Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a concise, accessible guide to help social workers understand how politics and policy making really work—and what they can do to help their clients and their communities. It offers informed, practical grounding in the mechanics of policy making and the tools that activists and outsiders can use to take on an entrenched system.
Trade ReviewIn
Politics for Social Workers: A Practical Guide to Effecting Change, Professor Stephen Pimpare offers a historically informed and theoretically grounded assessment of current political issues . . . The book will be extremely useful to social work students and professionals who still feel uncomfortable talking openly about politics. -- David Hornung, PhD, LMSW, Assistant Professor, CUNY York College-MSW Program * The New Social Worker *
Stephen Pimpare has written a book that should be in the hands of every social worker. Much like Saul Alinsky’s
Rules for Radicals, it provides an indispensable guide for navigating the politics of today in order to create a more socially just world. Insightful and inspiring! -- Mark R. Rank, coauthor of
Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About PovertyPimpare combines his political science background and public policy expertise in an easy-to-read tool kit for social workers seeking to become more strategically savvy when converting their practice-based critiques of inequality and social injustice into action for social change. A myth-busting but well-documented inspection of the inequities baked into the American political system. -- Mimi Abramovitz, author of
Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the PresentPolitics for Social Workers provides a uniquely thorough explanation and in-depth analysis of the structure and functioning of our political system. Pimpare brings this analysis to bear on policies and political structures that create the inequities and marginalization that social workers seek to alleviate. The book will grant social work students a more critically informed perspective from which to approach their ethical obligations to social justice. -- Mary Hylton, Salisbury University
For this reason, the book has relevance not just to practising social workers and social work students, but also to social work educators as it highlights that teaching advocacy to social workers in a meaningful way is not only possible, but highly relevant in these challenging times. * British Journal of Social Work *
The book deserves a broad audience of laymen and scholars, instructors and students, practitioners and policymakers. * European Journal of Social Work *
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
1. The U.S. Constitution Is Undemocratic
2. Our Representative Institutions Are Not Representative
3. We’re Terrible at Conducting Elections
4. We Are Exceptional—but Not in a Good Way
5. Most of Us Will Be Poor and on Welfare
6. Everything Is Political
7. Conservatism Is Not Conservative and Some of Us Are More Polarized Than Others
8. Cruel and Unjust Policies Serve a Purpose for Someone
9. Where You Can Go Depends on Where You’ve Been
10. Look at What’s Not Happening
11. People Learn Lessons About Their Value from Their Interactions with Government Agencies
12. The People Who Benefit Most from Government Are Most Likely to Claim They Don’t Benefit at All
13. People Like Lice and Cockroaches Better Than Congress
14. The Thing They Say About Making Sausage Is True
15. Presidents Are Weak and Command Too Much of Our Attention
16. It Really Is the Economy, Stupid
17. Judges Are Players, Not Umpires
18. People Aren’t Dumb but They Sure Are Ignorant
19. There Is No Public
20. There Is No View from Nowhere
21. You Will Not Change Anyone’s Mind
22. Social Work Is Conservative
23. Throw Sand in the Gears of Everything
Conclusion: We Can Do Better. There Are Solutions.
References
Index
