Asian Social Work Professional Work in National Contexts

The countries of East and Southeast Asia, taken as a whole, display a laboratory of social and political conditions, with individual countries presenting a variety of political, cultural and social characteristics. Some with one-party state systems, others with stable liberal democracies and yet others with more fragile democratic systems. As such the region presents a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between diverse national environments and social work education regimes. In this book, social work educators and theorists from around East and Southeast Asia provide accounts of the social work programs within the higher education systems of their respective countries and compare them to those of their neighbours. This is the first book to offer a structured account of how social work and social work education have emerged and finds their present place in the historical, economic, political, urban/rural and higher education contexts of Southeast Asia and East Asia. Experts from the region assess the extent to which these countries’ systems possess a collective coherence, while examining the diversity among them.

Introduction: Point of Entry (Ian Shaw )Chapter One: Social Work Within Governmental, Social and Cultural Regimes (Ian Shaw and Patricia O’Neill)Chapter Two: Social Work Metamorphoses: Practice, Education and Research (Rosaleen Ow)Chapter Three: Professional Practices in National Contexts (Ian Shaw)Part 1: Soft Authoritarian GovernmentsChapter Four: Hong Kong: Ruling Principles of The Government and Responses of Social Work Education and Practice (Sam W K Yu and Ruby C M Chau)Chapter Five: A New Horizon for Institutionalizing the Social Work Profession: Is There a New Hope for Malaysia? (Azlinda Azman and Paramjit Singh Jamir Singh )Chapter Six: Social Work Education in Soft-Authoritarian Singapore (Yen Kiat Chong and Irene Y.H. Ng)Chapter Seven: Socioeconomic Development in the Context of Social Work and Social Welfare in Thailand (Decha Sungkawan and David Engstrom )Part 2: Liberal democraciesChapter Eight: Professional Uncertainty among Japanese Social Workers (Takahiro Asano and Michihiko Tokoro)Chapter Nine: Social Work Education in the Making of a Welfare State: South Korea’s Experience (Ok Kyung Yang, Bong Joo Lee, and Kyo-seong Kim )Chapter Ten: Social Work in Taiwan: State Programming and the Search for an Empowered Profession (Yeun-wen Ku)Part 3: Fragile democracyChapter Eleven: Programming of Social Work in Indonesia (Adi Fahrudin)Part 4: State socialismChapter Twelve: The Governmental Technology of Social Work in China (Leung Tse Fong Terry , Luk Tak Chuen and Xiang Rong)Chapter Thirteen: Social Work Education in Vietnam (Richard Hugman and Nguyen Thi Thai Lan) EndnotesReferencesIndex

Ian Shaw undertook work on this book while S R Nathan Professor of Social Work at the National University of Singapore. He also is Professor Emeritus at the University of York, England. He was the initiator of the European Conference for Social Work Research, the first chair of the European Social Work Research Association (ESWRA), and a founder editor of the journal Qualitative Social Work. He has authored almost 100 peer reviewed papers, over 20 books, approximately 60 book chapters and various research reports. Rosaleen Ow is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Work, National University of Singapore with a M.Sc. from University College, Cardiff, Wales, and a Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS). She was a social work practitioner working mainly with children and families with very low income in Singapore and Wales before becoming an academic at the National University of Singapore. Her reserach interests and writing are focused on family and child welfare and the broader theme of social work in cross cultural contexts.