摘要：Karen Healy is Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences at the University of Queensland in Australia. She is a well know author of Social Work among her earlier publications is "Social Work Practices: Contemporary Perspectives on Change" (2000) and numerous publications on social work and social policy. Not only an academician she has practiced as a social worker in health, youth and child protection services. Her writing well re.ects her practical approach to social problems making theory an useful tool in practice.Social Work Theories in Context guides the reader through a wide range of social work theory trying, in my opinion successfully, the application to theory to practice. The book is divided in 11 chapters addressing a wide variety of issues. The first chapter "Practicing Social Work: Why context matters" is a sort of background chapter giving the argument for the book and the importance of addressing context issues. The second chapter " Dominant discourses in Health and Welfare" and the third of "Service Discourses" sorts of paints the picture of Public services and the fourth of "Alternative Service Discourses". The latter being a very important picture in a world with an increasing number of NGOs being active in old welfare states and always being active and important in many other countries. I was particularly happy to notice that Healy address the question of spirituality, the role of NGOs and ethnic and other minorities. All of them fields that are often ignored in the more general social work literature, leaving the subjects to be dealt with in the more specialized literature
