Humanistic Social Work: Core Principles in Practice - Paperback

by Malcolm Payne (Author)

In this exciting new book, Malcolm Payne draws on core principles of social work to articulate a new humanistic practice for the twenty-first century. Humanistic Social Work: Core Principles in Practice presents a profession that aims at positive fulfillment in social relationships, exploring and reconciling artistic, creative, and spiritual avenues with evidence-based practice approaches and postmodernist understandings of human growth and knowledge development.

Showing how practitioners can embody flexible, skilled, and knowledge-based responses to the complexities of human individuality, Payne reorients the aims of social work as an accountability to clients' individual self-fulfillment, enabled by community and social development. Humanistic Social Work is a reaffirming treatise on the strengths rather than the deficits of the individual, the innovations rather than the imperfections of the social work profession.

Author Biography

Malcolm Payne is a policy and development adviser to St. Christopher's Hospice, London and visiting professor, Opole University, Poland. During his forty-year career in social work, he has worked with families as well as mentally ill, criminally-charged, and unemployed persons. He is extensively involved with international social work and has served as a government consultant on numerous occasions. His main publications include Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care (2009), Globalization and International Social Work (2008), Creative Arts in Palliative Care (2008), What Is Professional Social Work? (second edition, 2006), Modern Social Work Theory (third edition, 2005), The Origins of Social Work: Continuity and Change (2005), and Teamwork in Multiprofessional Care (2000).