Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
14,926
result(s) for
"Social Welfare - history"
Sort by:
Does Money Matter? The Effects of Cash Transfers on Child Development in Rural Ecuador
A large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early‐life environments, so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood. Yet, remarkably little is known about whether poverty‐alleviation programs improve children’s developmental outcomes. We examine how a government‐run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the development of young children. Random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects. Our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi‐experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well‐being, as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes. The cash transfer program had positive, although modest, effects on the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of the poorest children in our sample.
Journal Article
Cultivating the Masses
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture.
InCultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world.
The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.
eBook
Social Welfare as Small-Scale Help: Evolutionary Psychology and the Deservingness Heuristic
Public opinion concerning social welfare is largely driven by perceptions of recipient deservingness. Extant research has argued that this heuristic is learned from a variety of cultural, institutional, and ideological sources. The Present article provides evidence supporting a different view: that the deservingness heuristic is rooted in psychological categories that evolved over the course of human evolution to regulate small-scale exchanges of help. To test predictions made on the basis of this view, a method designed to measure social categorization is embedded in nationally representative surveys conducted in different countries. Across the national- and individual-level differences that extant research has used to explain the heuristic, people categorize welfare recipients on the basis of whether they are lazy or unlucky. This mode of categorization furthermore induces people to think about large-scale welfare politics as its presumed ancestral equivalent: small-scale help giving. The general implications for research on heuristics are discussed.
Journal Article
New Brunswick before the Equal Opportunity Program : history through a social work lens
\"Prior to the implementation of the Equal Opportunity Program in the 1960s, most New Brunswickers, many of them Francophone, lived with limited access to welfare, education, and health services. New Brunswick's social services framework was similar to that of nineteenth-century England, and many people experienced the patronizing attitudes inherent in these laws. New Brunswick Before Equal Opportunity examines the observations and experiences of New Brunswick's early social workers, who operated under this system, and illuminates how Premier Louis J. Robichaud's Equal Opportunity Program transformed the province's social services. Authors Laurel Lewey, Louis J. Richard and Linda Turner, describe more than a century of social work history, including the work of the earliest Acadian social workers. They also address the fact that the federal government did not take responsibility for social welfare of the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet people, planning for assimilation instead. Clan structures continued to be relied on while subsisting upon inadequate relief provisions.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Household Registration System and Migrant Labor in China: Notes on a Debate
The household registration (hukou) system in China, classifying each person as a rural or an urban resident, is a major means of controlling populatin mobility and determining eligibility for state-provided services and welfare. Established in the late 1950s, it was initially used to bar rural-to-urban migration. After the late 1970s reforms, an inflow of rural migrant workers was allowed into the cities to meet labor demands in the burgeoning export industries and urban services without, however, changing the migrants' registered status, thus precluding their access to subsidized housing and other benefits available to those with urban registration. While there have been many calls for reforming this system, progress has been limited. Proposed reforms have attracted increasing academic and media attention.
Journal Article
Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France
The seventeenth century witnessed profound reforms in the way French cities administered poor relief and charitable health care. New hospitals were built to confine the able bodied and existing hospitals sheltering the sick poor contracted new medical staff and shifted their focus towards offering more medical services. Whilst these moves have often been regarded as a coherent state led policy, recent scholarship has begun to question this assumption, and pick-up on more localised concerns, and resistance to centrally imposed policies. This book engages with these concerns, to investigate the links between charitable health care, poor relief, religion, national politics and urban social order in seventeenth-century France. In so doing it revises our understanding of the roles played in these issues by the crown and social elites, arguing that central government's social policy was conservative and largely reactive to pressure from local elites. It suggests that Louis XIV's policy regarding the reform of poor relief and the creation of General Hospitals in each town and city, as enshrined in the edict of 1662, was largely driven by the religious concerns of the kingdom's devout and the financial fears of the Parisian elites that their city hospitals were overburdened. Only after the Sun King's reign did central government begin to take a proactive role in administering poor relief and health care, utilizing urban charitable institutions to further its own political goals. By reintegrating the social aspirations of urban elites into the history of French poor relief, this book shows how the key role they played in the reform of hospitals, inspired by a mix of religious, economic and social motivations. It concludes that the state could be a reluctant participant in reform, until pressured into action by assisting elite groups pursuing their own goals.
Tim McHugh is Wellcome Trust Researcher and Lecturer in the History of Medicine in the School of History at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
eBook