**Apologies for Cross Posting**
Rethinking Families by Fiona Williams is available to UK-based Social
Policy List members for a special price of £5 including postage and
packaging. If you would like a copy of this book – described recently by
Community Care as "a little gem" - send a cheque payable to ‘Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation’ to:
Keleigh Groves
CAVA Research Group
School of Sociology & Social Policy
University of Leeds
Leeds University LS2 9JT
Payment can only be made by cheque. For people living outside the UK who
would like to order a copy of the book, please contact the distributors
directly at: www.centralbooks.co.uk
Rethinking Families
Professor Fiona Williams (Director, CAVA Research Group)
"Statistical trends are set alongside material from in-depth studies, with
useful summaries at the end of each chapter. Williams concludes with key
messages for social policy, advocating for a move towards a positive
political "ethic of care", where flexibility, respect and non-judgemental
attitudes prevail. This very readable book will not only inform but will
provide the backcloth for important debates in many areas of professional
social care practice." Community Care, October 7th 2004.
Rethinking Families is a forward-thinking and timely contribution to
current debates about changes in family lives and personal relationships
from the Economic and Social Research Council’s CAVA Research Group at the
University of Leeds. It provides a considered, authoritative and
politically relevant perspective on these issues, indispensable for
policymakers, practitioners and students alike.
Rethinking Families sets out the main trends: the increase in the number
of working mothers, in cohabitation and divorce, in single- and step-
parenthood, in people living on their own or in more open same-sex
relationships – within the context of ethnic and cultural diversity and an
ageing society. How, it asks, do people deal with these changes and what
are the implications for future social policy? In pulling together new in-
depth research on people’s experiences it shows that while the shape of
commitments may be changing, there is no loss of commitment itself. People
may care in different ways but what it means to be a good mother, father,
grandparent, friend, daughter, son, partner or ex-partner is central to
how people negotiate their living and loving, working and caring.
From the analysis of family lives, friendships and support networks, the
author develops the case for a more radical repositioning of the place of
care in political thinking and strategy. In documenting accounts of
compassionate realism, this book provides an important counter to the idea
that people have become more self-centred and disconnected.
Fiona Williams, Director of the ESRC Research Group on Care, Values and
the Future of Welfare (CAVA) and Professor of Social Policy at the
University of Leeds, has written widely on social policy issues. She is
the author of Social Policy: A Critical Introduction: Issues of ‘Race’,
Class and Gender (Polity Press, 1989), and co-editor, with Jennie Popay
and Ann Oakley, of Welfare Research: A Critique of Theory and Method (UCL
Press, 1999).
ISBN 1 903080 02 9 96 pages Published by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
UK, 2004
|