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This book provides important philosophical insights concerning the kind of creatures we are such that we can experience something we understand as well-being, with these insights then being applied to various areas of social policy and welfare practice. The author defends what he calls The Ontology of Well-Being Thesis (TOWT), addressing ontological questions about the human condition, and how these questions are fundamental to issues concerning what we might know about human well-being and how we should promote it. Yet, surprisingly, these ontological questions are often side-lined in academic, political, and policy and practice based debates about well-being. Addressing these questions, head-on, six features of the human condition are identified via TOWT: human embodiment, finiteness, sociability, cognition, evaluation, and agency. The main argument of the thesis is that these features reveal the conflicting character of human experiences, which can, in turn, have a profound bearing on our experience of well-being. Notably, it is our conflicting experiences of time, emotion, and self-consciousness, which can potentially help us experience well-being in complex and multi-dimensional ways. The author then applies these insights to various social policies and welfare practices, concerning, for example, pensions, disability, bereavement counselling, social prescribing within health settings, the promotion of mental health, and co-production practices. This book is of importance to philosophers, social policy analysts, and welfare practitioners and is also relevant to the fields of psychology, sociology, politics, and the health sciences.
Richard Titmuss was Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics from 1950 until his death in 1973. His publications on welfare and social policy were radical and wide-ranging, spanning fields such as demography, class inequalities in health, social work, and altruism. Titmuss's work played a critical role in establishing the study of social policy as a scientific discipline; it helped to shape the development of the British Welfare State and influenced thinking about social policy worldwide. Despite its continuing relevance to current social policy issues both in the UK and internationally, much of Titmuss's work is now out of print. This book brings together a selection of his most important writings on a range of key social policy issues, together with commentary on these from contemporary experts in the field. The book should be read by undergraduate and postgraduate students in social policy and sociology, for many of whom Titmuss remains compulsory reading. It will be of interest to academics and other policy analysts as well as students and academics in political science and social work.
Around the world, governments are starting to directly measure the subjective wellbeing of their citizens and to use it for policy evaluation and appraisal. What would happen if a country were to move from using GDP to using subjective wellbeing as the primary metric for measuring economic and societal progress? Would policy priorities change? Would we continue to care about economic growth? What role would different government institutions play in such a scenario? And, most importantly, how could this be implemented in daily practice, for example in policy evaluations and appraisals of government analysts, or in political agenda-setting at the top level? This volume provides answers to these questions from a conceptual to technical level, by showing how direct measures of subjective wellbeing can be used for policy evaluation and appraisal, either complementary in the short-run or even entirely in the long-run. It gives a brief history of the idea that governments should care about the happiness of their citizens, provides theories, makes suggestions for direct measurement, derives technical standards and makes suggestions on how to conduct wellbeing cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses, and gives examples of how real-world policy evaluations and appraisals would change if they were based on subjective wellbeing. In doing so, it serves the growing interest of governments as well as non-governmental and international organisations in how to put subjective wellbeing metrics into policy practice.
This book analyses the role of evidence in taking wellbeing from an issue that has government attention to one that leads to significant policy change. In doing so, it draws on contributions from political science, policy theory and literature specifically on the evidence and policy relationship. The book has three main aims: to understand the role of evidence in shaping the prospects for wellbeing in public policy; to inform the barriers literature on the use of evidence in policy; and, to inform the multiple streams approach (MSA) to agenda-setting. While the book focuses on developments at UK government level, a number of the findings and arguments presented here have wider significance, both in relation to wellbeing developments elsewhere and to the theoretical literatures on agenda-setting and evidence use. The book draws on insights from interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders that were undertaken as part of the work of the Community Wellbeing Evidence Programme of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing.
What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this topic. The contributors draw from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and psychology and are leading scholars in these fields. The Handbook includes thirty chapters divided into four Parts. Part I covers the full range of methodologies for evaluating governmental policy and assessing societal condition-including both the leading approaches in current use by policymakers and academics (such as GDP, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, inequality and poverty metrics, and the concept of the "social welfare function"), and emerging techniques. Part II focuses on the nature of well-being. What, most fundamentally, determines whether an individual life is better or worse for the person living it? Her happiness? Her preference-satisfaction? Her attainment of various "objective goods"? Part III addresses the measurement of well-being and the thorny topic of interpersonal comparisons. How can we construct a meaningful scale of individual welfare, which allows for comparisons of well-being levels and differences, both within one individual's life, and across lives? Finally, Part IV reviews the major challenges to designing governmental policy around individual well-being.
This volume is the first collection in the field of wellbeing studies that places politics centre stage. Through a combination of intellectual inquiry, empirically-grounded research, and investigation across different settings, this book aims to provide fresh insights and develop new lenses through which to understand the rise and significance of the wellbeing agenda. Divided into three parts, it considers how to define wellbeing for public policy; the prospects for wellbeing as a force for political change; and the link between policy agendas and the everyday lives of people. The book explores the key political issues of power, democracy, and the legitimacy of wellbeing evidence in a range of settings – international, national and subnational/substate. The volume will appeal to wellbeing and politics scholars, as well as students and general readers with an interest in these new political agendas.
The authors explain why subjective indicators of well-being are needed, showing how these can offer useful input and giving examples of policy uses of well-being measures. They also describe the validity of the subjective well-being measures as well as potential problems, then delve into objections to their use for policy purposes.
Originally published in 1976 Talking About Welfare is a collection of essays providing a general survey of the problems facing social welfare. The book introduces a number of philosophers, social workers and social administrators, concentrating on problems in describing a general philosophical orientation to social work, what it means to understand another person, and to problems in describing and justifying social work and social welfare activity. The essays collected contribute to discussion of a wide range of welfare issues, principally that of personal and social welfare, the moral justification of welfare provision, and conceptions of community.
Marxist ideology is the only fully scientific ideology, the only one able to guide mankind toward the settlement of fundamental social problems and to point out the royal road for the proletariat to take in its march toward socialism and communism. Without Marxism, modern people cannot establish true social ideals, nor can they engage in the rational pursuit of values. Without Marxism, modern people cannot choose the correct path of development, nor can they build up new forms of civilizations. Without Marxism, modern people would never base their commitments to schedule the consensus-building effort and support the consensus-building process on any irrefutably and sufficiently sound theoretical foundations.
Part of the six-volume Wellbeing: A Complete Reference Guide, this is a comprehensive look at the economics of wellbeing with coverage of history, research, policy, and practice. Examines the challenges inherent in studying and measuring wellbeing from an economic perspective Discusses strategies and interventions to improve wellbeing across the lifespan and in different settings Addresses the potential economic benefits for governments and policymakers of actively investing in initiatives to improve wellbeing, from the workplace to the home to the natural environment Emphasizes the need to strengthen the evidence base for the economics of wellbeing and improve methods for translating research into policy and practice