Health & Social Services in the West

评语：老师推荐语：The Piven and Cloward book is essential reading for anyone aspiring to teach social welfare policy at a School of Social Work, in that the theory of the liberal American welfare state that is advanced in this book has influenced generations of social welfare scholars. The surviving author of this book, Francis Fox Piven (now aged 81), as recently as 2011 became target of death threats that were inspired by right-wing media attacks on her ideas –which were considered “dangerous to democracy”. Of all of the books I have assigned to doctoral students over the years, this is the most popular and influential –though there is also a formidable scholarly critique of the empirical foundations for the theory of the welfare state advanced by Piven and Cloward.

评语：老师推荐语：Theda Skocpol’s book in my view provides the definitive history of the foundations of the American welfare state. Although Soldiers and Mothers is a dense and very lengthy book, her writing is at once eloquent and thought provoking . Skocpol is arguably the most brilliant historian of our time, and we are very fortunate that she has taken a particular interest in the American welfare state.

评语：老师推荐语： As you will discover, my approach to the analysis social welfare policy frames social welfare provisions as benefits and entitlements that originate from theories of democratic citizenship and social stratification. Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s book provides an engaging synthesis of political theory, critical history, and the sociology of race and gender stratification that provides an alternative narrative of the American immigrant experience and its implications for the selective and exclusionary American welfare state.

评语：老师推荐语：Garfinkel, Rainwater and Smeeding are three very prominent scholars of both poverty and comparative social welfare policy. Their book is a concise and lucid comparative analysis of the American welfare state’s structure and outcomes relative to the approaches undertaken by other Western democracies.

评语：老师推荐语：The late Michael Katz, was a historian with an impressive breadth of expertise inclusive of the history of poverty, poverty policy and the evolvement of American social work (e.g. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America). This particular book provides a succinct and yet reasonably comprehensive analysis of the post-TANF welfare state framed within a deep appreciation of historical context.