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The article presents a research which analyzes the role of social service organizations in society for helping the poor and the needy. According to the research, which is based on the personal experience of the researcher, the social service delivery system involves several contradictions which the service providers have to face, because of which even with good intentions, they end up reinforcing not only the otherness of the poor, but their reliance on an indifferent market.

This study focuses upon factors related to the desire of social work students to work with the poor. It examines three sets of variables: students' perceptions of the causes of poverty, the best way of dealing with it, and preferred professional interventions. The sample consists of 514 graduating BSW students from Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Israel, and the United States. The findings indicate that interest to work with the poor is associated with less inclination to perceive poverty as caused by lack of motivation, effort, and responsibility; more inclination to view the expansion of state provision as the best means of dealing with poverty, less inclination to support its reduction; and more desire to employ policy practice and advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theory of pauperism. A student of economic conditions begins his article by regretfully confessing himself sadly ill-at-ease on the lonely heights of abstract economic doctrine may perhaps try to elucidate some of the general considerations surrounding the problems connected with pauperism, without being suspected of an unduly academic bias. Poor relief has been, with few exceptions, very little discussed by the economists who are professedly men of theory. The business of the Sociologist and of the Sociological Society is partly to advance knowledge by the collection of new facts, partly, and perhaps even more, to inform and organize it by the arrangement and criticism, by the testing and comparing with other times, of facts and theories which are already common property. The new facts are being supplied more quickly than one can assimilate them. A person who attributes pauperism to the inability to procure employment, will doubt the efficacy of the means which we propose to remedy it.