Welfare Reform on the Web (May 2003): Social Care - Overseas

THE CHANGING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS AND PUBLIC SOCIAL SERVICES AGENCIES IN THE ERA OF WELFARE REFORM

M. J. Austin

Non-profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 32, 2003, p. 97-114.

Article analyzes the changing relationship between U.S. county social services agencies and community-based non-profit service providers under welfare reform.

CONTINGENT ON CONTEXT? SOCIAL WORK AND THE STATE IN AUSTRALIA, BRITAIN AND THE USA.

C. McDonald, J. Harris and R. Wintersteen

British Journal of Social Work, vol. 33, 2003, p. 191-208

Discusses how the political and social context impacts on social work as a profession in Australia, Britain and the USA. Social work in the USA has developed as a therapeutic profession targeted on dealing with individual or family pathology. Social work in Britain survives at the core of a reformed welfare regime, but has lost professional autonomy and is threatened by its immersion in multi-disciplinary developments. In Australia, social work has never had a major role in the delivery of social welfare services. The current decentralisation and fragmentation of those services threaten to marginalise it further.