More than ever before, children are apparently being recognised as social actors and citizens. Yet public policy often involves increased control and surveillance of children. This book explores the contradiction. It shows how different ways of thinking about children produce different childhoods, different public provisions for children (including schools) and different ways of working with children. It argues that how we understand children and make public provision for them involves political and ethical choices.
Through case studies and the analysis of policy and practice drawn from a...

Care Work considers the current situation of care work and care workers, from childcare to eldercare, and from family carers to paid carers. It examines the composition of the current workforce (more than a million in the UK alone), the knowledge and education needed for care work, and the significance of where care work is undertaken (in the home, in institutions).

Considering potential challenges and scenarios, the book poses big questions about the future of care work offering some possible answers. Wide-ranging and innovative, Care Work will be of great...

Care Work considers the current situation of care work and care workers, from childcare to eldercare, and from family carers to paid carers. It examines the composition of the current workforce (more than a million in the UK alone), the knowledge and education needed for care work, and the significance of where care work is undertaken (in the home, in institutions).

Considering potential challenges and scenarios, the book poses big questions about the future of care work offering some possible answers. Wide-ranging and innovative, Care Work will be of great...

Kristian Hardy, an old man closing out his days in the Amazon jungle, was once Kurt Hellmann, the youngest railway stationmaster in Germany. One day as he was serving in that capacity, a phone call caused him to panic and precipitate the deaths of 123 Jews en route to the concentration camps.

Josef Mengele's remains having been identified, Hardy now regards himself as "the last Nazi mass murderer." He teeters just this side of despair, thanks to his love for Eduardo, his housekeeper's small son, and to his losing battle to maintain in good repair the Bechstein grand piano left behind by...

He dropped money bags from low-flying biplanes on remote rubber plantations and tin mines, spent nights in deep jungle longhouses, aboard fishing "kelongs" manned by aboriginals far out at sea, in mosquito-infested swamps collecting malarial parasites and on beaches where giant leatherback turtles came to lay their eggs. He accompanied commonwealth troops hunting for terrorists on the Thai-Malaysian border, flew reconnaissance patrols seeking guerilla camps and escorted Field Marshal Templer on his return visit to the country he had liberated from communist insurrection. He met Lady Edwina...

Having witnessed Britain's retreat from India in 1947, and Malaya in 1957, Peter Moss traveled on through the lengthening shadows of a waning Empire, seeking the last remnants of a once flourishing panoply of imperial pomp and circumstance. He arrived in Hong Kong to find this fabled territory less a British colony than a triumph of collective enterprise; no mythic Babylon but a vibrant and compelling reality. His Hong Kong career spanned four decades, from the spillover of China's cultural revolution to the return of its prodigal son at midnight on June 30th 1997. In his take on events...

The filaments that enmeshed them in Durbar Court were the stories they wove. Leila, who never contributed any herself, claimed that without them the resident behemoths would fall permanently asleep. It was a soporific summer. An extraordinary summer, as if the mechanism of the seasons had broken down, stranding them in a time locked vault of cloudless blue. The garden parasols were giant sundials around which carousels of shadow clocked the intervals from breakfast to supper. Only the bearers punctuated the hours, padding out to them with trays of lemon cordial and iced tea. This second novel...

One of Hong Kong's oldest hongs has accidentally acquired an antiquated refinery on a remote island in the southern Philippines, run by a tyrannical sugar baron as his feudal fiefdom. And now its blue-eyed young executive has been kidnapped by guerrillas bent on toppling the baron and his regime. Worse, the kidnap victim has uncovered unsavory facts that could greatly embarrass his parent corporation, and has thrown in his lot with his captors in their struggle for justice.

An unexpected letter from Tokyo impels a Canadian accountant to break his resolution never to revisit the past. Hunting out an old journal, he relives his adventures on the far side of the Pacific, when he sought redemption for his sins among primitive but contented islanders. There he aided Japanese veterans in their search for a World War 2 flying boat, put an elderly English spinster in touch with her half-caste nephew and helped a tribe to preserve its age-old customs. Only now, ten years later, does he learn that, in the process, he may have forfeited the greatest opportunity of his...