For several decades, social work and child protection systems have been subject to accelerating cycles of crisis and reform, with each crisis involving intense media and political scrutiny. In understanding the nature and causes of this cycle, little attention has been paid to the importance of collective emotions.Using a range of cases from the UK, and also considering cases from the Netherlands, the US and New Zealand, this book introduces the concept of emotional politics. It sh...

Modern society is increasingly preoccupied with fears for the future and the idea of preventing 'the worst'. The result is a focus on attempting to calculate the probabilities of adverse events occurring – in other words, on measuring risk. Since the 1990s, the idea of risk has come to dominate policy and practice in mental health across the USA, Australasia and Europe.In this timely new text, a group of international experts examines the ways in which the narrow focus on specific ...

Available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.One of the most significant ways that social workers can engage with policy is by holding elected office. How and why do social workers transition into political roles? And what impact do they have on policy making once they get there?This book is the first systematic, comparative study of social workers in electoral politics across liberal democracies. Drawing on a common conceptual framework, leading scholars analyse the rec...