This unique text provides a framework for evaluating various theories and a context for addressing social work practice with varying levels of social systems. This revision places current theories of human behavior in a systems context. It is based upon a generalist practice foundation and includes practice examples that help students understand the underlying theory. The text examines the basic concepts in each of the various system sizes: the individual, the social group, the family, the organization, and the community. It includes expanded coverage of spirituality, diversity, values and ethics; social and economic justice/oppression; populations-at-risk; and other areas.The Fifth Edition presents new theoretical models in the areas of spirituality and individual development, discussion of spirituality is integrated throughout. Provides Expanded and integrated information on diversity is also included through out the text. And finally, this edition uses the concept of holon as a unifying construct at all systems levels.

Resilience engineering has consistently argued that safety is more than the absence of failures. Since the first book was published in 2006, several book chapters and papers have demonstrated the advantage in going behind 'human error' and beyond the failure concept, just as a number of serious accidents have accentuated the need for it. But there has not yet been a comprehensive method for doing so; the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) fulfils that need. Whereas commonly used methods explain events by interpreting them in terms of an already existing model, the FRAM is used to model the functions that are needed for everyday performance to succeed. This model can then be used to explain specific events, by showing how functions can be coupled and how the variability of everyday performance sometimes may lead to unexpected and out-of-scale outcomes - either good or bad. The FRAM is based on four principles: equivalence of failures and successes, approximate adjustments, emergence, and functional resonance. As the FRAM is a method rather than a model, it makes no assumptions about how the system under investigation is structured or organised, nor about possible causes and cause-effect relations. Instead of looking for failures and malfunctions, the FRAM explains outcomes in terms of how functions become coupled and how everyday performance variability may resonate. This book presents a detailed and tested method that can be used to model how complex and dynamic socio-technical systems work, to understand why things sometimes go wrong but also why they normally succeed.

Product Description: This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems--whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies--present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences...read more