History Social Welfare Flashcards
Test 1
What is Social Control?
The provision of services to ensure conformity from the “deviants”
Example: laws, rules, and regulations
what is Social Treatment ?
The provision of goods and services for the enhancement of human life.
Some services cross the line between social treatment and social control:
Example: Education ensures conformity and enhancement of life.
Institutional Perspective:
This is influenced by the Judeo Christian Value.
Examples: “universal income”, Medicare, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation.
The major criterion is membership in a society.
The assumption is that everyone has the right to services, without means testing or stigma.
Programs are universal and cover every person within their designated mandate rather than select groups of people.
Based on the structural or social model of social work in which social problems are believed to come from oppressive structures in society.
Solutions do not lie in controlling, punishing, or stigmatizing the individual, but in the root problems like classism, racism, and sexism and their elimination.
Residual Perspective:
Prescribes short-term, stop gap social welfare measures that last only until the social institutions normally providing help can resume their functions (family or employment.)
Based on the medical model of social work treatment in which social services are intended to “treat and cure” people who deviate from healthy society.
Blames the victim and does not consider structural problems (lack of employment opportunities.) Solutions lie in controlling, punishing, and stigmatizing the individual.
Features of Programs that Take on a Residual Perspective:
Means Testing: Ensures that applicants get no more help than they “should.” Criteria are usually based on the federal poverty level. Services are the least or smallest possible.
Less Eligibility: No person receiving public aid should get a grant higher than the lowest wage in the locality.
EXAMPLE DISCUSSED IN CLASS:
Housing programs. Bringing Families Home offers to provide rental assistance for up to 2 years. After that, families need to figure out how they will pay the rent.
TANF, Medicaid, SSI, General Assistance, Poor Relief, Food Stamps
Conflict theory:
Society is unequal with division between the powerful and the powerless. Comes from Marxism
Day and Schiele Chapter 2:
Conflict theory says:
Social problems lie int he structures of society rather than the fault of individuals
Social problems are the results of attempts of an elite group to maintain the privileges they have accumulated through exploitation of other classes and groups
Social problems will endure until the structures themselves change.
Micro-aggression:
Stunning small encounters with racism, usually unnoticed by members of the majority race.
Ex. comments like oh you have an accent, being asked where you are from all the time.
Law:
road definition: **Established rules, standards, or procedures that society members must follow. **Laws are legally binding and enacted by legislative bodies, and enforced by the government. They can carry penalties for non-compliances.
Class definition: A rule or regulation that is formally enacted and enforced by a governing authority, such a body or judiciary. Laws are binding enforceable on all individuals within the jurisdiction to which they apply. They are created to maintain social order, protect rights, and define acceptable behavior in society.
Policy:
Broad Definition: Decisions or sets of decisions that address a long-term purpose or problem. Policies are guidelines or principles established by organizations or governments to achieve specific objectives. Policies are not always legal.
Whiteness
Quality pertaining to Euro-American or Caucasian people or traditions. A privileged socioeconomic status conferred upon a group and often identified by light skin coloring.
White Privilege:
Privilege is unearned advantages of special group memberships.
Promotes the superiority of whiteness. White people generally have access to better education, employment, housing and neighborhoods, health care and etc. Whiteness is normal so white majority’s views, practices and culture are generall seen as normal.
Branches of Government – Rawls
To uphold a just social compact
Allocation: to keep capitalism efficient though such things as tax polices and subsidies (remember government is not a business as they cannot sell you products, run on taxes)
Stabilizing: maintains sufficient demand
Transfer: secures a minimum of basic goods for each member of the community (entitlement)
Distribution: ensures an approximate just distribution of income and wealth overtime, by adjusting the dynamics of the market (taxing the wealthy)
Tenets of CRT
1-Ordinariness of Racism
difficult to see, racism is difficult to cure or address, appears to be “normal.”
2-Interest Convergence
Racism advances the interest of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically). Thus, large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.
3-Intersectionality & Anti-Essentialism
No person has single, easily stated, unitary identity
Everyone has potentially conflicting and overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.
Example: AA woman may also be a republic, Christian, of low socioeconomic class.
4- Differential Racialization
related to the ways the dominant society realizes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market. Each race has its own origins and ever evolving history.
5-Voices of Color Thesis
Holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian , Asian and Latino/as may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that whites are unlikely to know. Minority status brings with it the presumed competence to speak about race and racism.
6-Whiteness as Ultimate Property
Social Welfare
Social welfare is defined as: An organized system of laws, programs, benefits and services which strengthen or assure provisions for meeting social or human needs.
Intended for the purpose of ensuring a basic standard of physical and mental well-being and providing universal access to mainstream society.
Institution of social welfare providers for those who cannot by themselves. Creates social change and the modification of social institutions, strengthens society, helps individuals, and provides services outside of the market economy for those who are unable to succeed within it.
Based on society’s altruistic, economic and political values
Whenever other social institutions do not provide a service, social welfare fills in the gaps.
Critical Race Theory (CRT):
A collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.
Intersectionality and Anti-Essentialism:
No person has single, easily stated, unitary identity
Everyone has potentially conflicting and overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.
Example: AA woman may also be a republic, Christian, of low socioeconomic class.
