social rights

This book places the issue of disability squarely in a social context and considers the implications of this view for the provision of services and for social work practice. In so doing, it starts from the ways in which disabled people have re-defined disability as a social rather than an individual problem and the influence that their organizations have had on service provision. It discusses the implications of this in a variety of different settings and across the life cycle.

A Most Uncertain Crusade traces and analyzes the emergence of human rights as both an international concern and as a controversial domestic issue for US policy makers during and after World War II. Rowland Brucken focuses on officials in the State Department, at the United Nations, and within certain domestic non-governmental organizations, and explains why, after issuing wartime declarations that called for the definition and enforcement of international human rights standards, the US government refused to ratify the first UN treaties that fulfilled those twin purposes.

This article addresses AIDS as a pandemic of changing social conditions. It reviews the form and consequences of several persistent responses to AIDS (denial, marginalization and urgency) both from within the context of the epidemic in North America and globally. Sociologists are called on to see AIDS as a rich environment for the application and testing of theories, with sociology seen as a discipline whose presence is required for understanding and potentially resolving social challenges produced by AIDS.

Existing research has focused on the extent to which transnational interventions compel recalcitrant governments to reduce levels of domestic repression, but few have considered how such interventions might also provoke new forms of repression. Using a longitudinal study of repression against AIDS activism in China between 1989 and 2013, the author proposes that transnational institutions’ provision of material resources and reshaping of organizational rules can transform a domestic repressive apparatus in specific policy areas.

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning.

The article contends that the attitudes of the majority population towards the allocation of political rights to out-group populations are distinct from attitudes towards the allocation of social rights. Data obtained from an attitudinal survey administered to a representative sample of Israeli adults show that the level of objection to the allocation of rights to labour migrants in the political sphere is twice as high as that found in the social sphere.

By the time Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, many employers had created maternity leave programs. Analysts argue that they did so in response to the feminization of the workforce. This study charts the spread of maternity leave policies between 1955 and 1985 in a sample of 279 organizations. Sex discrimination law played a key role in the rise of maternity leave policies. Building on neoinstitutional theory, this article explores how the separation of powers shapes employer response to law.

This article explores conditions under which global norms change. I use a case study in which the original interpretation of an international agreement on intellectual property rights was modified to address demands for improved access to affordable AIDS drugs. Conventional theories that focus on international negotiations cannot fully account for the events in this case. Drawing on the theory of recursivity and insights from the literature on diffusion, I suggest that shifts in global norms occur through reactive diffusion of policies across states.

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

The field of global health has roots in the AIDS pandemic of the late 20th century, when the installation of health care systems supplanted older, low-cost prevention programs to help stem the spread of HIV in low- and middle-income Africa. Today's global health is rooted the belief that healthcare is a human right, and that by promoting health we can cultivate equity and social justice in places where such values aren't always found.