Peter Leonard provides an accessible analysis of debates about the crisis of the welfare state under the contemporary conditions of postmodern scepticism and the triumphs of global market capitalism. In the last two decades Western governments have sought to replace the post-war welfare compact with neo-conservative individualism. The prospects for the Left look bleak. At the same time, postmodern critique raises profound questions about the validity of a mass politics of emancipation based on the universal values of justice, reason and progress. From a critical perspective founded in Marxism and feminism, Leonard uses elements of postmodern deconstruction to consider how we might now re-think the present and future of welf

Postmodern ideas have been vastly influential in the social sciences and beyond. However, their impact on the study of social policy has been minimal. Postmodernity and the Fragmentation of Welfare analyses the potential for a postmodern or cultural turn in welfare as it treats postmodernity as an evolving canon -from the seminal works of Baudrillard, Foucault and Lyotard, through to recent theories of the 'risk society'. Already disorientated by globalisation, new technologies and the years of new right ascendancy, welfare faces a significant challenge in the postmodern. It suggests that, rather than universality and state provision, the new social policy will be consumerised and fragmented -a welfare state of ambivalence. With contributions from authors coming from a variety of fields offering very different perspectives on postmodernity and welfare Postmodernity and the Fragmentation of Welfare also keeps social policy's intellectual inheritance in view. By exploring ways in which theorisations of postmodernity might improve understanding of welfare issues in the 1990s and assessing the relevance of theories of diversity and difference to mainstream and critical social policy traditions, this book will be and essential text for all students of social policy, social administration, social work and sociology.

The modern era is over. Assumptions that shaped twentieth-century thought and culture, the bridges we crossed to this present moment, have blown up. The postmodern age has begun. Just what is postmodernism? The average person would be shocked by its creed: Truth, meaning, and individual identity do not exist. These are social constructs. Human life has no special significance, no more value than animal or plant life. All social relationships, all institutions, all moral values are expressions and masks of the primal will to power. Alarmingly, these ideas have gripped the nation's universities, which turn out today's lawyers, judges, writers, journalists, teachers, and other culture-shapers. Through society's influences, postmodernist ideas have seeped into films, television, art, literature, politics; and, without his knowing it, into the head of the average person on the street. Christ has called us to proclaim the gospel to a culture grappling with postmodernism. We must understand our times. Then, through the power that Christ gives, we can counter the prevailing culture and proclaim His sufficiency to our society's very points of need.

'Postmodern Welfare' places postmodernism firmly on the agenda of contemporary debates about the welfare state. It is the first book to explain systematically the significance of postmodernism for understanding social welfare.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is used as a point of departure for a critique of contemporary welfare policy and the capitalist state. Martin and Torres set out to renew a critical Marxist method by extending it to an analysis of contemporary social policy. It is in this approach that they set out to argue that a critique of welfare policy within the context of capitalism is more timely and important than ever before.

This title was first published in 2003. This book examines the interrelationship between the unravelling of the post-war welfare state and legal change. By reference to theorists of postmodernity such as Zygmunt Bauman, Scott Lash and John Urry, and David Harvey, the principal argument is that contemporary law and legal institutions can be best understood as having changed in ways that mirror the recent transformation of the interventionist welfare state and its Fordist, Keynesian economic infrastructure. The key changes identified in the legal field include:- the shift toward marketized regulatory structures as reflected in privatization and deregulation, the attenuation of welfare rights, the privatization of justice, legal polycentricity, the reconfiguration of the welfare state’s social citizenship and the globalization of law. Empirical evidence from a number of jurisdictions is adduced to indicate the general direction of change.

"Colleen Lundy has created a wonderful synthesis of social work practice in a social justice context." - Lawrence Shulman, University at Buffalo School of Social Work