Social work education in Eastern Europe: can post-communism be followed by diversity?

The Eastern European region is geographically, historically and socially a wide and diverse territory and social work education depends and is influenced by two time periods and political as well as social regimes: state socialism (in some countries from 1921 but mostly after 1946 until 1991) and the post-socialist transition (1991 until present times). The region encompasses the former Soviet Union republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan), Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and countries that have become part of the European Union in 2004 (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, including the three Baltic countries already mentioned), in 2007 (Bulgaria, Romania) and in 2013 (Croatia). There is no single definition of what is Eastern Europe, but in order to understand the development of social work education the common denominator is state socialism.

In addition to state socialism, the pre-communist period of the three different empires (Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Tsars), geographical and economic differences, large disparities between urban and rural areas, religious influences (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim), multiethnic territories, and relations between ethnic groups contributed to the state of today’s social work education, social welfare institutions and professional practices. As the philosophy of social work sees the person within his or her context (biographical, social, political, structural), like social work practice itself which is always contextual and local, so also the development of social work needs to be understood within its impediments in different places, times and power contexts.

Social work schools and programs in the region

Despite the belief that social work did not exist in Eastern Europe prior to 1991, today there is considerable research which shows that professional social work education was established in some countries in the region after World War 1 (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria), but was disrupted and closed down at the end of World War 2, or soon after (Hering & Waaldijk 2003; Schilde & Schulte 2005; Hering & Waaldijk 2006). For the communist leadership, social work was associated with capitalist ideology, seen as backward and a counter-ideology compared with the socialist idea that universal employment would ensure all other economic, social and emotional needs of people and establish the system of universal social and health protection.

Yugoslavia was the only communist country which had established schools for social work after the communist takeover (in 1952 in Croatia, in 1955 in Slovenia, in 1957 in Macedonia and Serbia, and in 1958 in Bosnia and Herzegovina), which is today perceived as a unique development of social work education under communism (Zaviršek 2005, 2008, 2012). The understanding of ‘socialist social work’ from the communist period was that ‘social work carries out the goals of social policy’ and social workers were primarily expected to work in the areas of social assistance delivery, family protection (which included foster care for children who had lost parents during the war or who were abandoned, and divorced and single mothers) and to prevent ‘deviancies’ (especially alcoholism and intentional unemployment). Social work education was imposed from above to influence the everyday life of people (Zaviršek 2008, 2012). The social work teachers were with rare exception members of the Communist Party and only ideas and practices acceptable to the regime were taught and practised. During the 1970s a social work teacher from Slovenia translated a classic social work book Concepts and methods of social work written by Walter Friedlander in 1958 and, after that, a respected party member teacher was asked to rescue him, otherwise he would be expelled from the school.

After 1991, all countries of Eastern Europe with the exception of Turkmenistan established social work education, mainly as a four or five year university program. Most of the programs were established with the support of international organisations, and in most cases Western academics (mainly from the US and Europe) were involved in the development of the departments, schools or programs. Some programs depend entirely upon Western funds. During the establishment of the first social work department in Ukraine at the Kiev Mohyla University in the early 1990, the classrooms were named after the names of the donors, like ‘the Swiss room’, while only social work students who were enrolled in a Western-funded educational project were entitled to drink English tea during the breaks to warm up their cold hands (D. Zaviršek, participant observation, Kiev, winter 1997). There were many Western ‘social work missionaries’ who didn’t take account of culturally appropriate social work approaches and contexts and clearly dominated the local academics who struggled with poor language skills and lack of international experience. Simultaneously there were also a number of those who wanted to learn and to teach on an equal ground, carried books in their own suitcases in order to plant the seeds for the local social work libraries, helped students to get scholarships and accommodated them in their homes across the globe.

Due to such developments, social work education in Eastern Europe has become inevitably international. Eastern European social work students often knew more about social work in English-speaking countries, but had few ideas and almost no structural support to adopt and implement the transformed knowledge into the local context.

Until recently, educators in the region came from other social sciences (mostly sociology, psychology and law), while today social work teachers most often come from the social work discipline taught at the universities. Most social work departments have undergraduate and master’s programs, but some developed doctoral programs too. The hierarchy between other social science disciplines (psychology, pedagogy, special education, law) remains untouched, with social work being at the bottom of them. One of the rare exceptions is Georgia today, where social workers are among the most wanted and best paid professionals within the caring professions in the country. They are seen as having a modern and good-quality education compared with the old-fashioned Soviet-type education of some other professionals (D. Zaviršek, personal communication, 23 November 2013, Tbilisi).

The country with the largest number of social work undergraduate programs is the Russian Federation (175 social work departments and programs), followed by Ukraine (with about 50 social work programs), Kazakhstan (22 social work programs), Czech Republic (15 programs), Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan (with seven universities where social work has been taught), Bulgaria (with five) and Romania (with four universities) (Iarskaia-Smirnova 2013). The universities with social work programs which have been developed lately are in Montenegro in 2003, Georgia in 2004, Uzbekistan in 2004, and Kosovo in 2012. After the year 2000, intensive development in international collaboration in teaching and student exchange took place and many postgraduate master’s studies appeared across the region; for instance in Armenia in 2000, in Belarus in 2001, in Azerbaijan in 2005, in Kyrgyzstan in 2006, in Moldova in 2007, in Georgia in 2008, etc. (Rutgers University Center for International Social Work 2008). The processes of the academisation of social work are seen in research and the establishment of doctoral studies in social work in Armenia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Romania and Slovenia. A cross-national collaboration is shown also in the first International Doctoral Program in Social Work and Social Policy – Indosow, from 2009, which is run by a consortium of the schools of social work from the East and the West and was initiated, quite unusually, by an Eastern European school of social work (Zaviršek 2009a).

Today, most of the countries have national associations of social workers and some of them, like the Czech Republic, also have an association of social work educators (since 2009). Social work academics have been active in establishing a number of academic journals mostly in local languages; for example: The Journal of Social Policy Studies based at Saratov University, Social Work based at the University of Ljubljana and established already in 1962, Social Policy and Social Work based at the University of Belgrade and established in 1971, and many more. Some of the journals contain a mixture of local and foreign languages (e.g. Social Work Review based at the University of Bucharest, Social Work Yearbook based at the University of Zagreb), while some of them are published in English only, like for example Social Work in Transition from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Sheffield Hallam University. In 2008, the schools of social work from the region have established the East European Sub-regional Association of the Schools of Social Work which brings together a large network of social work schools and scholars from the region. Most of the schools in the region follow the work of the International Association of the Schools of Social Work including its global documents and the global social work definition, although only a handful of the schools are its members.

One of the disturbing characteristics of social work education in some countries from the region is a high number of social work students who are enrolled in the universities due to the lack of employment. The quantity of the students threatens the quality of social work education, especially when the topics of professional values and ethics are in question. Some social work programs have become hybrid academic-welfare institutions which ‘care’ for young people in the way that they keep them within the educational system until the age of 25 or more in order to prevent their early unemployment. The schools of social work in Slovenia or in Bosnia and Herzegovina are examples of such trends, but not the only ones. The Department of Social Work at the University of Sarajevo enrols 500 undergraduates on a yearly basis. All of them are taught and supervised by not more than 11 academic staff, mostly hard-working and under-paid female academics employed at the department. One of the social work teachers bitterly complained: ‘The government is buying itself social peace while offering 500 social work students’ placements at the university!’ (D. Zaviršek, personal communication, 16 March 2013, Sarajevo). Social work education itself has become a form of state social welfare intervention in neoliberal conditions. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the official rate of unemployment is more than 44% which is higher than in Greece with the deepest economic crisis among European countries (Sladojević 2012). The students, who experience this form of welfare-educational system, also know that they have little chance for employment as social workers, which influences their motivation and the learning atmosphere.

This is one of the reasons why most social work programs across the region have been lacking reflective and practice oriented learning, close supervision during the practice placements, and training in social work ethics. Many social work topics are contested and demand time and space in order to transform students’ value systems and taken-for-granted assumptions about people’s needs, dignity, ability and social work interventions. The medical model in the area of people with disabilities and mental health problems travels from one generation to another as taken-for-granted knowledge which needs – in order to be transformed into a social and holistic model of human beings – time, student and teacher engagement and a safe atmosphere. While state socialism has focused primarily on one type of inequality – economic injustice and consequently poverty – which social workers across Eastern Europe still today recognise as the main danger for human dignity, other human situations which could also cause discrimination and inhumane conditions, like multidimensional gender inequality, ethnic discrimination and hatred, and homophobia, are not seen as equally important as the right for economic redistribution.

Eastern European societies have difficulties with diversity (similar to postcolonial and remaining communist countries globally) and therefore social work education has an even bigger responsibility to teach diversity as a conscious learning process. Therefore, it goes beyond the feasible to accommodate large numbers of students with supported practice placements and to teach an engaged community-based and advocacy-oriented practice or even individual and collective empowerment. In many parts of Easter Europe the theories of diversity are not taught at all and at some schools they remain solely theories without practice.

The well-known quandary experienced in many local contexts with the word ‘empowerment’ is a symptom of how the theories travel and become local specific. In Slovenia, empowerment is officially translated as ‘krepitev moči’ (strengthen the power) (Videmšek 2014), which does not recognise historically founded oppression and the existence of unjust social structures including the welfare ones. Similarly, where the word ‘diversity’ is used, it most often means ‘the difference’ and ‘difference’ is mostly understood as otherness. When social work students or professionals express their respect towards diverse human conditions, they say they respect ‘those who are different’. This is a highly normative understanding of diversity, because the idea of ‘being different’ encompasses all conditions and appearances which are seen as not ‘normal’.

Social work education, therefore, mostly fails to lead the students to make some major paradigm shifts in thinking and to take a critical stance about the normative construction of normality which is mostly constructed and transmitted by a common sense old-fashioned medical, psychological, pedagogical and social work knowledge about the lives of the service users and their decisions.

Contextualising social work education in Eastern Europe

After the change of the political regimes in 1991, the region of Eastern Europe faced fragmentation due to ethnic wars, massive economic crises, migration and the appearance of state building among the former Soviet Union and Yugoslav republics alongside international political players (World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and institutions of the European Union) which influenced economic life and social policy/legislation of the countries in the region.

The ‘emergency welfare state’ (Inglot 2009) processes after 1991 included new social policy legislation and the development of the mixed system of social services (governmental, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private). The times of economic liberalisation were harsh for most Eastern European countries and for the majority of people (Jäppinen et al. 2011; Bessudnov et al, 2011). The existing industries and state enterprises collapsed and a period of enormous unemployment, among men, women and ethnic minorities (especially Russian in the Baltic countries, and Roma people in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria) started to dominate everyday life. Poverty expanded and has remained the central fact of life. It has affected most heavily the rural areas of the region, from where people migrated to the capital cities, or from more eastern parts of the region towards the Western parts, and from more southern parts towards the north (from central Asia to Russia; from Ukraine to Poland; from Kosovo and Albania to Croatia and Slovenia). In Albania, rates of poverty in rural areas are almost 70% higher than in the capital city (Ymeraj 2007).

People faced many breaks in their everyday routine: privatisation of publicly created goods and services during state socialism (kindergartens, local health centres, factories); flexibility of labour and consequently unemployment after a long period of full employment; early retirements of a huge number of workers in some countries; ethnic conflicts and wars; economic migration and consequently the transformation of extended family care systems and family life; the development of huge economic inequalities (‘the new rich’); and the return of religious powers as the key political and social players in secularised societies. Eastern European countries moved from the period of state socialism to the era of neoliberalism. Vanhuysse (2009) has observed that the large-scale early retirement of Eastern European workers in Poland and the Czech Republic during the 1990s was a deliberate governmental strategy against potential workers’ resistance and protest towards the neoliberal reforms from a decade ago. Many researchers show that the international financial institutions heavily influenced national governments’ decision-making in the economic and social policy areas and worked towards the neoliberalisation of the whole region (Deacon et al. 2007).

Violent ethnic conflicts (Croatia, Macedonia, Georgia), ethnic wars (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya), ethnic cleansing and mass killings (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo) which appeared almost immediately after the fall of Yugoslavia and Soviet Union caused deaths, disability, forced migration, a big number of refuges, internally displaced persons, as well as voluntary and compulsory re-migration, increased poverty, trans-generational losses and trauma. In Bosnia and Herzegovina 100,000–300,000 persons were killed and out of 4.4 million population one million fled the country between 1992 and 1995 (Holiček & Rašidagić 2007). Similarly, 850,000 persons fled from Kosovo in 1999 and 360,000 Kosovans sought refuge in neighbouring Macedonia which was about 17% of the whole population of Macedonia (Mitev 2007; Cocozzelli 2007). After Kosovo proclaimed the independent state in 2008, social work students disputed whether they were ethnically ‘Albanians’, ‘Moslems’ or ‘Kosovans’, and remained divided into three different ethnic identities (personal notes, University of Pristine 2008). Georgia with less than 5 million population has formally 250,000 internally displaced persons, and half of them still today live in Collective Living Centres (since the Russian occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions in 2008).

During state socialism, the 19th and 20th centuries’ primordial understandings of the blood-kin relationship based on singular ethnic belonging were replaced by the pragmatic communist ideology which suppressed the ethnic identity in order to construct again a singular but new identity of a socialist proletariat. After 1991, ethnicity became for the vast majority of people almost a ‘new’ political and social identity, not formally recognised and mostly not individually lived for almost half of the 20th century. The imagined identities were mobilised by political elites for a new political project of shifting the national and state borders. The revival of the ideology of blood was criticised by many world humanists including Nelson Mandela, who expressed it very clearly: ‘They [the leaders] thought through their blood and not through their brains’ (Crwys-Williams 2010, 25).

In 1992 the new Slovenian Government deprived more than 25,000 persons (official holders of Yugoslav passports who came to Slovenia as economic immigrants) of their citizenship rights and erased them from the register of permanent residents of the Republic of Slovenia. They lost all social and political rights and were treated as illegal migrants vulnerable to detention and deportation (Zorn 2009). In the Baltic countries, too, the exclusion of the internal ‘others’ (the Russian ethnic minority) helped to construct seemingly ethnically homogeneous states.

Roma people, who are today the largest ethnic minority in Europe, have suffered severely during the last 20 years. There are nine to 12 million Roma people in the region, most of them in Romania (2.5 million). The figures are estimates and include people who have defined their ethnicity as Roma during national censuses and those who have not (mostly because of racism). Roma men have lost their jobs due to the closing down of heavy industry and their poor education. Additionally, they have lost the alternative sources of earning (e.g. collecting iron, plastic bottles, simple craft, music) and remained largely without income, dependent on social assistance money. Many Roma fled ethnic wars. In Kosovo, for instance, Roma villages were burnt after the war, as the local population deemed the Roma as Serb collaborators. Many of them became asylum seekers, illegal migrants and long-term homeless. Unemployment levels among Roma people in all countries of Eastern Europe are extremely high, currently ranging from 60–90%. Roma women are transgenerationally marginalised, living mostly in segregated settlements that they hardly leave. They are unemployed, sometimes illiterate, but receive welfare assistance if they have children. Regardless of whether they have small or large Roma populations, all Eastern European countries articulate from moderate to extreme nationalist rhetoric against Roma peoples, some ethnically motivated hate speech and violent attacks against Roma settlements (Vermeersch & Ram 2009). The ethnic hatred has been a product of a long history of exclusion in the pre-communist period, during communism (since Roma lacked long-term industrial employment, they were categorised into the lowest class among socialist citizens, and called the lumpen-proletariat) and continues today.

Economic crises and the neoliberal transformation of the national governments, made thousands of people migrate to Western countries to seek jobs and support those who stayed in their country of origins. In Albania (3.1 million population) a quarter of its population (mostly young men) left the country between 1990 and 2005 mostly to Greece and Italy (Ymeraj 2007). Thousands of women from Ukraine and Lithuania have become care workers and are today part of the phenomena known as ‘global motherhood’ (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003). They care for the family of the employer abroad while providing economic care for their families at home, especially their children. In Germany there are about 200,000 female care workers from Eastern Europe with more than 30,000 from Lithuania. In the Ukraine, some estimates show that in every third family at least one female member is a migrant worker abroad (Tolstokorova 2010).

Remittances from Eastern European emigrants have become either a crucial income source or the only family income which helps numerous families to survive. Only recently has the large-scale female migration become a governmental concern. In Lithuania, the mass media speaks about the immigration of large numbers of women while in the Ukraine social workers and other social service professionals speak about the ‘Italian syndrome’ (abandoned and lonely children but with monthly income from their mothers working mostly in Italy). Some creative responses by social workers were developed to support children who are left alone. For instance, Lithuania introduced temporary guardianship for grandparents who care for children of migrant workers (Malinauskas 2011). Not only relatives, but also friends, neighbours and school teachers provide some social parenthood for these children. Social parenthood has become a reality for a growing number of adults and children (Zaviršek 2009b).

Nevertheless, many researchers express concern that, in poorer Eastern European countries, the system of home care is entirely based on the unpaid care work of the family members, mostly women, who are today leaving home to seek paid care work abroad (Prochazkova & Schmid 2009). Older people who are left alone can neither afford to pay state-run nursing homes nor even more expensive private ones. In some countries social workers are involved in poorly paid community-based home assistance services for the elderly.

Social work and the needs of people living in Eastern Europe

Since the individual was subsumed by the collective, and social policy served the goals of the communist states, social work education has traditionally focused on the theories of collective social justice and equality. The consequence is that social work theories of economic and social justice and the universal social protection are still more represented than the theories of diversity, self-determination and the understanding of human rights from the universalist-particularist perspective. The key epistemological challenges are understanding of diversity, empowerment and the shift from formal participation towards the actual one.

The delivery of social assistance money to people who are unemployed, poor families, ethnic minorities, elders and persons with disabilities is the main part of social workers’ activities. In wealthier countries in the region with a wide range of long-established governmental institutions and community-based welfare services (day centres for people with multiple diagnoses, sheltered workshops, crises centres for children in need, family-helpers system, women refuges and the group homes for people with mental health problems and other disabilities) social workers provide placements to these institutions and organise payment contracts usually covered by local municipalities, the state and the person and his or her relatives. Most of the welfare facilities are located in the cities and people from rural areas hardly reach them or must send relatives far away from home to long-stay institutions. Since the economic crises after 2008 and radical cuts in social protection in national states by the international financial organisations, even more social work activities are focused on social transfer delivery, and fewer activities happen in the area of community development.

Many types of welfare organisations, styles of work and approaches have remained the same until the present, e.g. long-stay institutions for disabled people despite pilot projects on deinstitutionalisation; the denial of most legal and actual rights of children with intellectual disabilities; the non-existence of independent advocacy work especially for children; the denial of self-determination of service users; and absence of social action approaches in deprived communities. At the same time, many social work educators, students and social workers have been involved in the process of deinstitutionalisation (funded and often initiated by the Western donors), which most often got stuck half-way due to the lack of local governmental support and lack of adequate professional support for carers (Anghel 2011; Russell & Iarskaia-Smirnova 2013).

The local and international NGOs cover many different social work areas. Especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the south-east of Europe, social work innovations were only possible with the use of the international money (violence against women and support for victims of rape, the development of personal assistance projects and independent living of persons with severe disabilities, deinstitutionalisation initiatives especially for children, cooperatives for people with long-term mental health problems, support services for mothers with a child with impairments, counselling for stigmatised LGBT people, medical aid and counselling for people affected with HIV and AIDS, and projects against human trafficking). In Belarus, disability activists try to make the government sign the UN Convention of the Rights of People with Disabilities and a well-known organisation for the prevention of women’s slavery, La Strada, works across the borders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine against women’s and children’s trafficking.

Local and international NGOs usually work in Roma settlements, mostly organising different projects with children and sometimes doing women’s empowerment work. Children’s maltreatment and the early marriages of Roma girls as well as violence against Roma women are the areas which are avoided and silenced by social workers as much as by the general public. A small number of gojim (non-Roma) social workers have developed a strong relationship of trust with the Roma and there are innovative projects in Bulgaria and Romania, where international NGOs together with social work students and local people set up Roma cooperatives in their settlements.

The economic crises and the neoliberal governments across the region have today caused more poverty among the retired workers, single-headed households, the elderly, people with disabilities and elderly single women. The consequence is that the religious organisations and the staff without academic education started to offer ‘social work’ services. These organisations have become the only anchor for people in extreme poverty. It seems like two parallel processes exist in the region: on the one hand, the academisation of social work and on the other the growing number of organisations practising charitable activities that are replacing the state social work services and professional support. The revival of the religious social services can be observed across the entire region. Church power has been re-established ideologically and economically after states returned some (or even all, like in Slovenia) of its confiscated property from the times before communism. Despite the regained power of the religious institutions which suffered persecutions during the communist era, the religious authorities see themselves as the victims of the former political regime and in need of compensation for previous atrocities. With the increased neoliberalisation the state abandonment of people in need of social assistance money, housing and other forms of support, the church got involved in social welfare work by ‘serving the poor’ (religious kitchens, help for families with many children, the elderly, the disabled, individual counselling).

At the same time, the religious authorities became front-runners in morally driven debates and are together with the leading political parties responsible for the increased level of intolerance and violence across Eastern Europe. In November 2013 the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church prohibited the local NGO to open a shelter for homeless families in the capital city Tbilisi. The organisation called Identoba (‘Identitiy’) has become known for its liberal views on same-sex partnerships and the promotion of the equal rights of LGBT community members. Religious spokesmen publicly condemned members of the NGO, claiming that their progressive attitude towards sexuality was dangerous and would negatively influence the homeless children under their care. Identoba got hundreds of anonymous threats from people across the country, which eventually stopped them opening the first shelter for homeless people and families in the country (Robakidze 2013; D. Zaviršek, personal communication, 23 November 2013, Tbilisi). Between 2009 and 2012 the Catholic Church in Slovenia started a campaign against the government proposal of the new Family Act which was meant to disallow physical punishment of children by parents and carers, give more rights to children with intellectual disabilities, and equalise families of same-sex parents with heterosexual ones. The ideological church campaign followed by right wing supporters constructed gay people as dangerous paedophiles, who posed a threat not only to an individual child but to the health of the nation as a whole (Zaviršek & Sobočan 2012). The proposed Act was banned. Similarly in Croatia the Catholic Church and the right wing parties succeeded in preventing a national referendum on a similar matter in December 2013. Those who attended it were in fact the minority of the national voting pool, but most of them supported the religious claim, saying that the constitutional changes should clearly define the marriage as only possible between a man and a woman (Ugrešić 2014). All of these examples show that Eastern Europe remains the zone of sameness, where diversity and difference are seen to be a threat to the homogeneous.

Social work theories and social work schools don’t necessarily challenge such values. Social work is seen, rather, as a neutral profession which helps, assesses, transfers, evaluates, measures, but does not criticise the existing social order and, with rare exceptions, does not teach social work students to become critical of social inequalities and injustices.

Conclusions

Social work education as well as social work practice in the region is very diverse and varies from a descriptive normative transmitting of knowledge about welfare systems, legislation and formal social work tasks prescribed by the national ministries and the political parties in power to critical teaching of distributive and recognitional justice.

When social work teachers and professionals from the region want to contextualise their professional activities, they most often use an expression that they work and live in a society which is in a transition. The ‘transition’ has become a cover-word which can be translated in variety of ways: as the justification of the given situation of economic hardship, an excuse for poor practice and services, and as an expression of a fatalistic world-view where little can be changed. Eastern Europe and its social work teaching and practice seem to be in ‘transition’ for decades or at least for more than 20 years. Nevertheless, the recent social protests of students, social workers and the general public which started in 2012 and are spreading across many countries (Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Slovenia and Croatia) speak very loudly against the local elites as well as the neoliberal power-players and government cuts of social transfers and salaries, and are advocating for diversity and democratic changes in societies including at the universities. These social movements are today re-shaping the post-communist Eastern Europe countries as well as their social work educational institutions and welfare practices.

References