Search

The National Social Work Voter Mobilization Campaign, also known as Voting is Social Work, involved social work faculty, field educators, practitioners, and students in a nonpartisan voter engagement drive. Following the 2018 elections, researchers surveyed Campaign participants in social work schools and agencies to document their voter engagement activities. The study reported extent and amount of their involvement. The survey distinguished between the voter engagement participation of school- versus agency-based social workers, which has not been studied elsewhere. Participants also reported the benefits of political participation to individuals, communities, and the profession and perceived barriers such as organizational constraints, fears of appearing partisan, and distrust of politics. Presented in historical context, the findings highlight the need to mainstream voter engagement throughout social work education.

History, the major storehouse of information, informs us about the important relationship between people and society and increases our understanding of basic societal values and institutional arrangements. A recent New York Times op-ed described "The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession." Likewise for historical content in social work education, exacerbated by the 1970s' rise of neoliberalism and the profession's long marginalization of historical research and teaching. The Social Welfare History Group renews its call to bring historical content back into social work education and to correct its deep-seated race, class, gender, and colonizing distortions. To ensure that all social work courses include history, we can revive the value historical knowledge; prepare a cadre of historical researchers and instructors; financially support emerging scholars and develop a pipeline of history-informed faculty to teach the next generation of social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reopens the historic debate about the roles of micro and macro practice in social work and encourages the profession to find ways to achieve a better balance between case and cause in education, practice, and research. To this end, it traces the history of the case versus cause debate including conceptual frameworks for rebalancing social work education: Bertha Capen Reynolds, C. Wright Mills, and William Schwartz, highlights three alternative approaches for resolving the dualism put forward over the years; separation, merger and interconnection; and identifies four model that help to bridge the gap by taking both the individual and the social structures into account: ecological, financial capabilities, trauma theory and oppression. This historical analysis offers promising directions for the social work profession as it tackles 21st-century social challenges, including growing inequality and austerity-driven public policies.

Objective: Adopting a business model in human service agencies has led to service delivery challenges and problematic working conditions. This article reports the initial validation of the Organizational Commitment to Managerialism (OCTM) scale, a tool designed to measure how the business model is operationalized in human service agencies. Method: Data from a purposive nonprobability sample of 2,326 workers employed in New York City metropolitan area human service agencies were collected by an anonymous electronic survey, and the sample was split to conduct discrete exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The exploratory factor analysis established the underlying factor structure of the construct; a confirmatory factor analysis examined the subsample's psychometric properties. Construct validity was confirmed by comparison with validated scales and individual items included in the parent study. Results: Exploratory factor analysis indicated that the OCTM consisted of five internally valid subscales: productivity , accountability , efficiency , standardization , and performance outcomes. Cross-validating confirmatory analysis supported this structure. In addition, OCTM scales correlated as expected with various hypothesized measures, providing strong evidence of construct validity. Conclusions: The OCTM is a useful tool to evaluate workplace factors and improve working conditions, service delivery, and the well-being of human service workers and the clients they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare reform has placed the lives of clients, the jobs of social workers, and the mission of agencies in jeopardy. Based on interviews with senior staff at 107 nonprofit human services agencies, this article documents the largely untold story of how nonprofit agencies' workers responded to the impact of welfare reform on their clients, their jobs, and the delivery of services. Workers reported less time for social services because of welfare-related regulations, penalties, work mandates, crises, and paper work. They also reported more service dilemmas including less control of the job, more ethical conflicts, less efficacy, and increased burn-out. Even so, workers felt that they were making a difference, and agencies indicated increased advocacy. Relying heavily on the voice of social workers, the article illuminates the experiences and feelings of agency staff as they try to do their best for clients in difficult times.

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the "golden age" of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the "carceral state." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The original article, published in 1983, applied Titmuss's framework of a three-tiered social welfare system. Based on new data and a more in-depth analysis, this article re-examines who benefits from and who pays for social, fiscal, and corporate welfare and concludes that all three systems continue to serve and favor the middle class, wealthy households, and large corporations. (Author)