Full Description
The historic Binnenhof, seat of the Dutch government in The Hague, provided the setting (January 1985) for a conference in which participants from eleven countries met to consider the theme: Support networks in a caring community: research and policy, fact and fiction. At the outset, conference leadership - provided by Professors J.M.L. Jonker (The Netherlands) and R.A.B. Leaper (United Kingdom) urged the conferees not to allow their enthusiasm for informal support networks to combine with the pervasive awareness of the failures of welfare states into a simplistic stance of advocacy, with a consequent appeal to politicians to direct state funds accordingly. Legitimate criticisms of the responses of welfare states to the needs of citizens were to be seen as the context for discussion, not the substance of conference deliberations. More specifically, if it is now apparent to many people that governmental assistance of individuals with social needs can lead to an undesirable dependency on the part of increasingly passive citizens, that awareness does not lend logical support to an ideological position that governmental expenditures are pern‾c‾ous per se - to be replaced as rapidly as possible by a return to reliance on self, family, friends and associations that are developed voluntarily and financed by those who are sufficiently interested.
Contents
I: Context.- Foreword.- Social support networks: a literature study.- II: Addresses.- From welfare state to caring society?: the promise of informal support networks.- Combining lay and professional resources to promote human welfare: prospects and tensions.- Economic developments in social security and welfare programmes: the Dutch case.- The significance of the built environment: how to develop new construction designs that could play a part in creating a more caring society.- Social policy and social care: divisions of responsibility.- III: Selected Papers.- Suitable cases for treatment? Couples seeking help for marital difficulties.- The social services as "network organizers".- Supporting the informal carers.- Conflicts as property: fear of crime, criminal justice and the caring community.- Problems and possibilities in informal care for the impaired elderly.- Community care capacity: a view from Israel.- Mediating structures and the linkage of social care and individual responsibility.- The eighth decade: family structure and support networks in the community.- Supportive relationships and loneliness: suggestions for the improvement of support networks as guidelines for research and policy.- IV: Conclusions.- Conference recommendations.- V: Appendices.- Appendix A: Conference participants.- Appendix B: Papers presented.
