Beyond the dependency culture

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John M. Herrick and Paul H. Stuart

"The Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America is a unique reference work that provides readers with basic information about the history of social welfare in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The intent of the encyclopedia is to provide readers with information about how these three nations have dealt with social welfare issues, some similar across borders, others unique, as well as to describe important events, developments, and the lives and work of some key contributors to social welfare developments. In choosing a continental focus, editors John M. Herrick and Paul H. Stuart encourage readers to explore cross-national and comparative work in the development of social welfare history." "The encyclopedia defines social welfare broadly to include education, informal mutual assistance, the development of the social work profession, and voluntary charitable activities as well as state supported public welfare activities. The coverage is broad and interdisciplinary, including the fields of anthropology, health sciences, history, political science, social work, and sociology." "No other reference work takes this unique approach, and as such, this will be a much needed acquisition for any academic or large public library with a social science collection. Beginning students as well as established scholars will find this an invaluable starting point for investigations into new areas of inquiry."--Back cover.

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Paul Close

The State and Caring is a collection of essays especially prepared by an international team of writers on issues concerned with the part played by the state in the process of caring in modern societies. The writers focus on five societies - Britain, Japan, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. But they deliberately address aspects of the state and caring in these particular societies so as to develop arguments and arrive at conclusions of relevance to modern societies in general. The writers come from different scholarly disciplines and accordingly employ a range of perspectives on the state and caring. Nonetheless, all the writers adopt approaches to their topics which lie firmly within the 'critical school' of social thought and comment. The writers scrutinise sceptically the outcomes, interests and motives associated with state care, favouring the view that the state not only inadequately but also detrimentally affects people's welfare. An overall message of the book is that we can understand and improve the state's involvement in care only by recognising how this involvement ties in with a further social process - that of social control. At the same time, the book carries the optimistic message that precisely because state care also entails the everyday experience of state control, the state's involvement in caring becomes a crucial source of progressive social change in modern societies.

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Paul Slack

Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, the character of English social policy and social welfare changed fundamentally. From Reformation to Improvement looks at the intellectual and political roots of this change.

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Peter Svedberg

"A large share of the population in many developing countries suffer from chronic undernutrition. In this book, Professor Svedberg provides a detailed comparative study of undernutrition in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia, the two worst affected areas, and provides crucial advice for all those concerned in development worldwide. The book concentrates on the five challenges that undernutrition creates: what undernutrition is, who the undernourished are, where the undernourished are, when people are undernourished, and why people are undernourished."--BOOK JACKET.