Written by Peter Beresford, OBE, Visiting Professor, University of East Anglia and Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, UK and Colin Slasberg, Independent Researcher and Consultant in Social Care, UK

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We’ve been gathering evidence about the state of social care for nearly a decade, publishing in peer-reviewed and professional journals as well as in mainstream media. What has continued to shock us has been the lack of reliable evidence in the field.

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Written by Dr Neil Thompson, independent writer, educator and adviser and a visiting professor at the Open University. His website, with his acclaimed Manifesto for Making a Difference, is at www.NeilThompson.info.

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I have been involved in teaching social work for over 30 years. To begin with, the majority of students were mature students who generally had some direct experience in the social work world (as social work assistants, care workers or foster carers, for example). It could be assumed, then, that we did not need to teach them about what social work is.

Over the years, though, the student demographic has changed considerably. We now have a greater proportion of younger students, many of whom have little or no experience in the field. Much of the early teaching therefore needs to focus on the nature and purposes of social work in order to establish a common baseline of understanding. This is necessary because a significant proportion of the general public have little or no idea of what social work is or what social workers actually do.

In my experience, misconceptions are more common than a genuine understanding of what is involved in the day-to-day work of social work teams up and down the country. Media distortions play a big part in this, reinforcing stereotypes of child care social workers as child snatchers (rather than highly skilled professionals who work extremely hard to keep families together while protecting children and safeguarding their health, education and welfare). Removing a child is, of course, a last resort.
Social workers in other fields of practice are generally invisible, in the sense that, unless you are professionally involved or you have had direct experience of being on the receiving end of social work support, the chances are you will have little more than a vague inkling of what social work is all about.

This low level of understanding (or high level of misunderstanding) is also to be found among fellow professionals at times, and so social workers will often have to clarify and negotiate their role before they can get down to the actual business of their work (for example, convincing GPs who issue instructions rather than make interprofessional referrals that social workers are obliged to make their own holistic assessment based on engaging with the individual or family concerned). I once had an elderly woman give me a referral letter from her GP and tell me that it was a ‘prescription’ for a place in a care home. It turned out, following a social work assessment, that all that was needed was a light package of support services – she was nowhere near the criteria for admission to residential care.

Social work is highly complex and demanding (if a problem is simple or straightforward, it is unlikely that it would find its way to a busy social worker’s desk, as they are likely to be up to their eyes with more high-profile cases with higher levels of risk). It is often poorly understood – even by people who should know better; largely underfunded (consider the longstanding concerns about the NHS experiencing difficulties because of the shortage of much-needed social care provision); and currently subject to major recruitment and retention problems (austerity measures have increased demand while decreasing supply, making the job unmanageable much of the time). These challenges then, of course, make teaching social work very challenging too. Successfully preparing students for all that they will face in the ‘real world’ of social work is no mean feat.

But, despite all these pressures and challenges, social work remains a popular choice for students who recognize that the pressures are largely counterbalanced by the rewards of the job – making a positive difference to the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in some of our most disadvantaged communities and promoting social justice.

Given the complexities and dilemmas that are part and parcel of social work, effective teaching needs to be much more than conventional talk and chalk (or the death by PowerPoint equivalent). I have been fortunate in my teaching career to have worked alongside some very creative and inspiring teachers. So, when it came to writing my Teaching Social Work book, I was privileged to be able to draw on what I had learned from such gifted educators, while also adding many ideas of my own developed over many years.

Despite the tabloid media’s predilection for distorting social work and for highlighting and exaggerating the small minority of cases that go wrong, social work is a major force for good, helping to make our society a humane, caring and inclusive one. By its very nature it is challenging and demanding, and so effective and safe practice relies on high-quality educational experiences. There is no easy, formula way to ensure such experiences, but what Teaching Social Work offers is a foundation of ideas, exercises and approaches that can help students engage with the professional knowledge base that can guide them in all their endeavours.

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Written by Charles J. Whalen, Research Fellow, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo, USA

On October 19, 1987, the US stock market lost nearly 25 percent of its value—the largest single-day drop in history. As market distress reverberated worldwide, values on global stock exchanges plummeted, resulting in “Black Monday”—the first contemporary global financial crisis. In the aftermath of that crash, American economists held their annual meeting in Chicago, and Hyman Minsky was the speaker it seemed everyone wanted to hear.

Minsky, then a professor on the verge of retirement at Washington University in St. Louis, was thrust into the limelight by the 1987 crash. That’s because many regarded him as the most prominent opponent of the economics profession’s insistence that financial crises and business cycles no longer represented important real-world problems. While other economists were either ignoring crises and cycles or dismissing them with general-equilibrium analyses, Minsky was developing a “financial instability hypothesis”—that explained booms and crashes as an inherent part of a modern economy—and patiently applying his theory to analyze a series of such episodes that occurred in the decades before and after World War II.

Minsky understood that achieving serious public-policy reform—aimed at reaching and sustaining full employment and better addressing financial instability and other real-world problems—requires also reconstructing economics. In fact, that was the explicit aim of a workshop he convened in 1991, when he served as a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Minsky stressed a reconstruction grounded in an appreciation of the following: constant economic change, the need for economic decision-making in the face of uncertainty, and the role of socioeconomic institutions and public policy as key determinants of economic processes and outcomes. He was an eclectic economist, who learned from a diverse group of professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard University (including Henry Simons, Oscar Lange, and Joseph Schumpeter), but in the last few decades of his life he was most at home among economists calling themselves post-Keynesians and institutionalists.

When the severe global financial crisis of 2007–2009 blindsided economists and policymakers alike, Minsky and his ideas were back in the headlines. For example, he was featured in a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation published an essay with the title “We’re all Minksyites Now.” However, by then Minsky had been dead for a decade, so the task of applying his insight to that crisis fell upon his intrepid followers, many of whom who have come to embrace the term “post-Keynesian institutionalism” to describe their approach to economic theory and policy.

Two new books by Edward Elgar Publishing look at the global financial crisis and several new and continuing economic challenges by drawing heavily on Minsky’s insight and analyses. The books also seek to trace the development and contours of post-Keynesian institutionalism, and to advance that approach by taking the ideas of Minsky and other pioneering contributors—including John R. Commons, Joan Robinson, and John Kenneth Galbraith—in new directions.

In Reforming Capitalism for the Common Good: Essays in Institutional and Post-Keynesian Economics, 25 essays (written over three decades) build on the work of Minsky and institutionalist John R. Commons to address the causes and consequences of US macroeconomic instability, job offshoring, community economic dislocation, financialization, income inequality, and rising worker insecurity. The result is a compelling case for reforming capitalism by addressing workers’ interests as an integral part of the common good, and for reconstructing economics in the direction of post-Keynesian institutionalism. Scholars and students of economics and labor studies will appreciate the incisive analyses and real-world focus, while policy analysts and concerned citizens will welcome the book’s optimistic vision for our economic future.

In A Modern Guide to Post-Keynesian Institutional Economics, an international team of more than a dozen scholars breaks new ground by extending recent analyses of today’s investor-driven (“money manager”) capitalism, with special attention to financialization and economic insecurity. It also sharpens concepts and methods (such as social capital and stock-flow consistent modeling, respectively), sketches new theories on labor and financial markets, and infuses post-Keynesian institutionalism with insight from other research traditions including feminist and environmental economics. The book serves as both a valuable reference volume and a source of material suitable for course adoption at either the undergraduate or graduate levels.

Both books make it clear that post-Keynesian institutionalism does not rest upon Minsky alone. But they underscore the continuing importance of Minsky’s contributions for those interested in a historically and institutionally grounded reconstruction of economics. They also highlight the enduring relevance of his focus on ongoing economic evolution, support for the goal of full employment, and commitment to a democratic and humane economy.

Minsky pointed us in the right direction. Earlier this year, a team of foundations announced a commitment to allocate more than $40 million to economic and policy research focused on alternatives, with special attention to inequality and the economic challenges faced by workers. Inspired by Minsky, post-Keynesian institutionalists have been studying these problems for decades. Minsky may be gone, but we can still stand on his shoulders to better understand the real world and craft a more constructive body of economic theory and policy.

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‘It’s the beginning of the new age, it’s the beginning of the new age, it’s … , etc’. So goes the refrain of the Velvet Underground anthem that used to so intoxicate me as a teenager. Now, I would substitute ‘It’s the beginning of the information age, it’s …, etc’. This, the information age, or, in Manuel Castells’s language, the global network society, is the context for the contributions I have collated in the Research Handbook on Information Policy. (The photo on the dust jacket is meant to represent the dawn of a new age: hopefully it succeeds, or that it is at any rate a pretty cover for the library shelf or coffee table.)

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