Mimi Abramovitz
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 175735 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mimi Abramovitz |
| NOMBRES | Mimi |
| APELLIDO | Abramovitz |
| FIRMA | ABRAMOVITZ M |
| AFILIACIONES | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0945-2981 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 221 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1982 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Teaching Note—Innovating the Curriculum
History, the major storehouse of information, informs us about the important relationship between people and society and increases our understanding of basic societal values and institutional arrangements. A recent New York Times op-ed described “The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession.” Likewise for historical content in social work education, exacerbated by the 1970s‘ rise of neoliberalism and the profession’s long marginalization of…
From the Welfare State to the Carceral State
Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; pr…
Neoliberal Managerialism and the Human Services
Neoliberalism emerged in the United States in the mid-1970s in response to the second economic crisis of the 20th century. Seeking to undo the New Deal enacted in response to the 1930s economic collapse, neoliberalism redistributes income upward and downsizes the state using tax cuts, budget cuts, privatization, devolution, and reducing the power of social movements. Privatization, a key neoliberal strategy, is typically understood as shifting re…
The Persistence of Residential Segregation by Race, 1940 to 2010
Has public policy shaped the persistence of residential segregation by race over time? Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) theory, which explains major shifts in policy paradigms as a response to an economic crisis informs our analysis. We compare federal housing policy across two SSAs: the Keynesian period (1940–1970) characterized by welfare state expansion and the neoliberal period (1970–2010) marked by its contraction. Using the isolation…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 48, No. 3
The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the pace of the digital transition process in which we have been immersed.In a context of generalized lockdown, our organizations have been forced to go digital and many of the activities social workers perform must now be done remotely.As a result, e-social work, or digital social work, has gone from being an emerging specialization to a critical specialty across organizations and activities.In this article, we …
Assessing the Business Model in Social Work
Objective: Adopting a business model in human service agencies has led to service delivery challenges and problematic working conditions. This article reports the initial validation of the Organizational Commitment to Managerialism (OCTM) scale, a tool designed to measure how the business model is operationalized in human service agencies. Method: Data from a purposive nonprobability sample of 2,326 workers employed in New York City metropolitan …
Structural Racism, Managerialism, and the Future of the Human Services
Over the past several decades, the introduction of the business model, managerialism, into the human services has led to dramatic changes in conditions of work and service delivery. This metric-driven approach increased the emphasis on measured performance outcomes and undercut the mission-driven nature of human services organizations. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread protests against racial injustice exposed routinely ignored struct…
The Perils of Privatization
During the last three decades in both the United States and Europe, neoliberal policies, especially privatization, have restructured services in ways that dramatically affect the capacity of human services workers and agencies to serve all clients. Privatization means not only transforming public programs such as Social Security, but also managerialism-the incorporation of business principles, methods, and goals into public and nonprofit human se…
External Review Board
Regulating the Lives of Women
Widely praised as an outstanding contribution to social welfare and feminist scholarship, Regulating the Lives of Women (1988, 1996) was one of the first books to apply a race and gender lens to the U.S. welfare state. The first two editions successfully exposed how myths and stereotypes built into welfare state rules and regulations define women as "deserving" or "undeserving" of aid depending on their race, class, gender, and marital status. Ba…
Moving Toward Racial Equity
Which side are we on?
‘“We don’t want to be ashamed tomorrow”: poverty, inequality and the challenge to social workers’ is a progressive/radical manifesto that challenges social workers to fight back against today’s mounting inequality, deepening poverty, and the austerity-driven attack on programmes for the poor and working classes. Jones and Novak, who see social workers as the ‘eyewitnesses to the suffering of the poorest’ ask us to protest against current conditio…
The Community Loss Index
The Community Loss Index (CLI), a new social indicator, focuses on the understudied role of place as a source of stress and an aggregator of individual experiences. Building on the relationship between loss and stress, the index attempts to capture collective loss, defined as the chronic exposure by neighborhood residents to multiple resource losses at the same time. Using maps, the article analyzes the spatial distribution of six types of loss i…
Theorising the Neoliberal Welfare State for Social Work
The Feminization of Austerity
The U.S. Welfare State
The fulfillment of human rights is the bedrock of social justice. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights sparked an ongoing debate over the obligation of governments to ensure the welfare of individuals by protecting their social and economic as well as civil and political rights. Although political rights won early support, the achievement of social and economic rights has lagged. Many in the United States regard the fulfillment of socia…
Human Rights in the United States
This book brings to light emerging evidence of a shift toward a fuller engagement with international human rights norms and their application to domestic policy dilemmas in the United States. The volume offers a rich history, spanning close to three centuries, of the marginalization of human rights discourse in the United States. Contributors analyze cases of US human rights advocacy aimed at addressing persistent inequalities within the United S…
Wall Street Takes Welfare It Begrudges to Women
Welfare Reform in the United States
This article argues that gender, race and class matter in welfare reform. It provides a brief historical overview of the US welfare programme for single mothers; describes the main provisions of welfare reform (enforcing work, promoting marriage and limiting the role of the federal government in wider society); and identifies the impact on women and children. It concludes that welfare reform is best understood as part of the neo-liberal/Right att…
The Largely Untold Story of Welfare Reform and the Human Services
Welfare reform has placed the lives of clients, the jobs of social workers, and the mission of agencies in jeopardy. Based on interviews with senior staff at 107 nonprofit human services agencies, this article documents the largely untold story of how nonprofit agencies' workers responded to the impact of welfare reform on their clients, their jobs, and the delivery of services. Workers reported less time for social services because of welfare-re…
The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy
Under Attack, Fighting Back
This new edition updates a highly acclaimed work with an analysis of the most recent developments in welfare and welfare rights activism. Drawing on first-hand reports of women forced to leave welfare and other newly available data, Mimi Abramovitz documents the impact of this historic change in public policy on the lives of poor single mothers and their children. She punctures the highly publicized claims that equate successful reform with shrun…
The Verne Weed Living Archive for Progressive Social Work
Everyone Is Still on Welfare
Most people have an inaccurate assessment of who is "on welfare." Two decades have passed since Social Work published the original version of this article, which applied Titmuss's framework of a three-tiered social welfare system and showed that nearly "everyone is on welfare." Based on new data and a more in-depth analysis, this article re-examines who benefits from and who pays for social, fiscal, and corporate welfare and concludes that all th…
Learning from the History of Poor and Working-Class Women's Activism
The long but largely untold history of activism among poor and working-class women in the United States since before the twentieth century reveals that low-income women activists developed a class- and race-based gender consciousness that fueled their activism at three key sites: the point of production, the point of consumption, and the point of state intervention. While their issues and strategies have varied over time, at each site low-income …
Social Work and Social Reform
The profession of social work has the potential both to meet individual needs and to engage in social change. However, the profession's position between the individual and society often forces practitioners to choose between adjusting people and programs to circumstances or challenging the status quo. The twin pressures of containment and change have made social work an arena of struggle since its origins in the late 19th century. In honor of soc…
Under Attack, Fighting Back
This new edition updates a highly acclaimed work with an analysis of the most recent developments in welfare and welfare rights activism. Drawing on first-hand reports of women forced to leave welfare and other newly available data, Mimi Abramovitz documents the impact of this historic change in public policy on the lives of poor single mothers and their children. She punctures the highly publicized claims that equate successful reform with shrun…
The Perils of Privatization
During the last three decades in both the United States and Europe, neoliberal policies, especially privatization, have restructured services in ways that dramatically affect the capacity of human services workers and agencies to serve all clients. Privatization means not only transforming public programs such as Social Security, but also managerialism-the incorporation of business principles, methods, and goals into public and nonprofit human se…
Welfare Reform in the United States
This article argues that gender, race and class matter in welfare reform. It provides a brief historical overview of the US welfare programme for single mothers; describes the main provisions of welfare reform (enforcing work, promoting marriage and limiting the role of the federal government in wider society); and identifies the impact on women and children. It concludes that welfare reform is best understood as part of the neo-liberal/Right att…
The Largely Untold Story of Welfare Reform and the Human Services
Welfare reform has placed the lives of clients, the jobs of social workers, and the mission of agencies in jeopardy. Based on interviews with senior staff at 107 nonprofit human services agencies, this article documents the largely untold story of how nonprofit agencies' workers responded to the impact of welfare reform on their clients, their jobs, and the delivery of services. Workers reported less time for social services because of welfare-re…
Everyone Is Still on Welfare
Most people have an inaccurate assessment of who is "on welfare." Two decades have passed since Social Work published the original version of this article, which applied Titmuss's framework of a three-tiered social welfare system and showed that nearly "everyone is on welfare." Based on new data and a more in-depth analysis, this article re-examines who benefits from and who pays for social, fiscal, and corporate welfare and concludes that all th…
The Community Loss Index
The Community Loss Index (CLI), a new social indicator, focuses on the understudied role of place as a source of stress and an aggregator of individual experiences. Building on the relationship between loss and stress, the index attempts to capture collective loss, defined as the chronic exposure by neighborhood residents to multiple resource losses at the same time. Using maps, the article analyzes the spatial distribution of six types of loss i…
Structural Racism, Managerialism, and the Future of the Human Services
Over the past several decades, the introduction of the business model, managerialism, into the human services has led to dramatic changes in conditions of work and service delivery. This metric-driven approach increased the emphasis on measured performance outcomes and undercut the mission-driven nature of human services organizations. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread protests against racial injustice exposed routinely ignored struct…
Everyone Is on Welfare
Titmuss's model of three welfare systems is used to analyze how the rapidly expanding system of tax benefits available to middle- and upper-income groups parallels the social welfare system for the poor. Operating as a shadow welfare state, the tax benefits system is invisible and nonstigmatized, favors the privileged over the poor, makes the tax code more regressive, and contributes to the upward redistribution of income endorsed by the Reagan A…
Poor Women in a Bind
The current effort to use social policy to restore the traditional nuclear family reflects deep-seated fears about the changing structure of the middle-class family, as well as distrust of the caretaking capacity of the poor. The concepts of the family ethic and social reproduction are used to examine and explain the cutbacks in social welfare and the state's increasingly punitive treatment of poor women and their families
The Feminization of Austerity
Learning from the History of Poor and Working-Class Women's Activism
The long but largely untold history of activism among poor and working-class women in the United States since before the twentieth century reveals that low-income women activists developed a class- and race-based gender consciousness that fueled their activism at three key sites: the point of production, the point of consumption, and the point of state intervention. While their issues and strategies have varied over time, at each site low-income …
Moving Toward Racial Equity
The Family Ethic
That relief policies regulate the lives of men and women differently is not well known. Concerns about the impact of relief on the able-bodied male have been generalized to the female pauper, leaving her story untold. This article suggests that the welfare state regulates women through a "family ethic" that parallels the work ethic known to shape the relationship between the welfare state and men. The "family ethic" is defined and applied to publ…
From the Welfare State to the Carceral State
Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; pr…
Wall Street Takes Welfare It Begrudges to Women
Making Gender a Variable in Social Work Teaching
The ideology of women's roles provides a framework for making gender a variable in social work teaching. The construction of gender ideologies is described. The incorporation of gender ideology and gender stereotypes into the social knowledge base, and research methodology as well as into clinical practice, social services, social welfare policy and pedagogy are detailed. Alternative formulations found in the new social sciences scholarship on wo…
The Reagan Legacy
The impact of Reaganomics on women, workers, and person of color is explored by looking at structural forces in the political economy that encourage business and government at one time to support and another time to undermine the welfare state. The expansion of the welfare state from 1935 to the mid-1970s meshed well with the needs of profitable production, political legitimacy and patriarchal control. With the economic crisis of the 1970s, the w…
The Conservative Program is a Women's Issue
The Conservative program strikes deeply at the institutions that support the economic independence and security of women. This paper reviews social welfare budget cuts, the relaxation of affirmative action and workplace health and safety rules, and the social issues agenda of the New Right for their impact on women's economic, social and political status. It describes how the Reagan Administration's economic recovery program victimizes women, esp…
Labor Education for Women Workers
Labor Education for Women Workers was published in 1981, a year that marked a significant shift in labor-movement history. When Barbara Wertheimer, working with a team of leading labor educators, published this essential text, it raised awareness of the importance of creating space for women workers to have solid labor education. They also identified a major gap in the literature on labor education and filled it with an accessible yet scholarly g…
Reaganomics and the Welfare State
Supply-side tax and spending policies have intensified poverty, unemployment and inequality, especially for women, minorities and organized labor. At the same time Reaganomics is shrinking and weakening the welfare state. To better understand and resist this conservative assault it is necessary to demystify the "economics" and "politics" of supply-side doctrine. This paper (a) defines the basic assumptions of supply-side economics; (b) identifies…
Everyone Is on Welfare
Titmuss's model of three welfare systems is used to analyze how the rapidly expanding system of tax benefits available to middle- and upper-income groups parallels the social welfare system for the poor. Operating as a shadow welfare state, the tax benefits system is invisible and nonstigmatized, favors the privileged over the poor, makes the tax code more regressive, and contributes to the upward redistribution of income endorsed by the Reagan A…
The Family Ethic
That relief policies regulate the lives of men and women differently is not well known. Concerns about the impact of relief on the able-bodied male have been generalized to the female pauper, leaving her story untold. This article suggests that the welfare state regulates women through a "family ethic" that parallels the work ethic known to shape the relationship between the welfare state and men. The "family ethic" is defined and applied to publ…
The Privatization of the Welfare State
Although the privatization of social services is not new, its purpose, form, and content have changed over time. Under the Reagan Administration, it has meant a greater role for private enterprise in a scaled-down welfare state. Intervention in the economy was historically conceived to modify the market in behalf of social justice. In contrast, privatization channels public dollars into private hands, strengthens the two-class welfare state, and …
Making Gender a Variable in Social Work Teaching
The ideology of women's roles provides a framework for making gender a variable in social work teaching. The construction of gender ideologies is described. The incorporation of gender ideology and gender stereotypes into the social knowledge base, and research methodology as well as into clinical practice, social services, social welfare policy and pedagogy are detailed. Alternative formulations found in the new social sciences scholarship on wo…
Poor Women, Poor Families
Poor Women, Poor Families: The Economic Plight of America's Female-Headed Households and Women and Children Last: The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America Get access Poor Women, Poor Families: The Economic Plight of America's Female-Headed Households. By Rodgers Harrell R.Jr., Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986. 167 pp. $35.00 cloth. Women and Children Last: The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America. By Sidel Ruth. New York: Viking-Penguin, …
Transitions
No abstract available for this article
The Verne Weed Living Archive for Progressive Social Work
No abstract available for this article
Poor Women in a Bind
The current effort to use social policy to restore the traditional nuclear family reflects deep-seated fears about the changing structure of the middle-class family, as well as distrust of the caretaking capacity of the poor. The concepts of the family ethic and social reproduction are used to examine and explain the cutbacks in social welfare and the state's increasingly punitive treatment of poor women and their families
The Reagan Legacy
The impact of Reaganomics on women, workers, and person of color is explored by looking at structural forces in the political economy that encourage business and government at one time to support and another time to undermine the welfare state. The expansion of the welfare state from 1935 to the mid-1970s meshed well with the needs of profitable production, political legitimacy and patriarchal control. With the economic crisis of the 1970s, the w…
Social Work and Social Reform
The profession of social work has the potential both to meet individual needs and to engage in social change. However, the profession's position between the individual and society often forces practitioners to choose between adjusting people and programs to circumstances or challenging the status quo. The twin pressures of containment and change have made social work an arena of struggle since its origins in the late 19th century. In honor of soc…
The Verne Weed Living Archive for Progressive Social Work
Everyone Is Still on Welfare
Most people have an inaccurate assessment of who is "on welfare." Two decades have passed since Social Work published the original version of this article, which applied Titmuss's framework of a three-tiered social welfare system and showed that nearly "everyone is on welfare." Based on new data and a more in-depth analysis, this article re-examines who benefits from and who pays for social, fiscal, and corporate welfare and concludes that all th…
Learning from the History of Poor and Working-Class Women's Activism
The long but largely untold history of activism among poor and working-class women in the United States since before the twentieth century reveals that low-income women activists developed a class- and race-based gender consciousness that fueled their activism at three key sites: the point of production, the point of consumption, and the point of state intervention. While their issues and strategies have varied over time, at each site low-income …
Under Attack, Fighting Back
This new edition updates a highly acclaimed work with an analysis of the most recent developments in welfare and welfare rights activism. Drawing on first-hand reports of women forced to leave welfare and other newly available data, Mimi Abramovitz documents the impact of this historic change in public policy on the lives of poor single mothers and their children. She punctures the highly publicized claims that equate successful reform with shrun…
The Dynamics of Social Welfare Policy
The Largely Untold Story of Welfare Reform and the Human Services
Welfare reform has placed the lives of clients, the jobs of social workers, and the mission of agencies in jeopardy. Based on interviews with senior staff at 107 nonprofit human services agencies, this article documents the largely untold story of how nonprofit agencies' workers responded to the impact of welfare reform on their clients, their jobs, and the delivery of services. Workers reported less time for social services because of welfare-re…
Welfare Reform in the United States
This article argues that gender, race and class matter in welfare reform. It provides a brief historical overview of the US welfare programme for single mothers; describes the main provisions of welfare reform (enforcing work, promoting marriage and limiting the role of the federal government in wider society); and identifies the impact on women and children. It concludes that welfare reform is best understood as part of the neo-liberal/Right att…
Wall Street Takes Welfare It Begrudges to Women
The U.S. Welfare State
The fulfillment of human rights is the bedrock of social justice. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights sparked an ongoing debate over the obligation of governments to ensure the welfare of individuals by protecting their social and economic as well as civil and political rights. Although political rights won early support, the achievement of social and economic rights has lagged. Many in the United States regard the fulfillment of socia…
Human Rights in the United States
This book brings to light emerging evidence of a shift toward a fuller engagement with international human rights norms and their application to domestic policy dilemmas in the United States. The volume offers a rich history, spanning close to three centuries, of the marginalization of human rights discourse in the United States. Contributors analyze cases of US human rights advocacy aimed at addressing persistent inequalities within the United S…
Theorising the Neoliberal Welfare State for Social Work
The Feminization of Austerity
Political science (31 obras) · Sociology (28 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Welfare (18 obras) · Economics (16 obras) · Politics (14 obras) · Social Work (14 obras) · Gender Studies (12 obras) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (12 obras)