1st edition: April 2008

Changes in Greek society in recent years, as a result of international and transnational policies as well as internal upheavals, have forced local communities to face crucial issues regarding goals, processes, and potential for social policy and organizing development interventions at a local level.

For social work, as a specific form of scientific and professional intervention in the social and political spheres, this developments are challenges that form a framework for public discourse on the potential offered by the contemporary emphasis on local society as the form for shaping “alternative” ways of growth, of combating social exclusion, and the processes for assimilating vulnerable social groups.

This book is an essential contribution to the dialogue on managing social problems at the local level and the prospects for creating a development strategy, especially in deprived areas, that takes into account local needs and characteristics. It focuses on the systematic presentation of social work and its diverse theoretical approaches, models, and applications both in Greece and abroad, as a means of applying a scientific approach to Greece’s multidimensional social problems.