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Once again Lena Dominelli has produced a text of note that promises to be widely read and discussed by social work researchers, educators and their students. Timely and well-written, this thought-provoking book is a call for social workers to rise to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century in the interests of global social justice and human rights. Among the challenges of the day relevant to social work practice are the new bureaucratic managerialism and economic constraints at the agency level that restrict professional innovation and the structural inequalities at the societal level that impede human growth and development.
Social work, as is emphasised in this text, is a profession in a state of flux. Globalisation, fiscal crises stemming from global economic markets, the technological revolution and the impact of natural and human-made disasters are among the forces presenting major challenges for social work today. In the introduction, Dominelli sets forth the purpose of Social Work in a Globalizing World which is to argue that social work at its best is emancipatory practice and, as such, that it has an ethical responsibility to work toward the improvement of human well-being. A secondary aim of the book is to encourage debate concerning critiques about the inadequacies of mainstream practices historically in responding to the needs of the people. Although the emphasis of the book is on the state of the social welfare system in the UK, the framework is global in scope. Chapter 2 provides a history of the social work profession, from its founding in the first social work education course offered in the Netherlands in 1896 to its development in universities in the UK and the US. Throughout the history of warfare and economic and social crises, social workers were there to pick up the pieces. We read about this and about some early assimilationist practices that were a disservice to indigenous populations in various parts of the world....