by Paul Slack (1999)
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.
Bernard Harris
This study examines the background to the establishment of the school medical service in 1908 and looks at the full range of economic, social and political factors which influenced its subsequent development. It also examines the history of child health in Britain between 1908 and 1974.
Heidi Safia Mirza
Young black women symbolise the effects of the inequalities of British society. They do well at school and are good, efficient workers, yet as a group they consistently fail to secure the economic status and occupational prestige of their white counterparts. Heidi Safia Mirza, a black woman sociologist, charts the experience of a group of young black women as they leave school and enter the world of work, and investigates why black women suffer these injustices. She challenges the widely-held myth that young black women underachieve both at school and in the labour market, and provides evidence that goes beyond current notions of black female identity. She reveals the processes of inequality that, despite meritocratic ideals, persist in western society, shifting the emphasis from an analysis of identity towards an examination of the central role of the social and economic disadvantages in the education system. Through a comparative study of research and writing from America, Britain and the Caribbean, Young, Female and Black re-examines our present understanding of what is meant by educational underachievement, the black family and, in particular, black womanhood in Britain. A forceful and positive reappraisal of the experience of black women, it will be essential reading for students of sociology, education, social policy, race relations and feminist thought.
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.
James Robertson
Twentieth-century capitalism and socialism propped each other up. Both belonged to the modern industrialized period of human history when the powerful interest groups of business and state dominated people, and Euro-American culture and power dominated the world. An emerging post-modern worldview foreshadows possibilities for a new path of progress, more deeply concerned for people and nature. Based on articles and lectures, this collection explores what this new path of progress could mean for politics, work, welfare, health, energy, the life of families and neighborhoods, the world role of today's rich countries, and other aspects of the human predicament today.