SOCIAL WELFARE POLICIES

Social Welfare Policies

Social Welfare Policies

Social Policy History & Policy Making

Social Policy and Administration is an academic subject concerned with the study of social services and the welfare state. It developed in the early part of the 20th century as a complement to social work studies, aimed at people who would be professionally involved in the administration of welfare (Balaswamy, 2004). In the course of the last forty years, the range and breadth of the subject has developed. The principal areas relate to policy and administrative practice in social services, including health administration, social security, education, employment services, community care and housing management;

social problems, including crime, disability, unemployment, mental health, learning disability, and old age;

issues relating to social disadvantage, including race, gender and poverty; and

The range of collective social responses to these conditions.

Social Policy is a subject area, not a discipline; it borrows from other social science disciplines in order to develop study in the area. The contributory disciplines include sociology, social work, psychology, economics, political science, management, history, philosophy and law (Beverly, 1999). Here have been a range of approaches to the analysis of social policy, although much of the work has been developed in departments of social administration, outside the framework of sociology. The so-called social administration approach to social policy dominant in the 1950s and 1960s has, however, been widely criticized as atheoretical, and Marxist approaches were especially influential amongst sociologists in the 1970s (see, for example, I. Gough 's The Political Economy of the Welfare State, 2009). More recently, T. H. Marshall's analysis of citizenship (see his Sociology at the Crossroads, 2003) has once again shaped discussions of welfare and social policy. There is also a greater focus on comparative social policy (with the insularity of British writers on social policy showing signs of waning). The impact of feminist scholarship has also been considerable, with much greater analysis of the role women play in welfare provision, for example through informal care of the sick and disabled, and also greater attention given to women as the recipients of social welfare(Chambers, 1999).

Policy making is the process by which governments translate their political vision into programmes and actions to deliver 'outcomes' - desired changes in the real world'. (Modernising Government White Paper, 1999)

This concern with achieving real changes in people's lives is reflected in the Government's overall strategy for improving public services published in March 2002(Chapin, 2001). Policy makers should have available to them the widest and latest information on research and best practice and all decisions should be demonstrably rooted in this knowledge.

Element of Social Welfare Policy

I have chosen the element of welfare of poor in this research paper. By European Union standards, Japan has rather meager social welfare provisions for poor families. Although the state provides various forms of social assistance to needy families, in 2002 a growing number of these people were slipping through an increasingly overloaded and unfunded social safety-net (Children's Defense Fund, 2000). As traditional family support networks continue to weaken, many poor families ...