Now featuring a color design, this best-selling text for policy analysis provides students with a comprehensive overview of social welfare policy in the United States while examining cutting-edge issues.

Thoroughly updated and revised to reflect the impact of dramatic changes in social welfare policy, the fifth edition continues to focus on the examination of how the major sectors of social welfare policy — the voluntary, governmental, corporate, and corporate sectors — operate and co-exist (the “pluralist approach”), while also offering a clear, user-friendly framework for policy analysis. Among the cutting edge issues covered in this edition are: technology and social welfare policy, the fringe economy, religion and social policy, the transformation of public assistance policy into labor policy, and the relationship between tax policy and social welfare policy.

In the fifth edition, you will find a new chapter on Religion and Social Policy that examines the past and present relationship between religion and the creation and the implementation of social policy. The discrimination chapter now includes coverage of the minority middle class and a comprehensive examination of gay and lesbian marriage policies. This chapter also has an upda31:T716,From its inception in the late nineteenth century, social work has struggled to carry out the complex, sometimes contradictory, functions associated with reducing suffering, enhancing social order, and social reform. Since then, social programs like the implementation of welfare and the expansion of the service economy-which should have augured well for American social work-instead led to a continued loss of credibility with the public and within the academy.A Dream Deferred chronicles this decline of social work, attributing it to the poor quality of professional education during the past half-century. The incongruity between social wor

Howard Karger