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First published in 1997, this volume is about the challenge of introducing business-originated concepts of quality assurance, personal social services are currently confronted with all over Europe. Undoubtedly, the new orientation towards a more business-like approach in social welfare settings will raise professionalism, "client-orientation" and controlling (instead of mere inspection). There is evidence, however, that the specificities of personal social services are not always taken into account if it comes to introducing market values and mechanisms. Due to this development it becomes essential to promote more adequate criteria for quality standards in the very field of personal social s...
This Second Edition celebrates 21 years of the practice of empowerment evaluation, a term first coined by David Fetterman during his presidential address for the American Evaluation Association. Since that time, this approach has altered the landscape of evaluation and has spread to a wide range of settings in more than 16 countries. In this new book, an outstanding group of evaluators from academia, government, nonprofits, and foundations assess how empowerment evaluation has been used in practice since the publication of the landmark 1996 edition. The book includes 10 empowerment evaluation principles, a number of models and tools to help put empowerment evaluation into practice, reflections on the history and future of the approach, and illustrative case studies from a number of different projects in a variety of diverse settings. The Second Edition offers readers the most current insights into the practice of this stakeholder-involvement approach to evaluation.
An increasing number of people work in organizations that 'trade in trust'. Institutions such as banks, accounting firms, schools, and hospitals require customers, students, and patients to have confidence in the experience and professional expertise of the staff, as well as in the effectiveness of the regulations, rules, and systems in place for quality control. What mechanisms have developed in modern society to create, manage, maintain, and convey trust in companies, public administrations, and civil society organizations? What takes place in the encounter between different cultures of confidence and what happens when confidence in or between organizations is shattered? Trust and Organizations gathers an interdisciplinary group of academics to contextualize the dilemmas resulting from the institutionalization of trust and confidence in a wide selection of organizational settings. The importance of trust is highlighted in relation to different types of borders or boundaries - institutional, organizational, and geographical - as the overlapping and blurring of such boundaries is becoming one of the main characteristics of an increasingly transnational and re-regulated world.
This book provides a critical analysis of evidence-based practice in social work. It introduces readers to the fast changing research, policy, legislative, and practice context and illuminates how adopting the methodology and language of evidence-based practice fundamentally alters the conditions under which social work takes place.
First published in 1952, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology) is well established as a major bibliographic reference for students, researchers and librarians in the social sciences worldwide. Key features * Authority : rigorous standards are applied to make the IBSS the most authoritative selective bibliography ever produced. Articles and books are selected on merit by some of the world's most expert librarians and academics. * Breadth : today the IBSS covers over 2000 journals - more than any other comparable resource. The latest monograph publications are also included. * International Coverage : the IBSS reviews ...
East-Central Europe is about to bring its welfare reforms to the European Union. Nevertheless, in the course of the Accession, one could hardly fix the European standards of social policy or examine to what degree the newcomers may have approached them. Evidently, there has always been a variety of welfare regimes in the EU. Moreover, today's experts in post-communist countries do not find stable policies and institutional arrangements in the West but rather another reform process, the "domestication" of the classical welfare states. True, the general trends are not dissimilar: partial retrenchment, decentralization, marketisation and privatisation of public welfare services, as well as an upsurge of the voluntary sector, are the main characteristic features of regulating welfare on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. These issues are addressed by the contributors of this volume, leading representatives of their professions, in an unprecedented way. In avoiding the convenient cliche
Originally published in 2004. Providing Integrated Health and Social Care for Older Persons - Issues, Problems and Solutions (PROCARE)" is a project in the EU Fifth Framework Programme (Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources, Area "The Ageing Population and Disabilities") that aims to help in defining the new concept of an integrated health and social care for older persons in need of care by comparing and evaluating different modes of care delivery. The project will identify structural, organisational, economic and social-cultural factors and actors that constitute an integrated and sustainable care system with enhanced outcomes for all actors involved. This book gathers the ach...
Conventional wisdom holds that aging populations are unfavorable for economic growth because of their potential impacts on labor supply, productivity, and savings. When this is coupled with the increased spending pressures because of pension requirements and health care, aging societies are likely to face serious fiscal problems. This report addresses these concerns in the unique context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union where many countries are aging rapidly without the economic resources and institutional capacity of other aging societies in Western Europe and Japan.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book analyses the considerable variation in the shares of private provision for core services in education, health and social services, in the Scandinavian countries. The chapters compare countries, service areas, and the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors. Each focuses on different levels of change: the mix of welfare providers, national laws and regulations, governance in municipalities, nursing homes and schools, and finally, the consequences experienced by the users of the services. The authors ask which combinations of governance structures, service sector providers, and user choice give the best results for active citizenship. Promoting Active Citizenship will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Public Administration and Management, Non-Profit Management, Social Policy, Innovation in Public Service, Social Care and Education and School Research.
IBSS is the essential tool for librarians, university departments, research institutions and any public or private institution whose work requires access to up-to-date and comprehensive knowledge of the social sciences.