社会福祉・社会保障 — 全 下位分類

Europe's health and social care systems are suffering from chronic staff shortages, rising inequalities and the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. These issues pose urgent questions about the sustainability and resilience of public services across the continent.

This edited volume offers the first evidence-based framework for tackling these issues. Drawing on cross-European case studies - from Scotland and Finland to Italy, Germany and Norway - the authors examine the structural, contextual and political factors shaping labour shortages. Using social democratic, neoliberal and corporatist welfare models, they present a compelling rationale for renewed investment and long-term growth in public services.

An original contribution to workforce theory, this book provides actionable strategies for tackling staff shortages and building resilient systems - offering both a diagnosis of the workforce crisis and a way forward for its resolution.

It is widely recognised that biological, microbial and social processes constitute each other, but there is much less agreement about what this means, or about how this interweaving should be conceptualised and studied. Whilst recognising that there has been huge growth in more-than-human approaches and in contributions from science and technology studies and feminist scholarship, this volume advocates that more ideas are needed if we are to address global threats, including the impacts of climate change, growing antimicrobial resistance, pandemics, the geographies and distribution of zoonoses and other large biosocial phenomena.

Contributors from disciplines including anthropology, geography, sociology and public health bring these resources to bear on fundamental questions about scale and transmission, the place of human bodies in social and biological theory, and concepts of health, risk and disease. Informed by real-life examples relating to food, insects, water and air, the spread of disease and antimicrobial resistance, the result is an agenda-setting book positioned at the intersection of research and policy.

It will appeal to scholars and academics with interest in social theory, microbes and public health, as well as academics and advanced students of geography, anthropology, sociology, medical sociology, social studies of science and the history of health.

AI for Healthcare provides a comprehensive, evidence-based guide to how artificial intelligence is transforming medicine. Structured in three parts, the book first demystifies core technologies (machine learning, deep learning, large language models, and AI agents) through concrete clinical examples.

It then examines real-world applications already deployed in hospitals worldwide, including diagnostic imaging, predictive medicine, connected health, digital mental health therapies, AI-powered disability assistance, and hospital operations optimization.

The final part addresses the conditions for responsible implementation, including ethics, trust-building, cybersecurity, and regulatory frameworks. Each chapter is enriched with exclusive interviews featuring physician-researchers and technology leaders from institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, as well as operational case studies from innovative technology companies and clinics.

The book bridges the gap between technical possibility and clinical reality. It is written for healthcare professionals, hospital decision-makers, health technology leaders, researchers, and policymakers who need to understand, evaluate, and act on AI within their organizations. Readers will gain a clear, jargon-free understanding of what AI can and cannot do today, the critical questions to ask before any deployment, and a practical framework for successfully implementing AI while keeping patients at the center.

In 2024, following years of austerity, political instability and external shocks including Brexit, COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis, Keir Starmer's Labour Party was voted into power in the UK. This book is the first in-depth analysis of Starmer's government from a social policy perspective.

Through expert chapters covering broad themes such as public expenditure, public opinion and devolution, and substantive areas including children and families, health, education, housing, social security, immigration, climate change and criminal justice, the book situates Labour's approach within a comparative framework of political traditions.

An invaluable text for anyone studying or teaching social and public policy, this book offers a rigorous, accessible foundation for understanding the ideas and constraints shaping contemporary social welfare in the United Kingdom.

In 2006, the United States Department of Defense for the first time authorized the use of FDA-approved psychiatric medications in the physical and tactical spaces of military operations including active combat. This policy change overturned a century of military psychiatry orthodoxy, which prioritized non-pathologizing, non-medication treatment for combat stress. Amid an ongoing global war, the US military embraced psychopharmacy as a radical and untested tool for keeping soldiers on the counterinsurgency battlefield and deploying them again and again, even with psychiatric diagnoses. Through powerful storytelling and original analysis, Stabilizing Empire uncovers a quiet revolution during the war on terror: the pharmaceuticalization of battlefield mental health care.

Explores the lasting echoes of an unprecedented pandemic that continues to shape politics in the MENA region today

From the Maghreb in North Africa to the Levant in the East, the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically impacted politics - and the promise of democratic governance - within the MENA region. In this edited volume, Anis Ben Brik assembles a group of scholars to explore how the Middle East and North Africa grappled with an unprecedented global health crisis that transcended medical dimensions and continues to manifest profound social, political, and economic implications for its people.

Featuring timely original research, including in-depth case studies and cross-country comparisons, contributors take us inside a region already grappling with complex political systems, social structures, and historical legacies. They show us how the pandemic triggered widespread democratic backsliding in the region, as countries like Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia began to adopt emergency measures that extended well beyond the immediate public health crisis, including increased censorship, arrests of activists and journalists, and the suppression of political dissent. Contributors also examine how the pandemic impacted perceptions of political legitimacy within the region, shaping people's support and opposition to emergency measures, legislation, and regimes and governments themselves.

Ultimately, the book captures the ways in which a global state of emergency created even more opportunities for political abuse and suppression, enabling authoritarian leaders to further consolidate their power within the region.

The interplay between power, communication and change is the bedrock of what social work is, what it needs to contend with and what it seeks to achieve. This textbook draws on these foundational concepts in order to combine the worlds of theory and practice, aiming to connect the two often disparate sides of social work.

Drawing on the key concepts of power, communication and change throughout, the book shows that these essential elements are evident in the explanation and application of all theory and practice perspectives. Divided into three sections, this work delves into each of these underpinning concepts in turn, demonstrating how they permeate all aspects of social work. Chapters address dimensions of power and embedded social structures; the complexities of communication and approaches to difficult conversions; and how assessment skills, along with a range of practice models can help to challenge injustices and facilitate change. In doing so, these chapters get to the heart of social work, by iterating the foundational goals of dispersing power, fostering effective communication and supporting change.

Written in an accessible style that is both clear and engaging, this book will be of interest to all students of social work and social work professionals.

Available open access digitally under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

How do older women use art and media to resist ageist and sexist norms that regulate their intimacy and sexuality?

This book brings the subversive aesthetic strategies of older women to the forefront, using the concept of 'unruliness', understood as a failure or unwillingness to conform.

Drawing on critical age studies, feminist theory and allied critical approaches, the book develops a new conceptual model that positions ageing women's aesthetic interventions as a source of insight and social change.

Combining theory with close readings of art and media, this book is a bold framework for rethinking ageing, sexuality and empowerment.

For millions with Long Covid and energy-limiting conditions, pacing is not self-care; it is survival. While most research focuses on causes and treatments, this book examines the overlooked long of Long Covid and its many temporal disruptions.

Drawing on complex realism and thousands of social media posts, the authors reframe pacing as temporal labour: exhausting, invisible work where limits only become visible once crossed. They introduce polyrhythmic biographical disruption, where disruption is not a single event but ongoing, and the uncanny-not-yetness: the eerie limbo of post-exertional malaise.

This book advocates for temporal justice, because pacing is always, irreducibly social.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Building on the influential Using Evidence to End Homelessness (Bristol University Press, 2020), this practical collection shows how evidence and data can drive smarter action to improve outcomes for people affected by homelessness. Six years on, it captures lessons learned and progress made while charting a path for greater impact. With new contributions from leaders including Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Sir Michael Barber and Rosanne Haggerty, it highlights innovative approaches transforming housing, health, education, media, sport and the arts.

Through case studies, collaborative models, and policy tools, it equips practitioners, policymakers, funders and community leaders to act more effectively. The book is an essential resource for all those working to end homelessness.

A sobering assessment of the systematic failures of mental health work.

The United States is in the midst of a mental health crisis that cannot be ignored. Its effects are visible in overcrowded emergency rooms, homeless encampments, and frequent police encounters responding to people with serious mental illness. And yet, the many ways we attempt to support people with mental illness-from medical care to housing support to basic hygiene-seem to never take meaningful hold. All this despite the tireless work of professionals who attempt to help people bring together the pieces of a life. The problem is not in any individual effort to ameliorate the problem; it's the many ways these programs fail to work together. For those with serious mental illness, and those who work to ameliorate it, there is no system. There is only mess.

In A Mad Mess, sociologist Owen Whooley uncovers the exasperating barriers, bureaucratic mismatches, and threadbare resources that have made a mess of what should be a supportive system. Set in Albuquerque, New Mexico-a city whose struggles echo communities nationwide- the book reveals the challenges mental health workers face daily, from tedious paperwork to occasional violence. Whooley interviewed mental health workers at two local mental health services organizations, the specialized behavioral health division of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD), and a psychiatric emergency department at the University of New Mexico Hospital. Despite mostly good intentions and sometimes heroic efforts, he shows why this important work so often ends in failure.

Written with deep sympathy and unflinching honesty, A Mad Mess reveals how the lack of a cohesive mental health system obstructs critical care and places roadblocks before front-line mental health workers at every turn. Most critically, for those who suffer from severe mental illness, these setbacks are a constant reminder that the institutions charged with helping them have left them on their own.

This book examines why Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) young people continue to face homelessness and intersectional disadvantages, even as legal and social attitudes appear to improve. Drawing on seventeen years of ethnographic research and frontline work in England, it offers an intimate and rigorous account of how young people navigate housing precarity, family rejection and uneven access to state support. It shows how sexuality, gender, race, class, disability and religion shape encounters with welfare systems, revealing how well-intentioned policies can reproduce harm and how celebrated progress in LGBTQ+ rights can obscure the structural conditions that leave many behind. Tunaker argues for a deeper understanding of the "paradox of progress" and its consequences for those at the sharpest edges of marginalisation. The book speaks to scholars and practitioners in socio-legal studies, legal anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, homelessness and housing research, and anyone concerned with state power and meaningful social change.

This volume provides a comprehensive examination of social policy approaches across the African continent, critically engaging with both theoretical foundations and practical implementations. It brings together diverse perspectives that challenge conventional social policy paradigms while proposing contextually appropriate alternatives rooted in African realities and epistemologies. The volume looks at social policy from multiple dimensions: from theoretical debates and historical trajectories to sectoral innovations and emerging challenges. In so doing, it showcases transformative pathways for inclusive development through effective policies and practical implementation.

The volume discusses both persistent structural constraints and innovative opportunities for transformation, resilience, and sustainability in social provisioning. Through case studies spanning healthcare, education, food security, resource governance, land reform, informal economies, and youth development, it highlights how locally grounded approaches can deliver meaningful outcomes despite significant constraints. It advances the Transformative Social Policy (TSP) framework as a paradigm that views social policy as a multidimensional instrument for societal transformation through production enhancement, social protection, redistribution, reproduction, and social cohesion functions. It provides foundational perspectives into the underpinnings of Africa's social policy landscape, the lingering impact of colonial legacies, and opportunities for transformative change that centres African agency and knowledge systems.

This volume is of interest to researchers, social policy scholars, development practitioners, civil society organisations, and policymakers committed to reimagining and implementing more effective, equitable, and contextually appropriate social policy solutions across the African continent.

Examining the emergence of international public health policy between the 1930s and 80s, this book sheds light on the role that rural community health initiatives in South and Southeast Asia played in the movement towards 'primary health care' and 'health for all,' articulated ultimately at the 1978 International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. The author argues that the movement was not directed exclusively from the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, but also by institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division in rural Southeast Asia, and through local community initiatives including the Bandung Plan for Health in Indonesia. The book illustrates how an exclusive association of global health with the emergence of the WHO in the 1950s fails to account for the local, national, or regional contexts that shaped the evolution of primary health care in South and Southeast Asia.

Disabled sexuality has too often been cast as taboo, as disabled people are routinely de-sexualized, infantilized, or positioned as objects of pity and (over)protection. Nevertheless, despite facing numerous obstacles to sexuality, sexual expression, and parenting, individuals with disabilities have consistently showcased resilience, agency, and creativity.

Disabilities, Pleasures, and Sexualities: Transforming Perceptions, Cultivating Desires, volume 17 of the Research in Social Science and Disability series, seeks to highlight and celebrate these qualities with contributions that challenge stereotypes, reimagine expressions of sexuality, illuminate aspects of reproduction and parenting, and explore different forms of intimate relationships. They recognize, affirm, and celebrate the reality that many disabled people already live full and fulfilling erotic lives. With contributions that foreground the lived experiences, representations, and self-understandings of disabled people as sexual beings, some contributions explore how disabled individuals and communities resist the social, cultural, and political forces that render their sexualities deviant, invisible, or dangerous. Other contributions turn to the urgent task of transforming sex education, critically examining how sex education for disabled people can be radically transformed. Finally, there are a number of pieces that highlight how disabled people navigate the affective, embodied, and increasingly digital landscapes of intimacy and connection.

In sum, this volume imagines sexuality as a site of access, interdependence, creativity, and joy, in hopes that it reshapes the broader sexual cultures in which we all participate.

Given the increasing number of international older migrants in Europe and the UK, Ageing Migrants' Sense of Home addresses a critical gap in understanding the conditions that facilitate or impede positive ageing in the context of migration, enhancing scholarly knowledge on how processes of identification and sense of belonging to places are experienced by people ageing away from their home countries.

Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a community of older Italians in Northeast England, Palladino explores experiences of ageing across borders, feelings of embeddedness in local communities, negotiation of belonging and perceived vulnerability. Highlighting how participants experience private and public spaces, their transnational lifestyles, and relationships with objects of affection, memory, and identity, chapters underscore the importance of affective bonds with places. Place attachment and identity impact health and well-being in later life, and insights into older migrants' subjectivities and life stories stress the social aspects of the environment and the importance of having places to call 'home' in the context of migration.

Drawing critical attention to the diversity of ageing experiences among older migrants and the need for research, practice and policy to respond to their needs both locally and internationally, this is a significant resource for researchers in social sciences, social gerontology, and human geography.

This book provides a comprehensive overview to the science of happiness research. It discusses scholarly definitions and measurements, and factors-personal, social and cultural-that reliably increase happiness throughout the life-span. Anchored in psychology, philosophy, economics and public health, the book distils hundreds of peer-reviewed studies into one lucid, teachable framework. Part I?traces the idea from classical eudaimonia to modern positive psychology, then untangles more than thirty related terms-well-being, flourishing, thriving, life satisfaction and others-into a working map of key distinctions. The discussion shows why happiness remains one of the most diversely interpreted phenomena in the social sciences and why no single definition yet commands unanimous agreement. Part II?presents a multilevel map of determinants, starting with personality and health, then progressing to relationships, income, culture, and the built and natural environments. The final chapter in this part evaluates evidence-based interventions, showing how current research can inform realistic, context-sensitive pathways to greater well-being-from gratitude practices and mindset trainings to policy levers aimed at housing affordability, neighborhood quality, institutional fairness, and life-course support. Each chapter weighs competing findings, flags methodological caveats and pinpoints areas of empirical convergence. Written for graduate students, researchers and reflective practitioners, this book offers conceptual rigour without sacrificing readability. Readers will finish equipped to design stronger studies, craft data-driven policies and pursue personal well-being grounded in evidence rather than myth.

Families in the United States experience child abuse investigations, the removal of children from their homes, and the termination of parental rights at higher rates than peer countries. Yet this does not make them safer and comes at a cost. As a historian and practicing doctor, Mical Raz asks how American society came to accept punitive interventionist policies that prioritize termination of parental rights. These practices "free" children for adoption, which leads to the devastation of families and communities and the creation of "legal orphans"-children who have no legal ties to their families of origin.

Drawing on original archival sources, legislative documents, and oral histories, Raz argues that adoption is not the inevitable solution to a child welfare system in crisis, maps the political history of this shift in child welfare policymaking-exemplified in the passage of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act-and proposes future reforms.

This compact book is a guide for social workers and social work students to integrate climate resilience and adaptation into their work in order to cope with a degenerating climate and increasing vulnerability. It is a forward-looking, practical, and ethically grounded manual designed to prepare social workers for the escalating challenges posed by climate change and societal instability. It explores how climate breakdown reshapes both the profession and its foundational mission -- supporting the most vulnerable.

Drawing on climate science, social work theory, and frontline practice, the book addresses how warming, extreme weather, resource scarcity, and even societal collapse could transform who is considered vulnerable, how services are delivered, and what new roles social workers may need to adopt. It guides readers through understanding the most realistic future scenarios, and what those mean for practice on the ground.

The book emphasizes building both personal and professional resilience, helping social workers not only survive but also lead with clarity and care in a world of uncertainty. Chapters include practical tools for assessing local risks, cultivating emotional and psychological strength, ensuring food and service continuity, and acting ethically in crisis conditions. Among the topics covered are:

• Reimagining Prevention: Integrating Climate Adaptation into Everyday Social Work Practice
• How the Natural World Fits into Social Work Climate Resilience
• Risk Assessment in Practice
• Practising Social Work Amid Societal Breakdown
• Maintaining Mental Health amid Ongoing Eco-Anxiety and Climate Grief: Being the rock in the stream

With a focus on justice, community care, and adaptive thinking, Climate Resilience Guide for Social Workers ultimately empowers social workers to act as stabilizing forces and advocates in their communities -- prepared not just to respond to climate-driven disruption, but also to shape a more compassionate and resilient future. The book is an essential resource for social work practitioners, students, and educators.

How the financialization of healthcare has eroded the quality of care, driven up prices, and worsened health inequalities

Financial actors and healthcare leaders increasingly view healthcare organizations as financial assets to be bought, sold, and managed for maximum profit, regardless of the effects on patient care. Healthcare in the Age of Finance Capital reveals how the federal government enables financial opportunism in healthcare and offers bold ideas for overhauling a failed system.

Rosemary Batt and Eileen Appelbaum provide a unique analysis of the financialization of healthcare, a process in which a growing proportion of the healthcare economy is owned and controlled by the financial sector. Healthcare organizations increasingly depend on financial machinations and the earnings derived from them rather than revenue generated from patient care.

The extent to which financial calculations overshadow the healthcare mission depends importantly on institutional legacies, reimbursement rules, and the failure of regulatory oversight. Batt and Appelbaum show how differences in regulations and financing rules shape whether financial actors can penetrate distinct healthcare segments-from hospitals, nursing homes, and ambulatory care to physician specialties, home health, hospice, and autism services. Nonprofit healthcare is not immune from this financial logic.

Evidence based, accessible, and informed by real-world examples, Healthcare in the Age of Finance Capital sheds critical light on how financial deregulation coupled with the relaxation of health, tax, anti-trust, and labor laws have allowed financially driven actors to exploit public funds for private gain at the expense of healthcare organizations, patients, communities, labor, and taxpayers.

This book explores the social context of healthcare innovation and highlights the emergent and contingent nature of implementing change. Drawing on empirical evidence, it examines the ways in which people and organisations engage in collective sensemaking processes to create meanings that enable innovation to become integrated into health care practice. With contributions from a range of cross-disciplinary authors and perspectives, the book ultimately advocates for a more open and interpretive approach to implementation, drawing together lessons learnt across the cases presented. This leads to a closer consideration of the processes through which collective sensemaking shape the implementation of healthcare innovation and change.

Chapters 1, 4 and 5 are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.