Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Policy Analysis And Older People: A Conceptual Framework, John E. Tropman, Jane Mcclure

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The policy sciences, says Harold Lasswell, require "clarification of goals, analysis of conditions, project of future developments, and invention, evaluation, and selection of alternatives."1 This rocess is imbued with values and often these values lie unrecognized.3 Both personal values of the individual analyst and social values of the Society can be and often are involved. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate four policy problems involved in analyses concerning the elderly, and to suggest some additional considerations which would bring these problems into the open and aid in specification and focusing of policy research in this area. While only …

The Transition: An Historical-Materialist Perspective On Social Welfare And Social Work Practice, Thomas Keefe

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

From an historical-materialist perspective American society is in a transition to a new structural form--a new order. The future of social welfare and social work practice is intimately bound to the nature and outcome of this transition. Moreover, the transition has economic and ideological characteristics that hold important implications for changes in the ways social workers view their clients and conduct their practice. Employing an historicalmaterialist analysis, this article will discuss the nature of the societal transition and its implications for social welfare and social work practice.

The analysis will be prefaced with a synopsis of basic concepts and assumptions …

Some Critical Questions In The Political Economy Of Social Welfare - The Carter "Welfare Reform" Proposals, L. K. Northwood

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The purpose of this paper is to discuss President Carter's welfare reform proposals, appropriately titled, "The Program for Better Jobs and Income." If these proposals are adopted by Congress, they will guide the Administration in its stance toward and its work with the lowest income sectors of the nation: the welfare poor--those who cannot work and must be supported by the government, and the working poor--those who are able to support themselves, but whose yearly income is less than the poverty level.

Consequently, the paper starts with an analysis of what the government documents have to tell us about the …

The "Science" Of Social Policy: Max Weber Revisited, Asoke Basu

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Science documents two sources of knowledge--sense and reason. Further, according to Kant, "The nature of the outer empirical world is not known, what becomes known is that which is perceived." Human constructs represent outer reality. They do not express reality directly as it is in original nature. The aim of the social scientist can never be to eliminate the relative perspective of social reality. It is to understand and explain it within a larger cultural framework. The nature of this task brings the social scientist "close" to defining the social reality within a broader cultural praxis. Any policy--essentially, a set …

Interagency Conflict, Power, And Sanctioning Systems: An Alaskan Example, Dorothy M. Jones

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The covert processes in the interagency system in Anchorage social services is the subject of this paper. The emphasis is on (1) conflicts between explicit goals of planning and rationality in social services and covert or hidden goals concerning protection of organizational jurisdiction; (2) the structure of interagency power; and (3) the socialization and regulation of member agencies' behavior. The data for the study derive from focused interviews with agency administrators and staff members and observations at community planning meetings. The major finding of the study is that the explicit goals of rationality, integration, and planning in social services are …

The Msw And The Mpa: Confrontation Of Two Professions In Public Welfare, Thomas H. Walz, Harry J. Macy

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

From its inception in the 1930's, public welfare has emerged as a major service industry commanding a sizeable portion of the public tax dollar. Concomitant with growth and size and expenditure has come the federalization of the program. In the face of a series of changes--the growth of welfare, added administrative complexity, and the emergence of new economic function--public welfare's identification with social work was weakened. Correspondingly, and perhaps logically, its identification with public administration has been strengthened. In this paper, there is exploration of the changes leading to the confrontation between social work and public administration within public welfare. …

Social Control Or Social Wage: On The Political Economy Of The "Welfare State", Paul Adams

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Discussion between liberal apologists for the "welfare state" and their radical critics has tended in recent years to focus on the question of "social control." In this area the corporate liberals and social democrats (the "welfare statists") are weak. They talk of the "welfare state" as if, at least in principle, it represented the collective assumption by society of responsibility for the basic needs and dependencies of its members. Insofar as "social control" is relevant for them, it has to do with society's exercise of restraint over the selfish pursuit of private profit.1 Radical critics of the "welfare state," on …

A Political Economy Critique Of The American Welfare State, Gerben Dejong

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Despite its rapid expansion over the last decade, the American welfare state appears unable to remedy many of the social problems it has been designated to solve. In many instances, the welfare state has become as much a part of the problem as the solution. Unfortunately, most proposals to reform the welfare state do not go beyond the liberalconservative conception of the welfare state as a backup to the capitalist market system. This conception of the welfare state is part of a larger comitment to a free market-pluralist ideology that singles out certain social phenomena as problematic and limits the …