Textbooks

Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision.

This Handbook is the definitive resource for anyone wishing to quickly look up and understand key concepts and measurements relating to socioeconomic position and inequalities.

This book explores the choices that we make about our sexuality and their effect our personal lives. It analyses how social policy informs and responds to such choices through an examination of normative assumptions about sexuality and its role in forming, regulating and constituting welfare subjects, discourses, theories, provisions and practices.

Fully revised and expanded to encompass the most up-to-date theory, policy and practice, this comprehensive text considers the different aspects of multi-agency working within criminal justice, bringing together probation, policing, prison, social work, criminological and organizational studies perspectives.

Authored by two highly respected and experienced academics, this book demonstrates the rewards of studying social policy from an international perspective by avoiding the constraints of a single-nation focus.

Drawing on real-world developments, and including international case studies, this book introduces students to the concept and causes of democratic decay in the modern world.

Drawing on the authors’ extensive experience as both teachers and practitioners, this book puts forward a new model of social work practice that both supports and protects service users across the lifecourse.

Understanding Family Meanings provides an overview of the basic concepts and theories related to families using readings with questions and analysis to encourage reflection and learning. It focuses on family meanings as the key underpinnings for academic study and professional training.

This substantially updated new edition sets out the contexts of children's and young people’s lives and encourages students to explore their complexities and contexts. Each chapter challenges students’ assumptions and examines crucial issues in the field, such as participation, race, and transnational childhoods.

This new edition for advanced students and practitioners is substantially updated to reflect the changes in the field since the publication of the first edition and contains multiple additional chapters discussing new and emerging topics for those in the fields of social work, education and health care.

This textbook covers the key concepts, themes and issues relating to human growth and development in adults. It examines key topics and issues within professional practice with adults and their families and covers a wide range of practice areas, fuses essential theory with practical application and provides a wide range of learning features.

This textbook provides a valuable introduction to the construction and application of US foreign policy in the modern era, encouraging readers to think about how ideas, institutions and goals have been at work in the foreign policy of recent presidential administrations.