Purpose: This study investigated the complexities in the school-to-work transition faced by youth with intellectual disabilities in Hong Kong. There is a lack of local research focused on such transitions for youth with intellectual disabilities. Methods: In-depth individual interviews were held with 30 participants, including youth with intellectual disabilities, their family carers and health, education and social work professionals. Data were analysed using the Framework Method. Results: Data analysis based on the ecological model revealed participants’ experiences of different challenges in different systems. Conclusion: By exploring the interplay among various interactions, this study revealed the conditions that impacted the self-determination of youth with intellectual disabilities in a Chinese context, the perspectives on work held by them, their personal aspirations and the interconnected factors within-and between systems. Recommendations for rehabilitation practice were given.

The indigenisation of social work education in Africa is a response to the limitations of Western-centric approaches to addressing complex local social issues. This paper explores the role of engaged scholarship and community social labs in indigenising social work education in Uganda. The study analyses data from four focus group discussions, and student WhatsApp conversations, to examine how these approaches facilitate meaningful community engagement and the integration of local knowledge into the social work curriculum. The results show that community social labs can help with cultural sensitivity and problem-solving that is relevant to the situation. They also demonstrate that institutional constraints and power dynamics may hinder this transition. Despite these issues, the study suggests that engaged scholarship through community social labs has significant potential to make social work education and practice in Uganda more culturally sensitive and responsive to local realities. Even with these challenges, the study suggests that engaging scholars in community social labs has a lot of potential to make social work education and practice in Uganda more sensitive to local cultures and needs.

Ubuntu is an indigenous African philosophy that promotes collectivism, solidarity and mutual interdependence as being vital for the majority welfare. In this paper, it is used to discuss the findings from a qualitative study of how older people living with HIV (OPLHIV) in Korogwe, Tanzania use help groups for informal social support, to battle their daily challenges as a result of HIV and ageing in a rural context. Interviews with 13 OPLHIV showed that there are voluntarily formed groups and arranged groups. We find that voluntarily organised groups seem to build on, and benefit from Ubuntu values. The study further showed that Ubuntu values in group organisation are currently challenged by donor dependency, heterogeneity and poverty in local communities. Social work practice is recommended to acknowledge the strength of Ubuntu to support already existing initiatives in the field, but also to recognise the factors that challenge it.

This article deals with issues of work inclusion, with a particular focus on the user’s perspective on work, and the work inclusion policy in Norway. An expanded concept of work is applied, which includes all human activities that contribute social value to society, and not only paid work. However, work is typically seen as activities that are valued in society. One consequence of this is that some activities are hidden and devalued as work, although they contribute socially valuable means. This is the case for a range of activities performed by clients in the welfare state who contribute to fulfilling the objectives of welfare policy. The article argues that the user’s perspective is important to understand how work inclusion comprises several activities that can be seen as work. Based on data from 14 in-depth interviews with young adults currently outside the labour market due to health problems, the study elucidates how being ill and part of work inclusion programmes are not a passive existence, but rather demanding work. The overarching question addresses how the young adults perceive their situation. They wanted to enter working life, in line with hegemonic norms, but health challenges meant that they did not always succeed. Mental and physical health problems affected their everyday lives in many ways. Pain, anxiety and fatigue made their days variable and unpredictable, and limited their level of activity and pace, both in daily chores and due to work inclusion. The article discusses some implications for policy-making, as well as for social work in the front line of the welfare state. Key factors involve the need for time, understanding and counselling to establish tasks and a workload that are sustainable over time.

This article discusses the use of professional theories in the field of child welfare. The presentation is largely based on the author’s observations from debates between Norwegian scholars over the last four decades. The conclusion, however, may have a general validity. During previous century a large number of theories were introduced to the field of child welfare. When we reached the end of the century there was a multitude of available theories, but also strong disagreement among peers about which theory to choose. Several researchers then advocated a clean-up campaign where one through randomized controlled trials should decide which theories are true and which methods work. False theories and ineffective methods were to be discarded. The researchers, however, experienced problems and disappointments. It proved hard to demonstrate that a particular method had decisive impact on most children and young people. The author argues that one should give up the search for one ultimate approach, or a few preferred approaches, and realize that eclecticism is the way to high-quality child welfare.

In many countries, self-employment has become a common strategy for achieving inclusion in the labour market. Studies show that the occurrence of self-employment depends not only on individual motives, but also on existing policies and support. In Sweden, labour market measures to include people with disabilities are primarily organized to achieve inclusion through traditional forms of employment, though one tool offered by the Swedish Public Employment Service is Support to Start a Business. One part of this support is exclusive to people with disabilities. Although the Swedish Public Employment Service is responsible for this specific support, they collaborate with both external state-funded and non-profit actors who assess applicants’ business ideas. Drawing on the methodological approach of institutional ethnography, this article explores how the in-house frontline workers and external actors describe their professional roles, how they make decisions and what the chain of action looks like at multiple sites. Nine representatives from the various organizations that people can meet with when trying to start and run their own business have taken part in semi-structured interviews. The analysis identifies different institutional practices that overlap when people with disabilities apply for support to start their own business: one focusing on the efficient allocation of resources, and the other on the individual’s social and financial welfare by protecting the individuals these organizations meet with from risks connected to economy and health. These two practices reflect a long-standing conflict between control and support in objectives within both labour market policy and social work. This support of self-employment for people with disabilities is organized by actors who traditionally have not been studied in research on social work.

Nonstate service providers in the form of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play an important role in the delivery of social services and the development of social work practice, in particular in fragile and conflict-affected countries. In such challenging settings, NGOs also mobilize various resources, implement novel activities or service delivery models that may induce the development of social innovation; however, such perspectives have been overlooked in the social work literature. This study outlines a framework for understanding how social innovation generates by nonstate service providers in a challenging social work context. By analyzing 15 interviews from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the study identified three interrelated key mechanisms that drive social innovation by local NGO service providers: a) transcopy, b) coactive novelty and c) knowledge construction. The processes underlying these mechanisms include transnational networking, copying and adapting, contextual modification, relationship-building, pioneering novel solutions, knowledge production and transfer. This study offers new insights into the role of nonstate service providers in the development of social innovation in a challenging social work context and has several implications for practice.

Background: Although some individuals in Germany’s and Austria’s Bavaria–Tyrol border region live in one country but work, study, shop and/or access healthcare in the other, realising that lifestyle can be difficult for people with disabilities (PWD). Limited cross-border services currently available to PWD not only suffer from poor awareness and adoption but also fail to meet PWD’s manifold individual needs. Thus facing restricted individual social space, especially in rural areas, the region’s PWD experience various constraints to self-determined lives, which the COVID-19 pandemic’s isolation and heightened border control have only aggravated. Against that background, we sought to identify factors that have enabled or constrained PWD’s individual agency in the Bavaria–Tyrol border region both before and during the pandemic. Methods: Beginning in April 2020, we conducted 34 semi-structured interviews with PWD, their relatives and employers and various institutional, political and administrative personnel regarding the use of cross-border education, housing, leisure and occupational services during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bavaria, Germany, and Tyrol, Austria. In qualitative content analysis, we summarised the most pressing results into eight abstracts that we later compiled into a qualitative online survey completed by 51 of 229 interviewees and other participants (22.27%). Results: Pandemic-associated developments and policies have been external shocks to an already fragile (cross-border) support system for PWD. Added to pre-pandemic obstacles including a lack of information, consensus and options regarding cross-border activities, new deficits in mobility, housing and funding for support along with prejudices and the effects of digitalisation have further intensified challenges for PWD.

When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Norway in March 2020, comprehensive action was taken by the government, leading to the lockdown of welfare institutions, schools and kindergartens, and strict restrictions on physical meetings. This had severe consequences for Child Welfare Protection services (CWP). The restrictions stopped child welfare protection home visits and professionals in other welfare institutions, which usually observe children and notify child welfare protection services, were no longer able to identify children at risk. This article, drawing on interviews with 10 social workers, explores their experience during COVID-19. Applying Lipsky’s concept of street-level bureaucrats and theories of professional identity, the article documents how COVID-19 not only restricted, but also modified social workers jobs, and led to self-reflection on their professional identity. In turn, the findings suggest the potential for beneficial changes in practices in the aftermath of COVID-19.