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Mass Poverty (mass + poverty)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

Corruption in Africa , Part 1

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2009
John Mukum Mbaku
As Africans struggled against colonial exploitation, there was near universal agreement among the freedom fighters and other nationalists that one of the most important determinants of poverty in the colonies was the control of the instruments of economic and political governance by foreign interlopers, all of whose objectives were in conflict with those of the Africans. Colonial institutional arrangements were primarily instruments for the exploitation of Africans and their resources. Europeans came to Africa to maximize metropolitan objectives and hence, established within each colony, institutional arrangements that enhanced their ability to exploit Africans and their resources for the benefit of the metropolitan economies. With their comparative advantage in the employment of military and police force, the Europeans were able to impose on the African colonies laws and institutions that enhanced their objectives but significantly impoverished Africans. Hence, independence was considered critical not only to the elimination of the psychological effects of foreign occupation but also to the empowerment of Africans and the enhancement of their ability to take full control of their governance systems. First, independence was expected to expel the European interlopers from the continent and allow the in-coming African leaders to rid their societies of the exploitative, despotic and non-democratic institutions that had been brought to the colonies by the Europeans. In the post-independence period, Africans were expected to have full control of their own destiny, allocate their own resources, and generally take responsibility for the design and implementation of policies affecting their own welfare. Second, the new leaders were then expected to engage all relevant stakeholder groups in each country in democratic constitution making to develop and adopt locally focused, participatory, inclusive and politically and economically relevant institutional arrangements. Finally, Africa's post-independence leaders were expected to use public policy as an instrument for the effective eradication of mass poverty and deprivation. [source]

Social Change and Social Policy in Japan

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JAPANESE SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2009
Masayuki Fujimura
Abstract This paper aims to present and discuss social change and social policy in Japan after the mid-20th century from a sociological viewpoint. Japanese social change and social policy from the mid-20th century onward can be categorized into three models in chronological order: escape from mass poverty by means of industrialization, improvement of the social security system to establish a welfare state, and parallel progress of aspiration for a welfare society and workfare. Defined concretely, these are (1) the period that established and improved social security, which started immediately after the end of World War II and ended in 1973, when Japan began to suffer from low growth after enjoying high growth; (2) the period in which finance for social security was adjusted, halfway through which the country experienced a bubble economy; and (3) the period after the 1990s, in which the structural reform of social security went hand-in-hand with labor policy and the advent of globalization. In each of the three periods, the direction of social policy was affected by factors that caused changes in such areas as industrial structure (the decline of agriculture), demographic structure (an aging society), and family structure and work pattern (the growing trend of nuclear families, single-person households, and irregular employment). In Japan, life security now attracts increasing attention, and employment security rather than social security has been the central issue. As it is greatly affected by globalization, employment security grows less conspicuous and makes the vulnerability of social security grow more conspicuous. Social policy has the potential to become an area with which to struggle for national integration and fissures between social groups. [source]

Social work in South Africa at the dawn of the new millennium

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 3 2002
Mel Gray
The article examines recent developments in social policy and its implications for social work education and practice in South Africa. It traces the changes from the birth of democracy in South Africa to the dawn of the new millennium as these crucial years marked the beginning of a new era in South Africa's welfare history. It examines the challenges to social work and provides an example of the integrated, holistic developmental interventions, which are needed to combat social problems such as crime, AIDS and poverty. It ends with an examination of the implications of developmental welfare policy for social,work education as social workers are called to address mass poverty, unemployment and social deprivation through greater use of diverse social work methods, such as advocacy, community development, empowerment, consultation, networking, action research and policy analysis. [source]

The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
Loïc Wacquant
This article examines the workings and effects of the penalization of poverty in urban Brazil at century's turn to uncover the deep logic of punitive containment as state strategy for the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of triumphant neoliberalism. It shows how ramifying criminal violence (fed by extreme inequality and mass poverty), class and color discrimination in judicial processing, unchecked police brutality, and the catastrophic condition and chaotic operation of the carceral system combine to make the aggressive deployment of the penal apparatus in Brazil a surefire recipe for further disorder and disrespect for the law at the bottom of the urban hierarchy and steers the country into an institutional impasse. The policy of punitive containment pursued by political elites as a complement to the deregulation of the economy in the 1990s leads from the penalization to the militarization of urban marginality, under which residents of the declining favelas are treated as virtual enemies of the nation, tenuous trust in public institutions is undermined, and the spiral of violence accelerated. Brazil thus serves as a historical revelator of the full consequences of the penal disposal of the human detritus of a society swamped by social and physical insecurity. Drawing parallels between penal activity in the Brazilian and the U.S. metropolis further reveals that the neighborhoods of urban relegation wherein the marginal and stigmatized fractions of the postindustrial working class concentrate are the prime targets and proving ground upon which the neoliberal penal state is concretely being assembled, tried, and tested. Their study is therefore of urgent interest to analysts of international politics and state power at the dawn of the twenty-first century. [source]