Social Integration and Multiculture in Life-World = Tasks for Social Welfare

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Globalization has brought with it both opportunities and challenges to every sectors of our society for transformative adaptation and accommodation of multicultural forces. Social welfare, as a key force of social safety-nets to ensure the sustainability of quality living for all members of a society, seeks intentionally to empower the poorer, the uprooted, and the marginal by mobilizing social mechanism, be it governmental or civic, as well as professional commitments to ensure equity and justice toward achieving an optimal level of social integration and social progress. The author first examine the significance of multicultural factors in advancing social integration and then addresses the role of social welfare profession in responding to the demands of globalization in terms of intercultural making for empathic civilization (Rifkin, 2009). Attempts are made here to demonstrate what social work actually does in life-world to advance social integration of multicultural forces at various levels of intervention over life=span and cross-borders. Case studies of Asian and American intermarriage are also made to illustrate differential stage aspects of social integration. In ending, several implications are drawn from the foregoing discussion for multicultual and transcultural works in education, research, policy and practice, for social welfare, and for interdisciplinary endeavors.