004 was searched most rigorously. Based on this review, suggestions for where the profession of social work should focus its energies are offered. These key areas include focusing on generating empirically-based knowledge for practice and policy analysis and developing a system of social work education that addresses the unique knowledge and skills needed to participate in end-of-life practice as competent and informed professional practitioners. Current initiatives with regard to critical areas are summarized.     

How to Get Published: Practical Advice

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Changing Policy Environments in Europe and the Resilience of the Third Sector

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In the article, we analyse the impact of changing policy environments on the development of the third sector in Europe....     

The Evolution of Third Sector Research and the Journal Voluntas: The Editors’ Impressions

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

The Smothering Embrace: Competition in the Implementation of Social Policy

One element of recent welfare state reform has been the introduction of market coordination in the implementation of social policy. The authors of this article have conducted a comparative study of social security, health care and housing policy implementation in the Netherlands, focusing on the conditions necessary for an effective mechanism of competition. The most important condition is that clients should be able to switch between providers without difficulty. Evidence shows that the providers in these fields of social policy engage in activities that undermine the potential for future competition. While this is not uncommon in itself, the new markets in social policy appear to be particularly vulnerable to such activities. This can be explained on the basis of two variables: (1) the institutional characteristics of the policy fields as they existed before the introduction of market coordination, and (2) the characteristics of the products that providers distribute. The combination of path dependency and product characteristics strengthens efforts to reduce competition.     

The Trade-Off Between Capital and Community: The Conditions for Successful Co-production in Housing

Housing is an area in which the active involvement of citizens in the provision of services has the potential to enrich individual lifestyles, local communities and the organisations providing housing, regardless of whether public, private for-profit or non-profit. Yet in current housing markets, housing tends to be purely individual, in the form of home ownership, or collectively managed through social rented housing. The article explores the conditions under which co-production in this field could be successful, as an alternative model. The analysis, which draws upon the work of Ostrom, is based on empirical fieldwork carried out among German housing cooperatives. As it turns out, successful co-production depends primarily on the long-term maintenance of group boundaries and specific trajectories of organisational development. This can make co-production an attractive model for specific social groups, but there are drawbacks: it also tends to lead to limited use of the invested capital and an inward orientation.