Social Work

Building on the successful 1st edition, this reader brings together some of the most
significant ideas that have informed social work practice over the last fifty years. At
the same time as presenting these foundational extracts, the book includes commen-
taries that allow the reader to understand the selected extracts on their own terms
as well as to be aware of their relations to each other and to the wider social work
context.
There is no settled view or easy consensus about what social work is and should be,
and the ideas reflected in this volume are themselves diverse and complex. The world
of social work has changed greatly over the last ten years, and this new edition reflects
that change with new material on the decolonisation of social work knowledges, the
greater emphasis on inter-disciplinarity and co-production and the new concern for
identities.
With an accessible introduction to contextualise the selections, the book is divided
into three main sections, each presenting key texts drawn from a wide range of per-
spectives: psychological, sociological, philosophical, educational and political, as well
as perspectives that are grounded in the experiences of practitioners and those who
use services, which have contributed to the development of:

• the profession of social work,

• knowledge and values for social work and
• practice in social work.

By providing students and practitioners with an easy way into reading first-hand some
of the most interesting, foundational texts of the subject, it will be required reading
for all undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and professionals undertaking
post-qualifying training.

Viviene E. Cree (PhD) is Professor Emerita of Social Work Studies at the University of
Edinburgh. She is the author of Sociology for Social Workers and Probation Officers,
editor of Becoming a Social Worker and co-author of Social Work: Voices from the
Inside, all published by Routledge.

Trish McCulloch (PhD) is Professor of Social Work and Senior Associate Dean in the
School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the University of Dundee. She has
published widely on justice, social work and, more recently, on social work education
and professional learning.
Student Social Work
https://www.routledge.com/Student-Social-Work/book-series/SSW

This exciting new textbook series is ideal for all students studying to be qualified social
workers, whether at undergraduate or masters level. Covering key elements of the
social work curriculum, the books are accessible, interactive and thought-provoking.

New titles

Human Growth and Development

An Introduction for Social Workers, 2nd Edition
John Sudbery and Andrew Whittaker

Counselling Skills for Social Workers

Hilda Loughran

Social Work and Integrated Care

Robin Miller

Communication and Interviewing Skills for Practice in Social Work, Counselling

and the Health Professions
Patricia Higham

Using Advocacy in Social Work Practice

A Guide for Students and Professionals
Peter Scourfield

Becoming a Social Worker, 3rd ed.

Viviene E. Cree

Mental Health Social Work in Context, 3rd ed.

Nick Gould

Social Work Practice with People with Dementia

Peter Scourfield

Social Work
A Reader, 2nd edition
Viviene E. Cree and Trish McCulloch
Social Work
A Reader

SECOND EDITION

Edited by Viviene E. Cree and

Trish McCulloch
Cover image: A Taste of DCA Red by Chloe Alexander, 2018 (© the artist,
courtesy of University of Dundee Museums)
Second edition published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Viviene E. Cree and Trish McCulloch;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Viviene E. Cree and Trish McCulloch to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2010
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-032-01455-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-01450-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-17869-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents

List of figures ix
List of table x
List of contributors xi
Acknowledgements xvii

1
Reading social work
TR ISH McCULLOCH AN D V I V IENE E . CREE

10

11

31

37

44
N I G E L PA RT O N

57
V I S H A N T H I E S E W PAU L A N D M A R K H E N R I C K S O N
vi Contents
7 Human rights practice: possibilities and pitfalls for developing
emancipatory social work 61
S A R A H C E M LY N

8 The impact of scandal and inquiries on social work and the personal
social services 68
R AY J O N E S

9 Social work in a risk society 74

ST EPHEN A. W EBB

10 Am I my brother’s keeper? 79
Z YG M U N T B AU M A N

11 Research from the underside 84

BOB HOLM A N

12 What is professional social work? 90

M A L C O L M PAY N E

13 The client speaks 94

M A RT I N DAV I E S

14 Service users and practitioners reunited: the key component for social
work reform 96
P E T E R B E R E S F O R D A N D S U Z Y C RO F T

PART II
Knowledge and Values for Social Work 103

Commentary Two 104

15 The sociological imagination 105

C. W R IGH T M ILLS

16 Reassessing attachment theory in child welfare 109

S U E W H I T E , M AT T H E W G I B S O N , DAV I D WA S T E L L A N D PAT R I C I A WA L S H

17 A critique of the adverse childhood experiences framework in

epidemiology and public health: uses and misuses 116
M I C H E L L E K E L LY- I RV I N G A N D C Y R I L L E D E L P I E R R E

18 Resilience: some conceptual considerations 122

M I C H A E L RU T T E R
 Contents vii
19 A critical understanding of social work by Paolo Freire 128
M A R I LY N N M O C H

20 There is an alternative: homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism 132

J OA N T RO N T O

21 The social model of disability 137

M I K E OLI V ER

22 The relevance of Nancy Fraser for transformative social work education 141
D O RO T H E E H Ö L S C H E R , V I V I E N N E B O Z A L E K A N D M E L G R AY

23 Feminism for the 99% 148

C I N Z I A A R RU Z Z A , T I T H I B H AT TAC H A RYA A N D N A N C Y F R A S E R

24 Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas 152

PAT R I C I A H I L L C O L L I N S

25 Learning to deliver LGBT+ aged care 159

T R ISH H A F FOR D -L ETC H F I E L D, A L FONSO PE Z Z E L L A , SA N DR A CON N E L L ,
M OJ C A U R E K , A N Ž E J U RČ E K , AG N E S H I G G I N S , B R I A N K E O G H ,
N I N A VA N D E VA A RT, I R M A R A B E L I N K , G E O RG E RO B O T H A M ,
E L I S A B U S , C H A R L O T T E B U I T E N K A M P A N D S A R A H L E W I S - B RO O K E

26 Towards practising social work law 165

S U Z Y B R AY E A N D M I C H A E L P R E S T O N - S H O O T

27 What are values and ethics? 170

C H R I S B E C K E T T, A N D R E W M AY N A R D A N D P E T E R J O R DA N

28 Green social work in theory and practice: a new environmental

paradigm for the profession 177
L E NA DOM I N E L L I

PART III
Practice in Social Work 183

Commentary Three 184

29 On the nature of practice 185

M ICH A EL W H A N

30 ‘Radical Social Work’ by Roy Bailey and Mike Brake: a classic text
revisited 190
S T E V E RO G OW S K I
viii Contents
31 The critical role of street level bureaucrats 194
M ICH A EL LI PSKY

32 Assessment in the twenty-first century 199

J U D I T H M I L N E R , S T E V E M Y E R S A N D PAT R I C K O ’ BY R N E

33 The significance of African-centered social work for social work practice 205
T R I C I A B E N T- G O O D L E Y, C O L I TA N I C H O L S FA I R FA X A N D
I R I S C A R LT O N - L A N E Y

34 Bridging the past and present to the future of crisis intervention and
crisis management 210
K E N N E T H R . Y E AG E R A N D A L B E RT R . RO B E RT S

35 The contemporary context of relationship-based practice 217

G I L L I A N RU C H

36 The ecological systems metaphor in Australasia 223

K I E R A N O’DONOGH U E A N D JA N E M A I DM E N T

37 The strengths perspective in social work practice: extensions and cautions 230
DEN N IS SA LEEBEY

38 Personalisation through participation: a new script for public services 236

C H A R L E S L E A D B E AT E R

39 Collaboration and partnership in context 240

COL I N W H I T T I NGTON

40 A review of Donald A. Schön’s, The Reflective Practitioner: How

Professionals Think in Action 247
M I C H A E L E M S L I E A N D RO B WAT T S

41 Making things new: distant voices and unbound at Vox Liminis with
Padraig O’Tuama 253
PA D R A I G O ’ T UA M A

Index 257
Figures

8.1 The blame tree 72

12.1 The three views of social work 91
27.1 Competing values 174
27.2 Competing values: the wider picture 175
28.1 The green social work model: a framework for practice 181
36.1 Ecomap of Matt’s current life 226
39.1 A continuum of service partnerships in social care and health 242
39.2 Organizational levels and areas of partnership and collaboration 243
39.3 A matrix of collaborative structures 243
Table

37.1 Comparison of Pathology and Strengths 231

Contributors

Cinzia Arruzza played a key role in Sinistra Critica in Italy before becoming Asso-
ciate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York.
Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. A social the-
orist, he wrote about modernity, postmodernity, the Holocaust and globalisation.
Chris Beckett is a qualified social worker who went on to teach in Anglia Ruskin
University in Cambridge and then at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He
is now a full-time writer.
Tricia Bent-Goodley is a Professor Emeritus at Howard University School of Social
Work and a Graduate Professor of Public Health in the Graduate School. Her
writing has focused on domestic violence, HIV, African American, mental health
and women.
Peter Beresford is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at Brunel University London
and was also the former Director of the Centre for Citizen Participation. His par-
ticular areas of focus are public, patient and service user involvement in policy and
practice.
Claudia Bernard is Professor of Social Work and Head of Postgraduate Research in
the Department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies at Goldsmiths,
University of London.
Tithi Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Stud-
ies at Purdue University. She specialises in Modern South Asian History and writes
on colonialism, nation and class formation, gender and the politics of Islamophobia.
Vivienne Bozalek is Emerita Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, at the Univer-
sity of the Western Cape. Her research and writing interests include teaching and
learning in higher education in South Africa, new technologies in education and
participatory learning.
Suzy Braye is Emerita Professor of Social Work at the University of Sussex where her
research has mainly been in the field of social work and the law, adult social care
provision and adult safeguarding.
Charlotte Buitenkamp is Project Co-ordinator at Stichting Nationaal Ouderenfonds
in the Netherlands.
xii Contributors
Elisa Bus is affiliated with Stichting Nationaal Ouderenfonds in the Netherlands.
Iris Carlton-LaNey is Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Her research interests include aging issues and African American social wel-
fare history.
Sarah Cemlyn is an honorary research fellow at the University of Bristol, specialising
in human rights, welfare, community development and social exclusion.
Patricia Hill Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology Emerita at
the University of Maryland. Her writing focuses on race, class and gender.
Sandra Connell is a Lecturer in Mental Health at Middlesex University.
Viviene E. Cree is Emerita Professor of Social Work at the University of Edinburgh,
currently involved in community action in rural Perthshire, as well as continuing
to write and research on the profession of social work.
Suzy Croft, until recently, worked as a senior social worker at St. John’s Palliative
Care Centre and Research Fellow at the Centre for Citizen Participation at Brunel
University.
Martin Davies is Emeritus Professor, School of Social Work at University of East
Anglia, and has published mainly on social work practice and social work research.
Cyrille Delpierre has been a research fellow within the EQUITY team at the Uni-
versity of Toulouse, France, since 2008. His areas of interest relate to the deter-
minants of health and to the analysis of the mechanisms of the genesis of social
inequalities in health, more particularly in the fields of HIV infection and cancer.
Lena Dominelli is Professor of Social Work at the University of Stirling. Her cur-
rent research interests include health pandemic, climate change, extreme weather
events and globalisation.
Michael Emslie is a Youth Work lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social
Studies, RMIT University, Australia where his research interests include how to
promote good practice in human service and, in particular, youth work.
Colita Nichols Fairfax has been a Professor at Norfolk State University for over
20 years. She describes herself as ‘a Social Justice African/African American Stud-
ies scholar who focuses on VIRGINIA!’
Iain Ferguson is Honorary Professor of Social Work and Social Policy at the Univer-
sity of the West of Scotland. His main areas of interest are neoliberalism and social
work.
Jan Fook is Professor, University Scholar and Chairperson in the Department of
Social Work, at the University of Vermont. She is widely recognised for her work
on critical social work, practice research and critical reflection.
Nancy Fraser is a philosopher, critical theorist, feminist and the Henry A. and Louise
Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Professor of Philosophy at The
New School in New York City.
Matthew Gibson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. His research
interests are related to emotions and professional practice.
 Contributors xiii
Mel Gray is Emeritus Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has
published on social work theory and is acknowledged as a pioneer culturally rele-
vant social work education, research and practice.
Trish Hafford-Letchfield is Professor and Head of School of Social Work and Social
Policy at Strathclyde University. A qualified nurse and social worker, her research
explores the experiences of ageing in marginalised communities and is mostly
co-produced with people with lived experience.
Mark Henrickson is Professor of Social Work at Massey University, Aotearoa/New
Zealand. He has published on HIV prevention, care delivery and programme
design and evaluation.
Agnes Higgins is Professor in mental health nursing at Trinity College Dublin.
Bob Holman (1936–2016) was a Christian academic, author and researcher who
became Professor of Social Administration at the University of Bath. He left uni-
versity to become a community activist at the Southdown estate in Bath and then
at Rogerfield and Easterhouse in Glasgow.
Dorothee Hölscher is a social work lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery &
Social Work at The University of Queensland and a research associate with the
Department of Social Work and Criminology at the University of Pretoria.
Richard Hugman is Emeritus Professor of Social Work in the School of Social Sciences
(SoSS) at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW, Australia. His recent
research includes developing new approaches in ethics for the caring professions
and virtue ethics in social work.
Ray Jones was director of social services in Wiltshire. He was the first chief executive
of the Social Care Institute for Excellence and is now Emeritus Professor of Social
Work at Kingston University and St. George’s, University of London.
Peter Jordan is a Lecturer in Social Work at the University of East Anglia. His main
research interests are in ethics in professional life and interprofessional working,
and in the ways that newly qualified workers manage their entry into the profession.
Anže Jurček is a teaching assistant and researcher in the Faculty of Social Work at
University of Ljubljana.
Michelle Kelly-Irving is director of research at the Inserm and leads the EQUITY
research team at CERPOP, France. She has specialised in the field of life course
epidemiology where her focus is on the mechanisms and processes involved in the
production of health inequalities across the life course.
Brian Keogh is Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity
College Dublin.
Charles Leadbeater is a British author, journalist and former political adviser. He
currently works with entrepreneurs, governments and foundations on system
innovation.
Sarah Lewis-Brooke is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Middlesex University.
Michael Lipsky is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy institution
based in New York.
xiv Contributors
Jane Maidment is Professor of Social Work at the University of Canterbury in Aotea-
roa/New Zealand. Her main areas of work have focused on practice education and
practice skills teaching and learning; ageing; using craft as a vehicle to promote
social connectedness well-being.
Andrew Maynard teaches social work at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. His
major writing has been about values and ethics.
Trish McCulloch is Professor and Social Work Lead in the School of Education and
Social Work at the University of Dundee. Her research and knowledge exchange
activity straddles criminal justice and professional learning and is grounded in
ideas of voice, co-production and social justice.
Charles Wright Mills, born 1916, was an American sociologist and Professor of Soci-
ology at Columbia University, New York from 1946 until his death in 1962.
Judith Milner is a solution-focused practitioner, trainer, consultant and writer. Pre-
viously a lecturer in social work, she now acts as an independent expert, therapist
and consultant in child protection, domestic violence and sex offender cases.
Marilynn Moch is a translator with the Department of Social Services in New York
City.
Steve Myers was formerly Director of Social Sciences at the University of Salford. His
research and writing focuses on solution-focused practice, child protection and the
profession of social work.
Patrick O’Byrne is Professor of Nursing at the University of Ottawa. His research
and clinical work as a nurse practitioner focus on the prevention, diagnosis and
treatment of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
Kieran O’Donoghue is Head of School of Social Work at Massey University in
Aotearoa/New Zealand. His research interests include social work theory and
practice, social work supervision and the social work profession.
Mike Oliver (1945–2019) was a sociologist, author and disability rights activist. He
was the first Professor of Disability Studies in the world, based at the University of
Greenwich, and was a key advocate of the social model of disability.
Padraig O’Tuama is an Irish poet, theologian and conflict mediator.
Nigel Parton is Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of Hudders-
field. His writing and research explores child welfare, child protection and social
work.
Malcolm Payne is Emeritus Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University. He has
written on social work theory, palliative care, end-of-life care and social care.
Alfonso Pezzella is a Lecturer in Mental Health at Middlesex University.
Michael Preston-Shoot is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bedfordshire. His
writing and research focus on social work law, groupwork, professional accounta-
bility in social care, self-neglect and adult safe-guarding.
Irma Rabelink is a Manager at Consortium Beroepsonderwijs in the Netherlands.
 Contributors xv
Albert R. Roberts (1944–2008) was a Rutgers University Professor who founded and
edited the journal Victims & Offenders. His work was influential across social
work, criminal justice and mental health theory and practice.
George Robotham was former Chair of Outhouse, LGBT Community Resource
Centre in Dublin.
Steve Rogowski is a qualified social worker and social work author. His work has
mainly been with children and families.
Gillian Ruch is Professor of Social Work in the Department of Social Work and Social
Care at the University of Sussex. She is best-known for her writing on relationships
in social work and psychosocial approaches.
Michael Rutter (1933–2021) was the first professor of child psychiatry in the UK,
based at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London and consultant psychi-
atrist at the Maudsley Hospital, London.
Dennis Saleebey (1936–2014) was an American academic who championed strength-
based practice during his long tenure at the University of Kansas.
Vishanthie Sewpaul is a Senior Professor at University of KwaZulu Nata, Durban,
South Africa and President of the Association of Schools of Social Work in Africa.
Her main interests lie in social work education, research and practice.
Joan Tronto is Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts at the Uni-
versity of Minnesota and was previously professor of women’s studies and political
science at City University of New York. Her main concerns are political theories,
gender and the ethic of care.
Mojca Urek is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at University of Ljubljana.
Nina Van de Vaart is a Program Manager at Careyn in the Netherlands.
Patricia Walsh has retired from the School of Social Work and Social Policy at Trinity
College Dublin after 25 years as a social work academic.
David Wastell is Emeritus Professor in Information Systems at Nottingham Univer-
sity Business School. His areas of expertise include neuroscience and social policy,
information systems and public sector reform, design and innovation in the public
services, and safe systems in child protection.
Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University, Australia, where he
teaches and writes about policy studies, politics, the history of ideas and applied
human rights.
Stephen A. Webb is Professor of Social Work and Assistant Vice Principal for Com-
munity and Public Engagement at Glasgow Caledonian University. His main areas
include critical theory, risk and inter-disciplinary social sciences.
Michael Whan, at the time of writing this article, was a social worker based at the
Watford Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic, London.
Sue White is Emeritus Professor of Social Work in the Department of Sociological
Studies at the University of Sheffield. She has researched and written on child
xvi Contributors
protection, on neuroscience and epigenetics in child and family welfare policy and
on socio-technical systems design.
Colin Whittington has provided independent consultancy and research since 2000
and now works part-time on selected projects. He was Visiting Professor at the
University of Greenwich from 2012 to 2021.
Charlotte Williams held leadership roles at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia,
before returning to Wales to become Honorary Professor in the School of History,
Philosophy and Social Sciences, Bangor University, Wales.
Kenneth R. Yeager is the Director of Quality and Operational Improvement for The
Ohio State University Harding Hospital, Administrative Director of The OSU
Harding Hospital Outpatient Psychiatric Clinics and Clinical Associate Professor
in the Department of Psychiatry, The Ohio State University.
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people who made this book possible: first, the team
at Routledge (including Claire Jarvis, who invited Viv to submit a proposal for a sec-
ond edition and Sully Evans who was responsible for arranging all permissions from
publishers); second, our colleagues, partners and students at the Universities of Edin-
burgh and Dundee for sharing their suggestions for chapters and their insight along
the way; third, the librarians at both universities (Caroline Stirling at The University
of Edinburgh and the Digitisation team at University of Dundee) for their technical
help in reproducing some of the extracts; and last but by no means least, the members
of the Social Work Society at the University of Birmingham for sharing their reading
list for decolonising the social work curriculum.

The editors and publishers would like to thank the following authors and publishers
for permissions to reprint their material:
Chapter 1: Bristol University Press for permission to reprint Charlotte Williams
and Claudia Bernard, Black History Month: a provocation and a timeline. In Critical
and Radical Social Work 6(3) pp.387–406 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1332/2049860
18X15421187371408.
Chapter 2: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Richard Hugman, But
is it social work? in British Journal of Social Work 39 pp.1138–53 (2009). https://doi.
org/10.1093/bjsw/bcm158.
Chapter 3: SAGE Publications for permission to reprint Iain Ferguson, The politics
of social work in M. Gray, J. Midgley and S. Webb (eds) The SAGE Handbook of
Social Work, pp.740–754 (2012). ISBN: 978–1849207515.
Chapter 4: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Nigel Parton, Changes
in the Form of Knowledge in Social Work: From the ‘Social’ to the ‘Informational’? in
British Journal of Social Work, 38 (2): 253–69 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/
bcl337.
Chapter 5: Taylor &Francis for permission to reprint Mel Gray and Jan Fook, The
quest for a universal social work in Social Work Education 23(5): 625–44. (2004)
DOI: 10.1080/0261547042000252334.
Chapter 6: SAGE Journals for permission to reprint Vishanthie Sewpaul and Mark
Henrickson, The (r)evolution and decolonization of social work ethics: The Global
Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles. in International Social Work 62(6):
1469–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872819846238.
xviii Acknowledgements
Chapter 7: Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint Sara Cemlyn, Human rights
practice: possibilities and pitfalls for developing emancipatory social work, in Ethics
and Social Welfare 2(3) pp. 222–42. (2007). DOI: 10.1080/17496530802481714.
Chapter 8: Bristol University Press for permission to reprint Ray Jones, The impact
of scandal and inquiries on social work and the personal social services, in T. Bamford
and K. Bilton (eds) Social Work: Past, Present and Future pp.191–212 (2020). ISBN
978-1447356547.
Chapter 9: Palgrave/Macmillan for permission to reprint Stephen A. Webb, Social
work in a risk society: social and political perspectives. pp.1–22. (2006). ISBN:
9780333963616.
Chapter 10: Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint Zygmunt Bauman, Am I my
brother’s keeper? In European Journal of Social Work 3 (1) pp.5–11 (2000). https://
doi.org/10.1080/714052807.
Chapter 11: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Bob Holman,
Research from the Underside in British Journal of Social Work 17 pp.669–83 (1987).
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a055390.
Chapter 12: Bristol University Press for permission to reprint Malcolm Payne,
What is professional social work? Revised 2nd edition, pp.12–16 and p.21 (2006).
ISBN 978-1861347046.
Chapter 13: Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint Martin Davies, The Client
Speaks, in Practice. Social Work in Action 24(5) pp.341–42 (2012). https://doi.org/
10.1080/09503153.2012.725982.
Chapter 14: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Peter Beresford and
Suzy Croft, Service users and practitioners reunited: the key component for social
work reform in The British Journal of Social Work 34(1) pp.53–68 (2004). https://
doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bch005.
Chapter 15: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint C. Wright Mills, The
Sociological Imagination, pp.5–7 and 8–11. (1959) LC Class: H61.M5 2000.
Chapter 16: Bristol University Press for permission to reprint Sue White, Matthew
Gibson, David Wastell and Patricia Walsh, Reassessing Attachment Theory in Child
Welfare pp.1–21 (2020). ISBN 978-1447336921.
Chapter 17: Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint Michelle Kelly-
Irving and Cyrille Delpierre, A critique of the adverse childhood experiences frame-
work in epidemiology and public health: Uses and misuses, in Social Policy and
Society 18(3) pp. 445–56 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746419000101.
Chapter 18: Elsevier Publications for permission to reprint Michael Rutter, Resil-
ience: Some conceptual considerations in Journal of Adolescent Health 34 pp. 626–
31 (1993). ISSN 1054-139X.
Chapter 19: Penguin Books for permission to reprint Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the
oppressed. pp.49; 54–56; 71–81 (1972).
Chapter 20: Bristol University Press for permission to reprint Joan Tronto, There is
an alternative: homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism. International Journal
of Care and Caring 1(1) pp.27–43 (2017). DOI: 10.1332/239788217X14866281687
583.
Chapter 21: Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint Mike Oliver, ‘The social
model of disability: thirty years on.’ Disability & Society 28(7) pp.1024–26 (2013)
DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2013.818773.
 Acknowledgements xix
Chapter 22: Routledge for permission to reprint Dorothee Hölscher, Vivienne
Bozalek and Mel Gray, The relevance of Nancy Fraser for transformative social
work education. In Morley, C., Ablett, P., Noble, S. and Cowden, S. (eds) The Rou-
tledge Handbook of Critical Pedagogies for Social Work, pp.245–59 (2020) ISBN
9781032175386.
Chapter 23: Verso Books for permission to reprint Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhat-
tacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Postface. In Feminism for the 99%, pp.60–85 (2019).
ISBN 9781788734424.
Chapter 24: Annual Reviews for permission to reprint Patricia Hill Collins, Inter-
sectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology 41 pp.1–20. (2015).
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.
Chapter 25: Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint Trish Hafford
Letchfield et al, Learning to deliver LGBT+ aged care. Exploring and documenting best
practices in professional and vocational education through the World Café method.
Ageing & Society pp.10–15 and 19–20. (2021) DOI: 10.1017/S0144686X21000611.
Chapter 26: Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint Suzy Braye and Michael
Preston-Shoot, Towards practising social work law. In Practising social work law, 4th
edition, pp.1–25 (2016). ISBN 978-1137560292.
Chapter 27: SAGE Publications for permission to reprint Chris Beckett, Andrew
Maynard and Peter Jordan What are values and ethics? In Values and ethics in social
work, 3rd edition, pp.3–18 (2017). ISBN: 9781473974814.
Chapter 28: Routledge for permission to reprint Lena Dominelli, Green social
work in theory and practice. In Lena Dominelli, Bala Raju Nikku and Hok Bun
Ku (eds) The Routledge handbook of green social work pp.9–20 (2018). https://doi.
org/10.4324/9781315183213.
Chapter 29: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Michael Whan, On
the nature of practice. In The British Journal of Social Work 16(2), pp.243–50 (1986).
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a055193.
Chapter 30: Edward Arnold Publishers for permission to reprint Roy Bailey and
Mike Brake, Contributions to a radical practice in social work. In Radical social
work and practice, pp.7–24. ISBN: 9780713162806.
Chapter 31: Russell Sage Foundation for permission to reprint Michael Lipsky, The
critical role of street-level bureaucrats. In Street-level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the
individual in public services, pp.3–5; 6–8; 9–12 (1980). ISBN: 9780871545442.
Chapter 32: Red Globe, Macmillan Publishers for permission to reprint Judith
Milner, Steve Myers and Patrick O’Byrne, Assessment in the 21st century. In Assess-
ment in social work, 5th edition, pp.1–18. (2020). ISBN: 978-1352009415.
Chapter 33: Brooks/Cole Publishers for permission to reprint Gerard Egan, The
communication skills of therapeutic dialogue. In The skilled helper. a problem-­
management and opportunity-development approach to helping, 9th edition,
pp.131–150 (2010). ISBN: 9780495601890.
Chapter 34: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Kenneth Yeager and
Albert R. Roberts, Bridging the past and present to the future of crisis intervention
and crisis management. In Crisis intervention handbook: assessment, treatment, and
research, 4th edition, pp.12–15 and 19–25 (2015). ISBN: 978-0190201050.
Chapter 35: Jessica Kingsley Publishers for permission to reprint Gillian Ruch, The
contemporary context of relationship-based practice. In Relationship-based social
xx Acknowledgements
work: getting to the heart of practice, 2nd edition (eds) Gillian Ruch, Danielle Turney
and Adrian Ward, pp.25–35 (2018). ISBN: 978-1785922534.
Chapter 36: Jessica Kingsley Publishers for permission to reprint Kieran
O’Donoghue and Jane Maidment, The ecological systems metaphor in Australasia. In
Mary Nash, Robyn Munford and Kieran O’Donoghue (eds) Social work theories in
action, pp.39–45 (2005). ISBN 978-1843102496.
Chapter 37: Oxford University Press for permission to reprint Dennis Saleebey, The
strengths perspective in social work practice: extensions and cautions. In Social Work
41(3) pp.297–304. (1996) https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/41.3.296.
Chapter 38: Demos for permission to reprint Charles Leadbeater, Personalisa-
tion through participation. A new script for public services. London: Demos (2004)
pp. 15–26. ISBN: 978-1841801223.
Chapter 39: Jessica Kingsley Publishers for permission to reprint Colin Whitting-
ton, Collaboration and partnership in context. In Jenny Weinstein, Colin Whittington
and Tony Leiba (eds) Collaboration in social work practice, London: Jessica Kingsley
Publisher pp.15–38. (2003). ISBN: 978-1843100928.
Chapter 40: Basic Books for permission to reprint Donald A. Schön, The reflective
practitioner. How professionals think in action, Basic Books, pp. 311–14; 320–23;
339–47 (1992, 2008). ISBN: 9780465068784.
Chapter 41: Vox Liminis for permission to reprint Distant Voices and Unbound at
Vox Liminis, with Padraig O’Tuama, Making things new. https://www.voxliminis.
co.uk/Accessed 3 January 2023.
Introduction
Reading social work
Trish McCulloch and Viviene E. Cree

In this introduction, we outline the rationale, context and structure of this book,
which brings together a selection of key readings in social work across three sections:
The Profession of Social Work; Knowledge and Values for Social Work; and Practice
in Social Work. We begin by tracing the open, diverse and complex nature of social
work as a profession and academic discipline, and the implications of this for reading
and doing social work today. From here, we consider the rapidly changing contexts
in which social work is situated, as well as the destabilising and transforming effects
of recent social, political, economic, technological and environmental changes and
crises. We conclude with some reflexive observations about the opportunities and
challenges facing social work in the future.

Introducing social work

Social work is recognised globally as:

a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social

change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation
of people. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and
respect for diversities are central. …Underpinned by theories of social work,
social sciences, humanities and indigenous knowledges, social work engages peo-
ple and structures to address life challenges and enhance wellbeing (International
Federation of Social Workers, 2014).

Behind this important consensus is a practice, profession and academic discipline

characterised by open-endedness, diversity, complexity and conflict.
In part, social work’s open and diverse identity reflects the fact that it works with
people across the lifespan, with different social groups and communities, and across an
increasing number of contexts, countries and cultures (Baines et al, 2019; Longhofer
and Floersch, 2012). For example, it is reasonable to expect that social work with
children and families in the UK child protection system will look different from and
involve a different knowledge and skill set than, for example, that required to provide
practical help and assistance to individuals and communities responding to ecological
disaster in Haiti. Equally, social work is known to occupy a sometimes-ambiguous
position in terms of its service to the individual, society and state, a positionality that
often gives rise to questions and moral conflicts regarding whose interests, needs and
rights should take precedence in any given situation (Whan, 1986). Further, many

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-1
2 Trish McCulloch and Viviene E. Cree
observe that social work’s emphasis on understanding people, their experiences,
needs, rights and responsibilities ‘in context’, rather than in the detached and often
flat realm of theory, only adds to this indeterminacy; as does its emphasis, sometimes,
on relational, participatory and reflexive modes of practice. As Parton (1988) notes,
it is this insistence on social work as a fluid, dialogic and generative practice that has
been seen by some to undermine its claim to being a proper professional and intel-
lectual pursuit, that is, one able to point to its own bounded knowledge base and
research traditions. Relatedly, social work frequently finds itself subject to debate as
to whether it is principally a moral-practical activity, guided and governed by moral,
ethical and practical values, or a technical-rational one, governed by the systematic
application of science, reason and rational analysis (Webb, 2001).
Our view is that social work is rarely one thing, nor is it best served by attempts
to represent and reproduce it along binary and bounded lines (Flyvbjerg, 2006;
Collins, 2015). A foundational strength of social work is its commitment to working
‘with’ and ‘alongside’ people and communities rather than on them, an approach that
requires the construction of open, mutual and participatory relationships, where all
members are listening, learning and acting together. In this endeavour, knowledge
and practice must also be co-constructed, challenging conventional notions of profes-
sional knowledge and practice as an abstract or bounded enterprise (Gray, Holscher
and Bozalek, 2020). As Sheppard (2006) notes, far from being an intellectually light
or technical process, this kind of wisdom and practice requires a constant interplay
between enquiry, knowledge, values and action.
This Reader embraces social work on precisely these terms, as a practical, plural,
moral and intellectual endeavour. It recognises that social work is, at its heart, a
practical activity, that is, our capacity to know about social work, and how it works
best in any given situation, is made meaningful through the doing of social work and
through a constant interaction of the two, including through collaborative action,
learning and dialogue between practitioners, people who use social work services
and others (Beresford and Croft, 2004). Relatedly, it recognises social work as a thor-
oughly interdisciplinary discipline and practice, that is, one that draws upon a diverse
and developing body of knowledge as is relevant to its work with individuals, groups,
communities, societies and states, across countries, cultures and contexts. At the
same time, we recognise that social work’s open and fluid form can be challenging for
new readers and practitioners, and for those not so new, particularly as we navigate
post-modern territories of rising inequalities, risk, crisis and uncertainty (McGregor,
2019). Accepting these tensions, we do not promise here a definitive or complete
guide to social work; nor does this Reader offer a ‘how to’ of professional practice.
Rather, in this Reader, we invite you to enter the stimulating and challenging world
of social work through an edited collection of classic, key and contemporary writings.
Together, they demonstrate the breadth, ambition and restlessness of a profession that
refuses to give up on the notion that, together, we can change our world for good.

Aims of this book

Building on the internationally successful first edition published in 2011, this Reader
brings together some of the most important ideas, topics and perspectives that con-
tinue to shape social work as a modern and dynamic global phenomenon. Our aim
in doing so is to provide new and not so new social work students, practitioners,
 Introduction: Reading social work 3
academics and partners with a rigorous introduction to what we consider to be some
of social work’s key ideas and writings. More than that, we hope that this Reader,
and the ideas and provocations within it, will both whet and nurture our appetite for
a life-long approach to social work practice as an interplay of thinking, learning and
doing.
In the above respects, there are important continuities between the first and sec-
ond editions of the Reader. In this second edition, we continue to give place to social
work’s classic texts, including the seminal work of C. Wright Mills, Mayer and
Timms, Paolo Freire and Brake and Bailey, for example. We want readers to discover
some of the foundational writing that have had such an influence on social work ideas
and practice over the years and to consider the significance of these works today. We
also give continued coverage to what we consider to be social work’s core topics,
although the reader will note that our selections here are almost entirely updated,
reflecting the dynamic nature of social work knowledge and practice and the impor-
tance of making room for new and diverse perspectives on a given topic. This second
edition also introduces some new topics, including identity, care, politics, justice and
intersectionality, for example, reflecting the important contributions and questions
arising from theory and practice in these areas and the naturally shifting tides of what
is important in any given time and space. This edition also seeks to include different
voices and perspectives, reflecting the value of diverse contributions and our individ-
ual and collective duty to both interrupt and undo social work’s continued colonising
structures and tendencies (Kleibl et al., 2020).
As with any collection of this nature, there are, of course, gaps and omissions.
Some of these reflect the limits of any collection. Others reflect the fact that the
­documented world of social work ideas, knowledge and theory continues to be dom-
inated by white, able-bodied, cisgender, middle-class men and women located in the
minority world. As we note across this edition, we continue to grapple with these
challenges while taking up our mutual responsibilities for change. Acknowledging
these ­limitations, we stand by our aim to provide the reader with a compelling and
stimulating introduction to some of the most important ideas, perspectives and writ-
ing shaping social work theory and practice today. More than this, we hope to pro-
vide the reader with a foundation from which they can move confidently and humbly
through the diverse and demanding worlds of social work. In doing so, we invite you
the reader to co-construct a wider, richer and more practical body of knowledge from
which to act.

Context, crises and change

Before we proceed to set out the structure and contents of this book, let us take a
moment to consider the important contexts in which this second edition was produced.
For many, the last decade has been characterised by crisis: of democracy and the
economy, of the climate and poverty, in international relations and national iden-
tity, and of privacy and technology (Fraser, 2019; Beckett, 2019). Social, economic,
political and religious conflicts have raged across much of the world, including in
Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Ukraine and some African countries. This has led
to mass dislocation and movement of large numbers of displaced people across the
world, contributing to loss of life, extreme poverty, the erosion of national borders
and polarising debates regarding the erection of new ones. In the same period, we
4 Trish McCulloch and Viviene E. Cree
have witnessed the rapid expansion of unrestricted market economies, while many
countries and citizens continue to navigate the impacts of the global financial crises
these markets have helped create (Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2019). Further,
these crises have disproportionately affected the most vulnerable citizens and commu-
nities, widened inequalities and given rise to political policies of acute austerity across
much of Europe (Ferguson, Ioakimidis and Lavalette, 2018). Meanwhile, the threat
and effects of climate change have become tangible for citizens across the world, as
a catalogue of natural disasters including typhoons, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods,
volcanic eruptions and wildfires have shaken nations and communities, with the
promise of more to come.
At the same time, the above crises have given rise to powerful new social move-
ments on a scale not seen since the 1960s, accelerated and amplified by significant
advances in digital technologies and associated processes of globalisation. Examples
include: the rise of #Me Too in 2006, the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the
activism of Malala Yousafzai, the BlackLivesMatter movement of 2013, the interna-
tional feminist strikes of 2017 and 2018, the Orange Tide (Marea Narania) movement
in Spain and sustained global activism on issues of climate change (Dominelli, 2018).
While each of these movements has its own unique origins, each centres on issues of
inequality and social justice and has emphasised the power of the people instead of
the elite. As Beckett (2019) notes, they also bear the marks of an ‘impatient millenar-
ian quality’, that is, an expectation that momentous change is not only possible but
necessary and close at hand. This is a notable departure from, and powerful challenge
to, the liberal politics of change that have dominated across the minority world in
recent decades, which have mostly sought to effect change through centralised and
top down mechanisms and through modest and incremental means. As Arruzza et al.
(2019:4) observe, linking recent crises and movements to neoliberal capitalism, ‘the
contrast between these two visions of change could not be starker and has raised the
stakes for every social struggle’.
While these changes have unfolded, we have also experienced the local and global
impacts of the BlackLivesMatter movement. The killing of African-American George
Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020 led to protests against police
brutality and racism across the world, re-energising anti-racist movements and
impacting greatly on all our social, cultural, political and professional lives. The UK,
for example, has seen protests across the country about the slave-trade and its reper-
cussions; about racism in the media, sport and public services; and about the unfair
treatment of the so-called ‘Windrush generation’, to note just a few examples. There is
also a drive to ‘decolonise the curriculum’, across education broadly and social work
specifically, with renewed attention to ideas including ‘unconscious bias’, ‘power’,
‘privilege’ and ‘the global majority’, as well as associated critiques of Eurocentrism
and ‘Western’ values (Kleib, et al., 2020).
The book was also written under the enduring effects of the worldwide pandemic,
Covid-19. The World Health Organisation first reported cases of coronavirus in
Wuhan City, China, at the end of 2019, and by the end of January 2020, had declared
a global health emergency. Across the UK and much of Europe, the first so-called
lockdown in April that year involved the nationwide closure of schools, pubs, res-
taurants and gyms; a requirement to work from home and permission to leave home
only to buy essential food supplies and engage in daily exercise. Further lockdowns
of differing severity followed across Europe and internationally, as a vaccination
 Introduction: Reading social work 5
programme sought to contain the worst effects of the virus. At the time of writing,
Covid-19 continues to present a significant threat to lives, freedoms and well-being
and is contributing to sustained social and economic unrest, fear and uncertainty.
While the pandemic has underlined that all are affected by global change and cri-
ses, it has also made clear that some – the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in
societies – are affected more than others. As Whitehead, Taylor-Robinson and Barr
(2021) observe:

Covid-19 does not strike at random—mortality is much higher in elderly people,

poorer groups, and ethnic minorities, and its economic effect is also unevenly dis-
tributed across the population. The economic fallout is likely to be felt for years.
Without concerted preventive action worse off families and communities will be
disproportionately affected, increasing health inequalities in the UK and globally.

These contexts of change, crises and movements have greatly affected our approach to
constructing this second edition. While change is a familiar and even constant back-
drop for social work, the changes we are living through have been described as hav-
ing both a destabilising and transforming quality to them (McGregor, 2019; Fraser,
2019). Certainly, what and how we know about social work today is increasingly
being called into question, and what social work might be remains, we hope, ‘in the
making’ (Chilvers and Keanes, 2019). This destabilising space has created challenges
for us as editors. On the one hand, we have relished the opportunity to select from
and showcase the breadth, depth and contribution of social work as a local and global
profession, practice and discipline that many observe has ‘come of age’ in the last
30 years or so (Gray, Midgley and Webb, 2012). On the other, our celebration of
social work on these terms is tempered by our recognition of the enduring dominance
of a minority world view on developing accounts of social work knowledge and prac-
tice; of a sustained privileging, across the minority world at least, of regulatory and
ameliorative modes practice, and of our failure, to date, to meaningfully develop
social work’s identity as a genuinely co-productive discipline and practice (Ferguson
et al., 2018; Morley et al., 2020). Our essential dilemma has been how to represent
these dualities in a Reader that set out to bring together the brightest and best from
social work’s developing story. This is a square that cannot be circled; the onus is on
each of us, together, to bring about the changes we want to see.

Looking forward
Intersecting forces of globalisation; technological transformations; neoliberal capital-
ism; social, economic, political and ecological crises and associated movements for
change are contributing to a breaking down of what was and a remaking of what will
be (Fraser, 2019). How social work will evolve and emerge from these (r)evolutions
is yet to become clear. Most likely, social work will continue to find itself pushed and
pulled between what Beresford and Croft (2004) refer to as regulatory and liberatory
forms, albeit to differing degrees across countries, cultures and contexts (McGregor,
2019). Importantly, it is becoming increasingly clear that social work’s potential in
this destabilised and transforming space lies less in its capacity to resolve its innate
differences and dilemmas, and more in its capacity to recognise, embrace and act ethi-
cally within them (Bauman, 2000; Gallardo, 2014). As several chapters in this edition
6 Trish McCulloch and Viviene E. Cree
make clear, social work is, at its best, an ‘and/ both’ endeavour. It is both a local and
a global practice (Gray and Fook, 2004); it must combine care, help and protection
at the level of the individual and work to redress the social and structural factors that
give rise to individual-level-social problems (Ferguson et al., 2018); it must find ways
of working with and within the system and fight for change of the system (Lipsky,
1980). Perhaps most critically, it must forge new forms of practice (and professional-
ism) that enable it to form alliances with rather than boundaries between itself and
the people it exists to serve.

Structure and contents

The Reader is structured across three sections. The first section introduces the reader
to key texts which are important in understanding social work as a developing pro-
fession. The second section presents a range of source material which introduces some
of the central knowledge and ideas in social work. Some of the selected extracts are
by sociologists, educationalists and political theorists who have made a significant
contribution to social work’s developing knowledge and value base. Others are writ-
ten by social work academics and practitioners. The final section of the book presents
excerpts related to practice, acknowledging from the outset that the division between
theory and practice is inevitably a false one, since each works together to make social
work theory and practice meaningful.
Some texts are short extracts, others longer, depending on the nature of the subject
being presented. In two instances, an article is republished in full. A brief commen-
tary introduces each of the three sections, providing an overview so that readers may
understand better the nature of the different texts in relation to one another and in
relation to the wider social work context. In addition, each text is prefaced by a short
introduction, and concludes with recommendations for further reading.
We hope that all our readers will take something new from this collection; it is our
privilege to share it with you.

References
Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T. and Fraser, N. (2019) Feminism for the 99%: A manifesto.
London: Verso.
Beckett, A. (2019) The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved
nothing. The Guardian, 17.12.19. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/
society/2019/dec /17/decade-of-perpetual- crisis-2010s-disrupted-every thing-but-
resolved-nothing. Accessed 30 November 2021
Baines, D., Bennett, B., Goodwin, S. and Rawsthorne, M. (2019) Working Across Difference:
Social Work, Social Policy and Social Justice. London: Bloomsbury.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Am I my brother’s keeper? European Journal of Social Work 3 (1), 2000:
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for social work reform, The British Journal of Social Work, 34(1) pp. 53–68, https://doi.
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Chilvers, J. and Kearnes, M. (2020) Remaking participation in science and democracy. Sci-
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41(1) pp. 1–20.
 Introduction: Reading social work 7
Dominelli, L. (2018) Green Social Work in theory and practice. In L. Dominelli, B. R. Nikku
and H. B. Ku (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Green Social Work. London: Routledge
pp.3–18.
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tions, Social Work Education, 23(5) pp. 625–644 DOI: 10.1080/0261547042000252334
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Part I

The Profession of Social Work

Commentary One

The extracts in Part 1 demonstrate, above all, the contested and complex nature
of social work. Not only is this the reality today (both across and within countries
around the world), but it has been the case ever since social work emerged in the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century in the global North as a response to industrialisation
and urbanisation. Understanding social work’s identity and purpose becomes even
more problematic when we waken up to the fact that social work has been implicated
in processes of colonisation, often showing disregard for indigenous cultures and
patterns of living.
With this in mind, we begin the Reader with a chapter called ‘Provocation’, which
takes head-on the absence of black perspectives in social work history and more
broadly, in social work discourse. Unusually for a Reader, this article is repeated in
its entirety, because of its importance in rebalancing what has been a fundamental
inequity in the literature to date. This then leads us into three chapters which explore
the big questions about social work history, social work as a profession, and social
work as it is practised today. Chapters five to seven explore similar themes, but with
particular focus on ‘universal’ social work (is such a term ever viable?), global eth-
ics, and human rights. Chapters eight and nine examine social work in more detail,
through the lenses of scandal and risk, both of which have played a huge part in
framing policy and practice in different settings. Our response must, as all the con-
tributors to this book affirm, be moral, ethical, and led by the ideas, experience and
knowledge of those who use social work services, as chapters ten to fourteen explore
in different ways.

Key questions

What should professional social work look like?

Does it make sense to talk about global social work?
Who speaks for social work today?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-3
1 Black history month
A provocation and a timeline
Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard

Our choice of text to introduce the history of social work is, as its title suggests, ‘a
provocation’. Along with the authors of this important article, we have opted to step
outside the familiar social work history narratives, which focus on the stories of the
poor laws and the development of the welfare state, the role of ‘friendly visitors’
and the Charity Organisation Society and the importance of university settlements
as sites of student learning and community activism. Instead, we have chosen to
share with readers an account which has, to a large extent, been ignored in histo-
ries of social work, that is, the history of social work and social work education’s
‘engagement with black lives and black communities’ (p.391). In a carefully crafted
and detailed timeline, Williams and Bernard present this untold story, which we are
re-presenting in full. We urge readers to also think about what other untold stories
exist within social work’s past. The Further Reading includes references to some of
the more familiar social work history texts.
From: Critical and Radical Social Work 6(3): 387–406 (2018).

Introduction
Amid the confusion and contradictions of the so-called post-race era, it might be
apposite to take a moment to pause and take stock, to consider and to consolidate our
gains as a collective, and to open up critical conversations about race and racism in
social work education. We utilise the Black History Month moment to launch such a
project. Our endeavour is to provide a short provocation and an artefact to stimulate
thinking about what Gail Lewis (2000: 206) has called ‘moments in racial time’ and
their associated dominant thinking. The aim is to highlight watershed moments of the
black experience that have contributed to changes in the ideological, political, legal
and social contexts of social work education and practice.
Interest in collecting social work histories has gathered pace, with collections held
by the Social Work History Network (Edinburgh University)1 and accounts by Pierson
(2011) and Payne (2006) perhaps being the most well known. Few accounts exist that
specifically track the history of social work and social work education for engagement
with black lives and with black communities, though there exists a considerable body
of literature from which this history can be gleaned (among others, Penketh, 2002;
Tomlinson and Trew, 2002; Bhavnani et al, 2005; Lavalette and Penketh, 2014).
Here, we adopt a novel approach in setting out a timeline through a black British
history that charts significant events, key moments, landmarks and publications, and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-4
12 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
legislative and policy turns that have relevance to the overall story of social work and
social work education in the UK.
Timelines are a useful way of presenting historical material in a succinct and
sequential fashion. Such chronologies allow us to recognise patterns and associa-
tions between events, and consider the ways in which trends appear, recede and often
reappear. It is possible to use such formats to understand change, recurring events,
causes and effects in policy and practice turns, and to open up discussions about what
is reported and recorded and what is omitted in dominant accounts. Here, you can
picture or see time and cast an interpretive lens on key developments. They are, how-
ever, inevitably limited, and while they provide a useful secondary source to under-
stand history, they are but prompts to the deeper exploration of context, analysis and
interpretation.
We offer this artefact in that spirit. We are asking a lot of any reader – perhaps in
the same way that Peggy MacIntosh’s (1988) ‘knapsack’ of unearned privilege belies
a broader and deeper exploration of whiteness than the 50 statements of her artefact.
This is an artwork, a synopsis that will not satisfy, an unfinished project offered as
a convenient meme on which others can build and departures can be made, and the
basis for critical debate about the nature and direction of knowledge in this field.
In building the methodology to underpin this project, we have sought to represent
the UK as a whole, considering all its constituent sub-national countries; we have used
the term ‘black’ to reflect its predominant use in social work as referring to black,
Asian and mixed-race communities. We have established a date range (1940–2018)
that reflects as a starting point post-war mass migration and early published literature
guiding social work practice with ‘immigrants’ or ‘the coloured population’. Against
the broader backdrop of British race relations, we have selected what we consider key
moments that mark in some way the nature and direction of the debates and, in paral-
lel, key texts within or about social work that illustrate the orientation. The citations
are not comprehensive, but serve to epitomise the predominant thinking of the time
and the social work trajectory. Needless to say, key thinkers from the broader social
sciences shaped social work knowledge. Names such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Les
Back, John Solomos, Bhikhu Parekh and many others underpin this history. As a
definition of social work, we have used the dominant orchestrating representation of
the profession as portrayed in the disciplinary literature, but recognising Burnham’s
(2011) steer, we have attempted to include ‘alternative views’ in the evolution of social
work historiography. Each entry has been triangulated to enhance accuracy and the
sources are provided in the references. We acknowledge that all of these elements are
contested territory and we also acknowledge that all history is necessarily selective
and inevitably a construction of the moment – but that is exactly our point.
As can be seen from this timeline, social work has long engaged with issues of
racial difference and racism, from ‘the problem of the brown babies’ in the 1940s to
‘the migration crisis’ of the 2000s. The framing of such issues and the predominant
approach to them, however, has changed across time. The timeline records shifts in
the policy and practice focus, from the post-war period of assimilation based on a
viewing of black lives and experiences as pathological or deficit, through a period
of acknowledgement of multicultural diversity in the 1970s and the engagement of
the local state in responding to the challenge, to the highly politicised era of anti-­
racism in the 1980s and 1990s. In the late 20th century, social work education came
under attack for being ‘progressive’ and overly concerned with ‘political correctness’,
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 13
in particular, for being too narrowly focused on anti-racism and black perspectives
(Patel, 2002; Penketh, 2002). The 21st century has seen a notable shift in the lan-
guage and framings of race and anti-racism (Lavalette and Penketh, 2014). In the
current neoliberal context, a neo-assimilationalist language of diversity and dif-
ference has emerged, largely replacing the discourse of anti-racism with the atten-
dant hostile political discourse and conditionalities in relation to migrants, refugees
and a­ sylum-seekers, as well as a growing Islamaphobia. In this moment, black and
minority ethnic populations fade into the morass of ‘super-diversity’ characterised
by complex intersections of difference, reflecting the colour-blindness and assumed
meritocracy of the post-race era. In the rush to capture complexity, the past and its
consequences have disappeared from view, race and racism have become unsayable
and culture has disappeared as a predominant explanatory frame. As national bound-
aries concede to global connectivity, both virtual and physical, the domestic arena
struggles to maintain a parameter on the management of diversity.
Our provocation lies at the heart of this contemporary ambivalence with ‘race’ and
asks questions about the exemplar text(s) and intellectual endeavour that will capture
how we educate for such contingency, chance and change. In this ‘trans-national’ yet
‘nationalist’ turn – in this age of complex migration and diverse racial demographics –
what might emerge as the dominant orientation to how we prepare social workers
for a sophisticated response? The challenge for contemporary scholars is to shift the
paradigm, to push forward thinking and to re-engage with this historical context and
its relevance in formulating new pathways.

The Timeline

1940s’ and 1950s’ migrations, settlements and ‘the problem of the

brown babies’

1943–47
• About 100,000 black servicemen (American GIs) are stationed in the UK during
the Second World War. Prevented from marrying under US law, their association
with white women becomes a source of considerable alarm, particularly in rela-
tion to fears of miscegenation. In this period, some 700–1,000 ‘brown babies’ are
born to white British women, most of whom are unmarried. Many reluctantly
give up their babies to institutional care. The issue of the failure to find suitable
placements for these children and/or adoption establishes them as ‘a problem’ for
social services.

1947
• Kenneth Little publishes Negroes in Britain: A study of race relations in English
society (London: Kegan Paul), a detailed study of black settlement that long pre-
dates the Second World War. Little identifies the long-standing discrimination
and the poor living circumstances of this community in Cardiff. Other studies
of early settled black communities would follow, including Richmond’s (1954)
study of Liverpool: Colour prejudice in Britain: A study of West Indian workers
in Liverpool 1942–1951 (London: Routledge).
14 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
1948
• The British Nationality Act confers legal rights of citizenship to all Common-
wealth citizens but distinguishes between British citizens of the UK and those of
the colonies.
• The Empire Windrush arrives on 22 June in Tilbury docks, marking mass migra-
tion to Britain. The reception of these migrants, who had been actively recruited
to work in Britain, would be characterised by hostilities and discrimination.

1950
• The Colonial People’s Defence Association (CPAD) is established to promote
cohesion and protect the collective interests of the ‘coloured race’. The CPAD
is concerned with the elimination of discrimination, providing legal advice but
also activism to increase employment opportunities for black people in the public
sector. It has an all-black leadership and many of the social workers it employs
are women.

1952
• Franz Fanon, a black psychiatrist and philosopher, publishes his book Black skin,
white masks in French. Drawing on his own experience, Fanon provides a pow-
erful critical commentary on the ways in which the human psyche is affected
by the forces of colonisation, racism and dehumanisation. Fanon’s work would
influence psychiatric practice as well as the development of post-colonial studies
and critical theory.

1954
• The National Children’ Home’s ‘The problem of the coloured child: the experi-
ence of the National Children’s Home’ (Child Care Quarterly, 8, 2) highlights the
issues of the over-representation of black children within the care system and the
‘impossibility’ of finding placements.

1956
• Sam Selvon’s The lonely Londoners (Longman) is published in a period when the
annual intake of migrants from the West Indies has reached over 25,000. Sam
Selvon’s account of immigrant life depicts first-hand accounts of the colour prej-
udice of the time. Selvon’s migrants are offered the worst jobs, pay extortionate
prices for poor and insecure housing, and face indifference and hostility.

1958
• The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is established, operating as a think tank
and publishing house for research on race relations. It sponsors the first study
of British race relations entitled Colour in Britain (Oxford University Press) by
James Wickenden.
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 15
• Race riots (uprisings) in Nottingham and Notting Hill break out in August as
resentments and tensions build and the hostility of white youth towards young
black males and black families erupts. Widespread discrimination and injustices
characterise the experience of the UK’s black populations.
• The Adoption Act 1958 identifies black children as among the ‘hard to place’ –
the problem of over-representation of these children in the care system emerges
as a public issue. Clean-break policies define a stronger role for social workers in
facilitating adoption.

1960s: the assimilationist mandate and the local state

1962
• Commonwealth Immigration Act introduces an employment voucher system and
requires permits for black workers entering the UK if they have a job to go to, a
recognised skill or have served in the British forces.
• E.R. Braithwaite’s Paid servant (Bodley Head) is published – the insider story
of a black social worker in London recruited to promote the placement of black
children with black families.

1963
• Sheila Patterson’s Dark strangers: A sociological study of the absorption of a
recent West Indian migrant group in Brixton, South London (Tavistock Publica-
tions) notes the reluctance of white families to adopt black children and agencies
sceptical of placing them with white families.

1965
• The Race Relations Act makes it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of
colour, race or ethnic or national origin in access to services and facilities in
public places, and establishes the Race Relations Board as the enforcement
body. However, it fails to tackle housing or employment. Campaign Against
Racial Discrimination (CARD) is formed to campaign against racism and lobby
for change.
• The British Adoption Project (BAP) establishes trans-racial adoption as a recog-
nised issue, asking the question ‘Can families be found for coloured children?’
and decisively challenging the notion of black children as unadoptable. An initia-
tive to promote the recruitment of black foster carers is developed.

1966
• Section 11 of the Local Government Act directs funding to deprived areas,
including those of significant black settlement, to address educational and wel-
fare needs. Although unintended, this measure prompts the recruitment of black
workers into social services departments. It is assumed that these specialist work-
ers will benefit black communities.
16 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
1967
• Racial discrimination – Report of Political and Economic Planning (London)
finds ongoing and widespread discrimination in the UK in employment, housing,
insurance and financial services.
• A study by K. Fitzherbert, West Indian children in London (London: Bell &
Sons), focuses on the assumed cultural deficit of the child and their family, who
are expected to adjust to society as it is. Fitzherbert adopts an anthropological
approach, outlining largely stereotyped West Indian family forms.
• Enoch Powell MP delivers his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham criticizing
mass migration.

1968
• Commonwealth Immigration Act links right of entry with having a parent or
grandparent born, adopted or a citizen in the UK.
• Race Relations Act now makes it illegal to discriminate in employment, housing
or public services, and establishes the Community Relations Commission as the
monitoring body and Community Relations Councils.

1969
• IRR launches the newsletter Race Today, which becomes the leading medium of
black politics during the 1970s. It runs to 1988.

1970s: liberal multiculturalism and equality of opportunity

1971
• Immigration Act curtails large-scale immigration. The Act distinguishes between
patrial and non-patrial citizens, the latter not having the right to remain. ‘Patrial’
refers to citizens of the UK by birth/adoption/naturalisation who have been law-
fully settled for five years or more.
• Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian child is made educationally sub-normal
in the British school system (London, New Beacon) draws attention to the poor
educational outcomes of black children.
• The British Journal of Social Work is launched and includes Jeff Smith’s (1971)
‘The early history of West Indian immigrant boys’, which names and records the
histories of nine West Indian boys, their experiences of migrating to Britain and
how they came into contact with children’s services.
• Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) is estab-
lished and is operative until 2001. CCETSW is charged with establishing and
regulating the rules and standards for social work education under the oversight
of a government-appointed Council and Chair.
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 17
1972
• Idi Amin expels Asian population from Uganda. The majority are British
­passport-holders and migrate to the UK, where they are classified as refugees and
not British citizens.
• Juliet Cheetham’s (1972) Social work with immigrants (London, Routledge)
places work with the ‘coloured’ population on the social work agenda within a
liberal-pluralist perspective. She looks to special measures such as positive dis-
crimination to enhance equality of opportunity for disadvantaged immigrants.
• John P. Triseliotis (ed) Social work with coloured immigrants and their families
(Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations) signals sociocultural
factors in shaping social work assessments but these are interpreted in terms of
the particular cultural attributes of various groups.

1973
• J. Rowe and L. Lambert publish the research report Children who wait (London:
Association of British Adoption Agencies [BAAF]). This comprehensive study
provides a snapshot of the state of childcare in Britain. Following the Abortion
Act 1967, a shortage of babies meant that agencies looked to alternative sources
for children, including minority ethnic children and those with disabilities.
• Brixton Black Women’s Group campaign on many issues, including racism in
education provision and the discriminatory practice of the contraceptive drug
Depo Provera being prescribed to black women on a long-term basis. The group
remain active until 1986.

1975
• The Soul Kids Campaign (1975–76) represents the first concerted effort to recruit
black adoptive parents for black children.

1976
• Race Relations Act added making it illegal to discriminate in the provision of goods
and services (such as social services), introducing the concept of indirect discrim-
ination. It establishes the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) as the enforce-
ment body. The Commission will run until 2010, undertaking high-profile case
law, research projects and publications and campaigns to promote race equality.

1977
• B. Tizard’s (1977) Adoption: A second chance (London: Open Books) draws
attention to issues of mixed-race children in the care system.
• A group of mainly Asian women workers mount a year-long strike at Grunwicks
in London for equal pay and conditions.
18 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
1978
• Momentum grows in the 1970s to signal black women’s needs and perspectives
and black feminist thought as distinct within the wider women’s movement. The
Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) (1979–83)
is formed, bringing together black women from across the country to form an
umbrella group for black women’s organisations.
• The Association of Directors of Social Services (ADSS) and the Commission for
Racial Equality (CRE) produce a joint report entitled Multi-racial Britain: The
social services response. This report is published at a time of significant shifts in
the organisation and delivery of statutory services, and calls for social services
departments to rethink how they plan their services at national and regional lev-
els to take account of race.

1979
• Southall Black Sisters (SBS) is formed to campaign against institutionalised rac-
ism, racist immigration legislation, virginity testing and violence against women.
SBS is at the forefront of campaigns to achieve better policies and practice for
minority women.
• V.S. Khan’s (ed) Minority families in Britain (London: Macmillan) points out that
it is no longer appropriate to speak of ‘immigrants’. Taking a cultural-­pluralist
perspective, the contributors’ work focuses on South Asian communities and cul-
tural diversity among minority groups.
• CETSW issues a policy statement on preparing students for practice with minor-
ity ethnic groups and convenes a working group to consider how well social work
programmes prepare students for work in a multi-racial society.

1980s: the political moment – resistance and anti-racism

1980–81
• Riots (uprisings) in St Paul’s, Bristol (1980) and in Toxteth, Liverpool and Brix-
ton (1981). New Cross Deptford fire (1981) kills 13 young people and prompts a
20,000-strong protest march through London. Mass unemployment, racist polic-
ing, inadequate housing and welfare services are the focus of discontent. The
response of black citizens forces anti-racism to be adopted by the local state,
particularly education and social services.

1981
• The Scarman Report on policing, The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981
(London: HMSO) notes the significance of factors of racial disadvantage and
inner-city deprivation.
• Suspended Under Suspicion (SUS) laws (Vagrancy Act 1824) is repealed following
arguments that this policy is differentially applied to black people.
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 19
• British Nationality Act restricts right of settlement of children or grandchildren
of British citizens.
• Juliet Cheetham’s study, Social work services for ethnic minorities in Britain and
the USA. Report to the DHSS (Oxford: Barnett House), identifies weak organi-
sational responses despite systematic ethnic monitoring and signals, among other
things, that ethnically sensitive practice cannot proceed without the recruitment
of black social workers.

1982
• Sivanandan argues ‘racism is about power not about prejudice’ in A different
hunger (London: Pluto Press). Sivanandan’s work points the way towards a struc-
tural analysis of racism.
• P. Gilroy (1982) publishes The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s
Britain (London: Hutchinson). A groundbreaking intervention made by the Cen-
tre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) collective argues that the state is
fundamentally implicated in popular racism.
• Brixton Black Lesbian Group is founded – the first such group in the UK. This
begins to signal important intersections of difference and diversity.

1983
• The Mental Health Act provides for attention to ethnic and linguistic diversity
in appropriate interviewing. It was amended in 2007 but fails to place race dis-
crimination within the statute. A Code of Practice (Department of Health, 2015)
provides statutory guidance.
• Association of Black Social Workers and Allied Professionals (ABSWAP) is
formed. ABSWAP begins to articulate a coherent black perspective on social
work policy and practice and advocate the views of a black constituency to bodies
such as the Social Service Committee and the Association of Directors of Social
Services. A particular issue is the persistence of the high number of black children
in the care system.
• CCETSW Paper 21, Social work curriculum study – teaching social work for
a multi-racial society, is published. In 1981, a working group including lectur-
ers, training officers, practice teachers, managers and consultants produces this
resource to support curriculum development. Several of the participants later
become members of the Black Perspectives Committee.
• Patrick Kodikara is appointed as the first black Director of Social Services in the
London Borough of Camden.

1984
• Jasmine Beckford dies at the hands of her stepfather after being severely neglected
and starved. She had been under the care and intervention of Brent Social Services
for two-and-a-half years prior to her death.
• Tyra Henry dies after being battered and bitten by her father while in local author-
ity care. A report on the case finds that the white social workers from Lambeth
20 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
council tended to be too trusting of the family because they were black. New
guidelines on child abuse cases for social workers follow after a major inquiry.
• Heidi Koseda is starved to death in a locked room in her home in Hillingdon,
West London. A private inquiry into her death finds that the senior National
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) inspector allocated
to her case failed to investigate a complaint of child abuse made by a neighbour
and subsequently tried to cover this up with a fictitious account of a visit to see
the child.
• Peter Fryer (1984) publishes Staying power: The history of black people in Brit-
ain (Pluto Press). Fryer evidences the long historical presence of black people and
communities in Britain.
• The first national Black Feminist Conference is held.
• Brent Asian Women’s Refuge and Resource Centre is established.

1985
• Broadwater Farm Riots in Tottenham, London. Cynthia Jarrett dies following
the police raid.
• Beverley Brian, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe publish Heart of the race: Black
women’s lives in Britain (Virago), stating: ‘our aim has been to tell it as we
know it... using our own voices and lives to document the day to day realities of
Afro-Caribbean women in Britain over the past 40 years’. Their stories capture
their treatment by the welfare state and their struggles against racism.
• The Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development, campaigning
against female genital mutilation, leads to the Prohibition of Female Circumcision
Act.
• Zami 1 – the first black lesbian conference – is held in London and over 200
women of African and Asian descent attend. Zami heralds the start of further
conferences and a new confidence for black lesbians who are fearful of coming
out.
• Stubbs, P. (1985), in ‘The employment of black social workers: from “ethnic sen-
sitivity” to anti-racism’, provides a critical discussion of the role of Section 11
monies in sponsoring the recruitment of black social workers.
• Black and in Care is started by a group of young black people in the care system in
England, including the poet Lemn Sissay. The group produce a video, also called
Black and in Care. As experts by experience, Black and in Care is a pioneering
work in bringing the voice of the user into social work education and practice.
• Scottish Black Women’s Group is established in Edinburgh and becomes instru-
mental in establishing Shakti, Black Women’s Aid.

1986
• Shakti Women’s Aid is set up by the Edinburgh Black Women’s Group. The
organisation offers support, advocacy and information to all black/minority
ethnic women, children and young people experiencing and/or fleeing domestic
abuse from partners/husbands, ex-partners and other family members.
• Child First in Transracial Adoption and Fostering is formed to challenge the
rigidity of same-race adoption policies and practice.
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 21
• The Mickleton Group – a group of black students and academic activists – draw
attention to the inequalities experienced by black students and the inadequate
response to race equality in social work education and training in an open letter
to CCETSW.

1987
• Ely and Denny’s (1987) Social work in a multi-racial society (Gower) is pub-
lished. It identifies four dominant perspectives in the social work literature: ‘cul-
tural deficit’, liberal pluralism, cultural pluralism and the ‘structural position’.
Ely and Denny’s book adds ‘Black professional perspectives’.
• Critical Social Policy Editorial Collective publishes ‘Towards an anti-racist pub-
lishing practice’ (vol 7[1]), which challenges the neglect of black academic outputs
and concerns in major policy and practice journals.
• Black History month is inaugurated in UK.
• CCETSW’s Black Perspectives Committee is established to consider and guide the
Central Council on matters of anti-racist education and training. The Committee
remains operative from 1987 to 1994.
• The Race Equality Unit is established as part of the National Institute for Social
Work (NISW). In 2006, its name is changed to the Race Equality Foundation.
The organisation aims to promote race equality in public services.
• A high-profile public inquiry into the death of Tyra Henry chaired by Stephen
Sedley QC on behalf of the London Borough of Lambeth publishes the report
Whose child: The report of the public inquiry into the death of Tyra Henry. The
inquiry suggests that the white social worker involved with the family lacked the
confidence to challenge the parents because they were black and this contributed
to the poor outcomes for Tyra.

1988
• Lena Dominelli, in Anti-racist social work: A challenge for white practitioners
and educators (Basingstoke: Macmillan), gives focus to the policing of minority
ethnic groups by white social work, which exacerbates their exclusion and is det-
rimental to their well-being. Social work is identified as a socio-political practice.
The book calls for a shift in the social work curriculum’s political bias towards
structural perspectives.
• Salman Rushdie’s book Satanic verses (Random House) is published, creating
outrage among Muslim communities. This represents a significant departure
from the homogenising of black communities, giving focus to diversity by reli-
gious belief.

1989
• The Children Act provides statutory recognition of the importance of religion,
race, culture and language in child welfare decision-making.
• CCETSW (1989) Rules and requirements for the Diploma in Social Work (Paper
30) includes Annex 5: The policy statement, written by the Black Perspectives
Committee, which states: ‘CCETSW believes that racism is endemic in the values,
22 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
attitudes and structures of British Society, including those of social services and
social work education’.
• Amina Mama’s (1989) The hidden struggle: Statutory and voluntary sector
responses to violence against women in the home (Whiting and Birch) is pub-
lished. This represents the first published research study on black women’s expe-
riences of domestic violence.

1990s: retraction, revisionism, new perspectives

1990
• Bandana Ahmad’s Black perspectives in social work (Venture Press) is published.
It is a practice-focused book that uses case studies to address work with minority
communities, drawing on a black perspective as a statement against the assump-
tions and distortions of white norms of practice.

1991
• CCETSW (1991) Rules and requirements for the Diploma in Social Work (Paper
30) (2nd edn) consolidates the anti-racist approach within social work education.
• CCETSW Northern Anti-racist Curriculum Development Project, Leeds (1991–
93), is established to support delivery of Paper 30 requirements on anti-racist edu-
cation and training. It publishes Setting the context for change: Anti-racist social
work education in 1990, which introduces the series, followed by seven training
publications involving over 400 people in the production of the curriculum guid-
ance materials, on Racism and anti-racism (1991), Children and families (1992),
Learning difficulties (1992), Practice teaching (1993), Mental health (1993) and
Criminal justice (1993). Later work focusing on elders and ethnicity is produced
by Naina Patel within the Policy Research Unit on Ageing and Ethnicity (PRIAE).
• Ann Phoenix and Barbara Tizard’s book, Black, white or mixed race? Race and
racism in the lives of young people of mixed parentage (London: Routledge),
begins the work of reconceptualising ‘black’ identities.
• The report into the inquiry into the care and treatment of Christopher Clunnis
is published. Christopher Clunnis, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia,
had recently been discharged from hospital without a care plan when he mur-
dered Jonathan Zito, a member of the public, at a London train station. This
was a very high-profile case that garnered a lot of media attention and criticism
of the government’s Care in the Community policy. As a result, the Care Pro-
gramme Approach (CPA) is introduced into mental health policy and legislation
in England.

1993/94
• Hostile media coverage of ‘political correctness’ in social work and of ‘same-race’
placements policy and practice precipitates a turning point in CCETSW’s retreat
from the explicit positioning of anti-racist approaches.
• Ravinder Barn’s Black children in the public care system (London: Basford) is
published.
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 23
1994
• CCETSW’s Black Perspectives Committee is disbanded by the Conservative gov-
ernment following widespread backlash against anti-racist developments in social
work.

1995
• Jane Dalrymple and Beverley Burke’s (2006) Anti-oppressive practice, social care
and the law (Buckingham: Open University Press) offers a departure from cul-
tural competency approaches and gives a focus to the constructive use of the leg-
islative framework in addressing minority needs. Their framework foregrounds
intersectionality and the need for partnership working.

1996
• Operation Black Vote is established. This is a government-funded positive action
initiative to get greater representation of black people in politics and increase the
black vote.
• Two accredited Black Practice Teachers’ programmes are developed in Manchester
and Merseyside. All course participants, trainers and practice teachers are black.

1997
• In the publication Anti-discriminatory practice (Basingstoke, Macmillan), Neil
Thompson introduces his now widely cited Personal, Cultural, Structural (PCS)
framework for understanding the processes of discrimination.

1998
• David ‘Rocky’ Bennett, a 38-year-old African-Caribbean man, is killed while
being restrained in a medium-secure psychiatric unit. The independent inquiry
that follows (Blofeld report: Independent inquiry into the death of David Ben-
nett [2003]) produces 22 recommendations for practice in mental health.
• Devolution for Scotland and Walesa and an Assembly for Northern Ireland is
constitutionally established. These countries will become self-governing bodies
in specific social policy fields – health, education, social work and housing – with
social security and the tax system retained by Westminster. These assemblies
will be responsible for promoting race equality in their jurisdictions but hold no
power over immigration.
• Williams C. and Short C. produce a bilingual resource: Working with difference:
a resource for people working to promote anti-racism in social work and social
care in Wales (CCETSW Cymru).

1999
• Section 115 of the Immigration and Asylum Act states that a person subject
• to immigration control will have ‘no recourse to public funds’, thus excluding
24 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
• them from a range of benefits, including child benefit, disability benefits, housing
• benefit and social security benefits.
• The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (Macpherson report) defines the concept of insti-
tutional racism. Racism cannot simply be considered the actions of individuals,
but is recognised within institutional practices and processes. The report makes a
number of recommendations, including strengthening the Race Relations Act to
address institutional discrimination.
• Paul Henderson and Ranjit Kaur’s (eds) Rural racism in the UK (London: Com-
munity Development Foundation) draws attention to the extent of racism in rural
communities and uses case studies to illustrate community-based responses. This
marks a new trajectory in thinking about anti-racism beyond the metropolis.
Other studies of rural areas will follow.

2000s: statutory drivers

2000
• The Social Exclusion Unit argues that minority ethnic disadvantage cuts across
all aspects of deprivation and provides a policy focus for interventions aimed at
deprived communities.
• The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 extends the scope of the 1976 Act
and places specific duties on public sector organisations to consult with black
and minority ethnic communities to develop race-equality plans and to monitor
impacts. The legislation includes a positive duty ‘to promote’ race equality, not
just to prevent unlawful discrimination.
• Damilola Taylor, a 10-year-old black boy, is murdered on a council estate in Lon-
don. This is the start of paying serious attention to knife crime in urban areas,
and considering the role of welfare agencies and the youth justice system.
• Victoria Climbié, aged eight, dies from hypothermia in her home in Tottenham,
North London, after suffering months of horrific abuse and neglect. A public
inquiry into her death, begun in September 2001 and chaired by Lord Laming,
leads to sweeping reform of Britain’s child protection services. It is established
that there were at least 12 chances for the agencies involved in her protection to
have saved her.
• Refugee women’s groups’ struggles to bring a gendered analysis to asylum claims
result in the UK’s Immigration Appellate Authority (the Immigration and Asylum
tribunal) launch of its Asylum gender guidelines for use in the determination of
asylum appeals. The guidelines note that the dominant view of what constitutes a
‘real refugee’ has been that of a man. The guidance aims to ensure that the gender
of the asylum seeker does not prejudice their application.
• The future of multi-ethnic Britain, the report of a commissioned panel chaired by
Bikhu Parekh on the current state of multi-ethnic Britain, proposes ways of coun-
tering racial discrimination and disadvantage across the four nations of the UK.
The report is controversial in arguing for the need to ‘rethink’, revise and rework
the national story, and is criticised by the right-wing media for a lack of patriot-
ism. The report provides many recommendations for tackling racial disadvantage
within all tiers of society but fails to get traction amid hostile media coverage.
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 25
2001
• Census recognises the category ‘mixed-race’ for the first time.
• The ‘9/11’ attack on the World Trade Centre in New York shifts public atti-
tudes towards Muslims and the Islamic faith. This will become a major trigger of
revived Islamaphobia.
• CCETSW closes and the General Social Care Council is established as the regu-
lator of social work education [in England].
• Valuing people: A new strategy for learning disability for the 21st century
(Department of Health) highlights the needs of ethnic minority individuals with
intellectual disabilities and their carers.

2002
• Brian Alleyne, in Radicals against race: Black activism and cultural politics
(Bloomsbury Publishing), provides an account of the New Beacon Circle, a group
of activists made up of parents, teachers, lawyers, social workers, writers and
artists engaged in social movements and transformative practices concerning edu-
cation, culture, class, race and citizenship.
• In response to the weak focus on migration in social work, Steve Cohen, Beth
Humphries and Ed Mynott (eds) publish From immigration controls to welfare
controls (London: Routledge), which outlines social work’s responsibility to have
knowledge of immigration law.

2003
• The Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbié is published. The report
makes 108 recommendations aimed at changing childcare law and practice.
• Inside outside: Improving the mental health services for black and minority eth-
nic communities in England (National Institute for Mental Health England) sig-
nals an important step forward to support the reform of mental health services. It
aims: to reduce and eliminate ethnic inequalities in mental health service experi-
ences and outcomes; to develop the cultural capability of services; and to engage
the community and build capacity through community development workers.
• S. Fernando’s Cultural diversity, mental health and psychiatry: The strug-
gle against racism (Hove: Routledge) is published and includes practical and
far-reaching suggestions about changes in practice to meet black and minority
ethnic mental health needs.
• The Female Genital Mutilation Act strengthens and amends the Prohibition of
Female Circumcision Act of 1985. For the first time, it is an offence for UK nation-
als or permanent UK residents to carry out female genital mutilation abroad, or
to aid, abet, counsel or procure the carrying out of female genital mutilation, even
in countries where the practice is legal.

2004
• Lord Laming’s inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié leads to the enactment
of the Children Act 2004, which amends the Children Act 1989, and creates the
26 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
‘Every Child Matters’ initiative to improve outcomes for all children in England
and Wales. Some significant changes are introduced, including the establishment
of the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and Local Safeguarding Children
Boards, and the development of information, retrieval and tracking systems (IRT).
• Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe’s anthology entitled ‘Mixed race’ studies: A Reader is pub-
lished and highlights the development in theorising mixed-race identity.

2005
• Delivering race equality in mental health care – five year plan 2005–2010
(Department of Health) sets out the government’s five-year plan for reducing
inequalities in black and minority ethnic patients’ access to, experience of and
outcomes from mental health services. The action plan is developed following the
recommendations made by the Blofeld inquiry into the death of David ‘Rocky’
Bennett. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 is introduced as a result of the case
of Mr C, a black elderly Caribbean man who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia
and was a long-term patient in the high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor.
Mr C made a legal challenge against the doctors who wanted to amputate his leg
as a result of serious (and life-threatening) gangrene in his foot.
• Valerie Mason John publishes Borrowed body later retitled The banana kid
(published
• by BAAF), which tells the story of a black girl growing up in the care of Dr. Bar-
nardo’s Village in Essex and years in and out of foster homes during the 1960s.
The book wins MIND’s book of the year award in 2006.
• The 7/7 terrorist bombing in Central London pave the way for the development
• of the PREVENT agenda, the government’s counterterrorism strategy to tackle
• the radicalisation of children and young people.

2006
• Ravi Kohli’s (2006) book Social work with unaccompanied asylum-seeking chil-
dren (Macmillan) flags the complexities of migration and unaccompanied minors.

2009
• Following lobbying by ‘Abolish No Recourse to Public Funds’ Campaign mem-
ber organisations and activists, the Home Office announces a three-month pilot
project providing accommodation and subsistence support while applications
for indefinite leave to remain are submitted and processed. This is subsequently
extended further after consultations with the campaign group.
• Concerns are expressed against the government’s proposals to amalgamate all
existing equalities legislation into a single Equality Act, fearing a dilution of the
focus on race equality. The Equality Review (launched in 2002) and the subse-
quent creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (established in
2007) created by the Equality Act 2006 presented the single Equality Bill (pub-
lished on 27 April 2009).
 Black history month: a provocation and a timeline 27
A new decade: the ascendancy of neoliberal diversity, global complexities
and change

2010
• The Equality Act receives Royal Assent, which brings together the existing equal-
ities Acts to strengthen anti-discrimination legislation and accommodate an
improved response to intersectionality. The Act covers age, disability, ethnicity,
gender identity, sexual orientation and religion and belief. The Equality Act intro-
duces impact assessments.

2014
• The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) highlights the low numbers of
black professors in UK higher education institutions. By 2018, there are five black
professors of social work in the UK.
• The Children and Families Act stipulates that adoption agencies no longer
have to give due consideration to a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin
and cultural and linguistic background when matching a child and prospective
adopters.

2016
• The Immigration Act 2016 introduces new measures to enforce immigration
laws, making it easier to remove illegal immigrants. It is thus much harder for
immigrants to access work, housing and health care, and to open bank accounts.
The Immigration Act 2016 also has implications for the local authority role in
relation to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children by reducing the support for
care leavers (18+) with no immigration status if they have exhausted all their
rights of appeal.

2018–
• On 17 April, Prime Minister Theresa May issues an apology to ‘Windrush’
Commonwealth migrants following the denial of citizenship rights and threats
of deportation if they were unable to furbish evidence of their legal migration
status. This affected an unknown number of people who arrived in the UK from
the Caribbean as children, often on parents’ or siblings’ passports, but were never
formally naturalised or had not applied for a British passport.

Note
1 This is incorrect. The Social Work History Network is located, not at Edinburgh Uni-
versity, but at King’s College London. Find out more here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/
scwru/swhn/index/ Accessed 21st September 2021. Meanwhile, the University of Edin-
burgh has an online website (with social policy timeline) dedicated to 100 years of social
work education history. Find out more here: https://sw100.ed.ac.uk/ Accessed 6th Decem-
ber 2022.
28 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
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30 Charlotte Williams and Claudia Bernard
Further reading
Cree, V.E. and Myers, S. (2008) Social work: Making a difference, Bristol: Policy Press/BASW:
15–30.
Leighninger, L. (1988) Social work: Search for identity. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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Macmillan.
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pedia of social welfare history in North America. (pp. 198–203). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Stuart, P.H. (2019) ‘Social work profession: History’. Encyclopedia of Social Work. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.013.623. Accessed
6 July 2021.
Vicary, S., Cree, V.E. and Manthorpe, J. (2018) ‘Social work education – a local and global
history, Practice, 30:4, 223–226, DOI: 10.1080/09503153.2018.1483646. Accessed 6th
July 2021.
2 But is it social work?
Richard Hugman

It was in May 1915, at an early social work conference held in Baltimore, United
States of America, that Abraham Flexner posed the question, ‘Is social work a pro-
fession?’ This question came at a critical time, as early social workers in the global
North were fighting to be recognised alongside members of the older professions
including law and medicine. Social workers have struggled with this question, and
with questions about the identity and nature of social work ever since. In this arti-
cle, Richard Human, distinguished Australian academic and author, argues that the
global North must look to the global South to understand better the fundamental
question, ‘but is it social work?’
From: ‘But is it social work? Some reflections on mistaken identities.’ British Jour-
nal of Social Work (2009) 39: 1138–1153. DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bcm158

It is widely accepted that the history of the professionalization of social work in West-
ern countries can be traced from the second half of the nineteenth century […] Two
forms of social work are clearly identifiable in that early period, represented most
clearly by the Charity Organisation Society and the Settlement movement […]. From
these beginnings came two broad strands of social work that can be seen running
through the profession from then until the present day.
The first of these strands—the work of ‘charity organization’- grew from a concern
to apply the rapidly expanding scientific sensibility of the late nineteenth century to
charitable assistance offered to those individuals and families who faced problems of
poverty, family breakdown, poor housing and the like. The primary approach of this
strand was to use the relationships established between people in need (‘clients’) and
their individual ‘caseworkers’ as a basis for helping those in need to develop better
coping strategies and to make best use of the resources available through charitable
funds. In broad terms, the development of ‘scientific charity’ represents the begin-
nings of micro-level approaches in social work. Its work tended to be concerned with
individual functioning and questions of social order, and it is often regarded as having
been politically conservative […]
In contrast, the ‘settlement movement’ took a more structural approach to the
same range of social problems. The solution that it offered was for those who pos-
sessed social resources, what might now be termed ‘social capital’[…], to live and
work among those who lacked such resources in order to share the benefits of educa-
tion, knowledge about solving social problems and so on. So, although the settlement
movement also used social relationships to assist people to resolve social problems,
these were not addressed in terms of individuals and families but rather through
working in and with communities more generally. Thus, this approach represents the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-5
32 Richard Hugman
beginnings of macro-level practice in social work. Its work was based on a structural
understanding of social issues and it was focused on social change; thus, it tends to be
regarded as having been politically radical […].
A factor that unites both the ‘charity organization’ and the ‘settlement movement’
developments was that they arose as responses to the exacerbation of social problems
that followed from the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization and
modernization that created the massive social upheaval of the industrial revolution
across northern Europe and North America. One important set of phenomena to
emerge in this period is that of modern forms of professionalism, such as seen in law,
medicine, nursing, the allied health professions and teaching (Freidson, 1994). Social
work, in both the ‘charity organization’ and ‘settlement movement’ forms, was part
of these developments (Hugman, 1991; Payne, 2005).
Where ‘charity organization’ and the ‘settlement movement’ differed was in their
understanding of the most appropriate way to understand and respond to the social
problems of the time. These differences can be seen in ways of explaining the causes of
social problems (personal moral failings, social structural inequalities, and so on), the
level at which social problems might be identified (individuals and families, or com-
munities, organizations and policy) and the means by which social problems should
be addressed (various forms of intervention at personal or collective and structural
levels) (Smith, 1980). Seen in this way, the two approaches divided roughly between
micro and macro levels of thinking and action on each of these dimensions.
[…] we must ask why the project of professionalization must be tied to the micro-
level perspective. To this question there are, I suggest, three interlinked answers. The
first is that social work in the global North has tended overwhelmingly to be an
agency-based practice. That is, unlike those professions whose clientele historically
included socio-economic groups with the capacity to pay fees, social work has always
had a tendency to focus on people who experience social need. This means people who
either are living in poverty or who tend to be at the lower end of the socio-economic
spectrum. It could even be said that this is the consequence of an early commitment
to social justice. Second, because social work tends to be agency-based, we have to
consider what an agency will employ social workers to do. […] as most agencies that
employ social workers have sought a profession that could promote welfare (under-
stood here very broadly) at the level of individuals and families, they have tended to
employ social workers who could undertake micro-level practice. Third, social work
has taken the same path as other occupations engaged in similar work, of seeking to
be recognized as having knowledge and skills that make it plausible that it should be
sanctioned to act and listened to when it speaks. […]
For a time in the second half of the twentieth century, in these other Northern
countries, community work or community development practices had a clear role
within the state welfare bureaucracies. However, with the rise of neo-liberalism and
the impact of fiscal crises in these welfare states (Mishra, 1984), ‘community’ became
the location of micro practice in ‘community care’ and the collective focus of com-
munity action was largely abandoned (Butler and Drakeford, 2001). The impact of
neo-liberalism has led to the commodification of welfare, in which social workers
(and other professions) have been recast from ‘providers of service’ to ‘producers of
welfare’ and service users have become ‘consumers’ (Hugman, 1998). Thus, it could
be said that in this ideological environment the legitimacy of the voice of professions
to speak about matters of structural inequality has been severely challenged, unless
 But is it social work? 33
those professions are called on to speak technically in advising others who hold the
roles of managers and policy makers. On this reading, the potential for social work-
ers to engage with what can be declared to be ‘political’ is confined firmly within the
private sphere, in that social workers are heard simply as any citizen would be when
speaking about such matters, irrespective of any claim they might have to special
expertise or knowledge.
Yet, although these understandings of the contemporary dominance of micro over
macro perspectives in social work in the global North are substantially correct, this is
not the whole story. There is in these analyses an unfortunate assumption that micro-
level practice cannot be informed by structural understandings of social need (or ‘is
not progressive’ or ‘does not pursue social justice’) and that macro-level practice is
necessarily so informed (or ‘is progressive’ or ‘pursues social justice’). […]
In the neo-liberal ‘post-welfare’ world of the global North, social work is contested
in so far as it seeks to address structural issues in its theory and practice. This comes
partly from the prevailing sense that the competence of professionals relates only to
technical matters (Hugman, 1998). Two things follow from this. First, the legitimacy
of professions now rests solely on perceived technical competence and if social work
cannot show that it can do certain things, then its authority will be challenged. Sec-
ond, the macro level of focus in any profession (social work can find itself allied with
teaching, nursing and even medicine in this respect) either may be cast as an inap-
propriate interference in the responsibilities of managers and policy makers or else
deflected as simply a matter of the concerns of private citizens. In other words, in so
far as the micro-level focus has come to dominate over the macro perspective, this is
not simply a choice made by social workers who were too concerned with their own
professional interests (although, for some, this may be the case).
[…] However, for the profession as a whole, the third possible choice is the one that
is most realistic in relation to professional history and the actual tasks that social
work can offer the communities in which we live and work. The social needs faced
by older people who require assistance, people with mental ill-health, children at risk
and their families, women experiencing domestic violence and so on all have both
individual and structural aspects. Social work is about both these aspects, together,
and the efforts of the profession should be about how each can inform the other and
constitute sites for non-oppressive practice. As Butler and Drakeford (2001, p. 17)
remind us, the ‘service user movement’ in the UK represents one possible model of
how this might be achieved, in working partnerships between service users and pro-
fessionals in which the latter are genuinely focused on serving the former. Mendes
(2007, pp. 28, 42) likewise points to the issue of relevant and engaged professionalism
rather than the abandonment of social work as an organized profession. The identity
of social work continues to have many facets and how it finds ways of realizing its
core values (such as ‘social justice’) have been and should remain plural.

New horizons: social work developments in the global South

The underlying issues facing social work in the global North are significant, not only
in those countries, but also in the other parts of the world in which social work is
developing. So, we now turn our attention to the identity of social work in the global
South. The development of social work in some parts of the global South is nearly as
old as in the North. For example, social work began to be professionalized in South
34 Richard Hugman
Africa in 1924, in China in 1932 and in Egypt and India in 1936 (Healy, 2001,
pp. 22–4). Unlike the countries of the North, however, the transmission of ideas
about social work between countries was not based on a relationship of exchange,
but on one of colonialism. This led to what Midgley (1981) calls ‘professional imperi-
alism’, or the imposition of a particular professional identity for social work that was
constructed in the image of particular interests in the Northern countries. Perhaps it
should be no surprise, therefore, that a micro perspective of social need was widely
adopted, with individualized forms of practice tending to predominate, as these fitted
with the ideologies of colonial rule. However, in the post-colonial world, the lack of
fit of these imported forms of social work has become more apparent, so change has
been sought in many countries.
Walton and Abo El Nasr (1988) distinguish two important processes in the post-
colonial contexts of the South. The first is that which has been termed in the litera-
ture ‘indigenization’, which occurs when social work is rendered appropriate for local
needs. This is:

… a process whereby a western model of social work is transplanted into another

environment, making some modifications which enable the model to be applied in
a different cultural context (Walton and Abo El Nasr, 1988, p. 148).

Against this, Walton and Abo El Nasr argue for a process of ‘authenization’, that is:

… [the] creating or building of a domestic model of social work in the light of

the social, cultural, political and economic characteristics of a particular country
(Walton and Abo El Nasr, 1988, p. 149). […]

What can be seen […] of social work developments in countries of the global South
is that the meaning of the goals and tasks of social work varies according to the
context in which they are found. The micro focus of practice introduced through
colonialism is not rejected outright, but each of these countries demonstrates ways
in which structural and communal perspectives are seen as necessary also, as part of
the core of social work. Yet, the understanding of structure and community in these
countries is grounded on an understanding of social harmony and social cohesion as
key objectives. It is not that these social workers are unconcerned about issues of ine-
quality and the structural causes of social need, but that the ways of addressing these
has to be constructed in ways that are relevant to different contexts. Consequently,
the separation of micro and macro perspectives on the causes and appropriate ways
of addressing social needs is not evident in the same way as it is in countries of the
global North. […]

Roasting old chestnuts: reconsidering the debate about the definition

of social work
[…] The first conclusion that we might reach from these varying debates and accounts
is that there is, in reality, no one single thing that could be regarded as social work.
[…] we must be careful that the promotion of human rights, which is agreed as a core
value by social workers around the world, is not interpreted in such a way that it
 But is it social work? 35
assists in the imposition of socially and culturally inappropriate approaches to social
work in a form of neo-colonialism (however unintended).[…]

Finding a way to a common core: some tentative conclusions

[…] From the point of view that social work necessarily embraces many aspects, and
is concerned with the micro, the macro and the connections between them, the dis-
putes about its identity can be understood using another ancient metaphor (which
I have adapted from organizational analysis; see Perrow, 1980). Let us imagine a
group of people who are blindfolded and then asked to describe an elephant. One
person notes that it is tall, thick and round like a tree trunk (she has hold of its leg);
another that this animal is long, thin and moves in a manner like a snake (he has hold
of its trunk); a third person notes that this animal is flat, leathery and very flexible
so that it can flap (she is holding its ear). All perceive the elephant in very different
ways; all are describing the same animal. However, while each of these insights tells
us something about an elephant, only by standing back and considering the animal as
a whole do the separate parts make sense so that we may appreciate the contribution
they make to the holistic nature of this animal.
There is a notable weakness in this metaphor in that, unlike the elephant, even
when we stand back and look at social work in the broadest possible terms, we may
still fail to see where the parts connect. Arguments against the idea of an integrated
profession have been seen to arise particularly in the global North. The purpose of
this discussion has been to make a case for recognizing such connections, both by
looking at issues from the North and by considering the ways in which social work in
the global South is moving beyond such a binary construction. So, I conclude that in
the same way that an elephant is more than simply the sum of its parts, so, too, must
social work be considered as such. Social work is a whole that is made up of micro and
macro perspectives on social need, of the pursuit of social change and social harmony
and stability, and of the way in which all of these elements interconnect in achieving
human well-being. Portrayals of social work that say it is only this or only that are
cases of mistaken identity. No one part can be privileged without distorting and so
misrepresenting the complex whole.

References
Butler, I. and Drakeford, M. (2001) ‘Which Blair project? Communitarianism, social authori-
tarianism and social work’. Journal of Social Work 1(1): 7–19.
Flexner, A. (1915) ‘Is social work a profession? Proceedings of the National Conference of
Charities and Correction.’ New York: National Conference of Charities and Corrections:
576–90. Reproduced in Research on Social Work Practice, 11(2) March (2001): 152–165.
Freidson, E. (1994) Professionalism reborn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Healy, L. (2001) International Social Work: Professional action in an interdependent world.
New York: Oxford University Press
Hugman, R. (1998) Social welfare and social value. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Mendes, P. (2007) ‘Social workers and social activism in Victoria, Australia.’ Journal of Pro-
gressive Human Services 18(1): 25–44.
Midgley. J. (1981) Professional imperialism. London: Heinemann.
Mishra, R. (1984) The welfare state in crisis. Brighton: Harvester–Wheatsheaf.
36 Richard Hugman
Payne, M. (2005) The origins of social work: Continuity and change. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Perrow, C., Salaman, G. and Thompson, K. (1980) “Zoo story” or “Life in the organisational
sandpit”. Control and ideology in organisations. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Walton, R. G. and Abo El Nasr, M. M. (1988) ‘The indigenisation and authentisation of social
work in Egypt.’ Community Development Journal 23(3): 148–55.

Further reading
Aymer, C. and Okitikpi, T. (2000) ‘Epistemology, ontology and methodology: What’s that got to
do with social work?’ Social Work Education 19(1): 67–75. DOI:10.1080/026154700114667.
Cree, V.E. (1995) From public streets to private lives. The changing task of social work.
Aldershot: Avebury.
Hugman, R. (1991) Power in Caring Professions. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Johnson, T.J. (1972) Professions and power. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Morley, C., Ablett, P., Noble, C. and Cowden, S. (2020) The Routledge handbook of critical
pedagogies for Social Work. London: Routledge.
Pithouse, A. (2020) Social work: The social organisation of an invisible trade. 2nd edition.
London: Routledge.
3 The politics of social work
Iain Ferguson

This chapter, along with the previous two, sets the context for this Reader. Iain
Ferguson is a Scottish social work academic and activist who has written widely on
critical and radical social work. In this chapter, he reviews the history and politics of
social work and makes a compelling case for social workers to acknowledge the polit-
ical nature of their profession and to grapple with its consequences and potential.
From: Gray, M., Midgley, J. and Webb, S. (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Social
Work. London: Sage (2012): 740–754. DOI: 10.4135/9781446247648.n48

[…] understanding of context – political, social, and economic – should form the
starting point for any discussion of the place of social work in society. […] The very
origins of social work as a system of organised helping; the institutional forms it has
taken; the ideas and values which have underpinned it; and the activities in which
social workers have engaged on a day-to-day basis, have all been profoundly shaped
by the dominant political ideologies and concerns of the day. Despite this, however,
discussions on the role of social work – both inside and outside the profession – have
often been characterised either by a curious reticence about the relationship between
social work and politics or, not infrequently, by a denial of its very existence. Instead,
it is argued, social work is above all a practical activity in which politics, or political
explanations of social problems, have no place. [ …]
This chapter argues social work is a political activity, and any attempts to present
it as a purely practical, moral, or technical activity are, in a literal sense, ideological
since they conceal and distort not only the role and purpose of social work within
capitalist societies but also the origins and nature of the problems experienced by
people who use social work services. Accordingly, in the first part of the chapter,
through a critique of Whig approaches, which give primacy to the role of progressive
ideas in the historical development of social welfare and social work, it is suggested
political factors, ranging from ruling-class concerns about social cohesion through
to the impact of a variety of social movements, working-class or otherwise, have
been much more significant. […] The next part of the chapter addresses the different
politics, or ideological frameworks, which have informed the social work profession
since its inception, their relationship with the dominant politics within society, and
the factors which have shaped that relationship. The final part of the chapter discusses
contemporary issues and debates in the politics of social work, with a focus on three
recent developments. First, an emerging body of literature and research explores the
challenges facing social workers operating in a context of political violence (Ramon,
2008). The potential and possible limitations of this approach to politics and social

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-6
38 Iain Ferguson
work are critically assessed. Secondly, the past few years have seen a renewed interest
in the place of ethics in social work, including virtue ethics. […]. Finally, in response
to the impact of neoliberalism on social work theory and practice, the past decade
has seen the emergence of new critical and radical currents within social work, some
of which seek to connect to earlier traditions and to relate these to the changed con-
ditions of the 21st century. These are briefly discussed and their potential to offer a
paradigm for a new politics of social work considered.

Politics, Social Welfare, and Social Work

In a text of the same name published in 1932, British historian Herbert Butterfield
criticised what he called the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ popularised by 19th-
century historians, such as Lord McAuley, in which history is seen as a progressive
journey away from barbarism and ignorance and towards peace, science, and civilisa-
tion (Butterfield, 1932). Whig accounts of history tend to share three common char-
acteristics. First, they are idealist in seeing change and development within history as
occurring through the replacement of one set of ideas by a better one (e.g., slavery by
feudalism, feudalism by democracy, and so on). Where such ideas come from, other
than out of the heads of ‘great men’ (women rarely figure in these accounts) and why
they emerge at one point in time rather than another are questions seldom posed
within this discourse. Second, within this perspective, change is seen as essentially
a top-down process with progressive ideas succeeding as the result of the actions of
governments or far-seeing individuals. Third, as noted above, history is a history of
forward movement, of progress: the past is essentially a journey towards a present
which is the best of all possible worlds. The ideological function is clear: as one recent
text put it, ‘Whig history constructs a linear narrative to arrange the past according
to the expediency of pressing ideological needs in the present’ (Annetts et al., 2009,
p. 22).
[…] Though not usually described as such, Whig approaches have also been influen-
tial within social welfare and social work discourses. In a recent text on social move-
ments which seeks to restore ‘the bottom-up element in the contested and contentious
politics of state welfare’ (Annetts et al., 2009, p. 20), Annetts and his colleagues
single out the work of the British postwar academic, T.H. Marshall, and in particular
his 1950 essay ‘Social class and citizenship’, as an exemplar of this approach. In this
essay, Marshall (1950) set out his now famous definition of citizenship as involving
the progressive capture of three kinds of rights: civil rights, political rights, and social
rights, each corresponding to a definite stage of historical evolution. Marshall’s essay
has been, and continues to be, an extremely influential one in framing discussions of
citizenship. What is missing from his account, however, argue Annetts et al. (2009)
is any sense of the social forces bringing rights, such as universal franchise, into
existence. […]

The Political Origins of Social Work: Britain and China

[…] In his account of the history of social work, Payne (2005a) locates its 19th-century
origins in three main sources: the Poor Law, charity organisation, and the settlement
movement. While Payne’s (2005a) book is a useful source of facts and information,
it tends to reflect the kind of Whig approach referred to above. Thus, for example,
 The politics of social work 39
following what Payne (2005a) describes as the ‘growing concern from the 1890s about
the British system for dealing with poverty’ (p. 39), he continues:

As ideas of unemployment emerged and socialist thinking became more politi-

cally influential and drew attention to the inadequacies of existing provision…,
state responsibility for poverty and unemployment became a logical outcome
and the Poor Law was increasingly seen as an inadequate expression of it. The
period of 1900–14, therefore, became one of substantial social reform, particu-
larly during the Liberal administrations of 1905–14… A Royal Commission on
the Reform of the Poor Laws (1909) became the focus of a conflict between COS
[Charity Organisation Society] views on the importance of charity organisation,
represented by Octavia Hill, and the Fabian priority for more collective social
provision, represented by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (pp. 39–40).

All of the elements of a Whig approach are here: the top-down approach to change –
change arose from ‘growing concern about poverty’; old ideas are replaced by bet-
ter ones – ‘socialist thinking became more politically influential’, the Webb’s ideas
triumph over Hill’s; the inevitability of progress – ‘state responsibility was… a log-
ical outcome’, and the period ‘therefore’ became one of reform, …, ‘the Poor Law
is ‘increasingly seen’ as inadequate, and so on. What one does not learn from this
account is the period from the 1880s until the war of 1914–1918 was frequently one
of massive class struggles in Britain and a time of great anxiety for the British ruling
class. Among its many concerns was a fear of the ‘mob’ or ‘residuum’, the growing
army of the poor concentrated in the big cities and especially in the East End of
London (Stedman Jones, 1971) […].
This was the context in which British social work emerged: a context of growing
poverty and inequality, rising class struggle, ruling-class fears and bitter ideological
debates in both the working class and the ruling class, all framed by growing imperi-
alist conflict between Britain and Germany especially. Against this background, the
Charity Organisation Society’s leaders in particular proposed a consciously ideologi-
cal response, seeing their brand of humanistic individualism as offering an alternative
to the socialist ideas then becoming increasingly popular. The demise of that alter-
native by the time of the World War I, however, and its rejection both by the poor
who were its intended beneficiaries, as well as by the more enlightened sections of the
ruling class, owed less to the intrinsic merits or deficits of the ideas per se as to the
inability of the leadership of the COS to grasp the changing balance of class forces at
the end of the 19th century. […]
The second example is a contemporary one. The expansion of social work educa-
tion in China over the last two decades, and especially after 1999, is quite unprece-
dented in the history of the profession and, with justification, has been described by
two Chinese academics as ‘phenomenal’ (Xiong & Wang, 2007, p. 562). As late as the
1980s, social work education was virtually non-existent within mainland China. […]
By 2008, there were more than 200 schools of social work in China (Yan & Tsang,
in Gray et al., 2008). […]
One explanation for the extraordinary expansion of social work is the need to
address the range of social problems produced by the shift from state capitalism to
private capitalism. Second, there is the government’s stated policy of building a ‘har-
monious society’ (Xiong & Wang, 2007, p. 561). Arguably the current emphasis on
40 Iain Ferguson
such a policy, along with the government’s revived interest in neo-Confucianism,
reflects concern about growing social unrest arising from the enormous societal
changes resulting in, for example, a wave of widely reported strikes involving migrant
workers in 2010 (Watts, 2010). The origins of the policy, however, and the perceived
role for social work within it, go back almost two decades, to the year 1991. […]
The year is significant. Although the link is not made explicit by Xiong and Wang
(2007), it seems official government backing for Chinese social work came only two
years after the appearance of the biggest mass movement in China since the 1920s,
when thousands of students and workers flooded into Tiananmen Square in Beijing
demanding basic democratic rights. That movement was, of course, brutally crushed
by the Chinese army on 4 June 1989 (Calhoun, 1997). Twenty years on, however, fear
of a repetition continues to inform both the human rights and the industrial relations
policies of the Chinese government.

Social Work Politics

[…] In her introduction to an edited collection of papers on the role of social work in
the context of political conflict, Ramon (2008) speculates on the reasons why there
have been no previous texts on this topic and suggests:

This may relate to the reticence in social welfare to touch on issues deemed ‘polit-
ical’, an attribute that is perceived as unprofessional, unscientific and biased
within mainstream welfare ideology, and as a reflection of being ‘too lefty’ or
‘too radical’ (p. 3).

Turning these categories on their head would suggest desirable attributes of main-
stream welfare approaches would include professionalism (however defined), a sci-
entific approach, a lack of bias, and avoidance of radicalism. Not coincidentally,
such attributes are, of course, key elements of the positivist, evidence-based policy
approach promoted by Third Way governments over the past decade, an approach
which, critics have argued, has sought to transform social work from an ethical pro-
fession into a technical occupation, concerned solely with means – ‘what works’ –
rather than ends (Gray & McDonald, 2006). That said, such an avoidance of politics
on the part of mainstream social work long pre-dates the arrival of evidence-based
practice. As Jordan (1984) noted some time ago:

Social work has played various roles in contrasting systems of social provision,
and has served a number of political ends. Its great virtue – that it is almost
infinitely adaptable to social circumstances – also makes it open to exploitation
for any kind of policy objectives (p. 114).

The reasons for such subservience to the goals of the State are not hard to identify. In
many countries, social workers, accredited and registered by the state, take their man-
date from national government (in the form of statutes prescribing the activities of
social workers); are often located within the offices of government, national or local;
and are dependent on government for employment and career advancement. An ide-
ology of professionalism shunning ‘politics’, especially when reinforced by the type of
individualist understandings of clients’ problems which, in one form or another, have
 The politics of social work 41
dominated social work for most of its history (Midgley, 2001; Payne, 2005b), might
be seen as a price worth paying to allow mainstream social work to survive in even
the most hostile of political climates. The problem is, on more than one occasion, that
price has been a very high one indeed and paid not by social workers themselves but
by the communities they are supposed to serve. […]

New Directions
If social work’s dependence on the State, reflected in a narrow ideology of profession-
alism, has led historically to a tendency to downplay or ignore the political, there are
some indications this may be beginning to change.

Social work in the context of contemporary political conflicts

The past decade has seen growing interest in the role of social work in the context of
political conflict, for reasons not difficult to understand. […] [T]he period since the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism instead has seen the emergence
of new and bloody conflicts across the globe. […]
An emerging development within the profession is concerned with exploring what
the social work role should be in such situations and how social workers might relate
both to the victims of these struggles and also, in some cases, to the combatants or
ex-combatants. It marks a break with the dominant social work tradition in explicitly
addressing the political context and in insisting that ‘social welfare is also a political
project in so far as it is impacted by ideologies and power configurations, and that
social workers as members of their respective societies bring with them a personal–
political dimension to this issue’ (Ramon, 2008, p. 3). As a recent collection of writ-
ings on this topic highlights, the challenges, both personal and professional, involved
in practising social work in extremis, in situations dominated by sharply opposing
ideologies, the ongoing experience of domination and oppression, and the memories
of often traumatic past events are considerable (Ramon, 2008; see also Lavalette &
Ioakimidis, 2011).

Ethics and politics

A second development concerns the changing relationship between ethics and politics
in social work. In a review of the terrain of social work ethics, Banks (2008) refers
to an ‘ethics boom’, an upsurge of interest in applied ethics in the social sciences
and social welfare, which took off in the 1990s and has continued to the pres-
ent day. Among the factors which she sees as responsible for this development are
concern over the implications of climate change, developments in genetic technol-
ogies, and global terrorism, including, one might add, the ‘War on Terror’ and the
implications of practices such as ‘extraordinary rendition’ […] Of particular impor-
tance for social work ethics have been the neoliberal ideas, values, and policies dom-
inating social and economic thought for more than two decades (Ferguson, 2008;
Harvey, 2005). […]
Increasingly, however, the neoliberal offensive is generating resistance, both within
social work and more widely. Coming on top of official expectations, social workers
would behave in increasingly punitive ways towards oppressed groups, such as asylum
42 Iain Ferguson
seekers and young people. This undermining of ethical standards appears to be hav-
ing a galvanising effect on many social workers. As argued elsewhere:

More than any other single factor, it has been the attacks on these core values,
and the expectation that social workers will collude with policies that are per-
ceived as harming service users, that has produced the greatest anger and resist-
ance within the profession (Ferguson, 2008, p. 132).

In addition, outwith social work, concerns about climate change, the impact on social
relationships of neoliberal individualism, and the negative effects of the stark ine-
qualities market fundamentalist policies have created (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009)
have led to renewed interest in notions of ‘the good society’ and the question of ‘how
should we live?’ Such interest is reflected in a turn towards virtue ethics, an approach
to ethics rooted in the philosophical tradition of Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx. […]
Not surprisingly then, discussions of the application of virtue ethics to social work
theory and practice is becoming increasingly common in the professional literature
[…]

The return of the political?

Finally, there is a range of developments which, in their different ways, arguably
represent what Gray and Webb (2009) called ‘the return of the political’ in social
work. First, there are new and ongoing initiatives within the professional literature
to develop theoretical and practice frameworks to the left of mainstream approaches.
[…] Second, there is the active and growing involvement of social workers and social
work academics across the globe in a wide range of social movements concerned
with issues of social justice.[…] and movements such as the UK Social Work Action
Network seeking to combine new, more critical understandings of social work with a
campaigning approach across a range of issues.
Both of the above developments are mainly located within Western social work, or
even more narrowly, social work in the English-speaking world. A positive spin-off
of globalisation, however, and the opportunities it provides for the development of
international contacts, is an increasing, if belated, awareness of the rich social work
traditions in other parts of the world, including countries of the global South. To take
the example of Brazil, not only are social workers there much more likely to work in
close collaboration with social movements of poor people than their Western counter-
parts but the theory base from which they work is also an explicitly political one. […]
What this development implies is any new politics of social work in the 21st century
needs to draw actively on and learn from the traditions and experience of practition-
ers, academics, service users, and movement activists outside the traditional confines
of the English-speaking world, whether they in the global South, the former commu-
nist countries or in Indigenous communities across the globe […].

References
Annetts, J., Law, A., McNeish, W. and Mooney, G. (2009). Understanding social welfare
movements. Bristol: Policy Press.
Banks, S. (2008). Critical commentary: Social work ethics. British Journal of Social Work,
38, 1238–1249.
 The politics of social work 43
Butterfield, Sir H. (1932). The Whig Interpretation of History. Retrieved on August 30, 2010
from www. elioh.unifi.it/testi/900/butterfield
Calhoun, C. (1997) Neither gods nor emperors: Students and the struggle for democracy in
China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Eagleton, T. (2009). Trouble with strangers: A study of ethics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ferguson, I. (2008) Reclaiming social work: Challenging neoliberalism and promoting social
justice. London: Sage. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446212110
Gray, M. and McDonald, C. (2006). Pursuing good practice? The limits of evidence-based
practice. Journal of Social Work, 6(1), 7–20.
Gray, M. and Webb, S.A. (2009). The return of the political in social work. International
Journal of Social Welfare, 18, 111–115.
Jordan, B. (1984). Invitation to social work. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lavalette, M. and Loakimidis, V. (2011). Social work in extremis: Lessons for social work
internationally. In M. Lavalette (ed.). Radical social work today: Social work at the cross-
roads. Bristol: The Policy Press.
Marshall, T.H. (1950) ‘Citizenship and social class’. In T.H.Marshall and Bottomore, T. (Eds)
(1992) Citizenship and social class. London: Pluto Press.
Midgley, J. (2001) ‘Issues in international social work’. Journal of Social Work. 1(1): 21–35.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/146801730100100103
Payne, M. (2005a). The origins of social work: Continuity and change. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Payne, M. (2005b). Modern social work theory (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Ramon, S. (ed.) (2008). Social work in the context of political conflict. Birmingham: Venture
Press.
Stedman Jones, G. (1971). Outcast London. Oxford: Clarendon.
Watts, J. (2010) ‘Strikes in China signal end to era of low-cost labour and cheap exports’, The
Guardian, 17 June 2010.
Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always
do better. London: Penguin.
Xiong, Y.and Wang, S. (2007) ‘Development of social work education in China in the context
of new policy initiatives: Issues and challenges.’ Social Work Education 26(6): 560–572.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02615470701456210

Further Reading
Bailey, R. and Brake, M. (1975) (Eds.) Radical Social Work. London: Edward Arnold.
Ferguson, H. (2001) ‘Social work, individualization and life politics.’ British Journal of Social
Work 31(1): 41–55, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/31.1.41
Ferguson, I., Loakimidis, V. and Lavalette, M. (2018) Global social work in a political con-
text: Radical Perspectives. Bristol: Policy Press.
Gray, M. and Webb, S. (eds) (2013) The New Politics of Social Work. London: Macmillan.
Kleibl, T., Lutz, R. Noyoo, N., Bunk, B., Dittman, A. and Seepamore, B. (2020) The Rout-
ledge handbook of postcolonial social work. London: Routledge.
4 Changes in the form of knowledge
in social work
From the ‘social’ to the ‘informational’?
Nigel Parton

There is no doubt that information technology (IT) and information and communi-
cations technologies (ICTs), in particular, have changed the delivery of social work
in recent years; they have, at the same time, challenged and changed the professional
character of social work. In this seminal article, UK academic Nigel Parton gives
a highly detailed account of the shift from social work as a ‘social’ enterprise with
‘relationship’ at its core to social work as an ‘informational’ activity. The implica-
tions of this are picked up in subsequent chapters.
From British Journal of Social Work, 38 (2): 253–269 (2008).

Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the form of knowledge in social work and,
more particularly, how this might currently be subject to significant change. In doing
so, I am particularly cognisant of the growing importance of a whole variety of infor-
mation and communication technologies (ICTs) and their possible impact. A central
part of my argument is that the nature of practice and the knowledge which both
informs and characterizes it is increasingly less concerned with the relational and
social dimensions of the work and more with the informational.
Increasingly, it seems that the key focus of activity of social work and social care
agencies is concerned with the gathering, sharing and monitoring of information
about the individuals with whom they come into direct and indirect contact, together
with accounting for their own decisions and interventions, and those of the other
professionals and agencies with whom they work. It is not my argument that these are
new activities but that they have taken on a much greater significance in recent years
because of the growing importance of ICTs and that the pace of change is dramatic.
These are issues which have increasingly received attention in the social work lit-
erature and which Paul Michael Garrett (2005) has referred to as social work’s ‘elec-
tronic turn’. My purpose is to consider how this growing concern with information
might be transforming the form of knowledge in social work and the nature of ‘social’
work itself.

Notes on the form of knowledge in social work

Nearly thirty years ago, Mark Philp (1979) analysed the form of knowledge in social
work that was evident at the time. He argued that while there was an apparent free-
dom and eclecticism in social work theory there was an underlying form to social

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-7
 Changes in the form of knowledge in social work 45
work knowledge. This form of knowledge was both productive and constraining and
emerged at a particular time—the late nineteenth century.
[…] Philp argued that social work could be characterized as straddling a split
between internal subjective states, such as pain, want, suffering, love and hate, and
objective statuses such as old age, crime, debt, illness and madness. The knowledge
produced under social work’s regime of truth was one which described a process
whereby these objective statuses could be transformed into a social subject.
Crucially, ‘social work knowledge attempts to demonstrate potential sociability’
(p. 92). It denied absolute determinism of nature by trying to show that with com-
passion and an understanding of the individual’s essential humanity, deterministic
forces could be transcended, thereby realizing the individual’s inherently social self.
Social work thus tried to produce a picture of the individual which was at once both
subjective and social. Philp argued that this was a fundamental rule for social work
knowledge—a rule which knowledge had to obey if it was going to be acceptable in
the discourse, and it was a rule which was created by the social, economic and polit-
ical changes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Overall, the nature of social work and the form of knowledge which social work
adopted from the late-nineteenth century onwards attempted to normalize the vari-
ous ‘deviants’ with whom it worked and who had become detached from the respect-
able working and middle classes. In doing so, Philp made the important point that a
key part of the work was thereby concerned with surveillance, which, for some, could
be lengthy.
Thus, while the key form of social work knowledge that emerged from the late
nineteenth century was to produce a picture of the individual which was at once both
subjective and social and operated to integrate subjects into the wider society, it also
acted as a form of surveillance for those in the community who were not sufficiently
dangerous to require more rigorous attention from other agencies, including closed
institutions such as prisons or hospitals.
During the twentieth century, social work developed an internal confidence
and coherence and, increasingly, its theoretical orientation was influenced by neo-­
Freudianism and ego-psychology and the works of John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott
and others at the Tavistock Clinic, which emphasized that the importance of the rela-
tional aspects of the work was significant.
The role for the new social services departments, when they were established
in 1971, was not just to provide a range of services, including social work, but to
co-ordinate aspects of other welfare services and thereby make the welfare state more
responsive to need, particularly the functioning of a small number of families who
were seen as causing a disproportionate number of problems.
Social services departments were established as the ‘fifth social service’ (Townsend,
1970), with the family as its focus. They would provide the personalized, humanis-
tic dimension to the welfare state and the primary tool would be professional social
workers’ knowledge and understanding of human relationships and the work would
be carried out directly with individuals and families in the community, primarily in
their own homes.
While ‘the relationship’ was the primary tool or ‘technology’ of the work, there
were also a variety of other technical devices which were drawn upon so that individ-
uals would be rendered as knowable, calculable and administrative ‘subjects’. These
devices were in the form of a variety of written reports but also included other devices,
46 Nigel Parton
such as the car and the telephone, which made it increasingly possible to negotiate
time and place more efficiently and quickly. […]
What becomes evident is that, increasingly, such developments not only acted to
support and refine the work, but become a major influence in reconfiguring the form
of knowledge itself. Such developments become increasingly evident, with the intro-
duction of new systems of information technology (IT) and, more recently, ICTs.
While it is important not to give technology a privileged status as the primary
agent of change and extract it from society and, thereby, see it as an autonomous
force, technology—and increasingly ICT—permeates virtually everything that social
workers do in the twenty-first century. In this respect, social work is, perhaps, in the
process of undergoing major change such that its ‘form of knowledge’ increasingly
seems rather different.

The growing centrality of information, procedures and systems

The apparent failures of social work in a number of fields, from the mid-1970s
onwards, suggested that both its key forms of knowledge and its key technologies
of practice were in serious need of attention. As a result, its areas of discretionary
decision making were reduced and front line practitioners had to follow increasingly
detailed procedural guidance. At the same time, there was a growing emphasis on the
need for improved multi-agency and multidisciplinary work and the role and prac-
tice of managers became crucial. By the early 1990s, it was managers, as opposed to
front line professionals, who were seen as the powerful actors in the new network.
Managers became the new mediators between expert knowledge(s), individual and
community needs and the allocation of scarce resources. More specifically, notions
of management began to frame and supplant the central activities and the forms of
knowledge that social workers drew upon.
The central activities were concerned with assessment, planning, care management,
negotiating, co-ordinating, operating the law and procedures and using information
technology. Nowhere were these changes more evident than in child care, particu-
larly following a series of high-profile public inquiries into child abuse (Parton, 1985,
1991) and these changes started long before the introduction of new IT systems. A
major response to the inquiries was an increased emphasis on the need to collect,
share, classify and store information. […] Information took on a strategic significance
for both protecting children and making professionals accountable. The result was
that whereas the amount of ‘technicality’ in the job increased, the element of ‘indeter-
minacy’ decreased (Howe, 1992, p. 492).
[…] By the early/mid-1990s, it is clear that social work had become much more
routinized and proceduralized. In many respects, the form of knowledge had become
more ‘formalized’ and subject to a whole series of different and detailed forms—
literally. Forms came both to represent and constitute the nature and form of knowl-
edge which lay at the centre of front line practice. Increasingly, the changing social,
political and economic climate in which social work operated and the introduction
of a variety of new technologies and devices had the effect of subjecting practitioners
and the people with whom they work to a variety of ‘systems’ for providing safe,
reliable, standardized services and predictable outcomes. As Carol Smith (2001) has
argued, the situation is full of paradox, for while most agree that certainty in many
areas of social work is not possible, the political and organizational climate demands
 Changes in the form of knowledge in social work 47
it. Social workers have been found wanting and are no longer trusted. The result
is that many of the changes introduced act to sidestep the paradox and substitute
confidence in systems for trust in individual professionals and fails to recognize the
importance of ‘moral competence’ (Smith, 2004) in the work.

The nature of information and communication technologies

Such developments have become even more evident with the growing influence of
ICTs and the requirement that practitioners input, manage and monitor a whole vari-
ety of information via the new electronic systems. [… ] All of these changes are taking
place in a context in which the ‘modernization’ of public services is seen as crucially
dependent on the introduction of ICTs and e-government more generally.
In a recent survey of 2,200 social care professionals, over half said that they spent
more than 60 per cent of their time on administrative work as opposed to direct client
contact, while more than one-fifth spent over 80 per cent of their time on such tasks,
and 95 per cent felt ‘that social work had become more bureaucratic and less client-fo-
cussed over the previous five years’ (Samuel, 2005, p.8). Beyond this, however, it is
important to ask how these changes are impacting on the form of knowledge in social
work. What are the possible impacts of the increasingly central role of ICTs and data-
bases on the nature and form of social work knowledge? Is the form of knowledge in
social work being transformed by these changes and, if so, in what ways?
It seems that in social work, what is referred to as ‘knowledge’ is primarily related
to the way we gather, share, store, manipulate and use ‘information’. [ …] However
knowledge and information are quite different phenomena.
Whereas knowledge is mental, not yet objectified and very much associated with
ideas and requires a degree of commitment and understanding, information is
much more disembodied, decontextualized and objectified. While knowledge usu-
ally involves a knower, information is usually treated as an independent and self-
sufficient entity which is much more transportable and useable in different ways.
Clearly, social work has always used objectified and stored information in the form
of case records and other forms of recording; however, a large amount of knowledge
was undocumented and existed primarily in people’s heads. With the introduction
of ICT, there is an expectation that such internalized knowledge should be reduced.
Such changes are closely interrelated to the rise of managerialism and an audit culture
whereby an attempt is made to formalize and regularize organizational decision mak-
ing and which Stephen Webb (2006) has recently discussed in terms of the emergence
of ‘technologies of care’. Information becomes a self-contained substance which can
be shared, quantified, accumulated, compared and stored on a database.
A number of consequences can be seen to arise from the gradual encroachment of
the database culture. First, and most obviously, information becomes more available
and accessible and, in the process, the systems, the professionals and the decisions
that they take become, in theory, more transparent and accountable. In the process,
there is less discretion for the individual professional, for identifying what informa-
tion is seen as relevant is determined by the requirements of the database and the
algorithm. At the same time, knowledge which cannot be squeezed into the required
format disappears or gets lost. This has particular implications for the way in which
identities are constructed and the type of human experience which can be represented.
Stories of violence, pain and social deprivation can only be told within the required
48 Nigel Parton
parameters to the point that they may not be stories at all. While, traditionally, social
work has attempted to present a picture of their clients which is both subjective and
social via a holistic biographical narrative, the increasing use of computer databases
may not allow for the presentation of such identities.
Categorical thinking, based on the binary either/or logic, dominates, which puts
individuals into categories and, in the process, obscures any ambiguities. Rather than
be concerned with presenting a picture of the subject, as, previously, social work
increasingly acts to take subjects apart and then reassembles them according to the
requirements of the database. Practitioners are required to produce dispersed and
fragmented identities made up of a series of characteristics and pieces of information
which are easy to input/output and compare. In the process, the embodied subject is
in danger of disappearing and we are left with a variety of surface information which
provides little basis for in-depth explanation or understanding.
Not only can ‘the subject’ of social work knowledge be seen as being in the pro-
cess of transformation into a series of discreet categories but also the ‘social’ nature
of the work is disappearing. Scott Lash (2002) argues that, increasingly, social order
is not based on the principle of ‘society’ but by the principle of ‘information’. In an
order in which ‘sociality’ is being displaced by ‘informationality’, it is not surpris-
ing if social work is less concerned with the ‘social’ than with the ‘informational’.
While social work could always be conceived of as a strategy which contributed to
‘government at a distance’, this new emphasis on the informational rather than the
relational aspects of the work makes this even more explicit. Individuals are consti-
tuted and governed more through the computer and the database than through the
relationship. […]

References
Garrett, P.M. (2005) ‘Social work’s “electronic turn”: Notes on the deployment of information
and communication technologies in social work with children and families.’ Critical Social
Policy 24(4): 529–53.
Howe, D. (1992) ‘Child abuse and the bureaucratisation of social work.’ Sociological Review
40(3): 491–508.
Parton, N. (1985) The politics of child abuse. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Parton, N. (1991) Governing the family. Child care, child protection and the state. Basing-
stoke: Macmillan.
Philp, M. (1979) ‘Notes on the form of knowledge in social work.’ Sociological Review. 27(1):
83–111.
Samuel, M. (2005) ‘Social care professionals overwhelmed by paperwork.’ Community Care.
14 December p.8
Smith, C. (2001) ‘Trust and confidence. Possibilities for social work in high modernity.’ British
Journal of Social Work 32(2): 287–306.
Smith, C. (2004) ‘Trust and confidence. Making the moral case for social work.’ Social Work &
Social Services Review 11 (3): 5–15.
Townsend, P. (1970). The fifth social service: a critical analysis of the Seebohm proposals.
London: The Fabian Society.
Webb, S.A. (2006) Social work in a risk society. Social and political perspectives. Basingstoke:
Palgrave/Macmillan.
 Changes in the form of knowledge in social work 49
Further reading
Chan, C. and Holosko, M.J. (2016) ‘A review of information and communication technology-­
enhanced social work interventions.’ Research on Social Work Practice 26(1): 88–100.
Cree, V.E. and Mackenzie, R. (forthcoming 2023) Forming a new and unexpected relation-
ship through digital technologies: lessons for child and family social work. Adoption &
­Fostering. Special Issue: The digital turn in child and family social work: challenges, oppor-
tunities and imagined futures.
Peckover, S., White, S and Hall, C. (2008) ‘Making and managing electronic children.
E-assessment and child welfare’, Information, Communication & Society 11(3): 375–394.
Perron, B., Taylor, H.O., Glass, J.E. and Margerum-Leys, J. (2010) ‘Information and commu-
nication technologies in social work.’ Advances in Social Work 11(2): 67–81.
Steyaert, J. and Gould, N. (2009) ‘Social work and the changing face of the digital divide.’
British Journal of Social Work 39(4): 740–53.
5 The quest for a universal
social work
Some issues and implications
Mel Gray and Jan Fook

In this chapter, Mel Gray and Jan Fook, based at the Universities of Newcastle
(Australia) and Vermont (USA) respectively, unpack the quest for a ‘universal’ social
work. In doing so, they analyse recent trends towards universalism and globalism in
social work, setting these alongside parallel trends of localism, multiculturalism and
indigenisation. One of the many strengths of the paper lies in the authors’ care to
draw on different examples and perspectives, only some of which we have been able
to share here.
From: Gray, M. and Fook, J. (2004) ‘The quest for a universal social work: some
issues and implications.’ Social Work Education 23(5): 625–644. DOI: 10.1080/
0261547042000252334

There is a quest for universalism in social work, partly exhibited by attempts on the
part of international social work bodies to find agreement on an international defini-
tion of social work […] and, more recently, on global qualifying standards for social
work education […]. While there may be very good reasons for seeking to define and
identify common aspects of the profession across countries and cultures, the quest is
also problematic. For example, as Midgley (2001) rightly points out, social workers
are sharply divided on a number of important international issues: the nature of inter-
national social work; the profession’s commitment to internationalising social work
education and practice; the universality of social work values; internationalism as a
desirable normative position; and on the nature of social work itself, that is, whether
the profession should be committed to remedial, activist or developmental forms of
practice. […]

What is Meant by ‘Universal’ Social Work?

By ‘universal social work’ we mean a form of social work that transcends national
boundaries and which gives social work a global face such that there are commonali-
ties in theory and practice across widely divergent contexts. However, given that there
are many facets to social work and the way in which it is defined, practised, theorised,
and positioned, just what aspects are we talking about when we attempt to delineate
aspects which are universal? […]
It is common to talk about both the theory and the practice of social work.
However, if we examine the term ‘theory’, it has many different usages. […] The
term ‘practice’ is equally problematic. […] When we talk about ‘defining’ social
work, all the issues attached to the terms practice and theory also apply. Is social
work defined by the discourse about it or its actual practice? How do we know

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-8
 The quest for a universal social work 51
whether we are talking about the same observable phenomenon or simply using
the same ways to describe actions which might be dissimilar? And how much of
how we define social work, its theories and practices, is influenced by what we
are defining it in relation to, such as local infrastructures, histories and cultural
contexts?
[…] [T]wo forms which the quest for universal social work has taken at the inter-
national level are to develop a global definition for social work, and to develop min-
imum qualifying standards. Those who argue for universal standards do so in the
belief that there is a danger in values and practices being limited to particular soci-
eties, especially where they are deemed unjust. Hence radical feminists might inter-
pret the treatment of women in many Eastern societies as being oppressive. Having
recourse to international human rights charters enables them to apply their Western
values to these contexts, conscientising Eastern women towards their way of think-
ing. Also in countries that are working hard to professionalise social work in keeping
with the Western tradition, global standards provide a bargaining tool in arguing for
resources, both in education and practice arenas. […]
Lorenz (2001) suggested a continuum along which social work might be positioned
relating to the three dimensions that he considered important, namely, relationship
to the state, degree of professionalisation and academic status. These dimensions fit
with the Western view of social work within a professional model. However, there are
equally important dimensions that are overlooked, for example, the degree to which
the values of social work fit the context, social work’s effectiveness in meeting human
need and the extent to which social work contributes to social improvement. While
social work’s history has been tied to the institution of social welfare in most Western
countries, there are many who argue that this link with statutory responsibility has
hampered its social change and social reform impetus, leading to social control and
support for the status quo. […]
In South Africa, Hochfeld (2002) describes indigenous social work as having a
strong radical framework focused on structural change, in a social development con-
text via a postmodern perspective that values diversity and pluralism. The policy
thrust is towards social development and social action models capable of addressing
inter alia mass poverty, gross inequality, growing unemployment, and HIV/AIDS.
This seems to suggest a very different model of social work, away from the Western
professional model towards an indigenous social development model more relevant to
the needs of the population. […]
While trends to find a universal way of understanding and speaking about social
work, and for identifying and ensuring effective practice are laudable in many ways,
the more difficult issue is to work out ways in which such an emphasis on commonal-
ities is meaningful to a diverse range of players in a variety of contexts. […]

International Social Work

Is ‘international social work’ the same thing as ‘universal social work’? The notion
of ‘international social work’ is a related concept, in the sense that both seek to focus
on social work which crosses national boundaries. There are, however, quite a few
different ways of thinking about international social work. It can refer to social work
which focuses on issues of international concern (for example, the problem of refu-
gees, or ecological issues) and/or the way these are worked with at either international
or domestic levels. It can refer to social work activities which take place at a global or
52 Mel Gray and Jan Fook
international level (for example, work with international level organisations). It can
also include activities involving international exchanges. […]
Haug (2001) […] reported that the majority of texts on international social work
operated from the construction of international social work either as a cross-cultural
comparative exchange, or as international development practice, that is, ‘as a direct
practice activity within the domain of international humanitarian organisations’
(p. 3). International partnerships and exchanges have certainly led to a spread of social
work across the world [however], the trend has been to export Western models of
social work from the highly industrialised Northern nations to developing countries
in the South rather than to internationalise course content in Northern universities.
[…] Thus Hokenstad et al. (1992) ask, ‘What is the place of the organised profession
in different countries?’ (p. 4) and ‘what is the place of social work in international
agencies working in the Third World?’ (p. 53). Haug (2001) found that questions
like these, though their scope was ostensibly global, reflected a Western perspective
which casts international social work in ‘normative and ideal terms, largely ignoring
issues of power, voice and privilege. They tend to reflect unquestioned assumptions
about who has expertise, the superiority of a professional model, what is “develop-
ment” (shaping the South in the likeness of the North, with the help and expertise of
Northerners), and so on’ (p. 4). The IFSW and IASSW have, nevertheless, formulated
an international definition of social work despite lack of agreement on many aspects
of social work. Does social work have a role in social development? Is policy practice
part of social work’s brief? What is social work’s role in community development?
Although there are aspects of these methods and approaches in social work practice
in some contexts, in many countries, including the USA, social work remains a largely
individualistic, clinically focused activity. […]
What both ‘universal’ and ‘international’ social work might have in common then
is a tendency to use or impose social work models from the ‘developed’ world as
having global applicability. However, international social work need not necessarily
reinforce this model if the work is truly about exchange or comparison. Or if it is
about development, there are plenty of models of development which allow for work
in partnership. […]

The Westernisation–Indigenisation Debate

In post-colonial times much of these debates revolve around questions of how the
respective cultures of ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ interplay, and to discuss how iden-
tities and cultures are made now that there is no longer overt imperial control…To
some extent, these also involve questions of indigenisation, in the sense that the term
‘indigenous peoples’ can refer to any peoples who have been subjected to colonisation
and loss of sovereignty (Smith, 1999, p. 7).
The indigenisation debate rests on two central premises:
Social work is a Western invention and a product of modernity. […]
Indigenisation is postmodern to the extent that it questions the dominance of
‘social work as a Western invention’ and seeks to relate it to local culture, history, and
political, social and economic development. […]
However, one of the difficulties in developing indigenous approaches to social work
is that the process of indigenisation, of rediscovering and redeveloping indigenous
identities in a post-colonial and postmodern world, is that identities are being made
 The quest for a universal social work 53
and remade in a dynamic process of interaction with many diverse groups and struc-
tures (Brah, 1992). […] At the same time, even ‘Western social work’ as a monolithic
entity, is changing and developing, and attempting to incorporate new and diverse
perspectives.
According to Osei-Hwedie (1995), internationalism is leading to trends distancing
social work from locally based solutions. For example, the rise of anti-oppressive
practice models further distances most African countries which cannot afford a
Western-type of social work that focuses mainly on marginalised individuals and
groups that, by definition, form a small proportion of the population. […]. As it
became clear in most developing contexts of the world that social work was not hav-
ing a major impact on widescale poverty, its relevance began to be questioned. This
was especially true in South Africa through the 1990s when the first democratic gov-
ernment came to power and moved towards a social development model to the extent
that today there is no longer a Ministry of Welfare. […]
In countries like New Zealand, which has a strong bicultural policy, there have
been some constructive moves to articulate Maori culture and hence indigenous
social work practice models. Examples are the ‘Just Therapy’ approach (Waldegrave
et al., 2003) and Maori family group conferencing (Lee, 1997) both of which are
consequently having an impact beyond national and cultural boundaries. Gray &
Allegritti (2002) have highlighted the need for African writers to articulate African
cultural or indigenous models to demonstrate the way in which they differ from the
Western models which they criticise.

The Globalisation–Localisation Debate

Ife (2000) argued strongly that alongside the process of globalisation there was a
counter tendency towards localisation borne out by increasing interest in locally
based solutions as evident in inter alia communitarianism, the environmental move-
ment, the development of militia-style groups, and extremist political parties. These
locally based solutions shared an interest in the creation or maintenance of a sense of
community in the face of the ‘perceived universality and uniformity of the globalized
world’ (Ife, 2000, p. 56). […] However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern
what’s ‘local’ when global trends take hold so quickly. A kid in Asia, or Botswana, or
on the streets of LA looks the same, drinks Coca Cola, eats McDonald burgers, wears
his hat backwards, his shorts too long, his T-shirt too big … jives to the same hip-hop
music and so on, and the question of indigenous culture, which is changing all the
time, becomes difficult to pin down. […] To emphasise the equal importance of global
awareness and local solutions, a new term ‘glocal’ has emerged. To some extent, these
debates are also aligned with the postmodern emphasis on the importance of ‘situat-
edness’ or contextuality. […]

The Universal Values–Multicultural Social Work Debate

Here the question relates to ‘the implications of built-in cultural biases’ (Goldstein,
1986, p. 149). […] On the one hand we have values about individuals which are essen-
tially Judeo-Christian in origin and fit well within liberal, rights-based, democratic
systems and on the other we have values about social justice that focus on collective
interests and issues of equality and fairness, which fit well with socialist ideals. Social
54 Mel Gray and Jan Fook
work’s roots in the Charity Organisation and Settlement Movements as pioneered by
Richmond and Addams, respectively, reflected differing perspectives on social work.
While social work embraced these differences as it evolved, many developing con-
texts in Africa and Asia are tending towards values and practices more consistent
with Addams’ perspective which privileged grassroots values. Addams believed that
‘the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be
improved than she and her colleagues did. […] This is a far cry from the expert pro-
fessional model social work subsequently pursued.
There is a broader debate as to whether social work’s universal value system is at
odds with current thinking relating to cultural autonomy. […] the liberal notion of
multiculturalism […] advocates multiculturalism so long as processes of liberalism are
not compromised (Gray & Allegritti, 2002) […].

The Desirability of Universalising Social Work

Given the inconclusiveness of the debates outlined in this paper, what are the pros
and cons of attempts to define a universal social work? Gray and Fook (2002) believe
that it might be acceptable to think philosophically about an international orienta-
tion without necessarily attempting to attain universal agreement on definitions of
social work or standards for professional social work education and practice. […]
Midgley (1992) lists some obvious benefits of international exchange: increasing our
knowledge and understanding of human problems, strengthening practice, and fur-
ther development of the profession in raising its profile. Comparative knowledge can
serve to improve our practice. Emphasis on shared social work aims and activities can
serve political ends in raising standards and expectations of good service, especially
in countries less inclined to value social services.
Therefore, the central questions in the universalising debate should be less about
professional preservation and universalising values, and more about finding ways to
best achieve the goals of social justice and of making the world a better place for those
who suffer as a result of widespread injustice and poverty. The issues are less about
imposing a unified conception of social work, and more about a ground up collabora-
tive process for finding and developing commonalities to fight a common cause. […]
Care needs to be taken in making generalisations about social work so that it does not
become a new exercise in cultural imperialism. […]

Future Directions
First, given the need to recognise the importance of context in the different
forms and expressions social work might take, it seems important to emphasise a
grounded approach to understanding and documenting what we do. This includes
placing value on the ways in which workers who are indigenous to the situation con-
ceptualise their work, but also developing processes that encourage this. This does
not mean that overarching or imported discourses might not be used, but that they
be used, not so much as defining discourses, but as tools for developing grounded
perspectives.
Secondly, what approaches to professionalism and professionalisation are relevant?
Are more rigid or more flexible boundaries most productive in the current environ-
ment? […] One way of overcoming its marginal influence is for social work to join
 The quest for a universal social work 55
with other forces within society working for social change […]. In this way its value
premises undergo constant scrutiny and it potentially becomes more assertive about
its social and political role. […] The same argument applies for inter-disciplinary
co-operation within team settings or where solutions to or interventions in social
problems require a multi-disciplinary response (Gray, 1999). A broader view of
human need and broad conceptions of welfare render professional boundaries rela-
tively superfluous.
Thirdly, we would argue for the relevance of a social development response to
poverty and injustice, since, by its very nature, it requires a multi-layered approach.
It requires horizontal collaboration with various social sectors, like education,
crime prevention, justice, welfare, and health, working together; and vertical
co-operation with various tiers of government, local, regional and national, working
in harmony with one another, and with non-government organisations. More impor-
tantly, it requires a synergy between social, economic, political, and environmental
interests […]
Fourthly, there is a need to conceptualise social work as contextual practice, as not
only about working with people in contexts, the ‘person-in-environment’, but also
about working with whole contexts. […]
Finally, dialogical processes within local contexts are far more likely to create
indigenous and relevant models of social work practice than imported ones since they
directly address the needs of the country, respond to the culture of the people and
focus on pertinent social issues. This is not to say that there is not a shared area of
understanding and that there are not commonalities in social work education, prac-
tice and research across the world. […].

References
Brah, A. (1992) ‘Difference, diversity and differentiation’. In Donald, J. and Rattansi, A. (eds)
Race, culture and difference. London: Sage pp 53–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/03906701.
1991.9971087
Goldstein, H. (1986) ‘Education for social work practice: a cognitive, cross-cultural approach’,
International Social Work, 29(2): 149–164. https://doi.org/10.1177/002087288602900207
Gray, M. (1999) ‘Crime prevention in schools: a multi-disciplinary intervention research pro-
ject’, Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk 35(4): 375–386.
Gray, M. and Allegritti, I. (2002) ‘Cross-cultural practice and the indigenisation of African
social work’, Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk 38(4): 324–336.
Gray, M. and Fook, J. (2002) ‘Issues in defining “universal social work”: comparing social
work in South Africa and Australia’, Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk 38(4): 363–376.
Haug, E. (2001) Writings in the Margins: Critical Reflections on the Emerging Discourse of
International Social Work, unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Calgary. http://dx.doi.
org/10.11575/PRISM/24101
Hochfeld, T. (2002) ‘Striving for synergy: gender analysis and indigenous social work practice
in South Africa’, Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk 38(2): 105–118.
Hokenstad, M. C. & Kendall, K. A. (1995) ‘International social work education’. In Edwards,
R. (Ed) Encyclopedia of Social Work. Washington, DC: NASW Press, pp 1511–1520. https://
doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.013.562
Ife, J. (2000) ‘Local and global practice: relocating social work as a human rights profes-
sion in the new global order’, European Journal of Social Work (4): 5–15. https://doi.
org/10.1080/714052835
Lee, G. (1997) ‘The newest old gem: Family group conferencing’, Justice as Healing 2(2): 1–3.
56 Mel Gray and Jan Fook
Lorenz, W. (2001) ‘Social work in Europe: portrait of a diverse professional group’, in
Hessle, S. (ed) International Standard Setting of Higher Social Work Education, Stockholm
Studies on Social Work 17. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University, Department of Social
Work.
Midgley, J. (1992) ‘The challenge of international social work’. In Hokenstad, M.C.,
Khinduka, S. and Midgley, J. (eds) Profiles in International Social Work, Washington, DC:
NASW Press pp71–84.
Midgley, J. (2001) ‘Issues in International Social Work: Resolving critical debates in the pro-
fession’. Journal of Social Work 1(1): 21–35 DOI: 10.1177/146801730100100103
Osei-Hwedie, K. (1995) A Search for legitimate social development education and practice
models for Africa. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mullen.
Smith, L. T. (1999) Decolonising methodologies, Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago
Press.
Waldegrave, C., Tamasese, K., Tuhaka, F. and Warihi, C. (2003) Just therapy: A journey, Ade-
laide, NSW: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Further Reading
Ferguson, I., Lavalette, M. and Whitmore, E. (2005) Globalisation, global justice and social
work. London: Routledge.
Healy, L. M. and Thomas, R. L. (2020) International Social Work. Third Edition. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Noble, C. and Henrickson, M. (2014) Global Social Work. Crossing borders, blurring bound-
aries. Sydney, NSW: Sydney University Press.
Rankopo MJ, Osei-Hwedie K. (2011) ‘Globalization and culturally relevant social work:
African perspectives on indigenization’. International Social Work 54(1): 137–147.
DOI:10.1177/0020872810372367.
Watermeyer, T.D. and Yan, M.C. (2022) Indigenization without ‘indigeneity’: Problematizing
the discourse of indigenization of social work in China. British Journal of Social Work
52(3): 1511–1528, https: doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcab064
6 The (r)evolution and decolonization
of social work ethics
The global social work statement of
ethical principles
Vishanthie Sewpaul and Mark Henrickson

This article has been selected, not because of the answers it provides, but because of
the questions it poses and the insight it gives into the contested terrain that is global
social work, and more specifically, global social work ethics. The aim of the new
statement of ethical principles, approved by the International Association of Schools
of Social Work (IASSW) and International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) in
2018, was to move away from the ‘Western’ liberal humanist values that had charac-
terised the previous statement, and at the same time, to respond to calls to decolonise
social work. How far this has been achieved remains an open question. We invite
readers to use this extract as a brief taster, and to make up their own minds about
this important debate by reading the article in full.
From: International Social Work 62(6): 1469–1481. DOI: 10.1177/0020872819846238

The 2014 Global Definition (a revision of the 1982 and 2000 definitions) was devel-
oped over a period of 4 years of intensive conversation and consultation in every
region of the world. The consultation processes helped – we might even say demanded
that – the profession recognize that social work had become truly global. Indeed, in
January 2018, 53 percent of the IASSW’s] 478 institutional members (which include
all staff and students in a school) were in the Asia Pacific region, and only 39 percent
in North America/the Caribbean and Europe/the Middle East combined (the balance
came from the African region; 7% and 1 percent from Latin America). […] The chal-
lenge of defining social work globally was to identify the core features of social work,
and at the same time to recognize that the contexts in which social work is practised,
taught and researched vary considerably. Furthermore, the Global Social Work Defi-
nition Task Force had to do these things in a concise statement in which words and
concepts could easily be translated into many languages. The Task Force had to navi-
gate highly varied national and cultural contexts, and negotiate often competing and
sometimes entirely opposing views. Thus, the 2014 Definition is accompanied by a
six-page commentary, which details the spirit of the Global Definition and elaborates
on key concepts. The widespread consultations and the debates within the Task Force
taught us enough humility to appreciate that no single understanding of social work
could be conclusively applicable to all regions and countries of the world. For some,
the revision did not go nearly far enough; for others it went a step too far. Delegates
from Latin America, for example, wanted a far more radical revision to reflect the
Marxist roots of social work in the region, while European delegates originally pre-
ferred to modify the language of the previous definition in only minor ways. The Task
Force therefore added the sentence ‘The above definition may be amplified at national

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-9
58 Vishanthie Sewpaul and Mark Henrickson
and/or regional levels’ as part of the Definition. It is pleasing to see that some regions
and countries have undertaken amplification processes (for instance, the Asia Pacific
region approved its amplification in June 2016).

The GSWSEP [Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles]:

Processes and outcome
Inherent in the 2014 Global Definition are key ideas that recognize that social work
has become far more than a liberal humanist profession whose centre was located on
a European–North American axis. Its practice, teaching and research are informed
by a global array of philosophical positions and cultural values. The 2014 Defini-
tion requires social workers to interrogate the basic taken-for-granted principles in
the 2000 Definition, such as empowerment, liberation, human rights and social jus-
tice. This recognition led us to realize that the adoption of the 2014 Definition, and
the global context that created it, required that we next reconsider reviewing the
ethical principles of social work. Thus, a joint IASSW/IFSW Task Force was cre-
ated to review the existing Ethics in Social Work, Statement of Principles (hereaf-
ter referred to as the Statement) adopted by the General Assemblies of the IASSW
and IFSW in 2004 (IASSW and IFSW, 2004). This review, which has resulted in the
Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles (GSWSEP; IASSW and IFSW,
2018: hereafter referred to as GSWSEP – see supplementary material) used the 2014
Definition as its point of departure and was an exceptionally challenging process.
Nevertheless, we understand that social work is a dynamic profession, constantly
responding to changing knowledge and practice environments not only of place, but
also of time, so that new definitions and new ethics must be developed to reflect
evolving realities.
As the IASSW Task Force, in embarking on the review of the Statement we asked
ourselves whether we wanted to take the current Statement and make minor revisions
or to problematize the issues, and rethink ethics, even if we eventually returned to
a similar statement. Problematization is an effort ‘to know how and to what extent
it might be possible to think differently, instead of what is already known’ (Fou-
cault, cited in Alvesson and Sandberg, 2011: 253), with the aim being to disrupt
taken-for-granted assumptions (Bacchi, 2012). Given the range of taken-for-granted
assumptions and the rhetoric that underscore social work ethics, the rootedness of
social work ethics in hegemonic liberal humanist discourses, which are a poor fit with
Indigenous, Asian, Arabic and African realities, and the calls for the decolonization
of social work education, research and practice, the IASSW chose the latter. […]
After a protracted and difficult process, the IASSW and IFSW reached agreement
on the following nine main principles, which appear in the final GSWSEP:

1 Recognition of the inherent dignity of humanity

2 Promoting human rights
3 Promoting social justice and equity
4 Promoting the right to self-determination
5 Promoting the right to participation
6 Respect for confidentiality and privacy
7 Treating people as whole persons
 The (r)evolution and decolonization of social work ethics 59
8 Ethical use of technology and social media
9 Professional integrity.

Each of these principles has a number of subthemes. […]

Conclusion
The 2014 Global Definition of Social Work was developed during a painstaking
period of international consultation that involved a multifarious array of global cul-
tures, languages, religions and ethical contexts in practice, research and educational
settings. It recognized that social work is now a truly global enterprise. That defini-
tion was resoundingly embraced by the memberships of the IASSW and IFSW. The
inevitable consequence of the 2014 Definition is that the way we practise social work,
teach social work students (and provide continuing education to practising social
workers) and do research must be reconsidered. The GSWSEP is that reconsidera-
tion, which must be applied and tested in real-world practice. We frankly acknowl-
edge that no set of principles, let alone a code of ethics or code of conduct, can of
itself comprehend every context or make every social worker an ethical practitioner.
Social work education, research and practice are fraught with ethical complexities,
and there are no formulaic answers to these. Willingness to deal with ambiguity and
critical reflexivity must be the sine qua non of ethical practice, and all of us, as social
work educators, practitioners, researchers and students, must embrace, and remain
committed to, ongoing critical reflexivity. Thus, the GSWSEP ‘is designed to facilitate
social workers’ aspirations towards the highest possible standards of ethical practice,
through processes of constant debate, self-reflection, willing-ness to deal with ambi-
guities, and to engage in ethically acceptable processes of decision-making to achieve
ethical outcomes’ (IASSW and IFSW, 2018: 1). While the GSWSEP is an outcome of
global conversations, it can serve as a springboard for deepened conversations within
nations and ‘between global Southern and Northern social work, especially so that
the voice of the global south is heard’ (Hugman and Bowles, 2012: 160). We have con-
sidered the contemporary contexts of the professionalization of social work, the sup-
planting of codes of ethics by codes of conduct, the interrogation of accepted values
and principles from postmodernist and postcolonial perspectives, and the historical
legacies of colonialism, to craft a document that embraces a decolonization agenda,
which in itself is complex and contested; decolonization is a process, not an end. Like
the Definition, these ethical principles will no doubt need to be amplified at regional,
national and even local levels. Nevertheless, social work, as a profession and an aca-
demic discipline, must be in agreement about some core set of ethical principles that
unite us across countries and international associations. We look forward to ongoing,
informed and open-minded dialogue about these principles.

References
Alvesson, M. and Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematiza-
tion. Academy of Management Review 36: 247–71.
Bacchi, C. (2012). Why study problematizations? Making politics visible. Open Journal of
Political Science 2(1): 1–8.
60 Vishanthie Sewpaul and Mark Henrickson
Hugman, R. and W. Bowles (2012). ‘Social work values, ethics and professional regulation.’ In
K. Lyons, T. Hokenstad, M. Pawar, N. Huegler and N. Hall (eds) The SAGE Handbook of
International Social Work, pp. 150–62. London: SAGE.
International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and International Federation of
Social Workers (IFSW) (2004) ‘Statement of Ethical Principles’. Available online at: https://
www.iassw-aiets.org/archive/ethics-in-social-work-statement-of-principles/
International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and International Federation of
Social Workers (IFSW) (2014) ‘Global Definition of Social Work’. Available online at: https://
www.iassw-aiets.org/ global-definition-of-social-work-review-of-the-global-definition/
International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and International Federation of
Social Workers (IFSW) (2018) ‘Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles’. Avail-
able online at: https://www.iassw-aiets.org/2018/04/18/global-social-work-statement-of-
ethical-principles-iassw/
International Federation of Social Workers (2018) ‘Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Princi-
ples’. Available at: https://www.ifsw.org/global-social-work-statement-of-ethical-principles/

Further reading
Cox, D. and Pawar, M. (2013) International social work: issues, strategies and programs. 2nd
edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gray, M. and Webb, S.A. (2010) International social work. London: SAGE.
Lyons, K., Hokenstad, T., Pawar, M., Huegler N. and Hall, N. (eds) (2012) The SAGE hand-
book of international social work. London: Sage.
Noble, C., Strauss, H. and Littlechild, B. (eds) (2014) Global social work: crossing borders,
blurring boundaries. Australia: Sydney University Press.
Sewpaul, V. (2016) ‘The West and the rest divide: Human rights, culture and social work.’
Journal of Social Work and Human Rights 1: 30–39.
Staub-Bernasconi, S. (2014) ‘Transcending disciplinary, professional and national borders in
social work education’. In C. Noble, H. Strauss and B. Littlechild (eds) Global social work:
Crossing borders, blurring boundaries. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Williams, C., Graham, M. (2014) “A world on the move”: Migration, mobilities and social
work.’ British Journal of Social Work 44 (Suppl. 1): i1–i17.
7 Human rights practice
Possibilities and pitfalls for developing
emancipatory social work
Sarah Cemlyn

The idea of human rights is central to social work across the world. But what does
this mean, beyond the rhetoric? Sarah Cemlyn’s important article explores connec-
tions between human rights and other frameworks, including professional codes.
She identifies how difficult it is to keep human rights to the fore in the context of
managerialism and the consumerisation of rights, and she cautions against the dan-
gers of ‘Western’-style human rights approaches being imposed on other countries in
an uncritical way. This chimes well with one of the themes running throughout our
collection; that social work must be understood as a context-specific, diverse and
changing phenomenon. Please note: the article is highly referenced; readers should
go to the original article to find all sources.
From: Ethics and Social Welfare, 2:3, 222–242, DOI: 10.1080/17496530802481714

Human Rights and Emancipatory Social Work

[…] this paper takes as its starting point that human rights are inclusively constructed
within cross-cultural frameworks, are aligned with the struggle for social justice and
equality, emphasize common humanity, collectivity and contextuality (Ife and Fiske
2006), and evolve discursively through dialogue and political action. This contrasts
with abstract, expert definitions that may be somewhat separate from daily human
experience and perceived as primarily the province of lawyers.
However, the law can also be an essential framework for social work practice. Stra-
tegic use of the law can to some degree support practice that promotes anti-oppressive
action and human rights. Human rights law both reflects and aims to promote polit-
ical and cultural change.
This paper also emphasizes the links between a human rights perspective and
other theoretical positions. Various terms are employed for approaches to social work
that seek to challenge inequalities at structural and personal levels, promote greater
autonomy and empowerment, and resist policies and practices that disempower and
oppress. These include ‘emancipatory’, ‘radical’, ‘structural’ and ‘transformational’
social work and ‘anti-oppressive practice’. […]

Public and Political Endorsement of Human Rights

A number of factors facilitate the development of human rights as a core element of
emancipatory practice. Internationally the notion is embedded in political and public
discourse, to the extent that ‘human rights discourses are now a pervasive feature of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-10
62 Sarah Cemlyn
global public culture’ and ‘constitute an international symbolic order’ (Cohen 1999,
p. 260). At the apex of this symbolic order are UN conventions and treaties, which
are widely but not universally endorsed. Between 153 and 192 nations have ratified
major conventions such as those on civil and political rights, on social, economic and
cultural rights, on racial and sexual discrimination and on children’s rights. […]
Within Britain a broad public and political endorsement of human rights has been
promoted by government, especially since the introduction of the Human Rights Act
(HRA) 1998. […] the legal framework of the HRA has led to some successful chal-
lenges to social care and health practice, for example against a care trust’s decision
not to provide care within the home for a disabled daughter, and a local authority’s
delay in adapting accommodation for a disabled woman with six children.
Nonetheless the development of a British human rights culture is still limited. The
Ministry of Justice (2008) found that awareness and implementation of human rights
principles lag well behind the expressed aspirations. Moreover, the HRA, founded
on the 1950 European convention, emphasizes first-generation civil and political
rights, rather than second-generation social, economic and cultural rights, or third-
generation developmental, participatory and collective rights. Effective access to
social care rights implies the need for primary legislation carrying entitlements imple-
mented by local authority duties, rather than concessions implemented by powers and
mediated by social workers. […]
The establishment in October 2007 of the British Equality and Human Rights
Commission (EHRC) was proclaimed to embody a process of uniting rights with
anti-discrimination and equality work, accompanied by a wide-ranging Equalities
Review and a concurrent governmental review of anti-discrimination legislation. The
linking of rights and equality work in the UK policy context has significance for
social work, in which anti-discriminatory practice is currently more widely accepted
than human rights as a model to inform practice.

Professional Acceptance of Human Rights Discourse

It is relevant to analyse the extent to which the notion of human rights is already
embedded in the language, at least, of social work theory, ethics and practice. This
could provide a bridge to a more emancipatory interpretation of human rights to bol-
ster the profession’s ‘radical kernel’ (Lavalette & Ferguson 2007a).
Before the language of ‘human rights’ became more prominent, there was a
longer-standing requirement to respect ‘rights’ within social work values and ethics.
Rights to respect and self-determination based on Kantian moral philosophy were
key to principles that informed Western social work (Banks 2001). These rights are
effectively first-generation liberal rights. While they recognized humanity as an end
as well as a means, they were decontextualized from the social and economic situ-
ation of each individual, and could pave the way for pathologizing the service user
(Hugman & Smith 1995).
The British code of ethics (BASW 2007) also commits itself to human rights. Based
on an earlier version of the international statement, it spells out that this means
upholding both first- and second-generation rights, ‘not only civil and political but
also economic, social and cultural rights’. Third-generation collective and environ-
mental rights, which are highly relevant for less developed countries, have a lower
profile in both codes, although the BASW code refers to ‘social development and
 Human rights practice 63
environmental management’. Ethical codes for professional social work are develop-
ing in countries where social work is both new and established, although, arguably,
codes based on ‘Western’ individual rights are less relevant for some countries (Banks
2008). […] Human rights have to emerge from an abstract universal domain to engage
with the situated voices and needs of human beings. In summary, ethical critiques
such as those based on feminist and indigenous perspectives link closely with efforts
to sensitize and contextualize the pursuit of rights.
[…]

Community and Service-user Movements

Although the term ‘service user’ contains contradictions in terms of who is defining
the identity, Beresford (2005) argues that its strengths outweigh its disadvantages.
In social justice terms, the politics of recognition adopted by these movements has
redefined the identity of members of the groups as citizens with rights. Service-user
movements have demonstrated the strength of a rights-based approach and have
had a considerable impact on British social work theorizing, although arguably less
on social work practice. By reconceptualizing their experiences in terms of social
oppression and barriers, and reframing services as rights to citizenship and inclu-
sion, service-user movements shift the terms of the debate and have achieved some
re-evaluation and reshaping of services. Direct payments for service users are an
important UK example, although barriers and inequities remain in implementation.
While other liberation movements such as anti-racism and feminism have also
effected significant change, one aspect of the significance of service-user movements,
such as those involving disabled people, mental health survivors, people with learning
difficulties and young people in care, is that a primary source of their oppression has
been the way in which social and health services have been provided and have con-
trolled and limited their lives. The assertion of civil, participatory and social rights
in this domain is backed by the power of a political movement engaged in advocacy,
campaigning and community action.
Other highly marginalized groups whose citizenship rights are denied or con-
strained have also demonstrated the importance of asserting a human rights approach
in order to challenge exclusion and abuse. For example, asylum seekers have used UK
human rights law as well as community and political campaigns to challenge inhu-
man treatment in the form of detention, deportation and destitution. […] Another
group using a human rights approach both legally and politically are British Gypsies
and Travellers in their efforts to obtain somewhere safe to live without eviction and
with access to basic services. […]

Legal and Political Limitations

[…] despite wide acceptance, human rights treaties themselves remain contested in
key respects, in terms of overt acceptance and internal contradictions. For example,
at a national level the United Kingdom has taken reservations to the children’s rights
convention in respect of immigration legislation so that immigration control overrides
the child’s welfare. […]
In the international sphere, although 175 countries have ratified the convention on
eliminating discrimination against women, more have entered reservations to it than
64 Sarah Cemlyn
to any other human rights treaty, and many of these negate its core principles, such
as equality between women and men in marriage and family life. In several Western
countries including the United Kingdom, so-called anti-terrorist measures fly in the
face of civil and political convention rights to liberty and freedom from torture and
degrading treatment. Given social work’s emphasis on human dignity and well-being,
these measures should be of deep concern.
The gains of service user and community movements in promoting rights within
social work are undermined by various trends. The emphasis on risk management
can curtail both civil and social rights of some groups, for example mental health ser-
vice users. Given policy and resource constraints, there are considerable limits on the
extent to which social and economic rights within social care follow from an empha-
sis on civil rights. Ellis argues that disability activists have contributed to a dichotomy
between civil rights, which they favour, versus social rights, which are discredited. In
the United Kingdom this meshes with the orientation of the HRA creating ‘a conver-
gence between government and disability movement agendas in that both are based
upon individualistic approaches to freedom and rights’ (Ellis 2005, p. 701).
Moreover, civil rights such as rights to privacy and to freedom from degrading
treatment are themselves jeopardized by non-implementation of social rights, for
example disabled people’s lack of control of decisions and circumstances, and the
time taken by social services to decide on services. More positively, however, legal
developments are promoting some protection for socio-economic rights, reinforced
by the civil and political struggle of service-user movements.

Limitations in the Discourse and Practice of Social Work

Paradoxically, within social work and more generally, the contemporary prominence
of human rights discourse itself brings a problem of rhetoric masking reality, while
meanings and commitment remain unexamined. One aspect is that the prevalence
of rights discourse in social work can promote taken-for-granted assumptions about
their meaning, and a lack of examination of their contested and complex nature. […]

Consumerization, Privatization, Globalization and the Co-option of

Human Rights
Individualization of rights is itself part of the wider consumerization of many rela-
tionships within the former welfare state in Western nations, promoting a reversion to
a narrower focus on first-generation rights. The impact of globalization is felt within
transactions at the most local level in the United Kingdom as elsewhere, for example
the privatization of home care. Consumer rights are largely available to those who can
pay for services, but most social work service users are not in this position. The idea
of consuming services also ignores those service users for whom compulsion features
significantly. Moreover, privatization of services has limited even the use of the UK
Human Rights Act to protect service users, although legal challenges on this have
subsequently proved successful. […]
Consumerization and privatization reflect the global dominance of neo-liberalism.
[…] in the Western-dominated global order, socio-economic rights are marginalized
and seen as unrealistic aspirations. Economic development based on free markets
brings further poverty and human rights violations, but these are viewed by neo-liberals
 Human rights practice 65
as ‘high transition costs’ and therefore justified. Evans and Ayers (2006) see human
rights, free markets and democracy as a triad that is accepted virtually worldwide,
illustrating this through analysis of developments in Africa. More positively, Shafir
and Brysk (2006) see rights-based development as a projection of the development of
second-generation rights in individual nation-states. However, Mishra (2005) argues
that social and economic rights, as rights to provision rather than negatively defined
freedoms from interference, are more context dependent and reliant on the nation-
state to be met, bringing different challenges for formulating global standards that
are achievable within different economies. Mishra proposes a formula for linking
economic capacity with social standards that could be internationally accepted. In
this approach social rights are ‘not about reducing inequality per se but rather about
ensuring that a minimum of basic resources and opportunities are available to all to
ensure a life of human dignity and social inclusion’ (Mishra 2005, p. 17).
Internationally, this argument asserts that the universality of social and economic
rights is conditional compared to civil and political rights. This is echoed in Ellis’
(2005) British discussion of the limitations of a civil rights approach for equalizing
social provision for disabled people. While Mishra’s approach aims to take the devel-
opment of social and economic rights out of the sphere of ‘aspiration’, it also high-
lights some inherent difficulties of implementation, and pays limited attention to the
destructive impact of structural adjustment on local economies. […]

Universalism, Relativism and Culture

[…] There are wide-ranging debates about the relationship between universalism and
cultural specificity and autonomy. These weigh the balance between the importance
of universal human rights instruments and practices being available to all nations
and groups and the dangers of cultural dominance reflecting global hegemony within
social work. However, cultures are neither static nor monolithic and this affects inter-
pretations of rights within as well as between groups. Questions around cultural
relativism have been considered extensively from different perspectives: for exam-
ple, nationally, its potential to undermine a child’s core right to protection; interna-
tionally, whether working with the grain of Eastern traditional cultures clashes with
established (Western) social work values such as individual self-determination; and
more broadly the tensions between universalism and indigenization.
The relevance of these debates for this paper lies in the importance of clarity about
international inequalities, combined with an emphasis on dialogue and mutual inter-
cultural engagement. The argument here is that a dialogical approach to human rights
needs to become part of such analysis, recognizing the power of human rights to
‘resonate across cultures and traditions’ (Ife 2001a, pp. 2–3), while exploring multiple
perspectives on the meanings and experiences of human rights.

Conclusion
[…] At all levels human rights are contested territory, and for a human rights
perspective to become a more useful and useable for radical social work, these
contests, uncertainties and strengths need to be further researched, tested, debated
and reflected on rather than remain on a rhetorical shelf within statements of ethics
and definitions of social work. It is important that the links between human rights
66 Sarah Cemlyn
and social justice in support of the struggles of oppressed peoples are more fully
articulated, while the significant dangers and realities of incorporation within neo-
liberalism are clearly identified. […]
Social work is also contested territory, at no time more than the present. Human
rights are integral to social work, but equally reflect diverse and often opposing views
and positions. Both are ambiguous and under attack. However, human rights have
a current political momentum internationally and nationally with which social work
could be further aligned. Human rights claims and strategies have informed many
political struggles of marginalized and oppressed groups encompassing local and
global levels. […]
Participation, mutual engagement, dialogue and collectivity are also characteristics
of emancipatory approaches to social work, framed within an analysis of structural
inequalities and injustice, and a reflective stance on interpersonal power differences
and practice. These characteristics need to be nurtured and developed if the potential
of human rights for emancipatory social work in alliance with service users is to be
realized, rather than co-opted by a neo-liberal agenda, like many previous theoretical
and ideological tools (e.g. ‘empowerment’, and, some have argued, ‘anti-oppressive
practice’). A critical approach to human rights does not supersede other progressive
perspectives of structural and radical social work, critical postmodernism and anti-
oppressive practice, but is a further ingredient to reinvigorate, enhance and extend
them.
Human rights also need to be clearly linked to larger political critiques and civil
society movements. Their dynamism and potential for emancipatory change derive
from these struggles. Emancipatory social work builds on and is aligned with national
and global movements that critique the neo-liberal emphasis on consumption and
profit (with their corollaries of arms manufacture and war) and advocate the elimi-
nation of poverty and the promotion of social, economic and environmental rights.
For individual social workers the focus on emancipation, certainly within current
British state social work, will remain problematic. However, the room for manoeu-
vre […] indicates a more positive perspective based on the social worker’s creativity
and skills in human interaction and complex judgement and incorporating a focus
on power relationships at every level. This paper has argued that a more critical and
informed focus on human rights can be a further potentially powerful tool for the
social worker and the profession in seeking to contribute to resistance to oppression,
collective solidarity and the promotion of emancipatory change.

References
Banks, S. (2008) ‘Critical commentary: social work ethics’. British Journal of Social Work
38(6): 1238–1249.
BASW (British Association of Social Workers) (2007) The Code of Ethics for Social Work.
Available at: http://www.basw.co.uk/ Accessed 6 May 2021.
Beresford, P. (2005) ‘Service user’: Regressive or liberatory terminology?’ Disability and Soci-
ety, 20(4): 469–77.
Cohen, J. (1999) ‘Changing paradigms of citizenship and the exclusiveness of the Demos’.
International Sociology, 14: 245–68.
Ellis, K. (2004) ‘Promoting rights or avoiding litigation? The introduction of the human rights
act 1998 into adult social care in England’. European Journal of Social Work, 7(3): 321–40.
 Human rights practice 67
Ellis, K. (2005) ‘Disability rights in practice: the relationship between human rights and social
rights in contemporary social care’. Disability and Society, 20(7): 691–704.
Evans, T. and Ayers, A. J. (2006) ‘In the service of power: the global political economy of cit-
izenship and human rights’. Citizenship Studies, 10(3): 289–308.
Ferguson, I. and Lavalette, M. (2006) ‘Globalization and global justice: towards a social work
of resistance’. International Social Work, 49: 309–18.
Hugman, R. and Smith, D. (1995) Ethical issues in social work, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Ife, J. (2001a) Human rights and social work: towards rights based practice, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ife, J. and Fiske, L. (2006) ‘Human rights and community work: complementary theories and
practices’. International Social Work 49(3): 297–308.
Mishra, R. (2005) ‘Social rights as human rights: globalising social protection’. International
Social Work 48(1): 9–20.
Shafir, G. and Brysk, A. (2006) ‘The globalization of rights: from citizenship to human rights’.
Citizenship Studies 10(3): 275–87.

Further reading
Banks, S. (2003). ‘From oaths to rulebooks: A critical examination of codes of ethics for the
social professions’. European Journal of Social Work, 6(2): 133–44.
Barreto, J.M. (2016) ‘Decolonial thinking and the quest for decolonising human rights.’ Asian
Journal of Social Science 46: 484=502
Green, S. and Bennett, B. (2018) ‘Wayanha: A decolonised social work’. Australian Social
Work 71(3): 261–264. DOI: 10.1080/0312407X.2018.1469654/
Pease, B. and Fook, J. (1999) Transforming social work practice: postmodern critical perspec-
tives. London: Routledge.
Udah, H. (2021) ‘Coloniality of power and ‘international students’ experience: what are the
ethical responsibilities of social work and human service educators?’ Ethics and Social Wel-
fare 15(1): 84–99, DOI: 10.1080/17496535.2021.1880612
8 The impact of scandal and
inquiries on social work and the
personal social services
Ray Jones

This chapter has been selected for its careful examination of the impact of scandals
and inquiries on legislation, organisational arrangements, policy and practice; the
context is the UK, but the story is a familiar one elsewhere. Jones asserts that scan-
dals and inquiries are not solely responsible for the transformation that has taken
place in local authority social services since 1970. On the contrary, institutional
change often began before the event that precipitated a scandal or inquiry. But what
these scandals and inquiries, and the accompanying media coverage, have done,
Jones argues, is to precipitate a focus on risk and attempts to manage risk. This,
he concludes, has been to the detriment of social work’s central purpose of helping
people in crisis and difficulty.
From: T. Bamford and K. Bilton (eds) Social work: Past, present and future. Bristol:
Policy Press. (2020): 191–212. DOI:10.1332/policypress/9781447356530.003.0012

The Maria Colwell Inquiry and the 1975 Children Act

[…] it was the death of a child in 1973 that possibly had the biggest and longest-­
lasting impact on how local authority personal social (p.193) services were to develop,
with a legacy that is still in place today. Seven-year-old Maria Colwell was killed by
her stepfather in Brighton. She had previously for many years been well cared for by
foster carers, but when her mother asked that she be returned to her care this was
agreed. She subsequently experienced awful neglect and physical abuse.
Following coverage and campaigning, in particular by the local newspaper
and with the local MP lending his support, the government ordered an inquiry
(Department of Health and Social Security, 1974). Unlike the Monckton Inquiry fol-
lowing the death of Dennis O’Neill, which was undertaken and completed in four
days, the Maria Colwell Inquiry was to last 41 days and was held in public amid a
febrile atmosphere, with hostility and hatred targeted at the social worker who had
supervised Maria’s return to her mother (Butler and Drakeford, 2003, 2011).
It has been assumed […] that the Maria Colwell Inquiry led to, or at least was a
significant spur for, the 1975 Children Act, with children in care to be given greater
security through adoption or custodianship. However, as in the case of the Monck-
ton Inquiry in 1945, changes were already in stream […]. As with Dennis O’Neill
and the 1948 Children Act, and later the death of Victoria Climbié and the 2004
Children Act, a child’s death did come to be seen as the generator of legislative and
policy changes on permanency arrangements for children in care that were already

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-11
 The impact of scandal and inquiries 69
partly in train. […] what did more explicitly occur as a response to the Maria Col-
well Inquiry was a resetting of social work practice and procedures and a refocusing
of the work of social services departments, changes that have been confirmed and
reinforced over the subsequent years in response to further inquiries following the
deaths of children.

The Cleveland Inquiry and the 1989 Children Act and the 1990 NHS
and Community Care Act
The 1987 Cleveland Inquiry (Secretary of State for Social Services, 1988), led by Lady
Butler-Sloss, changed the direction of the press and public concerns about child abuse
away from children’s being left unprotected and towards their being inaccurately and
inappropriately identified as being abused. Professionals and the courts were viewed
as too energetic and evangelical in assessing children as having been abused (Bell,
1988; Waterhouse, 1994).
In Cleveland between February and July 1987 120 children were diagnosed as hav-
ing been sexually abused, in part following an anal dilation test used by two paedia-
tricians. Social workers and the police acted on the basis of the medical assessments.
The Inquiry criticised the paediatricians ‘for the certainty and over-confidence with
which they pursued the detection of sexual abuse in children referred to them’ and
stated that ‘the presence of the physical signs was elevated from grounds of “strong
suspicion” to an unequivocal “diagnosis” of sexual abuse’ (Secretary of State for
Social Services, 1988, p 243).
This turning of press, public and political attention away from children’s not being
protected from abuse to children’s being abused by the child protection system arose
not only in Cleveland. In Orkney, Rochdale and elsewhere there were concerns that
children had been wrongly assessed as being subjected to ritualised satanic sexual
abuse and had been placed in local authority care by the courts (Waterhouse, 1994;
La Fontaine, 1998). The debates about whether, and to what extent, children had
been inaccurately assessed as having been abused continue, and some 30 years on
there are still polarised views […].
It has been assumed that it was the Cleveland Inquiry that resulted in the 1989
Children Act. The Act sought to reset the attention of social workers and others to
helping ‘children in need’ within their families by working in partnership with par-
ents to assist them to care for their children, rather than the great majority of actions
and activities being to protect children through applying child protection processes
and procedures. But, as in the cases of the 1948 and 1975 Acts noted above, the roots
of the 1989 Act were already well established before the Cleveland scandal arose and
the Butler-Sloss Inquiry report was produced. […]
The 1989 Children Act was accompanied by ten volumes of statutory guidance
totalling over 1,000 pages. This in itself pushed specialisation in children’s social
work within social services departments, with separate divisions for children’s and
adults’ social services. This was also promoted by the 1990 NHS and Community
Care Act, which was implemented at the same time as the 1989 Children Act. The
1990 Act and subsequent guidance promoted a purchaser–provider separation within
adult services, whereas the thrust of the 1989 Act was towards integration and inter-
agency and inter-professional working. […]
70 Ray Jones
Every Child Matters, the Climbié Inquiry and the 2004 Children Act
The specialisation in children’s social work and the separation from adult services
was taken further by the 2004 Children Act, which required that within local author-
ities, services for schools and education were brought together within a children’s
services department under the leadership of a director of children’s services, while
adult services were to be led by a director of adult services. This was the demise, after
30 years, of social services departments and Directors of Social Services.
It is often assumed that the Laming Inquiry (Laming, 2003) into the death of 8-year-
old Victoria Climbié in Haringey was the major precipitator of the 2004 Children Act.
But, as with the previous children’s legislation, the road to the creation of the 2004
Act was longer and more convoluted than a straightforward response to an inquiry
report. […] As with the 1948, 1975 and 1989 Acts, […] there were already factors and
forces in play that were heading in the direction of, and leading the development of,
the new legislation. The scandals – each of which led to an official inquiry – became
attached to and symbolic of the legislation that followed and could be and were used
to support the need for the new legislation, but they occurred later within the pro-
cesses that were already shaping the legislative change. These processes included law
reviews that had already been initiated, changing government policy frameworks and
also the interests and commitments of key players, including politicians.

The impact of scandal and concern on practice, policy and

procedures
If the relationship between scandal, inquiries and changed legislation seems rather
more complex than might have been assumed, the impact on practice of media, public
and political concerns about – in particular – the deaths of children from neglect and
abuse is clearer and more immediate. […]
The 1980s saw a flurry of child abuse public inquiries following the deaths of chil-
dren, including Jasmine Beckford (London Borough of Brent, 1985), Tyra Henry
(London Borough of Lambeth, 1987) and Kimberley Carlile (London Borough of
Greenwich, 1987). Writing in 2004, Stanley and Manthorpe coined the phrase ‘the
age of the inquiry’ (Stanley and Manthorpe, 2004). It was an age that started in
the 1970s, gathered momentum in the 1980s and has not slowed down since, and
the impact has been selective and negative, as noted by Eileen Munro:

Approximately 40 more inquiries [after the 1973–74 Maria Colwell Inquiry]

were published up to 1990, providing a constant reminder to the public of the
existence of child abuse and the apparent failure of professionals to protect chil-
dren. A review of inquiry reports found that 25 per cent of the reports were not
critical of any professional group and social workers escaped censure in 42 per
cent. Media coverage, however, varied […] social workers were repeatedly sin-
gled out for blame even when other professional groups had played a major role.
(Munro, 2004)

It was in this context of inquiries that the Department of Health prepared further
guidance on inter-agency working in child protection. Drafted in 1986, […] it subse-
quently went through several iterations, and in 2010 Working Together to Safeguard
 The impact of scandal and inquiries 71
Children (HM Government, 2010) ran to 390 pages. The increase in statutory and
non-statutory policy, procedural and practice guidance, along with the increased
scrutiny, when a child dies, through serious case reviews – which were introduced
in 1988, with the requirement expanded upon in the 1991 guidance – has had three
implications.
First, social work practice with children and families where there might be con-
cerns about a child’s welfare or safety has become more proceduralised and bureau-
cratised, skewing how social workers spend their time – with more time committed
to recording, data inputting and report writing (see, for example, White et al, 2009;
Munro, 2011). Second, more attention has been given to scrutinising practice through
case auditing and performance management where the cult of managerialism (Harris,
2003; Harris and Unwin, 2009) – which became more prevalent in the 1990s and
beyond – has now been further layered by an audit and procedural compliance cul-
ture. Third, how social workers approach their work with families has also changed,
with greater attention being given to the monitoring and surveillance of families while
there is less time for direct work and advocacy to assist families (Featherstone et al,
2018).

The impact of the media’s story of ‘Baby P’

How this changed approach is a consequence of policy and practice responding to
scandal is well illustrated by the changes that occurred immediately following the
media shaping and selling of the ‘Baby P’ story in 2008.
Peter Connelly was 17 months old when he died in August 2007. In November
2008 his mother, her boyfriend and the boyfriend’s (p.200) brother were each found
guilty of ‘causing or allowing’ Peter’s death. The media coverage, led by The Sun
newspaper and its then editor, Rebekah Brooks, focused not on those who had abused
Peter […] but on the social worker who had sought to help the Connelly family, and
her managers, along with a community paediatrician. […]
There was an immediate step change across the country in local authority social
work and legal decision-making. Care proceedings applications to the courts to seek
removal of children from their families increased from 482 in September and 496 in
October 2008 to 716 in December 2008 (Children and Families Courts Advisory
Service, 2009) when the media’s ‘Baby P’ story was launched.
[…] just as the ‘Baby P’ story continues to be referenced in the media, the defensive
practice and decision-making that it promoted in 2008 still continues. Child protec-
tion inquiries undertaken under section 47 of the 1989 Act have increased year on
year from 89,300 in 2009/10 to 198,090 in 2017/18 (+122%); child protection plans
have increased from 29,200 as at 31 March 2008 to 53,790 in 2018 (+84%); from
2007/08 to 2016/17 care proceedings increased by 130%; and the number of children
looked after by local authorities in England has risen from 60,000 in March 2008 to
75,420 in March 2018 (+26%).

The blame tree

What has generated what is now an overwhelming focus on risk assessment, risk
management and risk avoidance? It is a combination of blaming, naming and sham-
ing; and the blame tree […] has its roots in key developments that have occurred
72 Ray Jones

Figure 8.1 The blame tree.

since the 1990s. These include the requirement that serious case reviews are now
published in full and that they should allocate accountability; inspection reports from
the national inspectorates; and national league tables based on bar graphs publicly
reporting comparisons between local authorities on nationally collected and collated
key performance indicators.
The reality and experience is that what is then given attention by the local media –
and sometimes also more widely – is any criticism or concerns about performance and
practice. […] The negative coverage then generates a public concern, with politicians
‘playing to the gallery’ […]. This is all a recipe that cooks up more defensive practice
and less stable and more distorted services at the same time that the menu of help to
families has been cut and curtailed. Children and families who might have received
help when in difficulty are now caught in the child protection monitoring and surveil-
lance net. […]

References
Bell, S. (1988) When Salem Came to the Boro: True Story of the Cleveland Child Abuse Case,
London: Pan.
Butler, I. and Drakeford, M. (2003) Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare, Bristol: Policy
Press.
Butler, I. and Drakeford, M. (2011) Social Work on Trial: The Colwell Inquiry and the State
of Welfare, Bristol: Policy Press.
 The impact of scandal and inquiries 73
Children and Families Courts Advisory Service (2009) CAFCASS Care Demand, London:
CAFCASS.
Featherstone, B., Gupta, A., Morris, W. and White, S. (2018) Protecting Children: A Social
Model, Bristol: Policy Press.
Harris, J. (2003) The Social Work Business, London: Routledge.
Harris, J. and Unwin, P. (2009) ‘Performance management in modernised social work’, in
J. Harris and V. White (eds), Modernising Social Work: Critical Considerations, Bristol:
Policy Press, pp 9–30.
HM Government (2010) Working Together to Safeguard Children, London: Department for
Children, Schools and Families.
La Fontaine, J. (1998) Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laming, Lord (2003) Independent Report: The Victoria Climbié Inquiry: Report of an
Inquiry by Lord Laming, Cm 5730, London: The Stationery Office.
London Borough of Brent (1985) A Child in Trust: The Report of the Panel of Inquiry into
the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Jasmine Beckford, London: London Borough
of Brent.
London Borough of Greenwich (1987) A Child in Mind: Protection of Children in a Responsi-
ble Society: The Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding
the Death of Kimberley Carlile, London: London Borough of Greenwich.
London Borough of Lambeth (1987) Whose Child? The Report of the Public Inquiry into the
Death of Tyra Henry, London: London Borough of Lambeth.
Munro, E. (2004) ‘The impact of child abuse inquiries since 1990.’ In Stanley, N. and
Manthorpe, J. (eds) The age of inquiry: Learning and blaming in health and social care.
London: Routledge: 75–91.
Munro, E. (2011) The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report, Cm 6802, London:
Department for Education.
Secretary of State for Social Services (1988) Report of the Inquiry into Child Abuse in Cleve-
land 1987, Cm 412, London: HMSO.
Stanley, N. and Manthorpe, J. (2004) The Age of the Inquiry: Learning and Blaming in Health
and Social Care, London: Routledge.
Waterhouse, R. (1994) ‘Satanic abuse dismissed as “myth” by government inquiry: report
blames Evangelical Christians and “specialists” for the scare which led to investigations’,
Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/satanic-abuse-dismissed-as-myth-
by-government- inquiry-report-blames-evangelical-christians-and-1420013.html.
White, S., Hall, C. and Peckover, S. (2009) ‘The descriptive tyranny of the Common Assess-
ment Framework: technologies of categorization and professional practice in child welfare’,
British Journal of Social Work, vol 39, no 7, pp 1197–217.

Further reading
Butler, I. and Drakeford, M. (2003) Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare, Bristol: Policy
Press.
Butler, I. and Drakeford, M. (2011) Social Work on Trial: The Colwell Inquiry and the State
of Welfare, Bristol: Policy Press.
Cree, V.E., Clapton, G. and Smith, M. (eds) (2015). Revisiting Moral Panics, Bristol: Policy
Press.
9 Social work in a risk society
Stephen A. Webb

This chapter takes further the notion of risk and social work. In it, Stephen Webb,
prominent social theorist and researcher in social work, social welfare and policy,
invites us to understand social work and its relationship to risk through the lenses
of ‘risk society’, neoliberalism and late modernity. Our chosen extract is from the
introduction to his book, in which he sets the parameters for the discussion that fol-
lows. In summary, he offers a way through technical-managerialist responses to risk,
culminating in an alternative vision and method for social work based on ethics and
‘the practice of value’.
From: Social Work in a Risk Society: Social and Political Perspectives. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan (2007), Chapter 1, Setting the Scene: 1–22.

This opening chapter sets out the themes of the book highlighting my central preoc-
cupation with the relation between current and past social work practice and the ever
present phenomenon of risk. It is clear that social work needs to look for a new model
of practice; one that is ethically valid as well as functionally accountable in terms
of reasonable decision making procedures and interventions. There is a not entirely
inappropriate perception that current social work has sunk into a ‘managerialism’
that is increasingly afraid of the complexity of risky situations and has become highly
defensive. The latter has resulted in increasing dependence upon adherence to more
and more elaborate rule systems, procedures and rule following. Thus there is a reduc-
tion of scope for social workers to develop competences of judgment, ethical insight,
and holistic forms of practice. In effect social work is under threat of becoming a
de-skilled profession. This book provides a diagnosis of the reasons for this vitiating
process. But it is not merely cast in immediate terms of social work circumstances;
rather it is located within an ecology of higher and lower level historical and contem-
porary political forces. Because of this we need to be tolerant of having to draw on
social theory and sociology as well as material from professional and applied spheres.
[…] One of the most powerful motives for innovation and change has been the
search for absolute knowledge. The public’s desire for omnicompetence on the part
of central and local authorities and the impossible task of providing it in our complex
modern world provoke a reactive politics. In Britain we can see concrete examples
of this in child care deaths […], BSE1, management of national exams systems, and
the approach to paedophiles. Caught between an aspirational culture of individuals
wanting a secure environment in which to execute their own life-plans and govern-
ment’s reactive responses to crises by creating more systems of accountability, par-
adoxically often farmed out to non-accountable private corporations, the public is

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-12
 Social work in a risk society 75
made anxious and governments increasingly authoritarian. […] In other words in a
world that appears to be increasingly risky the public want to govern their own lives
safely but freely, and governments at risk of blame try to assert control by authoritar-
ian measures that may well compromise democracy.
The difficulties of building rule systems which can not only shape and control
social problems but enable their prediction is a symbol of our being in a risk society.
Unanticipated system failures combined with the public’s persistent belief that govern-
ments should have anticipated them causes a spiralling of public fears about knowns
and unknowns alike. Fear of crime is disproportionate to actual likelihood of being
a victim, and in the nature of democracy governments have to respond to the fear as
much as to the reality. That we deal more with images – ‘simulacra’ or the ‘hyper-real’
as Baudrillard calls the central idea of postmodern society – should act as a salutary
warning about the creeping technologisation of risk society.

Dimensions of Risk Society

Ulrich Beck named these phenomena in his celebrated book of 1992: Risk Society.
Here he links anxieties around particular risky activities in industry, chemicals, pol-
lution, nuclear accident to our capacity to collectively mediate our fears through what
he called ‘reflexive modernisation’. For Beck this concept ‘designates a developmental
phase of modern society in which social, political, economic and individual risks
increasingly tend to escape the institutions for monitoring and protection in society’
(1992, p. 5) Here the concept of risk is connected to reflexivity because new anxieties
about risks and the failure of experts and institutions to deal with them raise critical
questions about current practices.
[…] Beck’s idea is that compensating forms of the rationalisation of risk emerge
where existing forms have declined. We cope with our modern condition through
emergent formations of reflexive monitoring as with ‘identity politics’ such as the disa-
bility rights, mental health service survivors, battered women’s and justice for fathers’
movements and what has recently come to the fore, ‘social capital’ – community-
based individuals’ use of trusted collective or social knowledge. Increasingly user
groups resist expert judgement and make claims to the right to self-definition and
advocacy for those people whose identity has been denied by professionals, such as
health and social care workers.
Re-configurations of the relation between state and people as a result of
responses to uncertainty are particularly felt in the world of social work. This is
because social care provision and social work deal with variably vulnerable popu-
lations under conditions of uncertainty, e.g. financial constraint, local government
re-organisation and the constant re-structuring of public policy and local priorities.
Under such conditions the opportunities for risky situations to arise are high, and
knowing this social work attempts to develop ever more extensive management and
‘actuarial’ (accountability and insurance) systems. Social work in the last 15 years,
damaged by successive child abuse scandals has embraced the language of risk and
accountability much as have other public institutions. Targets, performance measures
and lists of procedures issuing from central government have offered a ‘calculative
technology’ for the assessment and constraining of risky situations. Of course the
further burdening of already over-worked social care personnel leads to the opening
up of more risk.
76 Stephen A. Webb
That the natural and the social worlds are risky is a given: hurricanes as well as
family violence can lead to death. There are perhaps fewer and fewer areas of life
in which the public believe that risk is unavoidable, and this view places enormous
pressures upon public authorities […]. At a crucial if local level social services and […]
social work find themselves at the eye of the storm: the raging tumult of unrelenting
contradictions between the often unpredictable emergence of risk within neo-liberal
systems of governance that suggests risks are more effectively minimised through the
self-regulating processes of the market than through the often spectacular failures of
government planning.

Re-thinking Social Work in a Risk Society

[…] A key argument of the book is that social work needs to be analysed in terms of
the political, social and economic changes, upheavals and displacements that have
produced the insecurities and risks that mark this period of late modernity. From
this vantage point it can be seen how the effects of these wider transformations feed
into making a new paradigm for understanding social work (Macarov & Bearwald,
2001). […] the formation, shifts of attribution and structuring of social work take
place within a complex system: this system includes a social dimension, that of risk
society; a political dimension, that of advanced liberalism; and a cultural dimension,
that of reflexive or late modernity.

The Governance of Risk

My analysis of social work is cast in terms of the logic of […] governing risk within
advanced liberal political rule. The concepts of risk and neo-liberalism as they con-
figure social work in new ways are examined in detail. It is shown how the preoc-
cupation with risk and the problems which arise within neo-liberal risk society are
translated into social work and how as a consequence risk is produced, prevented,
minimised, dramatised, or channelled.
[…] The book supports Hazel Kemshall’s (2002) view that the role of social work
has shifted from a preoccupation with need to one with risk, but […] extend[s] her
analysis by showing how risk and need are often conflated in assessing and determin-
ing service provision for users. This blending of risk and need is seen to be a reflection
of a new hybridised form of risk as ‘actuarial governance’ in late modernity. Increas-
ingly, actuarial risk, or the calculation of risk probabilities derived from statistical
models based on aggregate populations is extended into social work.
This leads to a number of new and challenging questions about the role of social
work in modern society. Rather than situating social work within a state or welfare
society as a straightforward vehicle of social control, the key questions asked are: (1) as
an organised knowledge and set of values, what role does it play, refuse to play, or aspire
to play, in the constitution of risk society as a governable domain?; (2) how does social
work reproduce the conditions necessary for its legitimation and its professional role in
risk society?; (3) how do risk and its governance reconfigure the professional identity
of social work?; (4) more practically, how do risk society and social governance impact
on framing the stages of planning, implementing, evaluating, intervening and support-
ing in social work?; (5) and finally, what ethical practice might social work develop in
response to these new conditions of risk and neo-liberal governance?
 Social work in a risk society 77
[…] One of the most important features of social work – the social handling of risk –
is also one of the least well understood. This book analyses and highlights social work’s
pivotal role of risk regulation and expert mediation for problematic populations and
vulnerable people in risk society. Here the nature of risk in social work is analysed con-
ceptually as formed between the twin rationalities of regulation and security. A tense
relationship is shown to exist between security and regulation, […] as well as the emer-
gence of the institutionalisation of risk in modern social work organisations, policy
developments, and technologies of care. These tense relations are described as a general
feature of ambivalence in late modernity. It is shown how social work’s ambivalence is
manifest through, on the one hand, its instrumental rationality, as complicity with cal-
culating and regulatory practices, and on the other hand, its substantive rationality, in
securing personal identity through its dialogic and expressive face-work. Garrett neatly
captures this when he says there is a ‘tension between the original ethical impulse and
procedural execution [that] might be viewed as the focal point for a range of dilemmas
which confront social workers’ (2003c, p. 4) This ambivalence is shown not to be a
matter of coincidence or compromise but something that grows out of the limitations
and crisis of systems of governance in complex life-worlds.
[…] A new territory is emerging, after the welfare state, for the management of
micro-sectors of society (anti-social behaviours, multiple problem families, ‘at-risk’ pop-
ulations, attachment disorders, asylum seekers, emotional illiteracy) that social work
is decisively involved in. The book shows how the new programme of ‘actuarial prac-
tice’ is configured alongside a rationality of risk, at the expense of more substantive
ways of thinking about psychosocial problems. In trying to manage these micro-sectors
on the edges of society social work increasingly comes to trust in scientific methods,
forensic technologies and appeals to systematic evidence (Saleebey, 1992). It appeals
to the authority and expertise of what Max Weber called an ‘instrumental rationality’
(Zweckrationalität) in which the boundaries of expert intervention become narrow and
reductive, with the priority becoming one of selecting the appropriate means to the inter-
vention’s ends, whatever they happen to be. […] Social work is increasingly organised
and audited in ways that characterise this technological enframing whereby everything
is regarded as a resource in a system that has to be calculated, regulated and controlled.
[…] We also see how social workers like other public sector professionals increas-
ingly resort to quasi-scientific methods as a means of legitimation and credential-
ism in hostile boundary wars with managers, governments and other professionals.
Evidence-based practice, managed clinical care, knowledge management, decision
analysis, competence learning and computerised assessment are all used to bolster pro-
fessional judgement in the drive for effectiveness. Clear grids of intelligibility and spec-
ification are required as a rational response to risk. This is referred to as the deepening
of ‘actuarial practice’ in social work. Social workers are increasingly held accountable
for their interventions and decisions in mechanistic ways. Within this accountability
culture the high expectations of service users, management and government require
social work to specify the limits and define the boundaries of intervention in a coherent
way. Indices, rules and precision techniques are sought after as part of the legal and
moral responsibility of social work in a society saturated by and obsessed with risk.
The effectiveness, evidence-based, risk management and ‘what works’ movements in
social work can be partly understood as a rational set of responses to these demands.
It is argued that social work is abandoning a holistic approach to working with clients
in order to rationally align itself within the dominant politics of neo-liberal managed
78 Stephen A. Webb
care. Thus social work is less concerned with addressing deeply rooted psychosocial
problems than with the re-construction and re-generation of clients’ life strategies. […]
In a society that narrowly pursues material self-interest and individual choice adher-
ence to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realise. For me this is one
of the defining characteristics and distinctive features of social work and arguably its
main strength. […] The legitimacy of social work rests on exhortations that betray an
ethical intent rather than a set of empirical or outcome-based possibilities. I claim that
the return to ethics should be a major theme that characterises social work in the late
modern scenario. I refer to this as the ‘practice of value’ and identify some key distinc-
tive elements that legitimate an ethics of social work. If risk society necessitates a life
without guarantees we require an ethical framework that acknowledges the continuity
of care, recognition and strong values. We also need ethical relations that can deepen
capacity building and mobilise social capital. Instead of trying to extend the ethical
remit of social work into the political realm it is argued that the ethical in social work
emerges as a fragile but necessary response to the politics of neo-liberal risk society.

Note
1 “BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is a progressive neurological disease of cattle,
known commonly as ‘mad cow disease’.”

References
Beck, U. (1999) World risk society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Macarov, D. and Bearwald, P. (2001) ‘The future of social work theory and practice.’ Journal
of Social Work Theory and Practice 3: 3–13.
Kemshall, H. (2002) Risk, social policy and welfare. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Garrett, P. M. (2003c) Remaking social work with children and families: A critical discussion
of the modernisation of social care. London: Routledge.
Saleebey, D. (ed.) (1992) The strengths perspective in social work practice. New York:
Longman.

Further Reading
Alaszewski, A.M and Coxon, K. (2008) ‘The everyday experience of living with risk and
uncertainty’, Health, Risk and Society 10 (5): 413–20. DOI: 10.1080/13698570802383952
Beddoe, L. (2010) ‘Surveillance or reflection: Professional supervision in ‘the Risk Society.’’ In
Adams, R. Payne, M. and Dominelli, L. (eds) Practicing social work in a complex world, 2nd
edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Parton, N. (1996) ‘Social work, risk and ‘the blaming system’. In N. Parton (ed.) Social theory,
social change and social work. London: Routledge: 98–113.
Pyles, L. (2017) ‘Decolonising disaster social work. Environmental justice and community
participation.’ British journal of Social Work 47(3): 630–647. DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/bcw028.
Stalker K. (2003) ‘Managing risk and uncertainty in social work: A literature review’. Journal
of Social Work. 3 (2):211–233. DOI: 10.1177/14680173030032006
Stanford, S. (2011) ‘Constructing moral responses to risk: A framework for hopeful social
work practice. The British Journal of Social Work, 41 (8): 1514–1531. DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/
bcr030.
(2017) Understanding Risk in Social Work, Journal of Social Work Practice, 31(4): 375–378,
DOI: HYPERLINK “https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2017.1397612”10.1080/02650533
.2017.1397612
10 Am I my brother’s keeper?
Zygmunt Bauman

This article is based on a speech given to mark the 100th anniversary of the
Amsterdam School of Social Work. In it, Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most influ-
ential sociologists of the twentieth century, asks the age-old question, ‘Am I my
brother’s keeper?’, and in doing so, addresses fundamental questions about the role
and task of social work today, within the context of a welfare state that it not just
under pressure, but under attack. Bauman concludes that the only way forward is
to continue to ‘take responsibility for our responsibility’; to ‘measure the quality of
society by the quality of its ethical standards’ (p.11).
From European Journal of Social Work 3(1): 5–11 (2000) DOI: 10.1080/714052807

I
The proper task of social work ought to be, we are told, getting rid of unemployed,
handicapped, invalid and other indolent people who for one reason or another cannot
eke out their own living and depend on social help and care for their survival: and
this evidently is not happening. As social work, we are told, ought to be judged like
any other human action by its cost-and-effects balance sheet, it does not, in its present
form, ‘make economic sense’. It could only justify its continued existence if it made
dependent people independent and made the lame people walk on their own feet. The
tacit, rarely spelled-out assumption is that for not-independent people, such people as
do not join the game of selling and buying, there is no room in the society of players.
‘Dependence’ has become a dirty word: it refers to something which decent people
should be ashamed of.
When God asked Cain where Abel was, Cain replied, angrily, with another ques-
tion: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The greatest ethical philosopher of our century,
Emmanuel Levinas, commented: from that angry Cain’s question all immorality
began. Of course I am my brother’s keeper; and I am and remain a moral person
as long as I do not ask for a special reason to be one. Whether I admit it or not, I
am my brother’s keeper because my brother’s well- being depends on what I do or
refrain from doing. And I am a moral person because I recognize that dependence and
accept the responsibility that follows. The moment I question that dependence and
demand - like Cain did - to be given reasons why I should care, I renounce my respon-
sibility and am no more a moral self. My brother’s dependence is what makes me an
ethical being. Dependence and ethics stand together and together they fall.
To think of it, Levinas’s blunt verdict is not news. It but reiterates in somewhat
different terms what was, for millennia, the hard core of Judeo-Christian teachings

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-13
80 Zygmunt Bauman
which gestated and weaned our common understanding of humanity and civilised
being. What Levinas spelled out made the need of the other, and the responsibility
for meeting that need, into the cornerstone of morality - and the acceptance of that
responsibility into the birth-act of the moral person. But if Levinas’s verdict is not
news, then the decision and contempt for dependence and the stigma attached to it
must be news; perhaps even the most profound and radical of novelties which the
Judeo-Christian civilization has confronted in its long history. It is worth our while
to give some thought to that novelty and its causes when we celebrate the anniversary
of the daring initiative which today, a hundred years later, is pressed to apologize for
its results.
If Cain’s question is today asked in various updated forms all over Europe and if the
welfare state comes everywhere under attack, it is because the unique combination of
factors which led to its establishment and made it look and feel like the natural state
of modern society, has now fallen apart. We may say at its birth the welfare state was
‘overdetermined’. But now it is the resentment towards welfare state institutions, and
their gradual dismantling, which are similarly ‘overdetermined’.
It has been said by some people that the emergence of the welfare state was the
triumph of ethical intentions: their recasting in the constitutive principles of modern
civilized society. It has been said by some others that the introduction of the welfare
state was the result of a prolonged struggle waged by trade unions and labour parties
demanding collective and state-endorsed insurance of livelihood— threatened by the
uneven and erratic capitalist development. Some other analysts yet emphasized the
wish of the political establishment to defuse dissent and avert the possible rebellion
against that threat. All these explanations ring credible, but each one captures but a
part of truth. None of the factors identified would have been able to carry the weight
of the welfare state on its own; it was, rather, their coincidence that paved the way to
the creation of the welfare state and assured a nearly universal support for its provi-
sions and a similarly universal readiness to share its costs.
But even the combination of factors could have proven insufficient, were it not for
that buckle which holds them together: the need to keep both capital and labour in
a ‘market-ready’ state, and the responsibilities in this direction that had fallen upon
the state. For the capitalist economy to function, capital had to be able to buy labour
and labour had to be in an attractive enough condition to appear to its prospective
buyers as a desirable commodity. Under the circumstances, the major task of the state
and the key to proper fulfilment of all its other functions was the ‘commodification of
capital–labour relations’; seeing to it that the transaction of buying and selling labour
could go on unhindered.
At that stage of the capitalist development (now by and large over) the rate of
growth and profits was proportionate to the volume of labour engaged in the pro-
ductive process. The working of the capitalist market was notorious for its ups and
downs, for periods of boom followed by protracted depressions; not all potentially
available labour resources could therefore be employed at all time. But those currently
idle were the active labour force of tomorrow; at present, but only temporarily, they
were unemployed, people in an abnormal but also transient and rectifiable condition.
They were the ‘reserve army of labour’ - their status was defined by what they were
not at the moment but should have been ready to become when the time came. As
every general will tell you, the care for the military strength of the nation requires that
the reservists are well nourished and kept in good health, so to be ready to face the
 Am I my brother’s keeper? 81
strains of army life when called into active service. And since that was the era of mas-
sive labour and mass conscript armies, the nation could be confident of its strength
only if everyone could be, should the need arise, drawn into the ranks of industrial
labour or the army. […] That the task to keep the poor and handicapped, the impov-
erished and indolent, ready to rejoin the ranks at any moment is the duty of society as
a whole and a matter of well-understood interests of the nation as a whole, was fully
and truly an issue ‘beyond left and right’. No one needed much convincing that the
money spent on welfare provisions was money well spent.

II
The era of mass-employment industry is now over, at least in our part of the world,
and also the mass conscript army belongs to the past. Modern weapons mean few
professional soldiers, and technological progress in goods production consists now-
adays in cutting down the need for employment investment. This means fewer, not
more, jobs, and the stock exchanges all over the world promptly reward the ‘slimming
down’ and ‘downsizing’ companies and react nervously to the news of a falling unem-
ployment rate.
Let us be clear about it: people traditionally called ‘unemployed’ are no more the
‘reserve army of labour’, just like the adult Dutch- or Englishman is no longer the
army reservist about to rejoin the troops in case of military need. We are fooling
ourselves if we expect industry to recall the people it made redundant. Such an even-
tuality would go against the grain of everything relevant to the present-day economic
prosperity: the principles of flexibility, competitiveness, and productivity measured
by falling labour costs. And let us face the truth - that even if the new rules of the
market game promise a rise in the total wealth of the nation, they also, inevitably,
make virtually inescapable the widening gap between those in the game and the rest
who are left out.
This is not the end of the story, though. People left out of the game are also left
without a function which by any stretch of imagination could be seen as ‘useful’, let
alone indispensable, for the smooth and profitable running of the economy. They
are not needed as the would-be producers; but in the society in which the consum-
ers, not the producers, are cast as the driving force of economic prosperity (it is the
‘consumer-led’ recovery that we expect to take us out of economic troubles), the poor
are also worthless as consumers: they will not be tempted by market blandishments,
they carry no credit cards nor can they count on bank overdrafts, and the commod-
ities they most need bring little or no profit to the traders. No wonder they are being
re-classified as an ‘underclass’- no more a temporary abnormality waiting to be rec-
tified and brought back in line, but a class outside the classes, a category cast perma-
nently off-limits by the ‘social system’, a category without which the rest of us would
be better off and more comfortable than we are now. […]

III
[…] No wonder that the welfare state has received a ‘bad press’. One can hardly read
and hear nowadays of those hundreds or thousands of human beings whom caring
social workers have drawn back from the brink of ultimate despair or collapse; or of
those millions for whom welfare provisions made all the difference between wretched
82 Zygmunt Bauman
poverty and decent life; or of those tens of millions whom the awareness that help
will come if needed allowed to face the risks of life with courage and determination
without which successful, let alone dignified, life is unthinkable. But one reads and
hears quite a lot about those hundreds or thousands who sponge and cheat and abuse
the patience and benevolence of public authorities; or of those hundreds of thousands
or perhaps millions whom ‘life on the dole’ transformed into inept and lazy idlers
not just unable, but unwilling to take up work when it comes their way and prefer-
ring to live at the hard-working taxpayer’s expenses. In the popular American defini-
tions of the members of the ‘underclass’, the poverty-stricken people, single mothers,
school-dropouts, drug addicts, and criminals on parole stand shoulder to shoulder
and are no more easily set apart. What unites them and justifies piling them together
is that all of them, for whatever reason, are a ‘burden on society’. We would all be
better off and happier if they somehow, miraculously, disappeared.
There is one more, and powerful, reason, for the contemporary poor - the ‘social
services clients’- to turn from being the objects of pity and compassion into objects
of resentment and anger. We all, to a greater or lesser degree, experience the world
we inhabit as full of risks, uncertain and insecure. Our social standing, our jobs, the
market value of our skills, our partnerships, our neighbourhoods and the networks of
friends we can rely on, are all unstable and vulnerable—unsafe harbours for anchor-
ing our trust. The life of constant consumer choice is not tranquil either: what about
the anxiety over the wisdom of the choices we are daily bound to make; what about
objects of desire which are fast losing their attractions, and the objects of pride turn-
ing overnight into the stigma of shame; what about the identity we all desperately
seek, which has the nasty habit of falling out of fashion and esteem well before we
achieve it? Indeed, life is full of anxiety and fear, and few people would say that they
would change nothing in it if given the chance. Our Risikogesell-schaft (risk society)
faces an awesome task when it comes to reconciling its members to the hazards and
dreads of daily life. It is this task that the poor, once presented as an underclass of
outcasts, make a little easier. If their kind of life is the sole alternative to ‘staying in
the game’, then the risks and horrors of the flexible world and life-long uncertainty
seem a little less repulsive and unendurable hat is, they feel better than all other
thinkable options could. One may say, a bit cynically, that our peace of mind, our
reconciliation with life, and whatever happiness we may derive from a life to which
we have reconciled ourselves, all depend psychologically on the wretchedness and the
misery of the outcast poor.
And so making the lot of the poor worse still than it is makes the fate of all the rest
of us look better. […]

IV
[…] We are all our brothers’ keepers; but what that means is far from clear and can
hardly be made transparent and eindeutig. Clarity and unambiguity may be the ideal
of the world in which ‘procedural execution’ is the rule. For the ethical world, how-
ever, ambivalence and uncertainty are its daily bread and cannot be stamped out
without destroying the moral substance of responsibility, the foundation on which
that world rests.
The uncertainty which haunts social work is nothing more nor nothing less than
the uncertainty endemic to moral responsibility. It is there to stay forever; it may be
neutralized only together with the ethical conscience. […]
 Am I my brother’s keeper? 83
V
All this is bad news for the seekers of peace and tranquility. Being one’s brother’s
keeper is a life-sentence of hard labour and moral anxiety, which no amount of trying
would ever put to rest. But this is good news for the moral person: it is precisely in the
situations social workers are daily in, in the situations of difficult choices, of choices
without guarantee and without the authoritative reassurance of propriety, that the
responsibility for the Other, that foundation of all morality, comes into its own.
Let me sum up the message which, I think, needs to be pondered when we com-
memorate the pioneers of social work in the Netherlands. The future of social work
and, more generally, of the welfare state, does not depend on classifications, on pro-
cedures, nor on reducing the variety and complexity of human needs and problems.
It depends, instead, on the ethical standards of the society we all inhabit. It is those
ethical standards which, much more than the rationality and diligence of social work-
ers, are today in crisis and under threat.
The future of the welfare state, one of the greatest gains of humanity and the fore-
most achievement of civilized society, lies on the frontline of an ethical crusade. That
crusade might be lost - all wars involve the risk of defeat. Without it, however, no
effort stands a chance of success. Rational arguments will not help; there is, let us be
frank, no ‘good reason’ why we should be our brothers’ keeper, why we should care,
why we should be moral - and in the utility-oriented society the function-less poor
and indolent cannot count on rational proofs of their right to happiness. Yes, let us
admit - there is nothing ‘reasonable’ about taking responsibility, about caring and
being moral. Morality has only itself to support it: it is better to care than to wash
one’s hands, better to be in solidarity with the unhappiness of the other than indif-
ferent, and altogether better to be moral, even if this does not make people wealthier
and the companies more profitable.
It is a hundred-years-old decision to take responsibility for our responsibility, the
decision to measure the quality of society by the quality of its ethical standards, that
we celebrate today.

Further reading
Bauman, Z. (1997) Postmodernity and its discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (2001) Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk society. Towards a new modernity. London: Sage
Ben-Ari, A. and Strier, R. (2010) ‘Rethinking cultural competence: what can we learn from
Levinas?’ British Journal of Social Work 40: 2155–67.
Davy, B.J. (2007) ‘An Other face of ethics in Levinas’. Ethics & the Environment 12(1): 39–65.
Garrett, P.M. (2017) ‘Encountering the ‘greatest ethical philosopher’: Emmanuel Levi-
nas and social work’. International Social Work 60(6): 1457–1468. DOI:.org/10.1177/
0020872817706407
Garrett, P. M. (2013) Social work and social theory: Making connections. Bristol: Policy Press.
Smith, M. (2011) ‘Reading Bauman for social work’. Ethics & Social Welfare, 5(1): 2–17. DOI:
10.1080/17496535.2011.546175
11 Research from the underside
Bob Holman

We have chosen this paper, in large part, because it serves as an antidote to much
of what is written about research today. In it, Bob Holman makes an impassioned
plea for research that is led by values and principles, not numbers and equations; for
research that is less about what we (academics and practitioners) can get out of it,
and more about how it might help to alleviate the conditions of those who are mar-
ginalised and oppressed, that is, the poor, who make up the majority of social work
service users. Written more than 35 years ago, our aim is to introduce this piece (and
Bob Holman) to a new readership in the hope that readers will find him as inspiring
as we do. The further reading offers a broader look at literature on the theory and
practice of research in social work.
From: British Journal of Social Work (1987) 17: 669–683.

[…] I am neither a professional researcher nor a professional social worker. In fact,

I am not a professional anything. My focus will be upon the poor, the socially deprived,
rather than just upon the clients of social workers. My justification is that poverty and
social work are closely entwined. True, only a minority of all the poor approach stat-
utory social workers but it appears that a majority of social workers’ clients are now
in poverty. In their study Poor Clients, Becker and MacPherson (1986) point out that
in a one-year period 88% of all referrals to the Strathclyde Social Work Department
relied upon a welfare benefit as their main source of income. […] Some clients visit
social workers because they are desperately short of money. Others are visited by
social workers because poverty is directly or indirectly related to their alleged child
abuse, inability to care for their family or their commital of offences.
So my focus is on the poor […] Anyone who works or lives in the inner city or
the huge council estate schemes daily sees poverty and its terrible impact on peo-
ple’s lives. The values I hold are such that I long for the end of poverty and the
promotion of equality. My interest in research is thus just this, how can research
help the poor?

Research and the Poor

It may well be injected at this stage that research has done a great deal for the poor.
True enough. The publication of The Poor and the Poorest in 1965 was a social
landmark which established that poverty had not been abolished by the post-war wel-
fare reforms (Abel-Smith and Townsend, 1965). Since then, the characteristics of the
poor have been extensively documented. Indeed, in one book Peter Townsend devotes
1,216 pages to the subject (Townsend, 1979). There is a poverty research industry

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-14
 Research from the underside 85
and, at times, I have been a small cog within it. The researchers have established not
only the extent and nature of poverty but can also claim some credit for bringing it to
public notice. […] But valuable as it is, it is largely research about, on or for the poor,
not by or with the poor.
A parallel can be drawn with the welfare state itself. Beyond doubt, the welfare
state has raised standards of living and improved social conditions. [… ] Yet in two
directions its statutory and voluntary welfare agencies have not fulfilled earlier
hopes. In terms of worker participation, welfare bodies are not democratic institu-
tions. Divisions between different layers of employees in terms of pay, conditions
of employment, status and decision-making are as wide as in any capitalist factory.
Further, the personal social services do not allow clients or users any significant and
direct influence over the decisions which shape the major directions of those agencies.
There is a great divide between professionals and clients, officials and lay people,
givers and recipients. Services are to, for, even against users. They are not with or by
them and the socially deprived do not regard the personal social services as belonging
to them.
In the same way, although research may have done something for the poor, it also
reflects their unequal position. Firstly, the decisions to undertake studies are made not
by the socially deprived but generally by statutory departments, by research units, by
people like you and me. Secondly, the promises used to collect material also reinforce
notions of superiority and inferiority. […] Similarly, where the poor are the objects of
research, they are placed in the inferior position in which they are expected to supply
information but not to obtain any. Thirdly, the material, once collected, is used by
the research institutions and researchers for their purposes. The poor have no control
over it. In research where data is taken from files or computers, they may not even
know that details about themselves are being collated and circulated. It is not their
research and, in regard to what is done with it, they are powerless.
[… ]
So far I have argued that social work is concerned with poverty; that poverty can
be explained in a lack of power; that research is a small but powerful tool; that most
social research rejects the structures of our society in that it is something done to the
poor rather than being a mechanism which they employ to solve problems. The poor
lack power and, not surprisingly, tend to lack access to research. Researchers rarely
seem to place their skills at the disposal of the socially deprived. But given the poten-
tial of research findings to influence decision-making […] then the next step is to plead
for a form of research which is by and with the socially deprived.
Does such research exist? For the remainder of this paper I will draw attention to
some examples. But how do you evaluate research of this kind? Effectiveness in this
context is concerned less with sophisticated techniques and more with the extent to
which the deprived, the recipients of low incomes, the residents of neglected locali-
ties, are themselves involved in research. I suggest that effectiveness is about whether
they (the poor) define the issues to be researched; they contribute to deciding how the
topic should be researched; they participate in collecting the research material; they
interpret the findings.
In short, the question is, do they own the research? [… ] However, in regard to
outcomes, I would add two more bench-marks, namely whether the research enables
both researchers and respondents to be more fully aware of the issues being investi-
gated; the poor use the research findings for their own purposes. With these guide-
lines in mind, five research projects can now be examined.
86 Bob Holman
Five Research Projects

Beresford and Croft

Peter Beresford and Suzy Croft share a “long-standing commitment to explore and
improve people’s say and involvement in services” (Beresford and Croft, 1986, p. vi).
In one of their studies they focused on an area in Brighton where the SSD [Social
Services Department] had created one of its patch teams. They wanted to examine,
in particular, residents’ involvement in and response to this re-organisation and, in
general, to record their expression of needs and their attitudes towards the social
services. […]
The format of the study was as follows:
A sample of residents was drawn from the electoral roll to be interviewed by a sin-
gle researcher. Nothing unusual in that.
The interviews were to be a two-way process, to be treated as a social conversation
as much as a fact-finding mission. If people asked for advice, information or help, it
was to be given.
The research duo were not employed by a traditional research, academic or social
welfare agency. One member was employed part-time under an MSC Community
Programme at a studies centre for one year. Apart from that the study was unfunded.
This set-up did not mean the researchers were value-free. On the contrary, their val-
ues were strong and explicit. But it did mean that they did not have to express the
values of funding bodies, did not have to shape questions and to record information
to suit the purposes of others. Even the publication of their findings came via public
donations rather than traditional book publishers. So what of the findings?
Findings. […] Most of their findings cannot be detailed here but it is worth adding
that the open dialogue approach which they adopted, instead of a ‘tick the boxes’
approach, revealed that residents do not necessarily fit their needs into the catego-
ries which social services devise. Thus hardly anyone requested more social workers,
advice centres or residential establishments. They were more likely to express a need
for an adequate income, employment, accessibility to shops and cheaper transport.
[….]

Damp Housing
Damp housing is a major problem in Scotland with an estimated 25–30% of all coun-
cil housing so affected [….]. Dampness and its effects upon families was a major issue
identified by women belonging to the Royston|Wardieburn Tenants Group. They
made a tape-slide which they showed to a seminar at the Research Unit in Health and
Behavioural Change at Edinburgh University. As a result, a small team agreed to help
the Tenants Group by employing their research skills to try to produce incontroverti-
ble evidence of the link between damp housing and ill-health so that the group could
use it to put pressure on public authorities.
The study is ably written up in a report by Sonja Hunt, Claudia Martin and Stephen
Platt (1986). The research team devised a possible plan which was then discussed
with tenants at a public meeting. An article in the local paper and the distribution of
leaflets and posters ensured that the whole community knew about the investigation.
A one-in-four sample of houses was drawn and environmental health officers agreed
 Research from the underside 87
to provide independent assessment of the dampness. Interviewers were recruited to
obtain indicators of health from tenants.
Findings. The environmental health officers reported that 24% of the 300 dwell-
ings had damp, with 17% showing mould growth. Amongst the families, 45% had no
employed adult and in 81% the weekly income was under £100. In general, the health
of adults was not good but there was no significant difference between those in damp
and dry homes, except that women in the former reported more emotional stress.
However, children in damp homes were significantly more likely to suffer illness,
particularly of a respiratory or bronchial nature [….].

A Tenants ‘Association’
Dampness and mould growth were also a feature of some houses on the Whiteway
and Twerton council estates in Bath. Individual tenants had complained to the council
both about the health risks and the expense of continually re-decorating wet walls,
of replacing damp furniture and supplying extra heating. The council officers issued
a fungicide but this had only a short-term effect. They also suggested that tenants
alter their life styles - like boiling fewer kettles! In short, both the problems and the
solutions were laid at the door of individual tenants.
With the support of a community worker, a tenants association came into being.
Initially it decided to conduct a survey about dampness in one street. A question-
naire was designed and administered by members of the association. The results
indicated that damp was widespread and it was agreed to extend the survey to the
entire estates.
Findings. The survey revealed 23% of houses having damp which householders
believed was adversely affecting members’ health. Particular mention was made of
asthma, bronchitis and stress. Thirty-one per cent of respondents stated that damp
had damaged their clothes, furniture and food. The tenants concluded in a report
Families at Risk (1985) that damp and condensation were major problems and urged
the council to install better heating systems, improved ventilation and more effective
insulation. In the report, their findings and suggestions were endorsed by specialists
such as a building surveyor and a representative from Shelter (Whiteway-Twerton
Tenants Association, 1985). […]

The Southdown Project Survey

From 1976 I was the leader of a community project, sponsored by a voluntary society,
on a council estate. It was based in our home and placed much emphasis on local
involvement. After seven years, […] the project moved to its own premises and a local
resident took over as a project leader. […] It was felt timely to discover how residents
perceived the project, if they used it, how they wanted it to develop and what were
their needs in general. The team reckoned that the project was entering a new phase
and that information was required to plan for the future.
The Research Approach. An unemployed social worker was recruited to lead the
research. In conjunction with the project team, she designed a questionnaire, and a
one-in-six sample was drawn from the electoral roll for the area, giving 308 names
of whom 294 were eventually interviewed. The house-to-house interviews were
conducted mainly by local residents associated with the project. Nearly all were
88 Bob Holman
unemployed and ranged from a 66-year-old man to a 17-year-old girl. Before going
out, they received some training in interviewing and recording.
Findings. As suspected, usage of the project depended very much on geographical
closeness to it. Moving the project had deterred some users while attracting others.
Overall, 20% of adults and 84% of junior children were (or had been) attending a
project activity. […]
The interviewers did not participate in the writing of the report. But the report was
presented to the Users Committee (which included some of their number) and this
committee endorsed the report’s findings and the conclusions drawn from it by the
project team. The research thus led to proposals for new activities which were put into
effect (Boucherat, 1984).

South Birmingham Family Service Unit

One of the objectives of the South Birmingham Family Service Unit is to give local res-
idents more control over agency resources. The unit’s funding - mainly from the local
authority - was due to end in March, 1987 and the unit’s workers determined that
residents should be involved in research to plan for the future. The ensuing experience
has been written up by one of the workers, Penny Dobson (1987).
Research Approach. Instead of instigating interviews with a sample of the whole
area, an attempt was made to stimulate a more prolonged response from a small
group. A Steering Group of residents and two FSU workers was established and
met weekly for six months. It gathered information by visits to other local agencies,
after which members used FSU resources to type and duplicate their impressions;by
interviewing other members of the FSU team about their ideas on the future, with
particular reference as to whether the unit should go independent or remain under
the auspices of FSU headquarters; by Penny Dobson interviewing Steering Group
members individually and then presenting a paper to the group; by a Group Book in
which members recorded their views and feelings in a way that was not interpreted or
shortened by anyone else.
The final report was put together and typed by the residents. This was edited by the
two FSU members and agreed with the Steering Group. […]

Research from the Underside

In recent years, the term ‘participatory research’ has been coined to describe a form of
investigation which is primarily of use to those who carry it out. Hall states, “Participa-
tory research is most commonly described as an integrated activity that combines social
investigation, educational work and action” (cited by Beresford and Croft, p. 298).
The examples given in this paper show that there is a form of participatory research
which is of particular relevance to the socially deprived. For want of a better term, I
call it research from the underside. Traditional research is based on a top-down model
in which resourceful and frequently powerful agencies study the clients or the services
or policies which are intended to help or control them. Underside research is based
on a bottom-up model in which the investigated become the investigators. It contains
the following features:
The research is mainly for the sake of low income recipients, those who frequently
have no choice but to depend on welfare benefits and welfare services in order to
survive or who live in localities which score heavily on indices of social deprivation.
 Research from the underside 89
It is members of this population who initiate the idea of the research, who define
its scope and purposes.
These participants have a strong influence on the form and means of the study and
either collect the required material themselves or else approve the agents who do so.
Respondents, the suppliers of information, are not just “used” to meet the needs of
others but receive something in return.
The participants themselves evaluate, interpret and, if desired, circulate the results
of the research.
They use the findings to pursue their interests. In short, the underside owns the
research.
[…] It cannot be claimed that research from the underside is the answer to social
deprivation. But it can help some members to shape services in the way they want, to
express their needs and demands and to campaign for their purposes. Through this
process, their views, to cite Beresford and Croft (1986), can “develop and gain greater
equality with those of professionals and policy makers” (p. 299).

References
Abel-Smith, B. and Townsend, P. (1965) The Poor and the Poorest. A new analysis of the
Ministry of Labour’s Family Expenditure Surveys of 1953–54 and 1960. London: Bell.
Occasional Papers on Social Administration no. 17.
Becker, S. and MacPherson, S. (1986) Researching poverty amongst users of social work ser-
vices. Research, Policy and Planning, 4 (1/2): 8–14.
Beresford, P. and Croft, S. (1986) Whose Welfare. Brighton, Lewis Cohen Urban Studies.
Boucherat, J. (1984) The Southdown Project Survey, Bath: The Children’s Society.
Martin, C.J., Platt, S.D., Hunt, S.M. (1987) Housing conditions and ill health. British Medical
Journal 1987: 294: 1125–7.
Townsend, P. (1979) Poverty in the United Kingdom, London: Penguin.
Whiteway-Twerton Tenants Association (1985) Families at Risk. Bath: Whiteway Health
Project.

Further reading
Gray, M., Plath, D. and Webb, S.A. (2009) Evidence-based Social Work. A Critical Stance.
London: Routledge.
Humphries, B. (2008) Social Work Researching for Social Justice. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
McLaughlin, H. (2012) Understanding Social Work Research. 2nd edition. London: Sage.
Mitchell, F., Shaw, I.F., Lunt, N. (2008) Practitioner Research in Social Services. A Literature
Review. Institute for Research and Innovation in the Social Services. York: University of
York.
Rowe, S. E Baldry, E. and Earles, W. (2015) ‘Decolonising social work research: Learn-
ing from critical Indigenous approaches.’ Australian Social Work 68(3): 296–308. DOI:
10.1080/0312407X.2015.1024264
Shaw, I., Briar-Lawson, K., Orme, J. and Ruckdeschel, R. (2010) The SAGE Handbook of
Social Work Research, London: Sage.
12 What is professional social work?
Malcolm Payne

Malcolm Payne is one of the best-known social work academics in the UK. He has
written about many aspects of social work theory and practice for over 40 years,
including exploring the history and profession of social work. The extracts here
were included in the first edition of the Reader. In spite of the passage of time, they
remain a clear statement about the different ways of thinking about professional
social work, as therapeutic, social order or transformational. Payne’s contribution
lies in his realisation that social work is not ‘either/or’ these things, but rather, ‘both/
and’ (Hill Collins, 2000).
From: What is professional social work? Revised 2nd edition, Bristol: Policy Press/
BASW (2006) pp.12–16 and 21.

Social work’s three way discourse

The argument in this book is that social work is a three-way discourse; every bit of
practice, all practice ideas, all social work agency organisation and all welfare policy is
a rubbing up of three views of social work against each other. I argue that this discourse
plays out the struggle about the claim: these three views are different ways of dealing
with the claim. Figure 1.1 shows them at the corners of a triangle; the triangle represents
the discourse between them, a field of debate that covers all social work. When I first
described these three views, in the first edition of this book, I used complex names for
them, but more recently, people have used simpler terms, and give the complex names in
this future for reference. The important differences between these views of social work
connect with different political views about how welfare should be provided.
Therapeutic views. These see social work as seeking the best possible well-being for
individuals, groups and communities in society, by promoting and facilitating growth
and self-fulfilment. A constant spiral of interaction between workers and clients mod-
ifies clients’ ideas and allows workers to influence them; in the same way, clients affect
workers’ understandings of their world as they gain experience of it. This process of
mutual influence is called reflexiveness. Because it is reflexive in this way, social work
responds to the social concerns that workers find and gain understanding of as they
practise, and feeds back into society knowledge about these problems and how society
might tackle them. Through this process of mutual interaction with social workers,
clients gain power over their own feelings and way of life. Such personal power allows
them to overcome or rise above suffering and disadvantage, so they experience the
work to help them gain this power as therapeutic. I originally called this kind of social
work ‘reflexive-therapeutic’. This view expresses in social work the social democratic

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-15
 What is professional social work? 91

Therapeutic
Reflexive-therapeutic

A B
C

Social order Transformational

Individualist-reformist Socialist-collective

Figure 12.1 The three views of social work.

political philosophy that economic and social development should go hand-in-hand

to achieve individual and social improvement.
This view is basic to many ideas of the nature of social work, but two other views
modify and dispute it.
Transformational views. These views (for example, Pease and Fook, 1999) argue
that we must transform societies for the benefit of the poorest and most oppressed.
Social work aims to develop cooperation and mutual support in society so that the
most oppressed and disadvantaged people can gain power over their own lives. It
facilitates this by empowering people to take part in a process of learning and cooper-
ation, which creates institutions that all can own and participate in. Elites accumulate
and perpetuate power and resources in society for their own benefit. By doing so, they
create the oppression and disadvantage that social work tried to supplant with more
egalitarian relationships in society. Transformational views imply that disadvantaged
and oppressed people will never gain personal or social empowerment unless society
makes these transformations. Value statements about social work, such as codes of
ethics, represent this objective by proposing social justice as an important value of
all social work. This view expresses the socialist political philosophy that planned
economies and social provision promote equality and social justice, and I originally
called it ‘socialist-collective’.
Social order views. These see social work as an aspect of welfare services to indi-
viduals in societies. It meets individuals’ needs and improves services of which it is
a part, so that social work and the services can operate more effectively. Dominelli
(2002) calls these maintenance approaches, reflecting the term used by Davies (1994);
I originally called them ‘individualist-reformist’. They see social work as maintain-
ing the social order and social fabric of society, and maintaining people during any
period of difficulties that they may be experiencing, so that they can recover stability
again. This view expresses the liberal or rational economic political philosophy, that
personal freedom in economic markets, supported by the rule of law, is the best way
of organising societies.
Each view says something about the activities and purposes of social work in wel-
fare provision in any society, and so they are each different implementations of social
work’s claim. Therapeutic social work says: ‘Help everyone to self-fulfilment and
society will be a better place.’ Social order social work says: ‘Solve people’s problems
92 Malcolm Payne
in society by providing better help or services, and they will fit in with general societal
expectations better; promoting social change to stop the problems arising will pro-
duce all-round improvements.’ Transformational social work says: ‘Identify and work
out how social relations cause people’s problems, and make social changes so that the
problems do not arise.’
Each view criticises or seeks to modify the others. For example, seeking personal
and social fulfilment, as in therapeutic views, is impossible to transformers because
the interests of elites obstruct many possibilities for oppressed peoples, unless we
achieve significant social change. They argue that merely accepting the social order,
as therapeutic and social order views do, supports and enhances the interests of elites.
To the transformer, therefore, the alternative vies involve practice that will obstruct
the opportunities of oppressed people who should be the main beneficiaries of social
work. To take another example, social order views say that trying to change societies
to make them more equal or create personal and social fulfilment through individual
and community growth are unrealistic in everyday practice, and inconsistent with the
natural organisation of societies in competitive markets. This is because most prac-
tical objectives of social work activity refer to small-scale individual change, which
cannot lead to major social and personal changes. Also, stakeholders in the social
services that finance and give social approval to social work activities mainly want a
better fit between society and individuals. They do not seek major changes. That is
why social order views prefer their approach.
However, these different views also have affinities. For example, both therapeu-
tic and transformational views are centrally about change and development. Also,
therapeutic and social order views are about individual rather than social change.
Generally, therefore, most conceptions of social work include elements of each of
these views. Alternatively, they sometimes acknowledge the validity of elements of the
others. For example, transformational views criticise unthinking acceptance of the
present social order, which is often taken for granted in social order and therapeutic
views. Nevertheless, most people who take this view of social work accept helping
individuals to fulfil their potential within present social systems. They often see this
as a stepping-stone to a changed society by promoting a series of small changes aim-
ing towards bigger ones.
So these different views fit together or compete with each other in social work prac-
tice. Looking at Figure 12.1, if you or your agency were positioned at A (very common
for beginning social workers), your main focus might be providing services in a ther-
apeutic helping relationship, as a care manager (in managed care) or in child protec-
tion. You might do very little in the way o seeking to change the world, and by being
part of an official or service system, you are accepting the pattern of welfare services
as it is. However, in your individual work, what you do may well be guided by even-
tual change objectives. For example, if you believe that relationships between men
and women should be more equal, your work in families will probably reflect your
views. Position B might represent someone working in a refuge for women suffering
domestic violence. Much of their work is helping therapeutically but the very basis
of their agency is changing attitudes towards women in society, and you might do
some campaigning work as part of your helping role. Position C is equally balanced:
some change, some service provision, some therapeutic helping. My present job is like
that: to promote community development so that communities become more resilient
about and respond better to people who are dying or bereaved, but I also provide
help for individuals and I am responsible for liaison with other services so that our
 What is professional social work? 93
service system becomes more effective. Position D is mainly transformational but
partly maintenance. This reflects the reality that seeking change is not, in the social
services, completely revolutionary, but will also help to make the social system more
effective. Many community workers, for example, are seeking quite major change in
the lives of the people they serve by achieving better cooperation and sharing, but they
may act by helping local groups make their area safe from crime, by providing welfare
rights advocacy or by organising self-help playgroups in the school holidays.
[…]

Conclusion: the claim and the perspectives

Social work’s claim, unique among similar professions, is to combine in a professional
role both social transformation and also individual improvement through interper-
sonal relationships. Because the social world is constantly in flux and individual
humanity is infinity variable, the only valid approach to understanding social work is
to examine its social construction. However, a completely relative social construction,
premised on constant variation in response to social and human contexts, does not
reflect the world that most people experience. There are many continuities in social
work, which is constructed in a shared language of concepts about its nature, con-
tained in a discourse among three views of it: therapeutic, social order and transfor-
mational views. Social workers construct their own social work practice by following
pathways towards, through, and sometimes away from, a nexus of ideas and debate
that is the centre of social work. Thus, any particular social work act, any case, any
social work role, any agency, any welfare system, reflects a constantly changing bal-
ance among these three views about how to meet the claim. However, the three views
are constantly present.

References
Davies, M. (1994) The essential social worker. A guide to positive practice, 3rd edition. Alder-
shot: Arena.
Dominelli, L. (2002) Anti-oppressive social work theory and practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hill Collins, P. (2000) Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of
empowerment. 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Pease, B. and Fook, J. (eds) (1999) Transforming social work practice. Postmodern critical
perspectives. London: Routledge.

Further reading
Beddoe, L. (2013) ‘Health social work: Professional identity and knowledge’. Qualitative
Social Work 12(1): 24–40. DOI: 10.1177/1473325011415455
Cree, V.E. and Myers, S. (2008) Social work. Making a difference. Bristol: Policy Press/BASW.
Fook, J., Ryan, M. and Hawkins, L. (2000) Professional expertise. Practice, theory and edu-
cation for working in uncertainty. London: Whiting & Birch.
Higham, P. (2006) Social work. Introducing professional practice. London: Sage.
Lovelock, R., Lyons, K. and Powell, J. (eds) (2004) Reflecting on Social Work: Discipline and
Profession. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Welbourne, P. (2009) ‘Social work: The idea of a profession and the professional project.’
Locus socI@L 3/2009: 19–35. Available at: 10157-Texto Artigo-17766-1-10-20210811.pdf/
Accessed 23 September 2021.
13 The client speaks
Martin Davies

This article, written by a social work academic who is, himself, a respected social
work author, introduces the review of a book that has become a classic in social
work. ‘The client speaks’, written by John E. Mayer and Noel W. Timms and pub-
lished in 1970, was, as Martin Davies writes, ‘a research-based text that has rel-
evance almost 50 years later’. Because the article is short, we have used minimal
editing in the extract; we hope that readers will be encouraged to read ‘The client
speaks’ for themselves in the future.
From: Practice. Social Work in Action 24(5). (2012): 341–342.

[The client speaks] was the first major study of social work practice in the UK that
was based on the opinions and experiences of those whom the agency existed to serve.
As the authors admit at the outset, ‘we are profoundly ignorant about the ways in
which the consumers of […] services respond to the social work help that the com-
munity makes available’ (p. 2). And, they go on, ‘clients are apt to know a good deal
more about their thoughts, beliefs, experiences and reactions to treatment than do
those who are trying to help them’. This was revolutionary stuff and was recognised
as being likely to cause some unhappiness among the social workers whose perfor-
mance was being subjected to client critique. All credit, then, to those workers whose
willingness to participate in the research opened the door to a more egalitarian and
democratic approach in the future.
The second reason why The Client Speaks deserves its status as a classic of social
work literature – and this was not always appreciated by some early critics – is that
it is an absolute masterpiece of qualitative methods. Using 61 interviews with service
users and nine with their social workers, the data presentation is immaculate and
the analysis inspired. Significantly, the authors say that their identification of two
different styles of treatment approach (‘insight’ and ‘supportive-directive’) to clients
seeking two differing kinds of help (‘material’ and ‘interpersonal’) was ‘in no sense
planned’. Methodologically, this is the beauty and the purpose of qualitative research.
What of the project’s findings? The central conclusion is stated quite simply: sat-
isfied clients (or, as we would now call them, service users) got what they came for;
dissatisfied clients didn’t. And the conclusion applies equally to those who came with
problems of an interpersonal nature and to those for whom the stimulus was pri-
marily that of material need. ‘The clients’ reactions were significantly affected by the
degree to which the worker’s behaviour conformed to their particular expectations’.
The classic – almost notorious – example that Mayer and Timms give is of Mr and
Mrs Adam who, because of illness and unemployment during the winter, are unable to

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 The client speaks 95
afford to stock their small market stall that they run every summer. They are referred
by the state agency to the FWA [Family Welfare Association] for financial help, but
find themselves being, separately, interviewed by a young worker who homes in on
their marital situation and provokes distress by that very focus – so apparently con-
firming her suspicions that relationship difficulties lie at the heart of their problem.
There is a real sense in which The Client Speaks rang the death knell of the
‘insight-orientation’ approach to social work. Not entirely, of course. But the shift
of focus in social work away from casework and therapy to state agency gatekeep-
ing, decision-making, protection and maintenance makes the world that Mayer and
Timms explored feel like another country.
One aspect of their concluding discussion remains of particular interest – and pre-
sents parallel challenges in our contemporary world. They noted the significance of
the social class difference between clients and workers: the former being educated
middle class people; the latter almost without exception working class. The authors
draw on this class difference to argue that the ‘workers’ approach to problem solving
was fundamentally different’ from that of the clients; and, they say, this sometimes
led to an almost ‘Kafkaesque quality about these worker client interactions’. They
pinpoint the cognitive gap between the ‘unicausal moralistic-suppressive’ approach
to problem-solving held by working class clients and the more complex interactional
perspectives of the social workers. Mayer and Timms toy with the idea that clients
might need to be ‘re-socialised’ to understand the social workers’ approach, but they
conclude that a more fruitful way forward lies in the social workers themselves learn-
ing more about the working class cognitive world which their clients inhabit.
In today’s world of ethnic and gender diversity – including the complex diversities
characterising the social work workforce itself – our capacity to ‘understand’ every
service user’s cognitive framework might constitute an aspiration too far.

Further reading
Cree, V.E., Jain, S. and Hillen, D.P. (2019) ‘Evaluating effectiveness in social work: shar-
ing dilemmas in practice.’ European Journal of Social Work 22(4): 599–610. DOI:
10.1080/13691457.2018.1441136.
Rees, S. and Wallace, A. (1982) Verdicts on social work. London: Edward Arnold.
Shaw, I. and Lishman, J. (eds) (1999) Evaluation and social work practice. London: Sage.
Tedam, P. (2015) Black African students’ experiences of social work practice learning in
England: A critical race inquiry. Unpublished PhD thesis. Northampton: University of
Northampton
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999) Decolonizing methodologies. Research and indigenous peoples.
London: Zed Books.
Wallace, E. and Rees, S. (1988) ‘The priority of client evaluations’, in J. Lishman (Ed.) Evalu-
ation: Research Highlights in Social Work 8, 2nd edition. London: Jessica Kingsley.
14 Service users and practitioners
reunited
The key component for social work
reform
Peter Beresford and Suzy Croft

Peter Beresford (academic and mental health activist) and Suzy Croft (senior prac-
titioner and activist) have written widely on public, patient and service user par-
ticipation in social service policy and practice. In this article, they return to themes
introduced in their first publication in 1980, which might be read as a manifesto for
community control of social services. What is striking about both pieces is how reso-
nant their argument remains today. The full article charts the factors associated with
both regulatory and liberatory forms of social work, and we encourage readers to
read it in full. However, building on the two previous chapters, our focus here is on
practitioners and service users ‘re-uniting’ as a key mechanism for liberatory social
work reform. This seems an apt, if challenging, note on which to conclude this first
section.
From: British Journal of Social Work (2004) 34(1): 53–68. DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/
bch005

The history
It will soon be twenty-five years since we produced our first publication focusing on
social work and social services - Community Control of Social Services Departments
(Beresford and Croft, 1980). Now as we try to take stock of social work and social
services, looking to the future, it may be helpful first to look back at our early attempt
to argue for a libertarian future for social work.
This publication came less than ten years after the creation of social services depart-
ments, but their failings were already clear. It came when Mrs Thatcher was in power,
but before her New Right Conservative governments had made any major inroads
into cutting and restructuring social services. It was published some time after the
emergence of ‘radical social work’ and its associated journal/magazine, Case Con. It
was already becoming clear, however, that this brave initiative had failed to develop
a broad or inclusive base and instead was becoming a branch of academic activity
(Beresford and Croft, 1989).
We produced copies of the report in large numbers illicitly at our local social ser-
vices department photocopier. […] We were unfunded and unwaged and sales helped
to keep the work going. In the pamphlet, we saw a libertarian future for social work
coming from ‘community control’. We argued that this needed to include the con-
trol and involvement of ‘service users, workers and local people’. We thought it was

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-17
 Service users and practitioners reunited 97
important that all three overlapping constituencies should be included, rather than
any one’s inclusion being at the expense of the others. […]
We argued that:

[…] Users of social services effectively have no say in the decisions (Beresford and
Croft, 1980, p. 1).

Our starting point in 1980 was the same as it is here today:

Whether social services are seen as a capitalist con trick and means of social con-
trol, or an expression of the basic benevolence of a mixed economy, those we now
have seem much more the result of an incremental ad hoc process of development
from confused and often conflicting origins than of any consistent or coherent
philosophy or theory (Beresford and Croft, 1980, p. 1).

We saw control as very narrowly based:

Control of social services, meanwhile, is firmly in the grip of the hierarchy and
politicians … The further they are from the field and (service) users the more con-
trol administrators have. Fieldworkers, especially those seen as non-professional
like home helps, meals on wheels workers and residential staff, are allowed little
control of the formal service they offer or of the way it is planned (Beresford and
Croft, 1980, pp. 6–7).
We should not be surprised if social work is seen as an agent of social control
when so little control can be exerted over it by clients and community (Beresford
and Croft, 1980, p. 8).

We saw the way forward as shifting the balance of power and ownership in social
work and social services.

Days of hope?
Ironically, in retrospect, those times can now seem almost like ‘heady days’. There
were strong and energetic debates about social work and social services involving
progressive practitioners, students, academics and, increasingly, service users. This
discourse was supported by conferences and other events at low prices, routinely pro-
viding crèches and with free places for people who were unwaged. Feminists, black
people and members of minority ethnic groups, gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, chal-
lenged traditional assumptions and discourses and developed their own powerful and
influential critiques and discussions of social work and social services. New radical
journals emerged like Youth and Policy, Youth In Society, Critical Social Work, The
Bulletin on Social Policy, and Critical Social Policy. If debate had been sectarian and
stultified by Fabianism, it was now energized by Thatcherism. This was the context in
which people like us, having set out the problems and highlighted alternatives, went
on to produce a stream of pamphlets and publications to advance and respond to the
interest there clearly was in democratizing social work and social services […].
98 Peter Beresford and Suzy Croft
Back to the present
It is debatable whether there is the same kind of energy in social work and the social
services and debates about them now, although this is not to devalue the efforts that
continue to be made. Social work now lives in a very different world. The political,
ideological, social, cultural, economic, international and geo-political change that
has taken place in the intervening years has been on a massive scale. Yet questions
about whether social work and social services are essentially liberatory or confining,
progressive or regressive, empowering or disempowering remain as pertinent and con-
tested today as ever. […] Unless we take the view that social work’s primary purpose
should be regulation and control, at first sight, the picture is not encouraging. It seems
to be one of a consistent trend to increasing social control. During the 1990s, social
work came in for growing criticism for having an increasing role as a means of state
control, reinforcing broader pressures to economic individualism and social division
and for its weakening concern with social justice and equality (Parton, 1994, 1996;
Williams, 1996; Jordan, 1997). Concerns along these lines have consistently been
expressed by that important body of thinkers who might be seen as the keepers of
social work’s conscience, people like Bill Jordan, Bob Holman and Chris Jones […].
A first step to making sense of this development may be to examine some of the con-
ditions associated with it. There may be many. Here we are focusing on four which
we think are key:

• social work’s loss of identity;

• the devaluing of social work practice;
• the dominance of ideology and managerialism;
• globalization and social exclusion.

[…]

Counter developments
[…] But it would be a mistake to assume that there have not been counter develop-
ments and pressures - although these have tended to be given less prominence. As we
have argued frequently before, for service users particularly, there has been no ‘golden
age’ of social work when it was unambiguously positive and progressive. Instead there
have been different periods of complexity and difficulty. Key factors which can be
identified as encouraging a more liberatory social work include:

• a renewed commitment to practice;

• addressing diversity;
• involving service users.

[…]
The third of the developments that can be linked with the development of more
liberatory social work - the involvement of service users - is without real precedent.
While a more participatory rhetoric began to be associated with social work from the
1970s - and in some cases this related to genuinely grassroots bottom-up initiatives,
it was not until the 1990s that this began to be mainstreamed in policy and practice.
 Service users and practitioners reunited 99
[…] Since the early 1990s, through the 1989 Children Act and the 1990 NHS and
Community Care Act, there have been requirements for ‘user involvement’. Agen-
cies and practitioners are required to consult with and involve service users in their
assessment, in comment and complaints procedures and in service management and
planning. The fullest expression of this so far is the requirement in the new social
work degree introduced in 2003, that service users are involved in all aspects of social
work education and training.
[…] However, user involvement in social work cannot be considered in isolation. It
needs to be understood in the much broader context of the development of movements
of health and social care service users, including the disabled people’s and mental
health service users’/survivors’ movements. While professional and service-based dis-
cussion of service users tend to have been framed mainly in terms of ‘user involve-
ment’, this represents only one aspect of the emergence of service user organizations
and movements over the last twenty to thirty years. The focus of these movements
has extended far beyond social work, social care and welfare into broader political,
economic, social and cultural spheres. At the same time, they perhaps constitute the
most important and far-reaching force for more liberatory social work and social
services so far. They have been understood as both ‘liberatory’ and ‘new social move-
ments’ (Oliver, 1996). While the consumerist involvement offered by managerialist
related approaches to social work and social services has generally led to very little, if
any, transfer of power and decision making, the same is not true of service user move-
ments and organizations. While their achievements should not be overstated, they
should equally not be underestimated. These movements have been associated with
major changes in legislation, policy, culture, theory and provision, all of which have
impacted upon the policy, provision and practice of social work. […] They provide a
valuable counter to pressures in philosophy and practice, which social work has not
been able successfully to mobilize against from within.

The key context for social work development

Having said this, the present direction of social work - libertarian or reactionary-
remains unclear. […] Four characteristics seem to dominate the present political and
policy scene. These are: ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity and contradiction. […]

Positive forces for change

Within such an ambiguous political and policy framework, it continues to be as diffi-
cult as ever, if not more so, to decode the core role and nature of social work. Social
work still has a significant capacity both to liberate and to control. But we can per-
haps begin to see what those forces might be that are most likely to lead it in a more
liberatory direction.
The first of these is undoubtedly practitioners. The committed practitioner is the
cornerstone of emancipatory social work practice. The position of social work practi-
tioners remains weak, not to say marginal. This will only radically improve when the
social work (and social care) workforce is revalued financially, politically and socially.
The capacity of practitioners will always be subject to the constraints of their organ-
izations and hierarchies. But their ability to mediate both of these remains crucial.
Progressive practitioners have long been the factor that can transform reactionary
100 Peter Beresford and Suzy Croft
agencies into positive experiences for service users. Service users frequently distin-
guish between face to face practitioners and the organizations they work in, often
fearing and disliking the latter, and valuing the former. Too much now rests on the
capacity of practitioners to mediate broader structures of social work and social ser-
vices. This will only really change if practitioners can gain collective strength and
support for each other—meanwhile the struggle is likely to be at a more individual
level—in and against their agencies. They must also expect to face new problems. For
example, the integration of health and social care offers opportunities for improved
communication and coordination across services. Already though, both service users
and workers have expressed growing concerns about social models and approaches
supported by social work being put in jeopardy by the medicalized individual under-
standings which predominate in health.

Linking up for change

But there is another important and much more powerful force for change in social
work; the movements and organizations of service users. It is difficult to foresee how
far-reaching an effect these will have for the future. What we do know is that their
intervention is unprecedented and will have an impact, even if its scale cannot yet be
predicted. This further highlights the importance of developing links and alliances
between service workers and service users. This development is still in its infancy and
it is one to which practitioners need to give much greater priority.
In 1980, we saw the way forward for social work, as:

to rethink the present institutionalised approach to meeting need, the structure

and organisation of social services, the recruitment, training and roles of staff,
but most of all the need for a transfer of power and resources - for community
control of social services. Without that, they are merely an extension of the state
rather than a service of and for the people (Beresford and Croft, 1980, p. 18).

We have begun to see beginnings of the first - the progressive restructuring of social
work services and support. We are still a long way from the second - ‘community con-
trol’ of social services. Since we wrote in 1980, the situation of service users and their
organizations has in some ways been transformed. That of social work practitioners,
has if anything, been further weakened and that of other local people continues to
be marginal. But now there is, at least, a force to make ‘community control’ possible,
in the form of service users’ movements and organizations. In our view the lesson of
recent decades is that without the control of service users, workers and other local
people, social work will be an essentially controlling rather than liberating activity.
But there are now new chances for change.

References
Beresford, P. and Croft, S. (1980) Community control of Social Services Departments,
London: Battersea Community Action.
Beresford, P. and Croft, S. (1989) ‘Decentralisation and the personal social services’. In
Langan, M. and Lee, P. (eds), Radical Social Work Today: Social Work in the Recession,
London: Hutchinson.
 Service users and practitioners reunited 101
Jordan, B. (1997) ‘Social work and society’. In Davies, M. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to
Social Work. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 8–23.
Oliver, M. (1996) Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Parton, N. (Ed.) (1996) Social Theory, Social Change and Social Work, London: Routledge.
Williams, F. (1996) ‘Postmodernism, feminism and the question of difference’, in Parton, N.
(ed.), Social Theory, Social Change and Social Work, London, Routledge, pp. 61–76.

Further Reading
Arnstein, S (1971) The ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the Royal Town Planning
Institute 57(1): 176–182.
Beresford, P. (2000) ‘Service users’ knowledges and social work theory: conflict or collabora-
tion?’ British Journal of Social Work, 30 (4): 489–503. DOI: 10.1093/bjsw/30.4.489
Holman, B. (1993) A New Deal for Social Welfare, Oxford: Lion Publishing.
McCulloch T. (2016) ‘Co-producing justice sanctions? Citizen perspectives.’ Criminology &
Criminal Justice 16(4):431–451. DOI: 10.1177/1748895816639730
Oliver, M. (1996) Understanding disability: From theory to practice, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Smith, R. (2004) ‘A matter of trust: service users and researchers.’ Qualitative Social Work
3(3): 335–46.
Tyler, G. (2006) Addressing barriers to participation: service user involvement in social work
training, Social Work Education, 25 (4), 385–392, DOI: 10.1080/02615470600593394.
Part II

Knowledge and Values for

Social Work
Commentary Two

In Part II, we move onto a series of readings that can broadly be described as con-
cerned with knowledge and values. In doing so, we are fully aware of the difficult
choices that we had to make. There are gaps and omissions, deliberate and otherwise,
and our selection inevitably reflects our own political and personal preferences and
value-base, as well as the reality that some voices (particularly those of white men)
have been more prominent in the development of social work’s literature-base over
the years.
In the end, we have included some readings that can be described as knowledge for
social work and social workers. These are extracts from books or articles that have
had an impact on social work over time, but are written by people who are not them-
selves social workers. They allow readers to see first-hand where key concepts that
are often regarded as ‘social work’ ideas have come from, including, for example, the
notion that ‘private troubles’ have a social dimension (C. Wright Mills), or that disa-
bility is a social construct (Mike Oliver). Other readings in this section are written by
social work authors, demonstrating the breadth and range of topics that are central to
the creation of a socially just knowledge and value-base for social work. While Part
1 began with one ‘provocation’, Part 2 ends with another – how should social work
confront and respond to the global challenge facing us all in terms of the environment
and climate change?
It must be noted that because some of the extracts were written in the 1970s and
1980s, their language is out-dated (for example, the use of ‘man’ for ‘person’ or
‘humankind’). In addition, some authors give little or no attention to the experiences
of those who do not share a white, ‘cis’ gender, heterosexual, able-bodied identity. We
have sought to mitigate this by drawing readers’ attention to this in the abstract and
including additional sources of reading at the end of the chapter.

Key questions

1 What is social work knowledge? Who decides, and how has this changed
over time?
2 What are social work values? Again, who decides, and how have these
changed over time?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-19
15 The sociological imagination
C. Wright Mills

It is our great privilege to introduce the work of C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), the
American sociologist who reminds us that the things social workers often confront as
personal problems (as failings in the individual, their upbringing or their personality)
are in fact social problems; their remedies lie in society, not within individuals or even
within families. This is an important message throughout social work practice, as we
work with people who struggle with the impacts of poverty, poor housing, educa-
tional disadvantage, social exclusion and discrimination of all kinds. Although some
of its language is dated, The Sociological Imagination has been hugely influential in
shaping the thinking of generations of sociologists, feminists, radicals, policy-makers
and, of course, social workers. The chosen extracts are from the book’s first chapter.
From The sociological imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1959,
2000): 5–7, 8–11.

1
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical
scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of
individuals. It enables him [sic] to take into account how individuals, in the welter of
their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within
that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework
the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the
personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indiffer-
ence of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.
The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that
embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and
gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his
own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individual in his circum-
stances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. […]
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the
relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To rec-
ognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst. […] No
social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and
of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. What-
ever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or how-
ever broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-20
106 C. Wright Mills
imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts
of questions:

1 What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential
components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from
other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular
feature for its continuance and for its change?
2 Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by
which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the develop-
ment of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining
affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this
period—what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods?
What are its characteristic ways of history-making?
3 What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?
And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and
formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of
‘human nature’ are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this soci-
ety in this period? And what is the meaning for ‘human nature’ of each and every
feature of the society we are examining?

Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family,
a prison, a creed—these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked.
They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of man in society—and they are the
questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For
that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the
political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative
assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the
military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contem-
porary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote trans-
formations to the most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations
between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and
historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has
his quality and his being.
That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men now
hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening
in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within
society. In large part, contemporary man’s self-conscious view of himself as at least
an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social
relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is
the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. […]

2
Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works
is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure/
This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all
classic work in social science.
 The sociological imagination 107
Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his
immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited
areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the state-
ment and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical
entity and within the scope of his immediate milieu—the social setting that is directly
open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A trouble is
a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by him to be threatened.
Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the indi-
vidual and the range of his inner Me. They have to do with the organization of many
such milieux into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways
in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of
social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics
is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and
about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only
because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot
very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary
men. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often
too it involves what Marxists call ‘contradictions’ or ‘antagonisms’.
In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one man
is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the
character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a
nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and
we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any
one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct
statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the
economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situa-
tion and character of a scatter of individuals.
Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive
it or how to die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the
higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war’s termination.
In short, according to one’s values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the
war or make one’s death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do
with its causes; with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects
upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganized
irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.
Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal
troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of
every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the
institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them.
Or consider the metropolis—the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the
great city. For many upper-class people, the personal solution to ‘the problem of the
city’ is to have an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city, and
forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres
of private land. In these two controlled environments—with a small staff at each end
and a private helicopter connection—most people could solve many of the problems
of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid, does
not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What should be
108 C. Wright Mills
done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining
residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and
build new cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be?
And who is to decide and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are struc-
tural issues; to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political and
economic issues that affect innumerable milieux.
In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemploy-
ment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-
state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual
in his restricted milieu will be powerless—with or without psychiatric aid—to solve
the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as
an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers
and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable
of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the over-
developed automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of
urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth.
What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by
structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux
we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such struc-
tural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embrac-
ing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of
social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages
among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological
imagination.

Further reading
Garrett, P.M. (2021) Dissenting social work: Critical theory, resistance and pandemic.
London: Routledge.
Giddens, A. and Sutton, P.W. (2021) Essential concepts in sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Holman, B. (1988) Faith in the poor. London: Lion Hudson.
Ingleby, E. (2017) Applied sociology for social work. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Webb, S.A. (2019) ‘Resistance, biopolitics and radical passivity’. In Webb, S.A. (Ed.) The
Routledge handbook of critical social work. London: Routledge: 148–160.
White, J. (2020) Terraformed. Young black lives in the inner city. London: Repeater Books.
16 Reassessing attachment theory in
child welfare
Sue White, Matthew Gibson, David Wastell and
Patricia Walsh

The idea of ‘attachment’ is one of the central pillars of social work knowledge; from
the 1940s onwards, it has been considered a vital prerequisite for both child well-
being and healthy adult functioning. In the 1970s, psychologists (including Michael
Rutter) and feminists criticised attachment theory’s attention on mothers to the
exclusion of all other caregivers including fathers and grandparents. Attachment
theory was attacked again in the 1990s, when black researchers (including Lena
Robinson) pointed out that the theory’s precepts were built around white, ‘Western’
notions of ‘good parenting’. Not only did this scapegoat black parents, but it ignored
diverse parenting models practised in communities across the world. In spite of these
challenges, social work has remained remarkably attached to the idea of attachment
In this influential extract, Sue White, prominent UK social work academic, and her
colleagues take us through this story in detail.
From: Reassessing attachment theory in child welfare, Bristol: Bristol University
Press/Policy Press (2020) pp.1–21.

[…] Attachment theory, popularised during the 1940s and 1950s, is a synthesis of
object relations theory and ethological developmental psychology. It suggests a sym-
biotic dance of nature and nurture, achieved through the ministering of the mother.
It shares with object relations theory an emphasis on the infant’s relationship with the
‘primary object’, but these ideas are combined with those from cognitive psychology,
cybernetics (control systems theory), ethology and evolutionary biology. The theory
is thus an elegant, but pragmatic mishmash, arising from attempts to make sense of
empirical, clinical observations of real children experiencing distressing separations,
together with aspirations to make the world a better place for everybody by under-
standing the medium of love.

Beginnings
Bowlby’s interest in attachment was influenced by his personal experiences, being
cared for by a nanny and only seeing his mother for one hour a day. When Bowlby
was nearly four, his nanny left […]. Bowlby’s father was a military surgeon and often
absent, and he experienced the sudden death of his godfather during a game of foot-
ball. At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school and […] he later told his wife
that he would not even send a ‘dog’ away from home at that age. Bowlby attributed
his interest in attachment to his work as a volunteer at Priory Gate school for ‘mal-
adjusted children’. These experiences no doubt affected his interpretations of clinical
cases when he was working as a child psychiatrist in London.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-21
110 Sue White et al.
The observational studies by James Robertson, of children separated from their
mothers in hospitals, were also of central importance. Robertson was a social worker
and psychoanalyst who, many commentators note, was from an affectionate Scottish
working-class family, in contrast to Bowlby’s more privileged and, by implication
‘colder’, childhood. With his wife, Joyce, he completed observations, and sometimes
hands-on foster care, of children separated temporarily from their mothers. Bowlby
and Robertson’s early work (1952) identified three stages of infant distress when sep-
arated from their parent (mother):

• protest, in which the child cries, protests and clings to prevent the parent leaving;
• despair, in which the child begins to stop protesting, seems calmer but is visibly
upset and withdrawn and rejects attempts by other adults to soothe them;
• detachment, in which, as separation continues, the child settles and will take
comfort from others, but may be rejecting of, and show anger towards, the parent
on their return.

Robertson was an impressive campaigner and reformer, arguing that parents needed
to be allowed to accompany children to hospital. There are few who would argue
against this now. His observational work, alongside Bowlby’s theorising, had impact
and both were successful in changing practices.
Mary (Salter) Ainsworth joined the team at the Tavistock Clinic in 1950, following
a move to London with her husband after a period of study at the University of Toronto
under William Blatz. Crucial in Ainsworth’s intellectual lineage was ‘security theory’
(Blatz, 1940). […] Security was to become a key leitmotif of attachment theory. Secu-
rity theory held that infants must develop a dependence on parents before successfully
encountering unfamiliar situations. […] A related idea was the importance of ‘sensi-
tive mothering’ in the development of secure attachment patterns. Ainsworth’s exper-
imental methods were to make it possible to claim empirical verification of Bowlby’s
ideas, and these experiments came to expand the theory and spawn categories of
attachment, which were to have profound impacts on practice and understandings of
normal and abnormal relationships and development. The relationship between early
primary collaborators and the various critics is key to understanding the politics of
attachment theory and its extraordinary success […].
Specifically, the theory proposed that the development of selective attachments
served a biological purpose in providing emotional support and protection against
stress, and that this psychological need persisted throughout the lifespan. Bowlby was
also influenced by ethology and saw attachment as giving evolutionary advantage to
an infant. Thus, an infant would respond to a caregiver even if that caregiver were
insensitive, unresponsive and even harmful, with consequences for the development
of pathologies. […] the influence of cybernetics (the control of systems, biological or
otherwise) on Bowlby’s thought is clear. […]

The experiments
Although not an empirical researcher himself, Bowlby established his own research
unit focusing on mother–infant separation because it was a discrete and highly
researchable event. […] the ‘researchability’ of the phenomenon continues to be
a hallmark of the field, creating its own path dependencies. As a result, there has
 Reassessing attachment theory in child welfare 111
been a proliferation of the classification of different attachment patterns, some seen
as ideal and some deemed defective, facilitated by a range of quasi- experimental
methods based on observation of parent–child interaction. The most famous of
these is Mary Ainsworth’s (et al) Strange Situation Test, or Procedure (Ainsworth
and Wittig, 1969) […]. But, this was not the first of Ainsworth’s observational
studies. […]
During her husband’s period working at the East African Institute of Social
Research at Kampala in Uganda, Ainsworth set about looking at Bowlby’s theories
empirically. She recruited 26 families with babies aged between one and 24 months
not yet weaned. These she observed each fortnight for two hours over a period of
nine months. Ainsworth was interested in trying to determine when the behaviours
that promoted proximity (and responses to them) occurred, and when these became
directed preferentially towards the mother. Ainsworth’s subsequent analysis of data
from this project was influenced by correspondence with Bowlby and the intellectual
transfer was mutual.
[…] while Ainsworth noted that a great deal of shared care took place, with the
infants typically relating to several adults, her observations were of the mother–infant
dyad. This had been an issue of contention between Bowlby and the anthropologist
Margaret Mead, with the latter, based on many observations in the field, doubting
the necessity and desirability of a single continuous mother figure. ‘Sensitive mothers’
in Ainsworth’s study it seems, were also those who were better informants. Those
mothers whom Ainsworth described as preoccupied with other activities or thoughts
received lower scores, presumably as a result of being unreliable in their responses to
the multifarious cues from the infant.
[…] The Uganda study was followed by a very detailed naturalistic observational
study of 26 families in Baltimore in the United States, starting pre-birth, with 18
home visits of four hours’ duration, beginning in the first month of the birth and end-
ing at 54 weeks. This study appeared to corroborate the Uganda observations but in
much more detail: sensitive mothering is thus fully defined and validated. We should
note that these are not clinical populations; they are ‘ordinary’ families with a range
of parenting styles and no doubt various other differences.
Findings from the Baltimore study informed the design of the Strange Situation
Procedure. While it marks the start of an ‘experimental’ paradigm in attachment
research, it is not strictly speaking an ‘experiment’. For example, it does not rely on
random assignment to experimental or control conditions, or a differential manipu-
lation across the conditions; rather, it is best described as a semi-structured observa-
tional procedure in a laboratory setting. It is a 20-minute staged event, designed to
elicit mild distress in the infant, in which their behaviour on the departure and return
of their primary caregiver and a stranger is observed over eight episodes. […]
Typically, two-thirds of infants in a non-clinical sample (of ‘middle-class’ children)
will be categorised as showing ‘secure attachment’ (categorised as type B; Ainsworth
and Wittig, 1969). This group, while showing some separation distress, can be com-
forted quickly by a caregiver on return. About a fifth will show little sign of distress,
which Ainsworth attributes to learnt behaviour in response to caregivers who tend
to discourage displays of distress. These infants are classified as ‘insecure-avoidant’
(categorised as type A). Children who exhibit distress before separation, and who are
difficult to settle on return, are classified as ‘insecure-resistant/ambivalent’ (catego-
rised as type C). […]
112 Sue White et al.
The test has spawned many variants reminiscent of the animal studies that inspired
Bowlby. After a thorough review of the work and archives of Ainsworth’s correspond-
ence, Vicedo (2013, p 208) notes: ‘Ainsworth often moved from behaviour to feelings,
from children to mothers, and from relation to causation without sufficient evidence.
In addition, she never really clarified what attachment really is.’ Ainsworth herself
later expressed regret at the fact that the Strange Situation Procedure had ended up
as a stand-alone instrument, often being used as a shortcut method, instead of being
used in combination with home observations (Ainsworth and Marvin, 1995).
Before we conclude this section, we must introduce the concept of ‘disorganised
attachment’, which emerged from attempts to understand some of the behaviours elic-
ited in the Strange Situation Procedure that were difficult to classify using any of the
categories mentioned previously. Disorganised attachment has made its way, albeit in
distorted and simplified form, into the child welfare mindset with particularly trou-
bling consequences, the most consequential of which is that its aetiology is frequently
ascribed to child abuse and neglect. […] The category disorganised attachment is
invoked to describe infants who do not display a consistent response in dealing with
the scenarios in the Strange Situation test. Behaviours included in the category are
diverse and include the infant ‘freezing’, averting their gaze and hitting the parent
after seeming pleased to see them. In short, they embody some sort of contradic-
tory response. […] The origins of these ‘difficult to classify’ behaviours were quickly
sought: they must, of course, be spawned by the parent. […] Evidence is frequently
cited to show associations between the ‘disorganised’ category and various forms of
parental difficulty, adversity and disadvantage; it is also linked with future problems
in functioning. Although some longitudinal studies claim that problem behaviours
do not correlate with a child’s temperament, it seems implausible that interactions
and characteristics of the children are irrelevant and that the whole phenomenon is a
unidirectional effect of parenting. […]
The idea of a new category of behaviour that could be labelled ‘disorganised’ was
not necessarily accepted within the attachment research community at the time. […]
While on the surface this disagreement seemed simply about what constituted ‘disor-
ganised’ behaviour, the foundations of this disagreement got to the heart of attach-
ment theory, that is: What do we mean by attachment behaviours and what do we
mean by these being ‘organised’? […]

Animal experiments: modelling human love

While Ainsworth was observing and experimenting, Bowlby was building on his own
clinical work, interpreting and collaborating with leading figures conducting animal
studies. He was also reaching some not altogether uncontroversial conclusions. […]
Bowlby was explicitly influenced by ethological work, and this was particularly in
relation to Konrad Lorenz’s (1970) work on imprinting in goslings. Lorenz found that
goslings would follow almost any object they saw immediately after hatching and
preferred such an object, regardless of its species, as a potential mate in adulthood.
[…] Lorenz did not limit his theorising to birds. He was interested in collaborating
with psychologists and development specialists such as Bowlby. […]
Another major collaboration was between Bowlby and the American, behaviour-
ally oriented psychologist Harry Harlow. The two jointly participated in scientific
gatherings and engaged in correspondence from 1957 to the mid-1970s, shaping each
 Reassessing attachment theory in child welfare 113
other’s thinking. […] That Harlow’s work developed as it did suggests that his inter-
actions with Bowlby were persuasive; in particular, the relative importance of various
‘instincts’, such as clinging and sucking, informed the design of Harlow’s surrogate
mother research. In the controversial experiments, infant rhesus monkeys were sep-
arated from their mothers after birth. The infants were then ‘raised’ by one of two
mechanical mothers, both of which could dispense milk. One ‘mother’ was made of
wire and the other was covered in soft cloth. […] When infant monkeys could make
choices, they spent longer clinging to the soft surrogates, even when their food was
being delivered by the wire mothers – surely a blow to the behaviourists! In a second
experiment, Harlow separated the infant monkeys into two groups and gave them no
choice between the surrogates. Physical development was unaffected, but those with
‘soft’ surrogates behaved more ‘normally’, which was interpreted to be the result of
their access to a source of reassurance and security. Subsequent experiments, known
as the ‘open field tests’, were to examine the effect of surrogate mothers on infant
monkeys’ responses to novel or frightening situations. When the infant’s surrogate
mother was present, it clung to her, but then would gradually begin to venture off
to explore. If frightened, the infant monkey ran back to the surrogate mother and
clung to her for a time, before setting forth again. In the absence of the surrogate,
the infants appeared terrified. […] Harlow’s experiments continued, involving some-
times extremes of privation, such as complete isolation, with unsurprising deleterious
effects on the behaviour of the infant monkeys. […]

Controversies
The anthropomorphism in the design of the experiments seems to point to a shared
programme of work between Bowlby and Harlow. However, Vicedo (2009) takes a
different view of the cross- fertilisation and the development of Harlow’s work. She
refers to a triumvirate of Bowlby, Lorenz and Harlow, as legend or myth. […] In place
of the myth, she traces a complex constellation of contemporary social and political
factors that propelled Harlow’s experiments into the popular imagination […]. In the
UK, Bowlby was using ideas about attachment to argue in favour of the traditional
nuclear family, and this is the basis for many of the feminist criticisms of Bowlby.
However, in the United States, Harlow was making a wry suggestion that fathers, or
maybe even machines, could be good-enough mothers.
But there were questions to be raised about what exactly Harlow had shown. Was
he producing surrogate ‘mothers’ or simply infant-feeding machines? The psychoana-
lyst Erik Erikson, although an admirer of the elegance of Harlow’s experiments, was
unconvinced that he had found the formula for love. […] When monkeys reared by
surrogates reached adulthood they showed some very significant difficulties in being
normal and particularly in forming mating relationships […]. This should not have
been especially surprising as living mothers spend relatively little of an infant’s life
providing food and something warm to cling to. They normally begin to push the
infant away and encourage other ‘interests’ and associations with peers. Harlow’s
monkeys reared without play were healthy enough physically, but they were not inter-
ested in doing anything, including having sexual relationships with anyone other than
themselves.
Harlow thus began to try to explain how infant monkeys move away from their
mother and form attachments to others. Were the disturbed mating patterns and
114 Sue White et al.
appalling parenting shown by artificially inseminated ‘motherless’ mothers the result
of the absence of love, or their impoverished social environment? Later experiments,
for example, in which eight infant monkeys were reared on cloth mothers but allowed
to play in groups of four in playrooms, showed more normal grooming and sexual
responses developed. […] Harlow concluded that infants reared by their mothers did
better overall, but this was not in itself sufficient to optimise development. This is a
more hopeful story for monkeys and people, since those unfortunate enough to lose
their mother may be compensated by other affectionate bonds; it is thus more likely
to promote species survival. […]
[…] Michael Rutter’s important intervention into the ‘maternal deprivation’ debate
in 1972 affirms the importance of wider relations, resilience and the general ecology
beyond the infant–mother dyad, concluding that although the reactions to separation
in hospitals were likely due the disruption of attachment behaviours:

New research has confirmed that, although an important stress, separation is not
the crucial factor in most varieties of deprivation. Investigations have also demon-
strated the importance of a child’s relationship with people other than his mother.
Most important of all, there has been the repeated finding that many children are
not damaged by deprivation. (Rutter, 1972, p 217)

Stevenson-Hinde (2007, p 340) also notes that: ‘We sometimes conveniently over-
look the fact that children are raised in families, that emotional communication
occurs beyond the dyad.’ She suggests that there was considerable potential utility
in a synthesis of ideas about attachment and security with those of family systems
theorists who focus on patterns of interaction. This underscores the importance of
attachment networks. Bowlby showed considerable interest in family systems the-
ory, but it seems he was unconvinced about patterns as an explanation. He preferred
to look to the mother’s anxious attachments in childhood: all roads it seems lead to
Rome. […]

Conclusion
Given all the controversies and social changes of the latter half of the 20th century,
[…] how did it survive and, and not only survive but also thrive? […] First, from the
outset, the authority of attachment theory comes from its invocation of biology. It
appeals to what is natural and hardwired. […] Second, the principal actors presented
a united front, ignoring criticism and inconvenient results. This dogged togetherness
was not matched by the critics of the theory […] [who] simply couldn’t drown out the
attachment hymn. The third, and for us a very important, reason for the survival of
attachment theory is the theory’s interdisciplinarity. […] Clinical cases, observations,
animal models, cybernetics, ethology, a little of this, a drop of that, form the heady
cocktail that is attachment theory. […] [Bowlby’s] selectivity and pragmatism allowed
the theory the flexibility to be useful in clinical practice, and indeed to challenge dam-
aging practices such as the separation of children from parents during hospitalisation.
Regardless of the criticisms and apparent instability of the theory, it has survived and
thrived, finding a felicitous bond with child welfare professionals in the post-war
welfare state.
 Reassessing attachment theory in child welfare 115
References
Ainsworth, M.D. and Wittig, B.A. (1969) ‘Attachment and exploratory behavior of one-year-
olds in a strange situation.’ In B.M. Foss (Ed.) Determinants of Infant Behavior 4: 113–136.
London: Methuen.
Blatz, W. (1940) Hostages to peace: Parents and children of democracy. New York, NY:
Morrow.
Bowlby, J. and Robertson, J. (1952) ‘A two-year-old goes to hospital.’ Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Medicine 46: 425–7.
Erikson, E.H. (1950) Childhood and society. New York, NY: Norton.
Harlow, H.F. (1958) ‘The Nature of Love.’ American Psychologist 13(12): 673–85.
Lorenz, K. (1970) Studies in animal and human behaviour. Vols 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Robinson, L. (2007) Cross-cultural child development for social workers. An introduction.
London: Palgrave Macmillan/Red Globe Press.
Rutter, M. (1972) Maternal deprivation reassessed. London: Penguin.
Stevenson-Hinde, J. (2007) ‘Attachment theory and John Bowlby. Some reflections.’ Attach-
ment & Human Development 9(4): 337–42.
Vicedo, M. (2009) ‘Mothers, machines and morals. Harry Harlow’s work on primate love
from lab to legend.’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45(3): 193–218.

Further reading
Cassidy, J. and Shaver, P.R. (eds) (2016) Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clin-
ical applications. 3rd edition. London: Guilford Press.
Frost, L. (2020) ‘Why psychosocial thinking is critical.’ In Webb, S.A. (Ed.) (2019) The Rout-
ledge Handbook of Critical Social Work. London: Routledge: 115–25.
Howe, D. (1995) Attachment Theory for Social Work Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Noble, C. (2019) ‘Psychological and counselling theory in social work.’ In Payne, M. and
Reith-Hall, E. (eds) The Routledge handbook of social work theory. London: Routledge:
28–40.
Robinson, L. (2008) Psychology for social workers. Black perspectives in human develop-
ment and behaviour. London: Routledge.
17 A critique of the adverse childhood
experiences framework in
epidemiology and public health
Uses and misuses
Michelle Kelly-Irving and Cyrille Delpierre

Just as the previous chapter cast a critical eye over social work’s reliance on attach-
ment theory, so this chapter, written by two social epidemiologists (Michelle
Kelly-Irving and Cyrille Delpierre) based in France, interrogates another prominent
idea within social work policy and practice today: the Adverse Child Experiences
framework. Their paper demonstrates the danger of extrapolating from populations
to individuals and makes salutary reading for all those who have seen this framework
as ‘the answer’ to a host of different problems in social work and in life.
From: Social Policy and Society (2019) 18(3) pp. 445–456.

Introduction
The scientific literature on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is burgeoning,
and the term has also become commonplace outside the academic scientific milieu,
including policy practice and social work. This article will examine the importance
of the ACEs framework as it emerged in the field of epidemiology in the late 1990s
and 2000s, and how it influenced research on the aetiology of health and the social
determinants of health. We will also discuss the important societal issues that have
emerged as the population-level epidemiological research has increasingly been used
in other fields and at the individual level.
‘Adverse childhood experiences’ is a catch-all term that some authors have
attempted to use and define more specifically (Brown et al., 2010). From a method-
ological perspective, the type of approaches mainly involves collecting recall data
through questionnaires (Felitti et al., 1998), but some papers also identify ACEs using
prospectively collected data (Kelly-Irving et al., 2013a).

Social epidemiology: from the black-box towards causal mechanisms

Epidemiology is a quantitative discipline that acts essentially as a statistical tool-box
to inform and provide evidence to the fields of medicine and public health. […] The
tradition of social medicine and social epidemiology in Britain, influenced by histor-
ical figures including Engels (1987) largely focussed on the deleterious health effects
of material deprivation and poverty. Namely, low income, poor housing and over-
crowding were the main forms of social determinants examined in relation to health.
In the early 2000s a debate played out in the academic literature between this ‘neo-
materialist’ position (Lynch et al., 2000) and researchers defending the importance
of psychosocial factors as determinants of health and health inequalities (Marmot

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-22
 A critique of the adverse childhood experiences framework 117
and Wilkinson, 2001). The neo-materialist camp emphasised the importance of low
incomes leading to deleterious material conditions for people, having to live in poorly
maintained housing, not being able to afford adequate food and clothes, with con-
sequences on overall health. The psychosocial camp underlined the effects of social
status, and status anxiety, where people with disadvantaged social status are exposed
to chronic stress, which has consequences on physiological and mental health. […]
Desire to understand pathways and mechanisms was also pursued through research
on what was then known as the Barker hypothesis or the foetal origins of adult dis-
ease. This work took an interest in understanding why socially deprived geographical
areas appeared to have higher rates of cardiovascular disease fifty years later (Barker
and Osmond, 1986). […] In social epidemiology, the lifecourse framework emerged
from the social sciences while also integrating concepts from the biological sciences.
Understanding how health and disease are formed across the life span, and how the
social environment is involved in this process has become a central question in epide-
miology, and it is within this context that Adverse Childhood Experiences became a
key area of research.

Adverse Childhood Experiences emerge in social epidemiology

In 1998, the ‘ACEs study’ described a strong graded relationship between a number of
events and conditions in childhood deemed to be stressful, which they named Adverse
Childhood Experiences, and cause of death (Felitti et al., 1998). The authors explained
this association as an indirect relationship between the stressful conditions and mor-
tality risk factors including health-related behaviours. Exposed individuals coped
with adversity-induced stress by obtaining a pharmacological or psychological bene-
fit from tobacco or alcohol use. The underlying thesis of this study was that ‘stressful
or traumatic childhood experiences have negative neurodevelopmental impacts that
persist over the lifespan and that increase the risk of a variety of health and social
problems’ (Felitti et al., 1998). We will refer to this study as the ‘point source’ for the
ensuing epidemiological interest in ACEs for pragmatic reasons, since this was the
first study to use the term. However we fully recognise that previous work, especially
by Michael Rutter (1980) on the subject of stressful conditions during childhood
laid the ground for this subsequent literature. The ACEs study reported associations
between ACEs and lung cancer (Brown et al., 2010), risk of suicide (Dube et al.,
2001), depressive disorders (Chapman et al., 2004), ischaemic heart disease (Dong
et al., 2004) and so on. Since then, many studies by other authors using different data,
mainly from high income countries, have been conducted and published. […]
Methodological issues arise with ACE studies, many of which have been discussed
in the literature (for example, see Hartas, 2019). Across studies a heterogeneity exists
in how ACEs were defined: for example, in some cases poverty and deprivation is
included (Appleton et al., 2017). This may in some cases have its merits; however, it
means that exposure to poverty and the material pathway between deprivation and
health cannot be examined separately. One methodological flaw present in many ACE
studies is the self-reported retrospective nature of the data. Usually adults are asked
questions about trauma and adversities they may have experienced during childhood.
Such questions are vulnerable to recall bias, where adults with poor health may be
more likely to report adversity during childhood. […] Prospectively collected infor-
mation about ACEs presents a different set of methodological challenges, however.
118 Michelle Kelly-Irving and Cyrille Delpierre
The data are collected by proxy, often from a parent or teacher who may not have
full access to accurate information. In some cases it is possible to ask the children
themselves; however, it is probably inappropriate to question children directly about
experiences of physical or sexual abuse. There is therefore a risk of misclassification
bias, and under-reporting due to the sensitive nature of some issues or lack of aware-
ness of any problems at the time.
The contribution of ACEs to understanding the construction of health inequalities
is not apparent as a main objective of most studies, since in many cases the socioeco-
nomic environment is not an object of explicit interest, but merely a background fac-
tor. For social epidemiologists, the body of work on ACEs and chronic pathologies is a
convincing source of evidence for the psychosocial pathway between social exposures
and health outcomes alluded to in the previous section. We suggest that the reasons
for this are fourfold. First, as we have mentioned, there was relative consistency in the
findings across studies within the original ACE study and from other sources using
different data from different population. Second, the association between ACE and
health persists after adjustment for material deprivation or poverty, suggesting that
other mechanisms than those based on a ‘neo-materialist’ approach are at play. Third,
social-to-biological plausibility was present, meaning that the theoretical links made
between exposure to ACEs and biological processes appeared to make sense in the
results (clustering of exposures, dose-response association with disease). Fourth, new
developments in science on social embedding, embodiment or ‘the social to biological
transition’ highlight how chronic stress may modify biological functioning. However,
within the literature there is scope for considering ACEs within their socioeconomic
context, and, importantly, a need for a more detailed examination of mediating or
indirect pathways between ACEs and health outcomes. ACEs are likely to occur along
multiple causal pathways leading to a variety of adult health outcomes. For example,
our own paper (Solis et al., 2015) highlighted that the relationship between ACEs
and allostatic load at age forty-five was mainly mediated through health behaviours,
especially smoking, and wealth accumulation in adulthood. However, considerable
further research into the mediation pathways between ACEs and health, especially on
the mediating or moderating effects of social support or social capital, would provide
an important contribution to this field.
Beyond merely trying to describe associations, the ACEs framework also attempts
to understand how the relationships might work by referring to a literature on neu-
robiology, and notably the biology of stress (Shonkoff and Philips, 2000). The main
argument and rationale explaining these outcome-wide associations was that living
through ACEs is likely to induce the activation of physiological stress responses,
which, when activated for long periods of time are harmful to human biological func-
tioning. Human perceptions and emotions can lead to physiological stress responses
in various biological systems (neurological, immune, hormonal). Psychosocial stress
alters neuroendocrine hormone levels and down-regulates cellular immune responses
mainly via glucocorticoid and adrenergic signalling pathways (Lupien et al., 2009).
Stressful intra-familial conditions occurring between conception and adolescence
causing this cascade of physiological responses may lead to an adaptive biological
response during sensitive periods of development. This may alter an individual’s biol-
ogy in the long term in a way that makes them vulnerable to chronic conditions and
pathologies over their lifecourse. […]
 A critique of the adverse childhood experiences framework 119
ACEs and the misuse of epidemiological results
Altogether, epidemiological and animal studies in this area show that ACEs, through
biological mechanisms involving stress response systems, are likely to act upon sub-
sequent health and therefore represent a potential target for public health interven-
tion. However this evidence is being used in a discourse around the ACEs framework
that is possibly stigmatising and harmful. While the epidemiological research we
described on ACEs may be useful evidence for population-level or structural policies,
it is an insufficient and ill-adapted tool for implementation by social workers, medical
practitioners, child protection workers, and likely to stigmatise families and children.
Numerous examples of the concept of ‘ACEs’, becoming a buzzword in itself, being
used for diagnostic purposes, can be found. One such example is that of the National
Health Service in Scotland, which has formed an ‘ACEs Hub’.1 As with many of these
initiatives put in place in the health care sector, the intention is commendable: to take
social factors into account when aiming to improve health. In this particular exam-
ple, practitioners are encouraged to use an ACE questionnaire with patients, though
a caveat is expressed about usage in schools, which they say could be stigmatising.
An example outside of the health sector is an advocacy website ‘ACEs too high’, to
promote awareness about ACEs. One page asks visitors if they have ‘Got Your ACE
Score?’, and invites them to answer questions, and find out how many ACEs they
have. The individualised use of the original ACEs questionnaire poses many potential
ethical questions. What can an individual do with this information? Will they fear for
their health, or even their lives, even though the majority of exposed people will not
develop any ACE-related problems? Indeed, by individualising the problem, it seems
to take on a deterministic form, and puts the onus on individuals to act.
These examples are rooted in the epidemiological research; however, they reveal a
misunderstanding of the concept of risk. Let us look at briefly at our own previous
paper on cancer more closely (Kelly-Irving et al., 2013b). We showed that women who
experienced two or more ACEs were twice as likely to report having had cancer by
the age of fifty, compared to women with no ACEs. When we look closely at the abso-
lute figures we see that this result is due to 23 per cent of the 641 women in the high
ACE group who had cancer, being compared to 9 per cent of the 2483 women in the
zero ACEs group who had cancer. While the relative likelihood of developing cancer
in the higher ACEs group is greater compared to women with no ACEs, it is impor-
tant to note that the majority of women in the high ACE group, 77 per cent of them,
did not develop cancer. This is nearly always the case in the ACEs epidemiological
literature. We must remember that the evidence is about showing probabilities, and
is not highlighting deterministic directly causal relationships. Although such results
indicate that among sample of people with ACEs we can expect a certain number
of disease cases based on probabilities, we do not know which individuals in this
group will develop the disease. At an individual level, having experienced ACEs does
not mean that one is going to get cancer or die because of them. Furthermore, by
grouping ACEs together in a cumulative score, assertions about individual risk also
make the assumption that the specific patterning of ACEs and their consequences is
the same for every individual. However, at an individual level the severity, timing,
duration of stressful life events are likely to have different and heterogeneous conse-
quences for health.
120 Michelle Kelly-Irving and Cyrille Delpierre
The original ACE study authors, if anything, made very prudent links between
their findings and public health prevention strategies […]. Since then, in the last few
years, the public health community has begun using the ACEs keyword in the pri-
mary prevention and health promotion approaches. […]

Conclusion
We hypothesise that the observed increase in interest in ACEs in the scientific liter-
ature potentially comes from a number of sources: the initial novelty factor of the
theme as opposed to previous social epidemiological research on poverty and dep-
rivation; the catchy term; the fact that data on ACEs can be collected using rela-
tively inexpensive retrospective questionnaires, making such studies relatively easy to
do; the fact that the ACE literature is linked with the neurobiological and biological
embedding literature, giving it biological plausibility despite the self-reported nature
of the data; and the fact that there is a lay consciousness and even mythology about
the long term harms of childhood trauma (orphaned children seem disproportionately
represented in fictional literature). However, such a sudden increase in interest may
have contributed to the decontextualisation of ACEs from the wider socioeconomic
landscape and to a mismatch regarding links with policy.
The potential health consequences of ACEs is a research topic where the targeted
level for intervention must be the structural social context in which children are
exposed to ACEs and socioeconomic disadvantage. By examining this context, the
focus is placed upon conditions that may be adverse for child well-being, and how
these conditions come about. The focus should not be placed on the individual and
his or her responsibility, this being all the more important when taking an interest in
children. Nor should the evidence on ACEs be used to incriminate parents, but rather
to reveal the conditions, particularly social conditions, in which parents and children
live and how they cope. Developing studies on the biological impacts of ACEs there-
fore means seeking and providing evidence for population-based actions and avoiding
the possible stigmatisation of families and children who lack the means to act. […]
As social epidemiologists working on these issues, it is important for us to highlight
the all too frequent excesses and temptations that consist in translating, in simplistic,
erroneous, stigmatising and counterproductive ways, the research produced on ACEs
relating to children and families.

Note
1 NHS Scotland (2017) Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) http://www.healthscotland.
scot/population-groups/children/adverse-childhood-experiences-aces/overview-of-aces

References
Appleton, A. A., Holdsworth, E., Ryan, M. and Tracy, M. (2017) ‘Measuring childhood adver-
sity in life course cardiovascular research: a systematic review.’ Psychosomatic Medicine
79(4): 434–40.
Barker, D. J. P. and Osmond, C. (1986) ‘Infant mortality, childhood nutrition, and ischaemic
heart disease in England and Wales.’ The Lancet 1: 1077–81.
Brown, D. W., Anda, R. F., Felitti, V. J., Edwards, V. J., Malarcher, A. M., Croft, J. B. and
Giles, W. H. (2010) ‘Adverse childhood experiences are associated with the risk of lung can-
cer: a prospective cohort study.’ BMC Public Health 10: 20.
 A critique of the adverse childhood experiences framework 121
Chapman, D. P., Whitfield, C. L., Felitti, V. J., Dube, S. R., Edwards, V. J. and Anda, R. F.
(2004) ‘Adverse childhood experiences and the risk of depressive disorders in adulthood’,
Journal of Affective Disorders 82 (2): 217–25.
Dong, M., Giles, W. H., Felitti, V. J., Dube, S. R., Williams, J. E., Chapman, D. P. and Anda,
R. F. (2004) ‘Insights into causal pathways for ischemic heart disease: adverse childhood
experiences study.’ Circulation 110(13): 1761–6.
Dube, S. R., Anda, R. F., Felitti, V. J., Chapman, D. P., Williamson, D. F. and Giles, W. H.
(2001) ‘Childhood abuse, household dysfunction, and the risk of attempted suicide through-
out the life span: findings from the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.’ JAMA 286(24):
3089–96.
Engels, F. (1987) ‘The condition of the working class in England.’ American Journal of Public
Health 93(8): 171–84.
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss,
M. P. and Marks, J. S. (1998) ‘Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction
to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)
Study.’ American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14(4): 245–58.
Hartas, D. (2019) ‘Assessing the foundational studies on adverse childhood experiences.’
Social Policy and Society 18(3): 435–43.
Kelly-Irving, M., Lepage, B., Dedieu, D., Bartley, M., Blane, D., Grosclaude, P., Lang, T. and
Delpierre, C. (2013a) ‘Adverse childhood experiences and premature all-cause mortality.’
European Journal of Epidemiology 28(9): 721–734.
Kelly-Irving, M., Lepage, B., Dedieu, D., Lacey, R., Cable, N., Bartley, M., Blane, D.,
Grosclaude, P., Lang, T. and Delpierre, C. (2013b) ‘Childhood adversity as a risk for cancer:
findings from the 1958 British birth cohort study.’ BMC Public Health 13(1): 767.
Lupien, S. J., McEwen, B. S., Gunnar, M. R. and Heim, C. (2009) ‘Effects of stress throughout
the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition.’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10(6):
434–45.
Lynch, J. W., Davey Smith, G., Kaplan, G. A. and House, J. S. (2000) ‘Income inequality and
mortality: importance to health of individual income, psychosocial environment, or mate-
rial conditions.’ British Medical Journal 320: 1200–04.
Marmot, M. and Wilkinson, R. G. (2001) ‘Psychosocial and material pathways in the rela-
tion between income and health: a response to Lynch et al.’ British Medical Journal 322:
1233–36.
Rutter, M. (1980) ‘The long-term effects of early experience.’ Developmental Medicine and
Child Neurology 22(6): 800–15.
Shonkoff, J. P. and Philips, D. A. (2000) From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of
Early Childhood Development, Washington: National Academy Press.
Solis, C. B., Kelly-Irving, M., Fantin, R., Darnaudery, M., Torrisani, J., Lang, T. and Delpierre,
C. (2015) ‘Adverse childhood experiences and physiological wear- and-tear in midlife: find-
ings from the 1958 British birth cohort.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America 112(7): E738–46.

Further reading
Spratt, T. and Kennedy, M. (2021) Adverse Childhood Experiences: Developments in trauma
and resilience aware services. The British Journal of Social Work 51(3): 999–1017.
White, S. and Wastell, D. (2017) Blinded by Science: The Social Implications of Epigenetics
and Neuroscience. Bristol: Policy Press, University of Bristol.
18 Resilience
Some conceptual considerations
Michael Rutter

The notion of resilience has had an enduring influence on the practice of social work
over the last 30 years or so, and like attachment theory, it has been compromised
by misrepresentations and over-simplifications along the way. In spite of this, resil-
ience remains an ultimately useful and optimistic concept for thinking about human
behaviour and experience. In our choice of reading to present this, we have gone
back to the work of Michael Rutter, one of the foremost psychologists in this field. In
this paper, as well as outlining the history of the idea of resilience, he reminds us of
the need for caveats and qualifications in using this concept.
From: Journal of Adolescent Health (1993) 3 pp. 626–31.

“Resilience” and “Invulnerability”

All studies of risk factors have shown a very considerable variability in how peo-
ple respond to psycho-social adversity. Even with the most dreadful experiences, it
is usual to find that a substantial proportion of individuals escape serious seque-
lae (Rutter, 1991). Over the last 20 years, there has been an increasing focus on
this phenomenon as it has seemed to carry hope for successful prevention […]. The
implicit assumption has been that, if only we knew what it was that enabled people to
“escape” damage from serious adverse experiences, we would have the means at our
disposal to enhance everyone’s resistance to stress and adversity.
At first, influential writers tended to refer to invulnerable children (Anthony and
Koupernik, 1978). Fortunately, this extreme notion has gone out of the headlines.
It has been replaced by the rather more acceptable term resilience. However, in our
considerations of the phenomenon of resilience, it may be useful to consider briefly
just why the notion of invulnerability was so unhelpful. First, it seemed to imply an
absolute resistance to damage. The reality, of course, is that no one has absolute
resistance; rather, it is more appropriate to consider susceptibility to stress as a graded
phenomenon. Some individuals are more resistant than others, but everyone has their
limits. Second, the term suggests that the characteristic applies to all risk circum-
stances. Obviously, that is a biologically implausible suggestion. There is a range of
mechanisms by which risk factors operate, and it must be anticipated that the fea-
tures that constitute resilience will vary according to the risk mechanism. Third, the
concept seems to imply that the characteristic is an intrinsic feature of the individual.
That is misleading because research findings indicate that resilience may reside in the
social context as much as within the individual. Fourth, the term suggests that it deals
with an unchanging characteristic. That, too, is wrong because there is every reason

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-23
 Resilience: some conceptual considerations 123
to suppose that developmental changes will influence resilience just as they influence
any other characteristic.

The Study of Resilience

These considerations are emphasized because, although it is entirely appropriate for
us to grasp hold of the optimistic promise of the phenomenon of resilience, it is cru-
cial that we avoid thinking of it as some single answer to life’s problems. It is not like
that at all. Moreover, there are several different sorts of problems that need to be
borne in mind when considering research into this very important phenomenon. This
is not the time or place to go into the technical details but it is necessary to mention
a few of the main concerns about the study of resilience. To begin with, as with the
whole of science, it is essential that we appreciate that our measures are fallible and
incorporate a good deal of error in measurement (Rutter and Pickles, 1990). […] The
main solution to this measurement problem lies in making sure that we have access
to several different sources of measurement and, ideally, that we have measures that
are repeated over time.
The second main concern is that we must deal with the issue of diversity in out-
come. Unfortunately, there are too many studies of resilience that take just one type
of psychopathology as a criterion and then draw conclusions on resilience on the
basis of individuals who do not have that particular outcome. […] That seems to
me a most misleading way of thinking about things. Rather, we need to appreciate
that people may suffer in a range of different ways and that it is important that our
measures accommodate this diversity. The third concern is that we must get away
from thinking of resilience only in terms of the “chemistry of the moment.” That is
wrong because, as we shall see, the evidence clearly indicates the importance of both
preceding and succeeding circumstances. If we are to understand the phenomenon of
resilience, it is necessary that we take a much longer time perspective and, moreover,
that we do so within an appropriate developmental framework.

Resilience and the Exposure to Risk

Some “lessons” emerge from what is known about the factors associated with vari-
ability in people’s responses to physical hazards of various kinds. Thus, we need to
pay attention to research findings in the field of medicine as a whole and, indeed, in
biology more generally. The first finding that is immediately striking is that resilience
does not usually reside in the avoidance of risk experiences, or positive health char-
acteristics, or generally good experiences. Thus, for example, immunity to infections,
whether natural, or therapeutically induced through immunization, derives from con-
trolled exposure to the relevant pathogen, and not through its avoidance. Resilience
results from having the encounter at a time, and in a way, that the body can cope
successfully with the noxious challenge to its system. In short, resistance to infec-
tion comes from the experience of coping successfully with lesser doses, or modified
versions, of the pathogen. Perhaps the same may apply in the field of psychosocial
stresses and adversity.
The second feature that stands out in any review of resistance to disease is that the
risk or protective influences may stem from experiences at a very much earlier age.
For example, it is now apparent that relative subnutrition in early infancy (as indexed
124 Michael Rutter
by low weight at birth and during the first year of life) creates a much increased risk
of coronary artery disease and heart attacks in middle age (Bock and Whelan, 1991).
[…] We may suppose that somewhat similar phenomena may’ well apply in the psy-
chosocial arena.
The third feature is that it is necessary to focus on risk mechanisms and not on
risk factors (Rutter, 1990). That is because the same feature may be a risk in one
situation and a protective factor in another. For example, heterozygote status for
sickle-cell disease is obviously a risk factor for that disease. However, interestingly, it
constitutes a protective factor against malaria. In the psychological field, one might
view adoption in the same way. […] The point is simply that we must get away from
thinking in terms of characteristics that are always risky or protective in their effects
and, instead, focus on the specific processes that operate in particular circumstances
for particular outcomes.

The Origins of Risk and Adversity

With those general considerations in mind, we may consider some of the specifics as
they apply to resilience in the face of psychosocial risk factors. The first point to note
is that evidence from behavior genetics suggests that in many (but not all) circum-
stances, nonshared environmental influences tend to have a greater effect than shared
ones […]. What that means is that, on the whole, features that impinge equally on all
children in the same family are rather less important than those that impinge differ-
entially so that one child is more affected than others. In other words, it may be that
it is less important that the overall family atmosphere tends to be a rather unloving
or discordant one, than that one child is scapegoated and another is favored. Several
practical implications flow from this observation. First, it means that, given some
family-wide risk factor (such as discord or parental mental disorder), protection may
reside in children being able to, as it were, distance themselves to some extent from
what is going on. […] Another implication is that it is necessary to consider individu-
alized aspects of children’s experiences. For example, Jenkins and Smith (1990) found
that children were protected by a good relationship with one parent when the family
as a whole was characterized by overall discord.
A rather different consideration concerns the question of where adverse life experi-
ences come from. That may seem a curious question to ask but it needs asking because
it is so obvious that stresses and adversities are not randomly distributed in the pop-
ulation. Some children have far more than their fair share of psychosocial hazards,
whereas other children experience remarkably little serious stress and adversity. The
findings on reasons for individual variations in exposure to risk environments bring
out several important points. First, it is clear that people’s own actions and behavior
do much to shape and select environments that they later experience […] It’s impor-
tant to emphasize that, just because people bring about their own experiences, it
does not mean that they are unaffected by them (Rutter, 1986). Thus, people choose
whether or not they smoke cigarettes but the fact that they have chosen to expose
themselves to carcinogens and carbon monoxide in no way negates the fact that smok-
ing creates a serious risk for lung cancer, coronary artery disease, and various other
conditions in adult life.
The importance of this observation in relation to the phenomenon of resilience is
the implication that people can do a good deal to influence what happens to them. In
 Resilience: some conceptual considerations 125
that connection, it is relevant that our own research (Quinton and Rutter, 1988) and
that of Clausen (1991) have shown the protective effects that stem from young people
actively “planning” how they deal with what happens to them in important domains
of life such as marriage or work careers. […]
Of course, the answer to the question of where adverse life events come from is
by no means restricted to individual considerations. It is clear that, to an important
extent, part of the answer lies in societal factors. For example, the fact that in the
United Kingdom, as in the United States, the unemployment rate in young people is
much higher among black youths than among white youths is largely explicable in
terms of racial discrimination. These population-wide influences do not determine
individual differences to any marked extent but they do play a major role in determin-
ing the overall tenet of good and bad experiences of various kinds.

The Origins of Resilience

It was noted earlier that resilience could reside in both preceding and succeeding cir-
cumstances. In that connection, it is important to recognize the importance of poten-
tial turning points in people’s lives whereby those who seemed set on a maladaptive
life trajectory are enabled to turn onto a more adaptive path (18). […] Once more, the
point is that we need to think in terms of person-specific circumstances and not just
in terms of something that brings about general good. […]
The third key concept to mention is that of individual variations in susceptibility or
vulnerability to adverse experiences that stem from sensitizing or “steeling” experi-
ences at an earlier point in people’s lives. It is clear that stress experiences may work in
either direction, but there is a paucity of evidence to tell us which consequence is to be
anticipated in each circumstance. […] By analogy with the example of infections given
earlier, we may suppose that “steeling” effects are more likely to arise when people
have coped successfully with stress experiences. […] It is irnportant also to recognize
that individual differences in susceptibility to adverse experiences may derive from
personal characteristics that have an important constitutional component […]
The fifth point concerns the importance of how people appraise their circumstances.
Research into life events has made it clear that contextual factors are most important
(Brown and Harris, 1989). The same event is likely to be viewed quite differently by
different people. For example, for some people, promotion at work is seen as an awful
burden, bringing with it terrible worries as to whether the person can cope with the
increased responsibilities. For other individuals, by sharp contrast, promotion is seen
as a welcome challenge and a public recognition of their own positive personal quali-
ties. It is clear that cognitive factors play an important role in emotional disturbances
and also in how people deal with social problems of various kinds. […] Almost cer-
tainly, it is not that there is one “right” way of thinking about things, or one optimal
style of coping. Rather, what seems important is to approach life’s challenges with a
positive frame of mind, a confidence that one can deal with the situation, and a reper-
toire of approaches that are well adapted to one’s own personal style of doing things.

Protective Processes
The last consideration concerns the influence of protective mechanisms (4). They refer
to catalytic or reverse-catalytic effects by which a feature modifies the influence of
126 Michael Rutter
some risk factor. Up until recently, the main focus in discussions on psychosocial risk
has been on the reduction of adverse influences. Of course, that is an important goal
but it is equally important to pay attention to those features that, while not directly
promoting good outcomes, enhance resistance to psychosocial adversities and haz-
ards of various kinds. Surprisingly little is known ahout protective mechanisms but
some of the examples already under other headings (for example, the phenomenon of
planning) probably work in this manner.
Because there has been so little study up to now of protective influences, no firm
conclusions are warranted. Nevertheless, a review of what is known suggests that the
protective processes probably include (a) those that reduce the risk impact by virtue
of effects on the riskiness itself or through alteration of exposure to, or involvement
in, the risk; (b) those that reduce the likelihood of negative chain reactions stem-
ming from the risk encounter; (c) those that promote self-esteem and self-efficacy
through the availability of secure and supported personal relationships or success in
task accomplishment; and (d) those that open up opportunities of a positive kind (4).
Protection does not reside in the psychological chemistry of the moment but rather in
the ways in which people deal with life changes and in what they do about their stress-
ful or disadvantaging circumstances. In that connection, particular attention needs to
be paid to the mechanisms underlying developmental processes that enhance people’s
ability to cope effectively with future stress and adversity and those that enable people
to overcome the sequelae of past psychosocial hazards. This needs to include consid-
eration of the psychological operations associated with key turning points in people’s
lives when a risk trajectory may be redirected onto a more-adaptive path. […]

Conclusion
As is all too evident from this brief overview, while we have an understanding of some
key protective measurements, we do not as yet have any ready answers to how to
bring them about. Moreover, as a review of prevention opportunities more generally
shows (Rutter, 1982), knowing what end you want to bring about and knowing how
to achieve that objective are two very different things. We have some appreciation of
indicators of risk and protective factors, a little understanding of the processes that
they seem to reflect, but substantially less knowledge about how to influence these
processes in order to increase resilience. […]

References
Anthony, E.J. and Koupernik, C. (eds) (1978) The child in his family: Vulnerable children.
New York: Wiley, 1978.
Bock, G.R. and Whelan, J. (eds) (1991) The childhood environment and adult disease. Ciba
Foundation Symposium No. 156. Chichester: Wiley.
Brown, G.W. and Harris, T.O. (1989) Life events and illness. New York: Guilford.
Clausen, J.S. (1991) ‘Adolescent competence and the shaping of the life course.’ American
Journal of Sociology 96: 805.
Jenkins, J.M. and Smith, M.A. (1990) ‘Factors protecting children living in disharmonious
homes: Maternal reports.’ Journal of American Child Adolescent Psychiatry 29: 60.
Quinton, D. and Rutter, M. (1988) Parenting breakdown. The making and breaking of
inter-generational links. Aldershot: Avebury.
 Resilience: some conceptual considerations 127
Rutter, M. (1986) ‘Meyerian psychobiology, personality development and the role of life expe-
rience.’ American Journal of Psychiatry 1fi: 1077.
Rutter M. (1991) ‘A fresh look at “maternal deprivation.”’ In Bateson, P. (ed). The develop-
ment and integration of behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 331–74.
Rutter M. and Pickles A. (1990) ‘Improving the quality of psychiatric data: Classification,
cause and course.’ In Magnusson, D. and Bergman, L.R. (eds) Data Quality in Longitudinal
Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 32—57.

Further reading
Daniel, B. and Wassell, S. (2002) Assessing and promoting resilience in vulnerable children.
London: Jessica Kingsley.
Lambert, C. (2001) Promoting resilience in ‘looked-after children’. Norwich: School of Social
Work and Psychosocial Studies, University of East Anglia.
Norman, E. (Ed.) (2000) Resiliency enhancement. Putting the strength perspective into social
work practice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Rose, S. & Palattiyil, G. (2020). Surviving or thriving? Enhancing the emotional resilience
of social workers in their organisational settings. Journal of Social Work, 20(1): 23–42.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468017318793614
19 A critical understanding of social
work by Paolo Freire
Marilynn Moch

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was a radical educator in Brazil. His (1972) book is a
standard text on adult education courses but may be less well-known on social work
programmes, and yet we believe he has so much to offer social work. His notion
of ‘conscientization’ (critical consciousness) provides inspiration for social workers
as they struggle to help service users to reflect on the social forces that shape their
lives. At the same time, his critique of the ‘banking concept’ has much to teach social
work education, as students leapfrog through an increasingly prescribed and clut-
tered social work curriculum, with limited opportunities for building from their own
experience. We have chosen to present the occasion when Freire formally addressed
a social work audience for the first time, at the biannual conference of the Inter-
national Federation of Social Workers in Stockholm, Sweden in 1988. The extract
begins with the words of the article author and translator, Marilynn Moch, and then
moves onto Freire’s own words.
From: Marilynn Moch (2009) A Critical Understanding of Social Work by Paolo
Freire, Journal of Progressive Human Services, 20:1, 92–97, DOI: https://doi.
org/10.1080/10428230902878285

Freire was an educator, not a social worker, but he worked with social workers
throughout his life. Social workers have been his students, his colleagues, and his
friends, not only in the early years in Brazil mentioned in this article, but ever
since. Social workers, including myself, have been his students in his many work-
shops in the United States and throughout the world and have been among those
striving to implement his pedagogy in the classroom and in the field in social
work education and community practice, certainly throughout Latin America,
but also in Africa, the United States, and throughout the developing countries
and Europe.
But this is the first time that we have Paolo Freire’s thoughts directed specifically to
us […] about what it means to be a social worker. I believe these thoughts should be
included in the curriculum of every school of social work. […]
My friends and participants in this meeting, it is with emotion and pleasure that I
come here to speak with you while I think aloud about some of the issues of pedagogy
that have to do with social work.
Social work practice, whether casework, group work, or community organization,
is inherently and substantively educational-pedagogical. There is a particular peda-
gogy natural to social work where the social worker is in the forefront in the search
for a clearer understanding in coming to know certain subject matter. The social
worker is conditioned by the structure of the society she or he is in, in which she or

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-24
 A critical understanding of social work by Paolo Freire 129
he is formed. The social worker uncovers and makes explicit a certain dream about
social relations, which is a political dream. In the end, the social worker is also a
political being, and his or her work has to do with esthetics, it has to do with ethics,
and it has to do with understanding, as much as any educator, like me for example,
who teaches at the university.
In this sense, therefore, the social worker, as much as the educator, is not a neu-
tral agent in his practice and in his actions. One of the inclinations that we some-
times have—and this is an offense, an illegality, that we imbibe in our technological
society—is to think that the social worker is a very specialized person, a technician,
who works in a compartmentalized technical area, who in his compartment has a sort
of protection within a sort of aggregate of rights, as a particular social group, to stand
apart from the political battles of society, for example. For me, this is impossible. It
is an error.
The social worker is compromised if she or he becomes convinced that she or he
possesses a technical expertise that is more to be defended than is the work of other
workers.
Now, in this moment, when I am as personally convinced of the impossibility of
a neutral presence for the educator as for the social worker, I would like to closely
examine the possibilities for the progressive social worker. […] I will bring forth here
some five or six qualities that come to mind, although the order in which I refer to
them does not imply any greater or lesser importance.
The first observation I would like to make regarding these qualities, or these vir-
tues, is the following: these qualities, or these virtues, are not qualities one receives as
a gift or that one is born with. No, these qualities I am going to talk about are nur-
tured by us in our practice, or they are not nurtured, because we have to make them
happen. And I tell you that to nurture the qualities necessary in our work is not easy,
because we ourselves constantly fight against certain directions on the intellectual
level and contradict ourselves on the level of practice.
The first virtue, or quality, that I would cite for a progressive social worker is the
convergence between what is said and what is done. And it is not easy to work on
diminishing the distance between discourse and action. It is much easier to talk than
to do. But it is for that reason not enviable to continue being a progressive social
worker when calling on love, when calling on life, when affirming the possibilities we
human beings have of overcoming the situation through a practical action of trans-
formation of the world, are precarious.
It is impossible for a social worker to continue being progressive when she or he
only talks progressive but acts conservative or reactionary. For example, how is it
possible to be progressive, but at the same time to be racist or sexist? I cannot accept
speaking progressively and at the same time feel proprietary toward my wife. It is
irresponsible. I cannot consider myself to be progressive and at the same time restrain
the curiosity, the restlessness, of those among whom I work. I cannot consider myself
a progressive and regard working class people as naturally incompetent to advance
themselves, and that therefore my effort is needed to advance them.
I cannot be progressive and consider myself better than people who live in slums.
So then, to diminish the distance between what I say, what I affirm, and what I do,
I believe, would require an effort every single day to realize, for the educator, for the
social worker, with a progressive obsession. […]
Another quality that I believe to be indispensable for the progressive social worker
is not only to stimulate, to develop, a permanent critical curiosity toward the world in
130 Marilynn Moch
himself, but also to do so in those with whom she or he works. I am convinced that
curiosity is restlessness in search of knowing better that which is known and of learn-
ing that which is not yet known. In the historical process, this curiosity constitutes
the shoulders of history, the method by which that other animal that we were began
to transform itself into that which we are and that which we are creating today. For
me, it is impossible to be human without curiosity, without questions. The question is
in the foundation itself of human existence. […]
So then, to maintain the intellectual curiosity in oneself as a social worker and to
stimulate the curiosity among those with whom we work is for me an indispensable
quality for a progressive social worker.
As a quality, or a virtue, this curiosity has a corollary that the progressive social
worker ought to have, which is a permanent search for his, or for her, competence.
It is impossible to work progressively in favor of changing the world, in favor of a
transformation of the world, without competency. The progressive social worker has
to be responsible, has to be rigorous, has to work, to establish as much as she or he
can, scientifically, his or her understanding of the phenomena of the society in which
she or he works, and for this reason, then, ought to have a critical curiosity, must
gain a great deal of understanding. The question is not scientism but knowledge. So
then, competence, the search for competence, constitutes a fundamental quality for a
progressive social worker.
There is another quality that is extraordinarily important to me, and that is the
virtue of tolerance. I do not know whether you, in your surroundings, in your socie-
ties, have observed how intolerance pushes against progressive social work with such
force that it makes it reactionary. For me, tolerance is the glue with which we can live
with those who are different in order to be able to fight against our enemies. This is
tolerance. I cannot fight with people who are simply different from me but who have
an objective that at least appears like the objective that I have. Therefore, I must meet
with them without consideration of the differences in order to have the strength to
fight against those who truly have objectives and ideals antagonistic to mine. So then,
tolerance is fundamental.
Another quality I would speak of today to, above all, the social worker on the front
lines, out in the world, is the quality, also difficult, of living in impatient patience. […]
Society is transformed when we transform it, and we transform it when the organized
and mobilized political forces of the popular classes and workers throw themselves
into history to change the world, and not in someone’s head. So then, in its turn,
pure impatience forgets that in history, one does what is possible and not what one
would like to do. The big problem for us is how to know what is possible—today. And
that brings us to another excellent quality of progressive social workers, which is an
understanding of the limits of social work practice. To ask, “What are the limits in my
practice?” And those limits are social, ideological, cultural, political, and historical.
In consideration of all of these qualities, I would speak about one last quality of an
intellectual and political nature that a progressive social worker ought to cultivate, to
develop, to perfect, in her or in his practice, and that is an understanding of what is
historically possible. As I perceive history, it is not something that happens necessar-
ily, but something that will be made, can be made, that one can make or can refrain
from making. […] History is made by us, and as we make it, we are made and remade
by it.
Thank you.
 A critical understanding of social work by Paolo Freire 131
Further reading
Brake, M. and Bailey, R. (eds) (1980) Radical social work and practice. London: Edward
Arnold.
Fenton, J. (2019) Social work for lazy radicals. Relationship building, critical thinking and
courage in practice. London: Red Globe Press.
Freire, P. (2005) Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th Anniversary edition, translated by Myra
Begman Ramos, with an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo. New York, London: Continuum.
Garrett, P.M. (2014) Children and families (critical and radical debates in social work).
Bristol: Policy Press.
Lavalette, M. (2011) Radical social work today. Social work at the crossroads. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Morley, C. (2019) ‘Promoting activism and critical social work education.’ In Webb, S.A (Ed.)
The Routledge handbook of critical social work. London: Routledge: 437–448.
Tedam, P. (2020) Anti-oppressive social work practice. London: Learning Matters.
Turbett, C. (2014) Doing radical social work (reshaping social work). Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
20 There is an alternative
Homines curans and the limits of
neoliberalism
Joan Tronto

No social work Reader would be complete without at least one paper on the subject
of care; that this one explores care as a counter-point to neoliberalism is a bonus. In
this extract, Joan Tronto, political scientist, starts from the premise that neoliberal
policies around the world have made caring more difficult, and yet, building on the
seminal work of Carol Gilligan (1982), she argues that a ‘democratic form of care’
offers a way of challenging neoliberalism (p 27). This optimistic vision is one from
which we can all take heart.
From: International Journal of Care and Caring 1(1): 27–43. DOI: 10.1332/23978
8217X14866281687583

Seeing neoliberal care as a theoretical problem

Many articles and books have been written that see neoliberalism as a problematic
way to organise human societies. Indeed, in the literatures on care, there is also a
focus upon how neoliberal institutions and practices affect the adequacy of care. Yet,
the main response of scholars to neoliberalism has been either to treat it as the new
normal or to think of it as invincible. […]
The point of this article is to take a different, more optimistic, approach. If we have
lost touch with homo politicus, perhaps that is because after so much trucking with
homo economicus, we can no longer understand this more political way of thinking,
of calculating not only (or primarily) for the self. Suppose, instead, we were to intro-
duce a different route to greater collective political concerns, one that begins with
acknowledging that humans are essentially, in the plural, homines curans,1 ‘caring
people’? What if we were to argue against neoliberalism from the standpoint of care,
understood within a democratic society’s frame that care must be adequately and
equally provided for all, and that all must contribute their fair share to care? This
article is a contribution to that task.

Neoliberalism and care

Neoliberalism seems to be an unstoppable and hegemonic global set of forces that
remake human societies to conform to market logics. Although scholars emphasise
different elements of neoliberalism – some emphasising its description as the newest
form of capitalism (Harvey, 2005); others seeing it more in Foucauldian terms as
a regime of subject formation (cf Foucault, 2008) – it is also a political ideology, a
set of ideas that offer a coherent view about how society should be ordered. For the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-25
 Homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism 133
purposes of this article, three elements of neoliberalism are critical. The first is the
assumption that the market is the institution that is best able to resolve disputes, allo-
cate resources and permit individuals freedom through exercising choice. The second
is that societies work best when they allow rational actors to make choices in the
market and that anything that interferes with such choices reduces people’s freedom.
The third is that humans are taken to be the kinds of creatures who fit within such a
market-driven world, and neoliberal practices shape people to fit this image. […]
Neoliberalism has three ways to account for care. The first response, personal
responsibility, falls in line with Ong’s account of neoliberalism as the imperative of
self-mastery. […] The second neoliberal response is to see care as a market problem.
Since markets are expected to meet needs, if a need exists, then a market solution
will emerge. The third neoliberal response, already anticipated by the other two, is
to see the family as the proper locus of care. As Bedford and Rai (2010: 9) observe,
‘familialism is undergoing a resurgence as a model of securing care’ around the globe.
[…]
Putting these three pieces together provides us with a kind of theoretical account
of how people should care for themselves and those close to them within a neoliberal
society: care for yourself by acting rationally and responsibly; if there are care needs
that you cannot meet for yourself, then use market solutions; and, finally, if you can-
not afford market solutions, or prefer to care on your own, then enlist family (and
perhaps friends and charities) to meet your caring needs.
That neoliberal forms of caring are injurious to people’s health has been well doc-
umented by following care and social welfare provision (Coburn, 2000). […] Within
the framework of neoliberalism itself, these failures are understood as individual fail-
ures, not as a collective responsibility or failure. If people are now less well cared for,
it must, by definition, be a failure of their own personal or familial responsibility.
Let me argue, though, that neoliberal ideas can be revealed for their inadequacy
in two ways. In the first place, they are inadequate because they misunderstand the
nature of human beings. In the second place, though, neoliberal ideas of the market
need to be placed in a historical context that reveals their inadequacy and shows that
they can be defeated. We will consider each argument in turn.

Homines curans
The fact is that humans cannot achieve self-mastery on their own. Dependent at birth,
as death approaches and when we are ill or infirm, as well as dependent all the time
on somehow meeting our ongoing needs for food, shelter and sustenance, humans are
not only social animals, but also caring animals. […]
‘Care’ is a complex and slippery word with such remarkably broad meanings in
English that it can often not be translated into other languages. It conveys both a dis-
position and a set of actions. It can mean a burden, as in the phrase, ‘cares and woes’,
and it can mean love, ‘she cares deeply for her’. […] in the last generation, feminist
thinkers (and then others) have used the term to offer an alternative perspective that
has grown from its initial identification as a ‘different voice’ (Gilligan, 1982, 1993)
to a perspective that asks us to change our views on virtually everything: accounts of
ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics.
[…] Fisher and Tronto proposed four phases of care; Tronto has since added a fifth,
and a way to think about the moral dimensions of care. The phases do not necessarily
134 Joan Tronto
proceed in this order, but in this order, they provide a holistic account of care. They
are:

1 Caring about. At this first phase of care, someone or some group notices unmet
caring needs.
2 Caring for. Once needs are identified, someone or some group has to take respon-
sibility to make certain that these needs are met.
3 Caregiving. The third phase of caring requires that the actual caregiving work be
done.
4 Care receiving. Once care work is done, there will be a response from the person,
thing, group, animal or plant, or environment that has been cared for. Observing
that response, and making judgements about it (For example, was the care given
sufficient, successful or complete?) is the fourth phase of care. […]

In 2013, Tronto added a fifth phase of care: Caring with. Caring with occurs when
a group of people (from a family to a state) can rely upon an ongoing cycle of care
to continue to meet their caring needs. When such patterns become established and
reliable, they produce the virtues of trust and solidarity. Understood in this way, care
promises to revolutionise our way of looking at the world in a number of ways. […]
Care conceptually offers a different ontology from one that begins from rational
actors. It starts from the premise that everything exists in relation to other things; it is
thus relational and assumes that people, other beings and the environment are inter-
dependent. The care world view is not about ‘bodies in motion’ that collide, or about
the unforeseen consequences of such collisions. Instead, care presumes that people
become autonomous and capable of acting on their own through a complex process of
growth, in which they are both interdependent and transformed as they live. They can
be more or less attentive to the effects that they have on others and the world, though
care approaches err on the side of being more, rather than less, attentive. Assigning
responsibility is a collective act, not an abstract, scientific or legal endeavour. […]
A second ontological shift that follows from this first is to understand that all humans
are vulnerable and fragile. While it is true that some are more vulnerable than others,
all humans are extremely vulnerable at some points in their lives, especially when they
are young, elderly or ill. Human life is fragile, and people are constantly vulnerable to
changes in their bodily conditions that may require that they rely on others for care
and support. Third, all humans are at once both recipients and givers of care. While
the typical images of care are that those who are able-bodied and adult give care
to children, the elderly and the infirm, it is also the case that all able-bodied adults
receive care from others, and from themselves, every day. Furthermore, it is also the
case that humans engage in caring behaviour towards those around them.
[…] we should note that care is always contextual and, as a result, non-essentialist.
While it is true that all humans have the same basic needs, no two people, groups, cul-
tures or nations realise and meet caring needs in the same way. As a result, focusing
on care requires much attention to the precise details of the situation.[…]
A final point needs to be made about the way that I am speaking about care. As a
political ideal, care has a specific meaning. At this broad political level, care is about
the general allocation of caring responsibilities, not the daily work of care, which is
always done in more specific contexts. […] A primary task of democratic societies,
then, is to allocate caring responsibilities: and such allocations can occur by formally
 Homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism 135
or informally assigning them, or through a default mechanism where care responsi-
bilities follow older historical (and, in the US, gendered, raced and classed [Duffy,
2011]) patterns. […]

Democratic caring as an alternative to neoliberalism

The argument in this article suggests that this is the promising direction in which to
move. Insofar as care requires that resources be more equally shared in order to
make the burdens and benefits more equally distributed, then to recognise such caring
needs on the social level requires that we further democratise our polities and that we
reorient our understanding of freedom to fit better with this newly conceived relation-
ship of care to equality.
[…] The reason that the existence of homines curans is so much more powerful a
critique is because if we take the care perspective seriously, it requires us to change the
terms of the discussion. Including the ‘necessarily excluded’ is not the same thing as
a ‘choice’ to include or to ignore them. From a care perspective, humans can see that
they have a stake in creating a sense of collective fate, which undoes the simplicity of
the ‘personal responsibility’ response. […]
The creation of democratic caring will require further investigation of a number of
empirical questions as well. In the end, it is not for social scientists to decide the best
way to care, since so many other values are implicated in caring. Nevertheless, some
obvious questions follow from the previous arguments.
First, we need to investigate whether and how care inequalities lead to greater ine-
qualities in society. Given the importance of early childhood growth and develop-
ment, there is ample evidence to suggest that this point is accurate. If so, then the
adequate provision of early care, to children and families and through social institu-
tions and other forms of support, becomes a central issue of justice.
Second, we need to investigate the ways in which care is both innate and trained
in people. Gender differences in care persist; scholars have long argued that this is
a result of the ‘reproduction of mothering’ (Chodorow, 1978). How do we shape
social institutions and practices, from education to the allotment of work time, to see
whether all people can care more? Furthermore, if, as some recent public health advo-
cates have argued, bad forms of human behaviour such as violence are contagious, to
what extent can care become ‘contagious’ in a society?
Third, we need to be closely attentive to how patterns of care produce exclusions in
societies. Exclusions and segregations are based not only on race, gender and ethnic-
ity, but also on care status. People who are primarily self-caring rarely meet people
from different generations, abilities and care traditions. They are therefore apt, as
democratic citizens, to overgeneralise from their own experiences and to be unable to
put themselves in the places of others. How do such exclusions affect the capacities
of citizens to be empathetic towards others? Can changing caring practices help to
address such problems?

Conclusion
This article has argued that it is time for us to give up organising the world in neolib-
eral terms and trying to find ways to squeeze care into that worldview. A world organ-
ised around care would be organised very differently. When people are reminded that
136 Joan Tronto
they are not just economic actors, but homines curans as well, there is a greater frame
within which the hard work of explaining that ‘there is an alternative’ can begin.
We need now to stop being dazzled by neoliberal forms of resilience and, instead,
have the courage ourselves to return to a forestalled alternative future, one in which
care truly matters.

Note
1 The term homines curans appears at least once in medieval Latin writings, in the work of
Albertus Magnus (1899: 380).

References
Bedford, K. and Rai, S. (2010) ‘Feminists theorize international political economy.’ Signs
36(1): 1–18.
Chodorow, N. (1978) The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of
gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Coburn, D. (2000) ‘Income inequality, social cohesion and the health status of populations:
the role of neo-liberalism’. Social Science & Medicine 51(1): 135–46.
Duffy, M. (2011) Making care count: A century of gender, race, and paid care work. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fisher, B. and Tronto, J.C. (1990) ‘Toward a feminist theory of caring.’ In E.K. Abel and
M. Nelson (eds) Circles of care. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Foucault, M. (2008) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France 1978–1979
(trans Burchell G). New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.
Gilligan, C. (1982) In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005) A brief history of neoliberalism, New York, NY: Oxford.
Ong, A. (2007) ‘Neoliberalism as a mobile technology.’ Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 32(1): 3–8.

Further reading
Barnes, M. (2006) Caring and social justice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fine, M.D. (2019) Care and caring. In Payne, M. and Reith-Hall, E. (eds) The Routledge hand-
book of social work theory. London: Routledge: 83–94.
Loughnane, C. and Edwards, C. (2022). Reimagining care discourses through a feminist
ethics of care: analysing Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, International
Journal of Care and Caring (published online ahead of print 2022). Retrieved Jan 12, 2023,
from HYPERLINK “https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/ijcc/aop/article-
10.1332-239788221X16686175446798/article-10.1332-239788221X16686175446798.
xml”https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/ijcc/aop/article-10.1332-
239788221X16686175446798/
Yeandle, S.M., Chou, Y.-C., Fine, M. et al. (2017) Care and caring: interdisciplinary perspec-
tives on a societal issue of global significance. International Journal of Care and Caring 1(1):
3–25. DOI 10.1332/239788217X14866278171183
21 The social model of disability
Mike Oliver

It is now more than fifty years since the Union of the Physically Impaired Against
Segregation (UPIAS) and the Disability Alliance met in London with the following
aims: ‘(a) to consider ways in which disabled people can become more active in the
disability field and (b) to consider a long-term programme of action to involve dis-
abled people in discussions about their own affairs’. Their discussions were under-
pinned by the ground-breaking assertion that disability is a situation ‘caused by
social situations’.1 It is this notion, which has come to be known as the social model
of disability, that disability rights activist and sociologist, Mike Oliver, explores in
the following reflective paper. Because it is short, we have opted to re-present it here
in full.
From: Mike Oliver (2013) ‘The social model of disability: thirty years on.’
­Disability & Society 28(7): 1024–26, DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2013.818773

The idea behind the social model of disability stemmed from the Fundamental Prin-
ciples of Disability document first published in the mid-1970s (UPIAS 1976), which
argued that we were not disabled by our impairments but by the disabling barriers we
faced in society. A couple of years later I was teaching the first master’s course in what
has now come to be called disability studies in the United Kingdom. The course was
for qualified social workers and other professionals, and I wanted to help my students
develop a means of translating that simple idea into their everyday work with disabled
clients and their families.
So in the early 1980s I introduced both the individual and social models of disa-
bility (Oliver 1983) aimed largely at professionals. I suggested that until that point
those working with disabled people had operated largely within a framework based
on the individual model, and that in order to make their practice more relevant to the
needs of disabled people they needed to re-orient their work to a framework based
upon the social model. At no point did I suggest that the individual model should be
abandoned, and neither did I claim that the social model was an all-encompassing
framework within which everything that happens to disabled people could be under-
stood or explained.
Subsequently, however, the social model took on a life of its own and it became the
big idea behind the newly emerging disability equality training. It also soon became
the vehicle for developing a collective disability consciousness and helped to develop
and strengthen the disabled peoples’ movement that had begun to emerge a decade
earlier. Armed with the idea that we needed to identify and eradicate the disabling
barriers we had in common, the disabled peoples’ movement forced the media to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-26
138 Mike Oliver
change their images of us, transport providers to open up many of their services to
us, public buildings to become much more accessible and the legal system changed to
make it illegal to discriminate against us.
Of course there were some barriers that proved, and continue to prove, much more
intractable. The hegemony of special education has barely been challenged in schools,
although in further and higher education some disabling barriers have been removed.
The social model has also barely made a dent in the employment system because,
although it has identified many of the disabling barriers in the international labour
market and with the behaviour of employers, the solutions offered have usually been
based on an individual model of disability.
Almost from the beginning, critics of the social model began to emerge. Initially
these came from the major disability charities and many professional organisations
who felt that their dominance of our lives was under threat. Ironically many of them
now see the social model as central to their operations and often act as if they invented
it in the first place. Some years later, some disabled people and academics involved in
the newly emerging disability studies also began to question the value and relevance
of the social model.
It is not my intention to reprise these criticisms here but basically they can be divided
into two main areas of concern. The first of these suggests that there is no place for
impairment within the social model of disability. The second alleges that the social
model fails to take account of difference and presents disabled people as one unitary
group, whereas in reality our race, gender, sexuality and age mean that our needs and
lives are much more complex than that.
Overall these critics have argued that the social model is only a limited and
partial explanation for what is happening to disabled people in the modern world.
In recent years it has sometimes seemed as if these criticisms have received more
prominence than the social model itself. Many academic papers and some books
have been published whose main concern has been to attack, reform or revise the
social model, and reputations and careers have been built on the back of these
attacks.
My own response to these attacks has always been fairly relaxed because I have
never seen the social model as anything more than a tool to improve peoples’ lives
and I have been happy to agree that it does not do many of the things its opponents
criticise it for not doing. Indeed, in 1990 I published a book that attempted to develop
a more all-encompassing explanation of what was happening to disabled people in the
modern world (Oliver 1990).
It is this that is often referred to as the book which promoted and developed the
social model when, in fact, it was only discussed in three pages in the whole book.
Even when I and a colleague updated this text, the social model did not play a signif-
icant part (Oliver and Barnes 2012). I can only assume that those who have argued
that central to my work has been the promotion and policing of the social model have
based their evidence solely on inaccurate commentaries and that they have not both-
ered to read what I actually said.
However I, and others, have often pointed out that focusing on impairment and
difference will only de-politicise the social model and will not lead to the development
of any approaches or alternative models that are likely to be useful in developing
campaigns to improve or defend the lifestyles of disabled people. Essentially these
 The social model of disability 139
arguments between academics and political activists mattered very little while the
global economy was operating in boom mode, but when it went bust in 2008 things
changed very quickly for the vast majority of people throughout the world, disabled
people among them.
Just as we had predicted, emphasising impairment and difference was a strategy
that was impotent in protecting disabled people, our benefits and services, from the
economic firestorm that was raging around us. In fact government policy has now
begun to use these criticisms of the social model by bringing impairment and differ-
ence back into their economic and social policy while steadfastly ignoring the barriers
we still face.
Hence cuts in our benefits are being justified on the grounds that the intention is to
give more to those who are severely impaired (and hence deserving) and not to those
who are not (and hence undeserving). Our differences are being used to slash our
services as our needs are now being assessed as being moderate, substantial or critical
and many local authorities are now only providing services to those whose needs are
critical.
The disabled peoples’ movement that was once united around the barriers we had in
common now faces deep divisions and has all but disappeared, leaving disabled people
at the mercy of an ideologically driven government with no-one to defend us except
the big charities who are driven by self-interest. As a consequence of this, most of the
political campaigning that has taken place in defence of our benefits and services have
forced disabled people back into the role of tragic victims of our impairments and has
involved others undertaking special pleading on our behalf. In fact it has taken us back
more than 30 years to the time before the social model came into existence.
Those who have talked down the social model while failing to replace it with some-
thing more meaningful or useful must bear a heavy burden of responsibility for this
state of affairs. Remarkably they have been rather silent in speaking out or building
alternative models to address what is happening to disabled people now. Surely it is
time to either re-invigorate the social model or replace it with something else. One
thing is for sure; the talking has to stop.

Note
1 The minute of this meeting is available online at: https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/
wp-content/uploads/sites/40/library/UPIAS-fundamental-principles.pdf/ Accessed 12th
October 2021.

References
Oliver, M. (1983) Social work with disabled people. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Oliver, M. (1990) The politics of disablement. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Oliver, M., and Barnes, C. (2012) The new politics of disablement. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
UPIAS (1976) Fundamental principles of disability. London: Union of the Physically Impaired
against Segregation.

Further reading
Barnes, M. (2012) Care in everyday life: an ethic of care in practice. Bristol: Policy Press.
140 Mike Oliver
Brimblecombe, N. (2022) ‘The consequences for unpaid carers of unmet need for long-term
care services in England’. International Journal of Care and Caring. Retrieved January
12, 2023, from https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/ijcc/aop/article-10.1332-
239788222X16546112844546/article-10.1332-239788222X16546112844546.
Moran, N., Arksey, H., Glendinning, C., Jones, K., Netten, A. and Rabiee, P. (2012) ‘Person-
alisation and carers: Whose rights? Whose benefits?’ British Journal of Social Work 42(3):
461–79.
Morris, J. (2001) ‘Impairment and disability: Constructing an ethics of care that promotes
human rights’. Hypatia 16(4): 1–16.
Shakespeare, T. (2010) The social model of disability’. In Davis, L.J. (Ed.) The disability stud-
ies reader. London: Routledge: 266–73.
Thomas, C. (2004) ‘Developing the Social Relational in the Social Model of Disability: A
theoretical agenda’, in C. Barnes and G. Mercer (eds) Implementing the social model of
disability: theory and research. Leeds: The Disability Press: 32–47.
22 The relevance of Nancy Fraser
for transformative social work
education
Dorothee Hölscher, Vivienne Bozalek and Mel Gray

This chapter affirms the importance of political philosopher and critical theorist
Nancy Fraser’s work on the concept of justice for social work. In exploring the eco-
nomic, cultural and political dimensions of justice, it introduces important, if com-
plex, ideas which require careful reading and reflection. Readers who are willing to
grapple with the complexities of justice work, played out increasingly on a global
stage, are rewarded with access to a theoretical framework that enables social work-
ers to move beyond polite nods to justice as an appealing idea, towards a just pro-
fessional practice.
From: Morley, C., Ablett, P., Noble, S. and Cowden, S. (eds) (2020) The Routledge
Handbook of Critical Pedagogies for Social Work. London: Routledge pp.245–59.
DOI:10.4324/9781351002042-21

Introduction
It is a well-established tradition in social work to define itself, inter alia, by its com-
mitment to principles of justice. Yet, there appears to be little agreement about the
concept of justice itself, and about what practices would most suitably be employed to
furthering its ends (Hugman, 2008; Ife, 2008; Solas, 2008a, 2008b).
[Nancy] Fraser is well respected for her sustained work around the concept of jus-
tice, which she developed, over three decades, in relation to global capitalism’s devel-
opments from World War II to date. Over 30 years, she traced capitalism’s relation to
diverse struggles for democracy and against domination, including race-, class- and
gender-based oppression and imperialism. More recently, her attention has turned to
the intersection of economic crisis, ecological crisis, and crisis of social reproduction
under conditions of global capitalism in the 21st century.
In Fortunes of Feminism, Fraser (2013) grouped her writings into three phases.
The first phase, from 1989 to 1997, involved a radical critique of ‘male domination
in state-organised capitalist societies’ in a postwar era of social democracy (Fraser,
2013, p. 1). In the second phase, from 2003 to 2009, Fraser developed an expansive
theory of justice, examining how concerns of redistribution were challenged by com-
peting and complementary calls for recognition, as well as considering the relevance
of the political dimension of justice for calls for recognition and redistribution to
succeed. The third phase (from 2007 onwards) examines the nature and dynamics
of capitalist crisis in the contemporary neoliberal era and the implications thereof for
emancipatory movements across the world. […]

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-27
142 Dorothee Hölscher et al.
Redistribution, recognition, and the development of participatory
parity as a standard and process of justice
During the second phase of her work, Fraser (2003) developed a multidimensional,
multilevel theory of justice […]. To pull together a wide array of social (in)justices in
relation to one central norm, Fraser (2003) proposed the principle of participatory
parity, which she later explained as follows:

The most general meaning of justice is parity of participation. According to this

radical-democratic interpretation … of equal moral worth, justice requires social
arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life. Overcoming
injustice means dismantling institutionalised obstacles that prevent some people
from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction
(Fraser, 2009a, p. 16).

According to this principle, social arrangements can be considered ‘just if, and
only if, they permit all the relevant social actors to participate as peers in social
life’, whereas norms can claim to be ‘legitimate if, and only if, they can command
the assent of all concerned in fair and open processes of deliberation, in which all
can participate as peers’ (Fraser, 2007, p. 29). The concept of participatory parity,
then, enables at once an analysis both of existing social arrangements and of the
norms legitimising them, thereby helping to illuminate their underlying dynamics.
Such an analysis provides activists (including, if they so wish, educators, practitioners,
and students of social work) with a key prerequisite for addressing their ‘root causes’
of prevailing injustices (Bozalek & Hochfeld, 2016, p. 201; see also Leibowitz &
Bozalek, 2015).
Fraser (1997) began by developing the economic and cultural dimensions of justice,
calling this a two-dimensional approach. This perspectival dualism serves to identify
two types of power relations, which, albeit substantially different, are nonetheless
‘ineluctably entwined’ (McNay, 2008, p. 283). According to this bifocal view, both
redistribution, located in the economic dimension of contemporary societies, and
recognition, located in the cultural dimension of social life, are required for partici-
patory parity, with neither being reducible to the other (Fraser, 2000, 2003). Fraser
continued to subscribe to the view held by Marxists, socialists, and social demo-
crats that justice is a matter of a just distribution of economic rights, opportunities,
and resources. Questions of ‘how much economic inequality does justice permit’, and
‘how much redistribution is required, and according to which principle of distributive
justice’ remained important to her because ‘economic structures that deny [people]
the resources they need to interact with others as peers’ constituted important imped-
iments to justice (Fraser, 2009a, pp. 15–16). These, she referred to as maldistribution,
thus denoting many of the issues to which social workers must respond, such as pov-
erty, hunger, and rampant inequality.
Yet, Fraser (2009a) also shared the understanding, mainstreamed by feminist,
anti-racist, and anti-imperialist movements that identity, too, mattered to questions
of justice: to ask ‘what constitutes equal respect’ and ‘which kinds of differences merit
public recognition, and by what means’ is instructive because ‘institutionalised hier-
archies of cultural values that deny [people] the requisite standing […] to interact with
 The relevance of Nancy Fraser 143
others as peers’ constitute equally important ‘obstacles to participatory parity’ as do
economic injustices (Fraser, 2009a, pp. 15–16). Fraser (2009a) called these kinds of
injustices misrecognition, thereby denoting a common dynamic underlying a wide
array of discriminatory practices, such as ageism, classism, ethnocentrism, national-
ism, racism, and sexism, all of which social workers are expected to challenge (IFSW/
IASSW, 2014). Importantly, Fraser intended the term to reference a status subordi-
nation, located at a macro level of society (Fraser & Honneth, 2003, p. 30). In other
words, Fraser (in McNay, 2008) never conceived misrecognition:

as a psychological dynamic, but as institutionalised cultural value patterns that

have discriminatory effects on the equal standing of social actors. Status subor-
dination takes the concrete forms of juridical discrimination, government policy,
professional practice, or sedimented moral and ideological codes. (p. 284)

Fraser’s (2009b, 2013) political analysis of post-World War II feminist theorising and
practice is instructive of her understanding of injustice as a deep structural process.
[…] However, such comprehensive analysis and the activism it informs have been
gradually displaced by feminism’s turn to an identity politics which prioritises cul-
tural over all other justice concerns. This changing emphasis is best understood in
relation to the ascendance, from the early 1970s onwards, of neoliberalism as an
ideology and economic policy framework, in that the increasing tendency of feminism
and other social movements to foreground cultural critiques began to be impacted by
a rising ideology that worked to repress ‘all memory of social egalitarianism’ (Fraser,
2013, p. 219). Consequently, the idea of (mis)recognition became ‘unmoored from the
critique of capitalism’ (Fraser, 2013, p. 219), with the term recognition understood
increasingly to signify individual ambitions and interpersonal concerns, while mis-
recognition came to represent merely individual hurts and interpersonal afflictions. In
short, matters of recognition were being privatised. This development unfolded along-
side similar changes in other domains of social reproduction, where responsibilities
for welfare, education, and health were being returned to individuals and families,
even as their ability to meet them was being undermined by a deepening and widening
neoliberal ordering of societies at a global scale.
Social work’s professional discourse, analyses, and practices have been affected
profoundly by these individualised and privatised notions of culture and justice. For
example, in a predominantly female profession, the personal ambitions of many prac-
titioners and academics may be well-served, at least to the extent that they are able to
benefit from a growing consensus that people should not be disadvantaged on account
of their identities, instead requiring positive discrimination and support to overcome
historical limitations. Yet, such privatised readings of recognition may also have con-
tributed to the profession’s commitment to justice becoming disjointed from equally
important concerns for economic maldistributions within and across societies. This
slimmed-down politics of recognition fails to illuminate the extent to, and ways
in which, the economic and cultural dimensions of justice are entwined. Likewise,
these changes in consciousness have resulted in a general failure to appreciate how
individual acts of misrecognition within interpersonal relationships are connected
inseparably to the broader contextual conditions that enable interpersonal slights and
oversights in the first place.
144 Dorothee Hölscher et al.
Representation, framing, and justice as a multilevel phenomenon
Fraser (2005a, 2005b) began to expand her previous, bifocal conceptualisation into a
trivalent theory of justice, based on her contention that a third dimension was needed
to match the complexities of the injustices brought to the fore by globalisation, and to
help devise practices capable of protecting, widening, and deepening justice in their
wake (Fraser, 2005a, 2005b, 2009a). She explained that the political dimension

[f]urnishes the stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition are
played out. Establishing criteria of social belonging and thus determining who
counts as a member, the political dimension specifies the reach of … [the] other
dimensions. It tells us who is included in, and who is excluded from, the circle
of those entitled to a just distribution and reciprocal recognition. Establishing
decision rules, the political dimension likewise sets the procedures for staging and
resolving contests in both the economic and the cultural dimensions. It tells us
not only who can make claims … but also how such claims are to be mooted and
adjudicated (Fraser, 2009a, p. 17).

Due to her observation that it was as common as it was misleading to conflate the con-
cept of justice with the construct of the nation state, Fraser (2005b, 2009a) asserted
that simply adding another dimension to her theory would not suffice. From the
emergence of nation states as the dominant means for organising economic, political,
social, and cultural life, there was a widely shared consensus that arguments about,
and claims for, justice pertained either to relations between citizens, or to their rela-
tions with the state to which they ‘belonged’. Fraser (2009a) called this the Keynesian-
Westphalian frame of justice. However, with the global spread of neoliberalism as
a political ideology and economic policy framework, it became increasingly obvi-
ous that pertinent forms of injustice, whether economic, ecological, social, political,
cultural, and/ or military, unfold across national boundaries. Thus, Fraser (2005b,
2009a) contended that any conceptualisation of justice that fails to critique the
Keynesian-Westphalian frame itself will fall short analytically and cannot adequately
inform efforts to protect, widen, and deepen relations of justice. This is important for
a profession that has struggled to move beyond the still-dominant conflation of the
idea of justice with nation states, as the latter continue to finance, either directly or
indirectly, most social work services provided within their respective realms.
Thus, Fraser (2005a, 2005b) made the additional case for the political dimension
of her expanded theory to be conceptualised across three interconnected levels. On
the first level, the political, like the economic and cultural dimensions, concerns sub-
stantive questions of justice. Describing these as matters of ordinary-political (mis)
representation, Fraser (2005a, 2005b) con- tended that such substantive concerns
are about the terms of engagement in a given political community. For her, the ques-
tion was whether these terms ‘accorded’ its members ‘equal voice in public delibera-
tions and fair representation in public decision-making’ (Fraser, 2009a, p. 18). (Mis)
framing, as a ‘second order’ (in)justice (Fraser, 2009a, p. 15), is a matter of scope
in that it pertains to ‘the question of who does, and who doesn’t count as [a] sub-
ject of justice’ (Hölscher, 2014, p. 23). In other words, framing decisions are about
admission criteria and procedures concerning the award or denial of membership and
thus constitute an important aspect of what Fraser (2009a) called the grammar of
 The relevance of Nancy Fraser 145
justice (p. 21). Examples for this are the layered form of in-/ exclusion of non-citizens,
from undocumented migrants to permanent residents, in the country in which they
reside (Hölscher, 2014), or the financial exclusion of university students unable to
raise funds for their study fees or to access bursaries or loans (Bozalek & Boughey,
2012). Fraser (2009a) contended that frame-setting decisions could result in particu-
larly grave injustices by ‘constituting both members and non-members in a single
stroke’ (p. 19):
When questions of justice are framed in a way that wrongly excludes some from
consideration, the consequence is a special kind of meta-injustice, in which one is
denied the chance to press first order [that is, substantive] claims in a given commu-
nity (Fraser, 2009a, p. 19).
This understanding led to Fraser’s (2009a) articulation of the third level of her
expanded model, which concerns matters of process, that is, questions of meta-
political (mis)representation. The importance of participatory parity as an overarch-
ing framework for Fraser’s conceptualization of justice is evident again at this level,
in that Fraser’s (2009a) stated aim was to contribute to a democratisation of global
affairs. […]

Crisis of capitalism, abnormal justice, and the call for transformative

practices […]
Recently, Fraser (2012) turned her attention to the crisis of capitalism in the 21st
century, which she described as one of great severity and complexity and unprece-
dented intricacy and brutality, for which we lack a conceptual framework to interpret
or resolve it ‘in an emancipatory way’ (p. 4) […] Importantly, Fraser (2012) noted
that this crisis is ‘multidimensional, encompassing not only economy and finance, but
also ecology, society, and politics’ (p. 4), and that the crisis nodes in these respective
spheres are interlinked on a global scale. With this, Fraser aligned her scholarship
with that of an increasing number of critical theorists, who have turned their atten-
tion to the question of ecological justice and its connection to other dimensions of
justice.
Fraser (2012) contended that contemporary social struggles unfolding around
major crisis nodes in the ecological, economic, and sphere of social reproduction
‘must be analysed as a triple movement in which […] struggles for emancipation
alongside those for marketisation and social protection [… ] combine and collide’
(p. 12, emphasis added). According to Fraser (2012), struggles for emancipation com-
prise a diverse set of anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperial, de- colonial,
and environmentalist movements in regions of both the Global North and South.
Struggles for marketisation are being waged by forces representing neoliberal inter-
ests in governments, international governance structures, and the corporate sector
worldwide, among other places. Struggles for social protection, finally, are pursued
by formations as diverse as social- democratic parties and trade-union movements
on the one hand and a range of (re-)emerging nationalist movements on the other,
who operate from assumptions that protectionist measures around national bound-
aries might shield their constituencies from un- and under-employment and buffer
existing social security systems against being eroded; that cultural insecurities might
be contained by limiting or, better still, reversing the presence of Others in their
communities; or that the continued extraction of minerals and fossil fuels from the
146 Dorothee Hölscher et al.
earth around them might advance, rather than undermine, their followers’ interests
and well-being (see Fraser, 2012, 2016a, 2016b; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018). In saying,
furthermore, that these three lines of struggle can combine as well as collide, Fraser
alerts her readers that simplistic left–right cartographies of the contemporary politi-
cal space can be shown to be increasingly inadequate.
[…]
Given this analysis, Fraser’s (2009a) observation of a diminishing of consensus
concerning both meaning and scope of justice is perhaps unsurprising. Fraser (2009a)
referred to this as abnormal justice, that is, a historical moment when public debates
about justice ‘increasingly lack the structured character of normal discourse’, instead
assuming a progressively ‘freewheeling character’ (p. 49) […] This then makes con-
sensus hard to conceive and difficult to attain. […]. When such shared understandings
are lacking, Fraser (2009a) contended, ‘contests over basic premises [of justice] pro-
liferate [and] deviation becomes […] the rule’ (p. 50). The idea of abnormal justice,
therefore, alerts social work that contemporary political, economic, social, cultural,
and ecological crises need not necessarily lead to emancipatory outcomes generally,
or within social work discourse and practices more specifically. However, it does
make room for the possibility that, and enable imaginations of how, different social
movements might align and combine in myriad ways to advance emancipatory ends.

References
Bozalek, V. and Boughey, C. (2012) ‘Misframing higher education in South Africa’. Social
Policy and Administration 46(6): 688–703.
Bozalek, V. and Hochfeld, T. (2016) ‘The South African Child Support Grant and dimensions
of social justice.’ In J. Drolet (Ed.), Social development and social work perspectives on
social protection (pp. 195–212). London: Routledge.
Bozalek, V., Hölscher, D., and Zembylas, M. (eds) (2020) Nancy Fraser and participatory
parity: Reframing social justice in South African higher education. London: Routledge
Fraser, N. (2000) ‘Rethinking recognition.’ New Left Review 3(May/June): 107–20.
Fraser, N. (2003) ‘Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition
and participation.’ In N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds) Redistribution or recognition: A
­political-philosophical exchange (pp. 7–109). London: Verso Books.
Fraser, N. (2005a) ‘Mapping the feminist imagination: From redistribution to recognition to
representation.’ Constellation 12(3): 295–307.
Fraser, N. (2007) ‘Re-framing justice in a globalising world.’ In T. Lovell (Ed.) (Mis)recogni-
tion, social inequality and social justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu. Abington and
New York: Routledge: 17–35.
Fraser, N. (2009a) Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalising world. Cam-
bridge: Polity Press.
Fraser, N. (2012) ‘Can societies be commodities all the way down? Polanyan reflections on
capitalist crisis.’ Hal Archives-Ouvertes. Retrieved from https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.
fr/halshs–00725060
Fraser, N. (2013) Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis.
London: Verso Books.
Fraser, N. (2016a) ‘Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael
Dawson.’ Critical Historical Studies, Spring: 163–178.
Fraser, N. (2016b) ‘Contradictions of capital and care.’ New Left Review July–August:
99–117. NLR 100.
 The relevance of Nancy Fraser 147
Hölscher, D. (2014) ‘Considering Nancy Fraser’s notion of social justice for social work:
Reflections on misframing and the lives of refugees in South Africa. Ethics & Social Welfare
8(1): 20–38.
Hugman, R. (2008) ‘Social work values: Equity or equality? A response to Solas.’ Australian
Social Work 61(2): 141–145.
Ife, J. (2008) ‘Comment on John Solas:‘What are we fighting for?’.’ Australian Social Work,
61(2): 137–140.
International Federation of Social Workers/International Association of Schools of Social
Work (IFSW/IASSW) (2014) Global definition of social work. Retrieved October 30, 2019
from http://ifsw.org/ get-involved/global-definition-of-social-work/
Leibowitz, B., and Bozalek, V. (2015) ‘Foundation provision: A social justice perspective.’
South African Journal of Higher Education, 29(1): 8–25.
Magubane, N. P. (2015) The (mis)recognition of economic differences: Understanding the
experiences of social work students at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Durban, South
Africa. Unpublished Research Report. University of KwaZulu Natal.
McNay, L. (2008) ‘The trouble with recognition: Subjectivity, suffering and agency.’ Sociolog-
ical Theory 26(3): 271–296.
Solas, J. (2008) ‘Social work and social justice: What are we fighting for?’ Australian Social
Work, 61(2): 124–136.
Solas, J. (2008b) ‘What kind of social justice does social work seek?’ International Social
Work, 51(6): 813–822.
Towle, C. (1945/1973). Common human needs. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Further Reading
Aruzza, C., Battacharya, T. and Fraser, N. (2019) Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. New
York: Verso Books.
Craig, G. (2002) ‘Poverty, social work and social justice,’ The British Journal of Social Work,
32 (6): 669–682, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/32.6.669
Ferguson, I. (2007) Reclaiming social work: Challenging neo-liberalism and promoting social
justice. London: Sage.
23 Feminism for the 99%
Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya
and Nancy Fraser

We wanted to include a reading on feminism, not least because of the sustained

impact that feminism (especially ‘second-wave’ feminism) has had on social work
practice. In the end, we chose a paper that is not narrowly defined within the body of
social work literature; instead, it is an inspirational Manifesto that invites readers to
see feminism as an anti-racist, anticapitalist force that is ‘always open to transforma-
tion and contestation, and always establishing itself anew through solidarity’ (p85).
This extract, and the short book it comes from, offers inspiration as we reflect on the
various debates, differences and complexities within social work today.
From: Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. (2019) London: Verso, pp. 60–85.

Beginning in the middle

Writing a feminist manifesto is a daunting task. Anyone who tries it today stands
on the shoulders—and in the shadow—of Marx and Engels. Their 1848 Commu-
nist Manifesto began with a memorable line: “A spectre is haunting Europe.” The
“spectre,” of course, was communism, a revolutionary project they depicted as the
culmination of working-class struggles, viewed as on the march: unifying, interna-
tionalizing, and metamorphosing into a world-historical force that would eventually
abolish capitalism—and with it, all exploitation, domination, and alienation.
We found this predecessor immensely inspiring, not least because it rightly identifies
capitalism as the ultimate basis of oppression in modern society. But it complicated
our task, not only because The Communist Manifesto is a literary masterpiece—
hence, a tough act to follow—but also because 2018 is not 1848. It is true that we,
too, live in a world of tremendous social and political upheaval—which we, too,
understand as a crisis of capitalism. But today’s world is much more globalized than
that of Marx and Engels, and the upheavals traversing it are by no means confined to
Europe. Likewise, we, too, encounter conflicts over nation, race/ethnicity, and reli-
gion, in addition to those of class. But our world also encompasses politicized fault
lines unknown to them: sexuality, disability, and ecology; and its gender struggles
have a breadth and intensity that Marx and Engels could scarcely have imagined.
Faced as we are with a more fractured and heterogeneous political landscape, it is not
so easy for us to imagine a globally unified revolutionary force.
As latecomers, moreover, we are also more aware than Marx and Engels could pos-
sibly have been of the many ways in which emancipatory movements can go wrong.
The historical memory we inherit includes the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revo-
lution into the absolutist Stalinist state, European social democracy’s capitulation to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-28
 Feminism for the 99% 149
nationalism and war, and a slew of authoritarian regimes installed in the aftermath of
anti-colonial struggles throughout the global South. Especially important for us is the
recuperation of the emancipatory movements of our own time, which have become
allies of, and alibis for, the forces that fostered neoliberalism. This latter experience
has been painful for left-wing feminists, as we have witnessed mainstream liberal cur-
rents of our movement reduce our cause to the meritocratic advancement of the few.
This history could not fail to shape our expectations differently than those of Marx
and Engels. Whereas they were writing in an era where capitalism was still relatively
young, we face a wily, aging system, far more adept at co-optation and coercion. And
today’s political landscape is replete with traps. As we explained in our Manifesto, the
most dangerous trap for feminists lies in thinking that our current political options
are limited to two: on the one hand, a “progressive” variant of neoliberalism, which
diffuses an elitist, corporate version of feminism to cast an emancipatory veneer over
a predatory, oligarchic agenda; on the other, a reactionary variant of neoliberalism,
which pursues a similar, plutocratic agenda by other means—deploying misogynist
and racist tropes to burnish its “populist” credentials. Certainly, these two forces are
not identical. But both are mortal enemies of a genuinely emancipatory and majori-
tarian feminism. Plus, they are mutually enabling: progressive neoliberalism created
the conditions for the rise of reactionary populism and is now positioning itself as the
go-to alternative to it.
Our Manifesto embodies a refusal to choose sides in this battle. Rejecting a menu
that limits our choices to two different strategies for managing capitalist crisis, we
wrote it to forward an alternative to both. Committed not simply to managing but to
resolving the present crisis, we sought to make visible, and practicable, some latent
emancipatory possibilities that the current alignments obscure. Determined to break
up liberal feminism’s cozy alliance with finance capital, we proposed another femi-
nism, a feminism for the 99 percent.
[…]

The politics of feminism for the 99 percent

The preceding analysis informs the fundamental political point of our Manifesto:
feminism must rise to the occasion of the current crisis. As we said, this is a crisis that
capitalism can at best displace but cannot solve. A true resolution requires nothing
less than an entirely new form of social organization.
Certainly, our Manifesto does not prescribe the precise contours of an alterna-
tive, as the atter must emerge in the course of the struggle to create it. But some
things are already clear. Contra liberal feminism, sexism cannot be defeated by equal-
opportunity domination—nor, contra ordinary liberalism, by legal reform. By the
same token, and pace traditional understandings of socialism, an exclusive focus on
wage labor’s exploitation cannot emancipate women—nor, indeed, working people
of any gender. It is also necessary to target capital’s instrumentalization of unwaged
reproductive labor, to which exploitation is in any case tied. What is needed, in fact, is
to overcome the system’s stubborn nexus of production and reproduction, its entwine-
ment of profit-making with people-making, and its subordination of the second to
the first. And this means abolishing the larger system that generates their symbiosis.
Our Manifesto identifies liberal feminism as a major obstacle to this emancipatory
project. That current achieved its present dominance by outlasting, indeed reversing,
150 Cinzia Arruzza et al.
the feminist radicalism of the previous period. The latter had arisen in the 1970s on
the crest of a powerful wave of anti-colonial struggles against war, racism, and cap-
italism. Sharing in their revolutionary ethos, it questioned the entire structural basis
of the existing order. But when the radicalism of that era subsided, what emerged as
hegemonic was a feminism shorn of utopian, revolutionary aspirations—a feminism
that reflected, and accommodated, mainstream liberal political culture.
Liberal feminism is not the whole story, of course. Combative anti-racist and anti-
capitalist feminist currents have continued to exist. Black feminists have produced
insightful analyses of the intersection of class exploitation, racism, and gender oppres-
sion, and newer materialist queer theories have disclosed important links between
capitalism and the oppressive reification of sexual identities. Militant collectives
have kept up their hard, day-to-day, grassroots work, and Marxist feminism is now
undergoing a revival. Nevertheless, the rise of neoliberalism transformed the gen-
eral context in which radical currents had to operate, weakening every pro–working
class movement while empowering corporate-friendly alternatives—liberal feminism
among them.
Today, however, liberal feminist hegemony has begun to crumble, and a new wave
of feminist radicalism has emerged from the rubble. As we noted in our Manifesto,
the key innovation of the current movement is the adoption and reinvention of the
strike. By striking, feminists have taken a form of struggle identified with the workers’
movement and retooled it. Withholding not only waged work, but also the unwaged
work of social reproduction, they have disclosed the latter’s indispensable role in
capitalist society. Making visible women’s power, they have challenged labor unions’
claim to “own” the strike. Signaling their unwillingness to accept the existing order,
feminist strikers are re-democratizing labor struggle, restating what should have been
obvious: strikes belong to the working class as a whole—not to a partial stratum of
it, nor to particular organizations.
The potential effects are very far-reaching. As we noted in our Manifesto, feminist
strikes are forcing us to re-think what constitutes class and what counts as class strug-
gle. Karl Marx famously theorized the working class as the “universal class.” What
he meant was that by fighting to overcome its own exploitation and domination, the
working class was also challenging a social system that oppresses the overwhelming
majority of the world’s population and, thereby, forwarding the cause of humanity
as such. But Marx’s followers have not always grasped that neither the working class
nor humanity is an undifferentiated, homogenous entity and that universality cannot
be achieved by ignoring their internal differences. We are still paying the price today
for these political and intellectual lapses. While neoliberals cynically celebrate “diver-
sity” in order to prettify capital’s predations, too many sections of the left still fall
back on the old formula holding that what unites us is an abstract and homogenous
notion of class, and that feminism and anti-racism can only divide us.
What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the standard portrait of the
militant worker as white and male is badly out of sync with the times—indeed, it was
never accurate in the first place. As we argued in our Manifesto, today’s global work-
ing class also comprises billions of women, immigrants, and people of color. It strug-
gles not only in the workplace, but also around social reproduction, from the food
riots central to the Arab revolutions, to the movements against gentrification that
occupied Istanbul’s Taksim Square, to the struggles against austerity and in defense
of social reproduction that animated the Indignados.
 Feminism for the 99% 151
Our Manifesto rejects both perspectives, the class-reductionist left one that
conceives the working class as an empty, homogeneous abstraction; and the
progressive-neoliberal one that celebrates diversity for its own sake. In their place, we
have proposed a universalism that acquires its form and content from the multiplic-
ity of struggles from below. To be sure, the differences, inequalities, and hierarchies
that inhere in capitalist social relations do give rise to conflicts of interest among the
oppressed and exploited. And by itself, the proliferation of fragmentary struggles
will not give birth to the sort of robust, broad-based alliances needed to transform
society. However, such alliances will become utterly impossible if we fail to take our
differences seriously. Far from proposing to obliterate or trivialize them, our Mani-
festo advocates that we fight against capitalism’s weaponization of our differences.
Feminism for the 99 percent embodies this vision of universalism: always in forma-
tion, always open to transformation and contestation, and always establishing itself
a new through solidarity.
Feminism for the 99 percent is a restless anticapitalist feminism—one that can
never be satisfied with equivalences until we have equality, never satisfied with legal
rights until we have justice, and never satisfied with democracy until individual free-
dom is calibrated on the basis of freedom for all.

Reference
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848, 2018) The communist manifesto & selected writings. Macmil-
lan Collectors’ Library. Basingtoke: Macmillan.

Further reading
Cree, V.E. and Phillips, R. (2019) ‘Feminist contributions to critical social work.’ In Webb,
S.A. (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of critical social work. London: Routledge: 126–136.
Dominelli, L. (2002) Feminist social work theory and practice. London: Palgrave.
Mohanty, C.T. (2003) Feminism without borders. Decolonizing theory, practising solidarity.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Phillips, R. and Cree, V.E. (2014) ‘What does the ‘fourth wave’ mean for teaching feminism
in 21st century social work?’ Social Work Education. The International Journal 33(7):
930–43.
Wendt, S. (2019) ‘Feminist ideas in social work.’ In Payne, M. and Reith-Hall, E. (eds) The
Routledge handbook of social work theory. London: Routledge: 361–370.
Woodward, K. (2004) Questioning identity. Gender, class, nation. 2nd edition. London:
Routledge.
24 Intersectionality’s definitional
dilemmas
Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins is one of the foremost black feminist scholars in the world. In the
first edition of this Reader, an extract from her book, Black Feminist Thought, was
chosen as a way into thinking more about oppression and social justice. This time we
have selected her article on intersectionality, in which she engages with the dilemma
that although we think that we will ‘know’ intersectionality when we see it, we often
cannot define what it is. This ‘definitional dilemma’ means that we either define it
so narrowly that it reflects the interests of only one segment or so broadly that its
very popularity causes it to lose its meaning. Hill Collins identifies that practitioners
(including social workers) conceptualise intersectionality in dramatically different
ways and argues that this matters. We begin with the ‘commonly accepted general
contours of intersectionality’, before turning to the outline of the three ‘interdepend-
ent sets of concerns that characterize intersectionality as a broad-based knowledge
project: (a) intersectionality as a field of study; (b) intersectionality as an analytical
strategy; and (c) intersectionality as critical praxis’.
From Annual Review of Sociology (2015) 41 pp.1–20.

[…] The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gen-
der, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually
exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape
complex social inequalities. Variations of intersectional scholarship can now be
found across interdisciplinary fields as well as within more traditional disciplinary
­endeavors […].

Traveling Light? Intersectionality as a Field of Study

Intersectionality’s increasing acceptance as a field of study within the academy
is clearly evident. By the early 2000s, heightened interest in intersectionality fos-
tered a blizzard of journal articles, special editions to journals, edited volumes, and
undergraduate anthologies. […] Because power relations and social inequality have
been so central to intersectional knowledge projects, too much is at stake to ignore
the implications of intersectionality’s travels. Like similar knowledge projects that set
out to address social inequalities by reforming and transforming the academy, inter-
sectionality’s travels constitute a contested space (Parker & Samantrai 2010). In par-
ticular, intersectionality’s travels from social movements into the academy enable some
dimensions of intersectionality to flourish, leaving others to languish, if not disappear.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-29
 Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas 153
From Race/Class/Gender Studies to Intersectionality
Intersectionality as a knowledge project remained unnamed as such during the 1980s,
the major decade when its ideas but not its name were incorporated into the US academy.
During this period, the phrase “race, class, and gender” emerged as a placeholder umbrella
term into which ideas from several social justice movements coalesced. In this context,
scholar-activists who shared similar albeit differently expressed sensibilities concerning
community organizing, identity politics, coalitional politics, interlocking oppressions,
and social justice introduced a lively set of ideas into the curricular and programmatic
aspects of the academy. Their struggles were both intellectual, e.g., bringing new analyses
to the research process, publishing new scholarship, and criticizing their own ideas and
practices, and political, namely, changing the social organization of the academy itself,
an idea encapsulated by the concept of institutional transformation […]. In essence, prac-
titioners within race/class/gender studies created the conditions that made this knowledge
project possible by building a malleable framework for future growth […].
Scholar-activists who traveled into the academy in the 1980s and 1990s faced the
challenge of having their ideas translated within and by interpretive communities
within academia that were very different from those outside its boundaries. Their
responses often lay in founding new interdisciplinary fields that became conduits for
social movement sensibilities regarding social justice and race/class/gender (Parker &
Samantrai 2010). Women’s studies assumed an important leadership role by enabling
gender scholars who were spread across various disciplines to gather, compare, and
contrast the study of women within their distinctive disciplines, and then migrate
back into those very same disciplines with this new knowledge. Lynn Weber (1998,
p. 14), an early leader within race/class/ gender studies, summarizes the significance
of women’s studies: “It is in Women’s Studies – not in racial or ethnic studies, not
in social stratification (class) studies in sociology, not in psychology or in other tra-
ditional disciplines – that race, class, gender, and sexuality studies first emerged.”
In essence, women’s studies practitioners participated in a form of Anzaldu´a’s bor-
der crossing that desegregated both the symbolic boundaries of bodies of knowledge
and the actual structural boundaries of established academic disciplines (Lamont &
Molna´r 2002). Given the size and breath of the community of women’s studies prac-
titioners, the acceptance of race/class/gender studies within women’s studies also
explains the rapid spread of race/class/gender studies across disparate disciplines.
Despite the centrality of both Black feminism and race/class/gender studies to social
justice projects both inside and outside the academy, contemporary narratives con-
cerning the emergence of intersectionality increasingly situate its origins as a field
of study within academia. Prevailing stories of the emergence of intersectionality
routinely grant naming rights to Kimberle´ Crenshaw (1991), citing her Stanford
Law Review article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence against Women of Color.” This article contains a well-argued analysis that
develops important connections among the core ideas of community organizing, iden-
tity politics, coalitional politics, interlocking oppressions, and social justice. Yet these
ideas remain overlooked in favor of a common practice across contemporary intersec-
tional scholarship of mentioning Crenshaw’s “coining” of the term intersectionality
as the point of origin for intersectionality itself. This rhetorical strategy of mentioning
one African American woman as intersectionality’s foremother fosters a collective
154 Patricia Hill Collins
ritual that legitimates this particular origin story. Intersectionality seemingly was
not of value until Crenshaw both discovered it and, through the recognition that her
Stanford Law Review article received, aligned it more closely with, in Audre Lorde’s
words, the “master’s tools” in the “master’s house.”
My sense is that intersectional research that mentions Crenshaw in this fashion
has not thoroughly read her scholarship. Crenshaw herself has taken issue with this
rendition of her own work, claiming that it is returned to her in forms that are often
unrecognizable (Guidroz & Berger 2009). Yet despite this widespread practice of
recasting Crenshaw’s work to resemble colonial discoveries, “Mapping the Margins”
is useful for marking a juncture when the ideas of social movement politics became
named and subsequently incorporated into the academy. Crenshaw’s article illustrates
the links between social movement and community organizing sensibilities, the claim
that intersectional frameworks were needed to address the social problem of vio-
lence against women of color, and the call for an identity politics to empower women
of color. Within critical race studies, Crenshaw’s scholarship also reflects key tenets
of racial formation theory, in particular situating her analysis within the recursive
relationship between social structures and cultural representations. Despite the intel-
lectual richness of Crenshaw’s work, contemporary narratives of the emergence of
intersectionality rarely situate her work within this crucial historical juncture linking
knowledge projects from social movements advanced by women of color with the
institutionalization of race/class/gender studies.
The baggage intersectionality now carries differs from the baggage it carried dur-
ing these decades of academic incorporation […]. Intersectionality now garners its
share of self-proclaimed experts and critics of its ideas and potential, many of whom
demonstrate unsettling degrees of amnesia and/or ignorance concerning the scope of
intersectional knowledge projects writ large. […]

Producing New Knowledge: Intersectionality as an Analytical

Strategy
Despite intersectionality’s ongoing definitional ambiguities, intersectionality as a
field of study has catalyzed a copious outpouring of new knowledge, much of it pro-
duced by researchers, faculty members, and students who use intersectionality as an
analytical strategy. […] My reading of intersectional knowledge projects is that they
embrace one, some combination, or all of the following provisional list of guiding
assumptions:

• Race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, nation, ethnicity, and similar catego-
ries of analysis are best understood in relational terms rather than in isolation
from one another.
• These mutually constructing categories underlie and shape intersecting systems
of power; the power relations of racism and sexism, for example, are interrelated.
• Intersecting systems of power catalyze social formations of complex social ine-
qualities that are organized via unequal material realities and distinctive social
experiences for people who live within them.
• Because social formations of complex social inequalities are historically contin-
gent and cross- culturally specific, unequal material realities and social experi-
ences vary across time and space.
 Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas 155
• Individuals and groups differentially placed within intersecting systems of power
have different points of view on their own and others’ experiences with complex
social inequalities, typically advancing knowledge projects that reflect their social
locations within power relations.
• The complex social inequalities fostered by intersecting systems of power are
fundamentally unjust, shaping knowledge projects and/or political engagements
that uphold or contest the status quo.

The current unevenness across how scholars use intersectionality as an analytical

strategy reflects differing degrees of emphasis on specific guiding assumptions. Some
themes are definitely more popular than others. […] But this all begs the underly-
ing epistemological question of how these emerging patterns contribute to clarifying
intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. One way to understand intersectionality as
an analytical strategy is to place the earlier themes of community organizing, identity
politics, coalitional politics, interlocking oppressions, and social justice in dialogue
with the guiding assumptions of contemporary intersectional scholarship. Stuart
Hall’s construct of articulation may prove highly useful in examining the dynamic
patterns of how scholars use intersectionality as an analytical strategy. Hall posits
that a theory of articulation is “both a way of understanding how ideological ele-
ments come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a
way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to
certain political struggles” (Grossberg 1996, pp. 141–42). Stated differently, how do
and how might these two sets of ideas articulate to shape intersectionality’s emerging
canonical knowledge?
With hindsight, I see how this unanswered (and, some would say, unanswerable)
question of how to articulate multiple points of view on intersectionality frames its
definitional dilemmas. Yet the epistemological issues that affect any use of intersec-
tionality as an analytical strategy may take a different form outside the scholarly
requirements of the academy. When it comes to intersectionality as critical praxis,
practitioners might use both sets of ideas differently.

What’s at Stake? Intersectionality as a Form of Critical Praxis

[…] Practitioners are often frontline actors for solving social problems that are
clearly linked to complex social inequalities, a social location that predisposes them
to respond to intersectionality as critical praxis. Teachers, social workers, parents,
policy advocates, university support staff, community organizers, clergy, lawyers,
graduate students, and nurses often have an up close and personal relationship to
violence, homelessness, hunger, illiteracy, poverty, sexual assault, and similar phe-
nomena. Intersectionality is not simply a field of study to be mastered or an analyti-
cal strategy for understanding; rather, intersectionality as critical praxis sheds light
on the doing of social justice work. As was the case for intersectional scholarship, the
types of actions that characterize intersectionality as critical praxis are vast. Again, I
offer suggestive avenues of investigation. Local, grassroots, small-scale, and/or tem-
porary groups that draw upon intersectionality to guide their critical praxis can
often escape public notice. Typically, these groups are composed of society’s over-
looked populations, specifically the young, women, people of color, and poor peo-
ple. Yet groups such as these have a vested interest in drawing upon intersectional
156 Patricia Hill Collins
frameworks to address social inequalities. For example, Clay’s (2012) study of youth
activism in Oakland, California, shows how young people of color draw upon inter-
sectional frameworks to confront the persisting inequalities in schooling that face
them. Similarly, Harrison’s (2009) research on the hip-hop underground in San
Francisco reveals how a multiethnic group of youth renegotiate racial identifications
within a performative place of poetry and politics. Both studies show how young
people engage intersectionality as critical praxis in venues that often escape scholarly
scrutiny.
[…] Human rights is another vitally important area for intersectionality as critical
praxis. The ideas expressed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights bear
a strong family resemblance to strands of intersectionality that are aligned with social
justice initiatives. Article 1 affirms that all human beings “are born free and equal in
dignity and rights”; Article 2 states everyone “is entitled to all the rights and freedoms
set forth in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex,
language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth
or other status” […] Yet because the protected categories gain meaning only in rela-
tion to one another, actualizing human rights means transcending the limitations of
a strictly legal statement of human rights. Intersectionality potentially helps address
three main concerns. First, human rights requires more effective tools for identifying
the kinds of distinctions that constitute discrimination. In a world where petitions for
human rights violations could be brought under various categories, conceptualizing
discrimination becomes important. When discrimination is legally framed either by
sex or gender or race, how does one best serve people who bring claims that touch
on more than one area? Second, there is the need for better assessments of pain,
suffering, and injury. What types of pain and suffering are appropriate for bringing
forth a human rights claim? In what ways do questions of human dignity matter?
The third concern is the search for appropriate reparations and remedies to victims
of human rights abuses. What are state responsibilities if harm has been documented
and suffering has occurred? Despite its ubiquity, intersectionality as critical praxis
remains underemphasized within intersectionality as a field of study and within
scholarship that draws on intersectionality as an analytical strategy. This underem-
phasis may be due in part because these areas valorize studying or writing about
intersectionality over practicing it. In addition, the underemphasis on intersectional-
ity as critical praxis within academia most likely reflects efforts to avoid the implicit
political implications of intersectionality itself. The qualifier critical is important.
Practitioners who would be drawn to intersectionality as critical praxis seek knowl-
edge projects that take a stand; such projects would critique social injustices that
characterize complex social inequalities, imagine alternatives, and/or propose viable
action strategies for change.
The value of critical praxis reflects the norms of any given interpretive community.
For example, from her pathbreaking work on women, race, and class to her sustained
attention to prison abolition, the storied career of Angela Davis (1981, 2012) speaks
to a sustained engagement with intersectionality as critical praxis. Yet on the basis of
their respective agendas, activist and scholarly circles can interpret Davis’s intellectual
production differently. In scholarly settings, the critical dimensions of Davis’s work
open her up to accusations of bias—her analyses of capitalism, neoliberalism, racism,
 Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas 157
and prisons can read as too polemical and therefore unscholarly. In contrast, in activ-
ist venues searching for a critical analysis of social inequality, these same ideas remain
well-received, precisely because her work remains critical. Davis’s stature as a public
intellectual has pro-vided a platform for her ideas, making it difficult if not impossi-
ble to exclude them from academic venues. Increasingly, intersectionality’s ideas can
travel across diverse interpretive communities, a shift that has important implications
for intersectionality as critical praxis. The changing political economy of publishing
and social media provides new venues for circulating intersectional analyses both
outside and inside academia. […]
When it comes to intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas, much is at stake. As
Carbado (2013) points out, “Scholars across the globe regularly invoke and draw
upon intersectionality, as do human rights activists, community organizers, polit-
ical figures and lawyers. Any theory that traverses such transdemographic terrains
is bound to generate controversy and contestation” (p. 811). Despite the visibility of
scholars as the public face of intersectionality, practitioners such as hip-hop poets,
Afro-Brazilian feminists, IBPA scholar-activists, and intellectual activists such as
Angela Davis and Harsha Walia may be equally if not more likely to put forth the
innovative, cutting-edge intersectional analyses that will advance the field. In this
context, intersectionality as a knowledge project faces the fundamental challenge of
sustaining its critical edge. Holding fast to the creativity of this dynamic area of
inquiry and practice yet finding a common language that will be useful to its practi-
tioners is the cutting-edge definitional dilemma for intersectionality.

References
Carbado, D.W. (2013). Colorblind intersectionality. Signs 38: 811–45.
Clay, A. (2012). The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil
Rights Politics. New York: New York University Press.
Crenshaw, K.W. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence
Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43, 1241–1299.
Davis, A.Y. (1981). Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House.
Davis, A.Y. (2012). The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco:
City Lights Books. Grossberg, L. (1996). On postmodernism and articulation: an inter-
view with Stuart Hall. In Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. D Morley, K-H Chen,
pp. 131–50. New York: Routledge.
Guidroz, K. and Berger, M.T. (2009). A conversation with founding scholars of intersectional-
ity: Kimberle´ Crenshaw, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Michelle Fine. In K. Guidroz and M. Berger
(eds) The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class and
Gender. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press pp. 61–78.
Harrison, A.K. (2009). Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identifica-
tion. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Lamont, M. and Molna´r, V. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual
Review of Sociology 28: 167–95.
Parker, J. and Samantrai, R. (2010). Interdisciplinarity and social justice: an introduction. In
Parker, J., Samantrai, R. and Romero, M. (eds) Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revi-
sioning Academic Account- ability. Albany: SUNY Press: 1–33.
Weber, L. (1998). A conceptual framework for understanding race, class, gender, and sexual-
ity. Psychol. Women Q. 22:13–32.
158 Patricia Hill Collins
Further reading
Collins, P.H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Laird, S. (2009) Anti-oppressive practice. A guide for developing cultural competence.
London: Sage.
Thompson, N. (2016). Anti-discriminatory Practice: Equality, Diversity and Social Justice.
6th edition. London: Palgrave in association with BASW.
Williams, C. and Graham, M.J. (2016) Social work in a diverse society. Transformative prac-
tice with black and minority ethnic individuals and communities. Bristol: Policy Press.
25 Learning to deliver LGBT+
aged care
Trish Hafford-Letchfield, Alfonso Pezzella,
Sandra Connell, Mojca Urek, Anže Jurček,
Agnes Higgins, Brian Keogh, Nina Van de Vaart,
Irma Rabelink, George Robotham, Elisa Bus,
Charlotte Buitenkamp and Sarah Lewis-Brooke

This article has been selected for three reasons. First, it allows us to consider aged
care, and, more specifically, the challenges encountered by older people who identify
as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and ‘other less-articulated sexual and gender
identities (LGBT+)’ (page 2). Second, and just as significantly, it is an example of
research that is co-produced by educators, health and social care professionals and
LGBT+ lay older people. Finally, it demonstrates the value of taking an intersec-
tional approach to delivering good practice in social work. Trish Hafford-Letchfield
(a social work academic who has worked in this field for many years) and others
introduce us to a cross-national study in which participants from four European
countries met at World Café workshops to share their experiences and document
best practices for educators and learners in health and social care in the future. The
chosen extracts draw from the findings and conclusion sections of the article.
From: Learning to deliver LGBT aged care: Exploring and documenting best prac-
tices in professional and vocational education through the World Café method. Age-
ing & Society pp. 1–22. DOI:10.1017/S0144686X21000611: pp 10–15; 19–20.

Findings

Theme 1: Inclusive care for sexual and gender identities

In WC1 [World Café 1], participants identified a range of perspectives and challenges
on the notion of ‘inclusive care’. Sub-themes focused on the specific principles and
values required to achieve care inclusive for LGBT+ ageing as well as on the environ-
ment or culture in which care is accessed and delivered, particularly in relation to
‘coming out’.
Participants described ‘inclusive’ care as a difficult concept to define for LGBT+
populations given its commonalities with what older people expect from their care.
They were of the view that the definition needed to be contextualised within current
inefficiencies and start with the person, not the service, and encompass all staff com-
ing into contact with LGBT+ older people, e.g. ancillary staff who are essential mem-
bers of the caring team. Emphasis was placed on providers having an open approach,
which incorporated direct consultation with people on how they would like to receive
their care. There were also several strands relating to the importance of not stigmatis-
ing LGBT+ identities or seeing their needs as problematic.
The participants stated that it was not enough that care staff were able to recognise
different identities, but participants stressed the importance of how staff gave these

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-30
160 Trish Hafford-Letchfield et al.
identities ‘real value’. Those with experience felt that it was a few staff that were
responsive, but asserted that all staff had responsibility for familiarising themselves
with the issues associated with gender and sexual diversity. Familiarisation was about
having a genuine interest in the personal stories of those they were supporting, hav-
ing an appropriate ‘mind-set’ and a good command of inclusive language used in a
confident way. Inclusive care was about going beyond glib statements, lip service or
‘ticking boxes’, and being willing to challenge and be challenged in a positive way.
Staff were expected to be aware of heteronormativity, presumed cisgenderism and
heterosexism by being able to take a purposeful stance and to move away from what
is seen as ‘the norm’ as opposed to what is different or not different.
Some participants spoke of being able to ‘feel’ the atmosphere or culture of a service
even if the impact of discrimination was not easy to observe or articulate. While they
valued some level of curiosity from others, they stressed the importance of respect and
not being intrusive. One participant described inclusive care as being able to foster a
deeper understanding of individuality; another stated:

Older people often introduce their partners as ‘a friend’ and then workers look for
the family members and decisions are made when we should be talking to their
friend. (LGBT+ lay community member, WC1)

Participants were of the view for an inclusive culture of care to develop, providers/
professional needed to be familiar with people’s rights and knowledge of national and
international legislation, including acting to promote these rights. In their view, staff
should be skilled in articulating and in making an argument as to why LGBT+ needs
might merit ‘special treatment’, especially to people with control over resources. This
also required an ability to learn from mistakes as well as sharing good experiences
within services.
Given these expectations, participants shared mixed experiences of care settings.
Examples were given of patients with gender-diverse identities protesting about being
placed in a gendered hospital ward without any consultation or choice. They spoke of
being deliberately isolated from other patients if they disclosed their gender identity
or staff called their gender into question. Others reported ‘people being nasty about
homosexuality’, and reiterated feelings of isolation, loneliness, vulnerability and embar-
rassment, with many reiterating a common experience of ‘going back into the closet’.
Another example was the ignorance of care home staff towards sexual or intimate con-
tact between same-sex partners in care homes and in one situation misinterpreting this
as putting residents at risk and resulting in raising safeguarding concerns.
While many of the negative experiences were particular to hospital settings, some
reported good experiences with family doctors and other health-care staff who pro-
vided advocacy in some difficult situations. In relation to coming out, some LGBT+
participants said that they did not always want to come out to everyone, but they did
so to ensure that their partner was consulted, involved and that any care home place-
ments accommodated their personal relationships. They spoke of looking for ‘signals’
in care homes of acceptance, as one person put it, ‘having to start again when you go
into a care home’. Regarding ‘coming out’, one participant reflected:

People don’t have a relaxed look once they realise I am gay, and are wary about
what to say. They need to have to think ahead about how they are going to look
after me. (LGBT+ lay community member, WC1)
 Learning to deliver LGBT+ aged care 161
Participants talked about ‘having space to come out’ which was dependent on the skill
and demeanour of the staff member. Some staff were described as not being comfort-
able in acknowledging or discussing everyday issues associated with different sexual
and gender identities. This was crucial where participants wanted their partners and
people from their personal network more explicitly involved in decision making about
their care. Participants suggested training professionals in the use of open questions
such as ‘Who is in your network?’ and ‘Who are you closest to?’ Concerning develop-
ments in identifying gender identities as part of care, participants felt that this often
leads to ticking a box confirming sexual or gender identities. This in turn results in
other aspects of their identities being ignored when sexuality or gender is focused on.
A debated aspect of this discussion concerned the most appropriate time to ask these
questions, for example:

Not everybody wants to be in a box, but we need to be in a box to notice us.

(Comment during sharing of group image, WC1)

Participants agreed that their intimate and sexual selves often become more invisible
as they age. This was disappointing for those LGBT+ older people who had already
fought for their rights during their lifetime, as one older gay man stated:

Some people are growing old with HIV – and so there is a lot of hope – we need
to share our history and begin earlier with the young people. (LGBT+ lay com-
munity member, WC1)

The context in which care is developed and provided can also make a difference to its
inclusiveness. Participants gave many examples of national political situations where
the social climate will influence what is actually possible. Examples were given of
religious influences specific to Slovenia and Ireland. One example described highly
dependent older people being taken to attend religious services without any consulta-
tion due to cultural expectations.
It was noted that in care homes, acceptance and general knowledge of gender
identity issues are still very limited and bi-sexuality and intersex identities are not
discussed.

Theme 2: Education principles, values and environment

Within this theme, participants elaborated on the significance of the educator and the
desired attributes of an authentic learning environment. Sub-themes focused on the
importance of communication skills using accurate language and terminology, and
being able to address intersectionality. This theme also picked up on the values and
culture of the learning environment through involvement of the LGBT+ community
in education and creating reflective learning practices. These both referred to learners
and their educators.
In terms of the principles and values underpinning education on sexual and gender
diversity, these were identified as ‘Nothing about us without us’, respect collabora-
tion, advocacy, openness to learn and intention to challenge discrimination. Human
rights were asserted as the basis of setting standards and their legislative author-
ity. Notions of freedom, privacy, non-discrimination, equality, equal access, inclu-
siveness, non-judgemental, dignity, the right to personal development, integrity and
162 Trish Hafford-Letchfield et al.
diversity were keywords used in the data. Participants also felt that human rights
should be embedded within all levels of care from prevention to intervention in age-
ing education and this would support greater embeddedness of LGBT+ issues in the
ageing curriculum.
Participants were asked to use Post-it Notes to prioritise skills and attributes seen
as important for caring for an older person from the LGBT+ community. Frequency
counts highlighted significant words. The top ones were warmth, nurturing, sensitiv-
ity, accurate and reflective listening, compassion, patience, curiosity and adaptability.
Further discussion on communication skills in the Café table revealed the need for
people to ‘learn how to listen’ and ‘pick up on subtle signals’ about the presenting
situation and being more aware of one’s own assumptions and the ability to disarm
another person. One person articulated this as ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘taking
a holistic whole-person approach’ (social work educator, WC1). […]
A consistent sub-theme was the importance of exchanging knowledge and skills
through collaboration with LGBT+ advocates and allies by involving people from
LGBT+ groups in curriculum design, training and evaluation. These reflected much
of the data that sought to explore how people learn about LGBT+ lives rather than
following guidance and ‘box ticking’. This engagement with process-oriented meth-
ods of learning also extended to cross-disciplinary learning in health and social care.
In both WC1 and in the exchange of learning materials in WC2, the introduction of
life stories and lived experiences were commonly used, often drawing on arts-based
pedagogies such as drama, literature, visual art and comedy to increase their accessi-
bility and impact. […]
Within this theme, participants talked about the usefulness of blended learning
by using online discussions to provide learners with the opportunity to talk about
difficult topics where they might be too embarrassed to ask in front of others. This
might involve the use of a private ‘space’ for people to post questions that could be
then aired through anonymous structured facilitation. Again, this related to people
having enough space to feel safe and to challenge homophobia, biphobia and trans-
phobia through educational opportunities. These could be linked to intersectionality
of sexuality – race, disability and culture, for example – and placed in a broader
context to support awareness of LGBT+ history and political activism. Again, within
this theme, participants asserted the need to acknowledge the strengths of the com-
munity rather than just the pathologies or disadvantages experienced by older LGBT+
populations.
Specific skills were recommended as vitally important to include in the curricu-
lum and its delivery, such as the use of nurturing skills for LGBT+ people who may
have experienced trauma during their personal history, both emotionally and socially;
further, the importance of including epistemology and language (older people, gay,
lesbian, etc.) to demystify terms using both good examples and bad examples; and
having a clear focus on the epistemological basis of language used within education
and utilising teaching methods and discussion in a cumulative approach to transfer
these. Again, participants raised the importance of engaging with sexuality, intimacy
and ageing as a broader topic beyond sexual or gender diversity by integrating LGBT+
rights within sex and relationship education. Some participants stressed the impor-
tance of educators familiarising themselves with caring for trans and non-binary
older people as a matter of urgency and ensuring explicit inclusion in any curriculum
or learning strategies. Queer theory is often ignored or marginalised.
 Learning to deliver LGBT+ aged care 163
Theme 3: Challenges and support needed for educators to address
LGBT+ ageing
Having identified skills and attributes, within this theme, participants addressed what
type of support educators themselves need to address LGBT+ issues within teaching
on ageing. Sub-themes illustrated challenges at the level for individual educators, the
policies of the educational institution and on how far education links with LGBT+
service users and communities.
Some barriers and challenges for including sexual and gender diversity in education
of health and social care practitioners were identified. These were noted as fear and
bullying, the religion and cultural backgrounds of educators and learners, institu-
tional resistance including lack of management support, student resistance to learn-
ing, lack of space in a crowded curriculum and negativity towards the topic. This
included sanctions from external stakeholders who may not see LGBT+ education as
a priority. One practice educator wrote:

We need a deeper understanding of individuality that goes beyond lip service

and ticking boxes. Staff to be passionate and curious, and to avoid a legalistic
approach. The patient must be consulted if problems arise as a result of discrim-
ination and how to do this well is part of the problem. (Social care practitioner
educator, WC2)

[…] Participants made the following suggestions for progression and change: greater
exposure to LGBT+ service users and communities, cultural change in the form of
creating safer environments, adhering to legislation and policy, having champions
and role models, and challenging heteronormativity in all teaching practice. The use
of narrative approaches came up constantly in the data. […]

Conclusion
Through a process of learning and exchange during two World Cafés, best practices
in pedagogic approaches (the method and practice of teaching) emerged. The first
World Café provided an abundance of information in relation to people’s hopes, expe-
riences, expectations and vision for the education and training of care professionals
when working with older people from LGBT+ communities. There were consistent
themes, which emerged within and across the sessions and data collected, which reit-
erated the importance of inclusivity in the teaching and learning of professionals,
which was all-encompassing across intersectionality. Whilst sexuality, gender and
sexual identities were essential to person-centred care, they were also part and parcel
of other identities, culture and lifestyles, and also needed to be engaged with in rela-
tion to the individual person, their history and current needs. Given the wide-ranging
evidence accumulating in this field, many of our findings on what constitutes inclusive
care were not new. We were, however, able to focus on how LGBT+ issues need to be
assertively and purposefully injected into the health and social care curriculum. Com-
bined with ageism, these are not given important status in relation to other equality
actions and diversity issues in care, and warrant positive action.
In going forward, we have noted that there may currently be a dependence on
the commitment of individual educators, and overreliance on those who identify
164 Trish Hafford-Letchfield et al.
as LGBT+ themselves, to lead these much-needed developments. Inclusivity should
reflect LGBT+ issues associated with ageing throughout the health and social care
curriculum. Moreover, LGBT+ issues are not just LGBT+ people’s business, they
need to be everyone’s business and as such all educators must be trained in teach-
ing LGBT+ issues and its scholarship. More research is needed on the culture and
support needed within educational environments to overcome these alongside other
barriers in teaching and learning. These may stem from a lack of interest and support
from managers or colleagues, religious beliefs and bullying, both overt and including
micro-aggressions.
At the same time training, education and awareness of LGBT+ issues are key to
challenging negative attitudes, and these associations need to be explicitly recognised
and dealt with. The commitment shown to the World Cafés in this project demon-
strates the importance of role modelling and LGBT+ education by building alliances,
particularly those which share experiences and partnerships, which in turn facilitate
engagement with the experiences of LGBT+ service users. These personal experiences,
as illustrated in the formal evaluation, were instrumental when challenging personal
beliefs and discrimination.

Further reading
Brown, H.C. and Cocker, C. (2011) Social Work with Lesbians and Gay Men. London: Sage.
Durose, C., Beebeejaun, Y., Rees, J., Richardson, J. and Richardson, L. (2016) Towards
Co-production in Research with Communities (AHRC Connected Communities Pro-
gramme Scoping Studies Report). London: Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Fish, J. (2012) Social work and lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people. Making a difference.
Bristol: Policy Press.
Fish, J. and Karban, K. (eds) (2015) Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans health inequalities. Inter-
national perspectives in social work. Bristol: Policy Press.
Fish, J., Almack, K., Hafford-Letchfield, T. and Toze, M. (2021) ‘What Are LGBT+ Inequali-
ties in Health and Social Support - Why Should We Tackle Them?’ International Journal of
Environmental Research and Public Health 18(7): 3612.
Hafford-Letchfield, T., Simpson, P., Willis, P.B. and Almack, K. (2018) ‘Developing inclusive
residential care for older lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people: an evaluation of
the Care Home Challenge action research project.’ Health and Social Care in the Commu-
nity 26: 312–320.
Higgins, A. and Hynes, G. (2019) ‘Meeting the needs of people who identify as LGBTQ in
palliative care settings.’ Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing 21: 286–290.
Westwood, S., Willis, P., Fish, J., Hafford-Letchfield, T., Semlyen, J., King, A., Beach, B.,
Almack, K., Kneale, D., Toze, M., Becares, L. (2020) ‘Older LGBT+ Health Inequalities in
the United Kingdom: Setting a Research Agenda.’ Journal Epidemiology and Community
Health 74: 408–411.
26 Towards practising social work law
Suzy Braye and Michael Preston-Shoot

In this chapter, UK social work academics Suzy Braye and Michael Preston-Shoot
address the complex relationship between the law – an important and increasingly
expansive body of social work knowledge – and social work practice. They trace
the complexities of developing law-informed practice while also setting out some
practical principles for doing so. The examples drawn upon are limited to English
legislation and statute but many of the insights of this chapter are transferable and/or
invite comparative analysis and reflection. What this paper does not do is to explore
the ways in which the law has been deeply implicated in the criminalisation of black
people and people of colour. Readers should turn to the Further Reading to find out
more.
From: Practicing Social Work Law, (4th edition) (2016). London: Palgrave ­Macmillan,
pp.1–25.

The contested relationship between law and social work

There has been long-standing concern about apparent deficiencies in social workers’
knowledge and use of legislation, and their unease when acting as statutory agents.
During the 1980s reports into child abuse tragedies criticized the failure of practition-
ers to identify and observe their legal duties, and to use their available legal powers
[…] They suggested that social workers disliked the authoritarian role of legal inter-
vention. By contrast other reports criticized social workers for being overzealous and
ill-advised in their use of the law, and found that using statutory controls can be coun-
terproductive to risk management and decision-making in childcare […]. The paradox
was stark: social workers used too little law, too late, or they used too much, too
soon. A report fiercely critical of law teaching in social work education […] prompted
calls for legally competent practice (Vernon, Harris and Ball, 1990).
The paradox has continued, however, with social work caught in a pendulum that
swings between a coercive, child protection-focused approach to family assessments,
and a more supportive, preventive framework […]. Following introduction of the
Children Act 1989 (CA 1989) [in England], social workers were initially criticized
[…] for focusing more on child abuse and child protection than on the support needs
of children and families. An increased emphasis on preventive services was advocated,
without indicating how an apparent preoccupation with abuse was to be modified,
thereby failing to address the roots of the paradox in the legal mandate and its rela-
tionship with social work. Other research […] found social workers refocusing risk

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-31
166 Suzy Braye and Michael Preston-Shoot
assessment and supporting families through partnership but concluded that some
cases entered the court system too early and others too late. In the early years of
the 21st century, the preventive agenda dominated […]. However, simultaneously the
paradox was further reinforced by the Laming Report (2003), which urged social
workers to adopt a more suspicious approach towards families, despite the risk of
jeopardizing preventive and collaborative work […]. This swing back to protection
was given further impetus by the death of baby Peter Connolly in 2008, and Laming
(2009) advocating measures to strengthen responses to children at risk of significant
harm. A government-commissioned independent review of child protection (Munro,
2011) advocated reforms that would free social work to achieve an effective balance
between child protection and early intervention, preventive work. Nonetheless, oth-
ers have described the ‘unholy alliance of early intervention and child protection’ as
creating a ‘perfect storm’ of failure to recognize the pernicious effect on families and
children of inequalities within a neoliberal regime […], and deflecting social work’s
attention from ‘wider appreciation of what harms children, how their welfare might
be improved and how such issues are related to wider social and economic forces’
(Parton, 2014, p. 2053).
In adult social care, the law-social work relationship has had a different trajec-
tory, with legal rules sometime conspicuous by their absence. Adult safeguarding in
England only developed under policy guidance (DH, 2000a) shaping engagement
with adults at risk of abuse and neglect. It is only with the Care Act 2014 (CA 2014)
that a statutory duty to make enquiries in such circumstances has been introduced.
Series and Clements (2013) observe that the introduction of Resource Allocation
Systems, which have impacted dramatically on social work decision-making, has
occurred without any statutory change at all. The policy of personalization, envisag-
ing independence, choice, and control for adults with care and support needs, with
high quality, flexible services designed to pro­mote wellbeing, has created a sea change
in the welfare system and radically changed social workers’ role and task, even in the
absence of a statutory mandate for such change. Again only in 2014 did the CA 2014
create a clear legal framework for more user-focused services, embedding in statutory
measures principles that support personalization. […] Arguably such developments
strengthen the synergy with social work’s goals and values, although the philosophy
of personalization that underlies the choice and control mandate is a contested one,
about which social work is advised to be cautious […].
Another discourse identifies implementation failure in frontline practice. One ver-
sion attributes it to personal failures (unprofessional performance) and systemic prob-
lems (organizational malaise), reserving special criticism for how law is interpreted and
implemented (Laming, 2003). In a later commentary under similar circumstances -
the death of a child attributed to a failure of child protection - Laming (2009) repeated
the emphasis on professionals fully understanding their responsibilities under the leg-
islative framework. An alternative version attributes it to undue emphasis on rules and
procedures rather than outcomes, acknowledging that despite more legislation the
system has not helped social work (Munro, 2011 […]). Judgements have to be reached
within a legal framework but the intricacies of decision-making require professional
expertise to work with children and families, to manage uncertainty and evaluate
risks […]. How the pendulum swings between these two perspectives depends signif-
icantly on political and public attitudes […].
[…]
 Towards practising social work law 167
Law-informed practice
How then should social workers practise within and interact with a legal system
that can discriminate against or fail to protect people? How should they intervene in
the context of an unequal society where the law is made by, and frequently benefits,
those with social, economic and political power? How might social workers challenge
narrow definitions of need and the influence of resource considerations whereby the
welfare offer becomes residual rather than oriented around considerations of quality
of life?
First, the law relating to specific user groups is essential knowledge for effective
social work practice. It provides a degree of confidence by clarifying the rights, duties
and powers of those involved and the circumstances in which these may be invoked.
However, practice-relevant knowledge extends further than the ability to quote Acts
of Parliament. Factual legal knowledge of primary and secondary legislation, policy
and practice guidance, and case law, while important, is only part of the story. The
dynamics of the encounter between practitioner and user are such that legal knowl-
edge alone will not guarantee that practitioners feel confident or intervene appropri-
ately. Many situations are unpredictable and decisions will require skilled judgement.
A second requirement, therefore, is knowledge of, and skills in managing, the pro-
cesses that occur. Social workers encounter frightening and horrifying behaviour, fre-
quently working where violence is explicitly or implicitly threatened. […] They inherit
an ambiguous mandate that requires certainty before action but the minimum of risk
and time delay. […] The dynamics of the helping encounter and the anxiety created
by the work can lead social workers to down­play the legal authority vested in them or
to employ simplistic directive authoritarianism to control the dynamics and minimize
stress. The result can be inappropriate investigative measures or removal into care, or
delayed rehabilitation - measures to minimize risk-taking, when risk may be justified
but carries the possibility of an adverse out­come. If these ‘forces’ are not understood,
work is more likely to become purposeless, stuck and ineffective.
This extension beyond legal knowledge also applies to the third requirement: knowl-
edge that transcends specific groups. Clearly social workers must possess knowledge
of the law affecting their work with users, such as knowledge when rights may be
overruled, and procedures for obtaining evidence. However, the timing and mode
of intervention demands a practice rationale as well as a legal rationale, drawing on
social sciences and social work theory and practice. This knowledge may relate to
specific user groups or transcend them. […] While legal measures promote an individ-
ual focus, more effective or durable change follows from a person-in-situation focus
where both the individual and social dimensions of problems are addressed, where the
whole context, rather than just one individual part of it is confronted.
Fourth, social workers must understand legal processes and procedures. This
includes familiarity with court structures, rules of evidence and limits to confidenti-
ality, and an understanding from administrative law of the standards required when
exercising authority. However, it also requires a critical appreciation of the dilemmas
inherent in legal processes, such as the rights of victims in giving evidence vs the rights
of the accused.
The fifth component - understanding of the relationship between law and social
work - operates at two levels. The macro level involves not only identifying the prac-
tice relevance of the law but also the ways in which it contributes to or exacerbates
168 Suzy Braye and Michael Preston-Shoot
social work’s practice dilemmas, role conflict, uncertainty and ambiguity. This
requires analysis of the law as a social construct, reflecting dominant (sometimes dis-
criminatory) assumptions about, for instance, the role of women, appropriate needs,
ageing, rights and responsibilities of parents, and disability. This understanding must
incorporate the concept of conflicting imperatives, which are the outcome of conflicts
and compromise between value systems and result in contradictory expectations of
welfare services. From understanding the relationship between law, social work and
society, practitioners must develop strategies for change at individual and social lev-
els, which give life to principles of empowerment, advocacy and anti-discriminatory
practice. The micro level relates to the ethical questions and value and practice dilem-
mas that the law poses for each practitioner. Each must determine where they stand
on the law and anti-discriminatory values, on rights vs risks, on welfare vs justice,
and on political action concerning resources and working within agency constraints.
These issues must be faced if practitioners are to manage the personal experience of
work and be effective rather than inconsistent, defensive and/ or dangerous.
The sixth component is a conceptual framework that integrates legal knowledge
with ethics and rights, to formulate what may or must be done in any given situa-
tion, why, when and how. Such a framework draws on techniques of legal reasoning,
assessment of evidence and rules of procedural fairness alongside social work ethics
and knowledge […] providing a considered rationale to guide action […].
Decisions are only as good, however, as the competence of practitioners in relevant
skills, which provides the seventh essential component of a model for effective prac-
tice in social work law. The relevant skills include legal skills - collecting and giving
evidence, and applying the law where those to whom it is applied may wish to reject
it - and practice skills - removing a child on an emergency protection order, applying
for compulsory admission to psychiatric hospital, or encouraging but not coercing
an older per1on to accept domiciliary services or residential care. They also include
generic social work skills […]: information gathering, formulating assessments, inter-
vening on the basis of assessment and evaluating that intervention, recording and
report writing, working in partnership with professionals and service users, transfer-
ring learning from one context to another.
Finally, practitioners must be competent in their social work roles. These extend
beyond legal roles, such as using powers and duties to protect people from abuse, to
promoting their rights or assisting decision-making when they are unable to exercise
capacity or provide informed consent. Broader roles express the profession’s commit-
ment to anti-oppressive practice by means of social action, advocacy and empow-
erment, including supporting choice and promoting equality of opportunity, and
building relationships through which to seek resolution of complex family and social
situations […].
These roles focus on individual and community realization, political awareness
and action, and on social change, and may involve challenging agency policies and
procedures.

References
Laming, H. (2003) The Victoria Climbie Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Lord Laming.
London: The Stationery Office.
Laming, H. (2009) The Protection of Children in England: A Progress Report. London: The
Stationery Office.
 Towards practising social work law 169
Munro, E. (2011) The Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report – A Child Centred
System. London: The Stationery Office.
Parton, N. (2014) ‘Social work, child protection and politics: some critical and constructive
reflections.’ British Journal of Social Work 44: 2042– 2056.
Series, L. and Clements, L. (2013) ‘Putting the cart before the horse: resource allocation
systems and community care.’ Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 35(2): 207–26.
Vernon, S., Harris, R. and Ball, C. (1990) Towards Social Work Law: Legally Competence
Professional Practice. London: Central Council for Education & Training in Social Work.

Further Reading
Braye, S. and Preston-Shoot, M. (2006) ‘The role of law in welfare reform: critical perspectives
on the relationship between law and social work practice.’ International Journal of Social
Welfare (1): 19–26.
Carr, H. and Goosey, D. (2021) Law for Social Workers (16th edition). Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
English, R. (2020) Racism and the rule of law. UK Human Rights Blog. Available at: https://
ukhumanrightsblog.com/2020/06/18/racism-and-the-rule-of-law/ Accessed 13th October
2021.
Gordon, P. (1988) ‘Black people and the criminal law. Rhetoric and reality.’ International
Journal of the Sociology of Law 16(3): 295–313.
Macpherson of Cluny, Sir William (1999) The Stephen Lawrence inquiry: Report of an
inquiry. Cm. 4262. London: Home Office. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/
publications/the-stephen-lawrence-inquiry/ Accessed: 13th October 2021.
27 What are values and ethics?
Chris Beckett, Andrew Maynard and Peter Jordan

Written by three UK social work academics, this chapter explores the important
place of values in social work. It starts by recognising the, sometimes overlooked,
relationship between our values and the decisions we take. It goes on to highlight
that we operate with and within multiple value systems, and that these can change
over time and space. The chapter concludes by recognising that value-based practice
often involves tension and conflict. The authors therefore encourage us to reflect on
the different values and value systems that we live and work within, as well as the
particular histories (and, we would add, different experiences of gender, ‘race’ and
ethnicity etc.) that contribute to and shape these.
From: Values and Ethics in Social Work (3rd edition), London: Sage (2017)
pp. 3–18.

The word ‘value’ is used in a number of ways which, at first sight, do not seem to have
a huge amount in common. It is used in a financial way, as in ‘gold has a higher value
than lead’, or in a personal way, as in ‘I value your company’. Or we can speak of
values in a cultural sense, as in ‘Islamic values’, ‘liberal values’, ‘value systems’.
However, although ‘the value of gold’ and ‘value systems’ seem like very different
kinds of idea, there is nevertheless a common ground of meaning. It lies in the notion
of preference or choice. When we say to someone ‘I value your company’, what we are
really saying is that their company is important to us, and that we would choose their
company over other things. If an expert on jewellery values your gold ring at £200, he
is saying that given the choice between the ring and a sum of money, you should not
choose the money unless it is £200 or more.
Similarly, when we speak about the ‘value system’ of a particular culture, we are
referring to the things that culture gives a high priority or importance to when mak-
ing choices. In a liberal democracy, for instance, a high value is given to personal free-
dom (‘Everyone has the right to liberty’, says the European Convention on Human
Rights). In other societies, personal freedom may be seen as less important than other
things, such as the observance of religious rules, or family loyalty, or social cohesion.
Different cultures use different sets of criteria to make choices, presumably as a result
of different circumstances and different traditions. […]
Our values are the basis on which we act. Imagine you are driving to an impor-
tant meeting … to which you feel you have an important contribution to make. You
are on a motorway driving at over 70 mph, but due to being held up earlier in the
journey, you are in danger of arriving late. Should you drive even faster? If you go
faster, you are more likely to make your meeting on time and be able to make your

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-32
 What are values and ethics? 171
contribution, but you are also more likely to have a crash and hurt someone, and of
course (in the UK) you would be breaking the law. These are the facts of the matter.
However, the facts alone cannot tell you what you ought to do. All they can do is
tell you the available possibilities. […] In this case your decision as to what you
ought to do will be based on what value you place on arriving on time as against
the value you place on not endangering yourself and other drivers and/or on sticking
to the law.

Values and value systems

At any given moment of time, we value different things and this may vary according
to our mood or circumstances, but most of us also subscribe to a set of values, ‘a
value system’, that is not so readily changeable and which some of us may even be
able to give a name to: ‘I am a Muslim’, ‘I am a socialist’, ‘I am a feminist’, ‘I am a
conservative’.
For most of us, beliefs of these kinds are an important cornerstone of our existence,
acting as a filter which defines the things we accept or reject, and as a driving force
that makes us jump one way as opposed to another. They shape the way we think,
the judgements we make, the perceptions we hold about people, and the companions
we choose to spend our time with. They are an important part of how we define
ourselves, and yet they are never completely our own creation. It is even sometimes
argued that whole nations can be defined in terms of a kind of value system. … You
might like to give some thought to your own value system, and how it interacts with
the value systems of others. […]
[W]hen we move from our private life to our professional life, the concept of ‘val-
ues’ takes on an additional dimension. Value questions don’t go away when we put on
our professional ‘hat’ - far from it - but they cease to be purely personal. As Kerstin
Svensson observes:

Outside the organization, ‘doing good’ is just a personal matter … Within the
organization, social work does not just entail ‘doing good’ but also includes the
exercise of power and influence … It is thus necessary to understand the concept
of doing good from a perspective where the organizational aspects are taking into
consideration. (2009: 235)

The level of legislation

Various principles are enshrined in the framework of laws, policies, government
guidelines and agency rules within which social work operates. These principles
are based, implicitly or explicitly, on certain values. … The principles enshrined in
legislation are not necessarily in harmony with one another. They can and do con-
flict. Nor are they necessarily in harmony with other aspects of government decision-­
making. For instance, the legislation may enshrine one principle, but government
policy, at the local or national level, may make that principle impossible to achieve in
practice. […]
In addition to the framework provided by the law, government provides guidelines
and procedures which agencies are required to follow and individual agencies have
their own documents ranging from broad mission statements to detailed procedural
172 Chris Beckett et al.
manuals. Sometimes these documents include explicit statements about an organisa-
tion’s values, and about the ethical principles it attempts to follow.

The level of agency priorities

What people say and what they do are not necessarily the same. If someone said ‘I
really value your opinion’ but then never let you get a word in without immediately
interrupting or contradicting you, you might well question whether they really did
respect your opinion so very much. Whether looking at yourself, or some other
person, or an organisation – or indeed a whole society - it is necessary to look
behind words and stated intentions to get an idea of the values that really guide
actions.
If you want to understand an agency’s values, therefore, it is important to look
at its priorities in practice as well as its stated intentions. Consider, for instance, an
agency that stated that it was committed to working preventatively or proactively. If
you looked at the way it responded to new referrals and found out that they were only
ever followed up if they were dire emergencies, you would have to conclude that, in
fact, working preventatively was not a priority for that agency, whatever it might say
or whatever its staff might like to think. [ …]
So, part of the values framework within which a social worker operates is their
agency’s priorities and its expectations in practice about the ways things should be
dealt with, which may or may not be reflected in the agency’s public statements about
its values.

The level of professional ethics

Doctors, lawyers and accountants all have their codes of professional ethics, and so
do social workers. […] Underlying all these formal codes typically are certain values
which are seen as being core to that profession. These guidelines, and the professional
values that lie behind them, set a different kind of framework of expectations around
professionals which is distinct from those created by legislation, policies and agency
priorities. The job of a doctor is different in different settings - a heart surgeon and a
GP have very different tasks to perform - and yet certain ethical principles, and a cer-
tain professional ethos, are supposed to be common to all doctors. The same is true
of social work. And it can happen that professional values come into conflict with the
values inherent in legislation or policy or agency guidelines.

Personal values
A professional social worker - or indeed any other professional - cannot only be
guided by her personal values, but she cannot simply disregard her personal values
either. Personal values, after all, lie behind her decision to go into social work in the
first place, rather than into some other occupation. Many people who go into social
work are motivated by a belief that it is important to do something for those who are
excluded or disadvantaged by society at large. Some are motivated by religious beliefs
or political convictions. Your own personal values will also inevitably influence how
you do your job and the decisions and choices that you make, so it is as well to think
about what they are.
 What are values and ethics? 173
Societal values
We were sceptical earlier about the idea of ‘British values’. The views and priorities of
people who live in a whole society are just too diverse to be neatly encapsulated in a
single set of values. Nevertheless, it is true to say that each society, at a given point in
time, has some generally accepted norms.
In Britain, for instance, there has been a huge shift in the last 50 years in what
is generally regarded as acceptable sexual behaviour. Premarital sex is nowadays
accepted as the norm and, generally speaking, has no stigma attached to it where it
once would have done. Homosexual relationships have shifted from being prohibited
by law to being a form of relationship that can be formalised by marriage just like het-
erosexual ones. By contrast, premarital sex is a punishable offence in some countries,
such as Saudi Arabia, and ‘in five countries and in parts of two others, homosexuality
is still punishable with the death penalty, while a further 70 imprison citizens because
of their sexual orientation’ (BBC News, 2009, 2014).
Corporal punishment is another example. Fifty years ago, caning and other forms
of corporal punishment were seen as normal and acceptable in schools and at home in
Britain. Now, any form of punishment that leaves a mark could result in criminal prose-
cution of parents, and teachers are not allowed to use corporal punishment at all in Brit-
ain (Children’s Legal Centre, 2008). In 49 countries all corporal punishment of children
is illegal (Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment of Children, 2016), but in many
other countries beating of children is not only legal but still the norm. Clearly societies
do have different prevailing values. But social work offices typically include people from
different social backgrounds, different ethnic and religious communities, and different
parts of the world, not everyone will agree with the prevailing values of society.
And it often also happens that even widely-held values, with which few people would
disagree, will frequently come into conflict with one another.[…] [T]he 1983 Mental
Health Act in England and Wales attempts to balance important yet fundamentally
contradictory principles: (a) the state should respect individual liberty; (b) the state
should protect the public and vulnerable people. It is in the nature of social work that
it tends to find itself in these kinds of difficult places where deeply held societal values
collide. And, since this involves making compromises in which one principle is partly
sacrificed for another, this can often result in social workers seeming, in the eyes of
others, to trample on one or other of those deeply held values. The idea that family
life is sacrosanct and private, for instance, is a deeply held belief in our society and,
for this reason, social workers intervening in families can easily be seen as interfering
and oppressive, transgressing against a deep taboo. On the other hand, since it is also
a strongly and widely held belief that childhood is precious and that children should be
protected from harm, the failure of social workers to intervene in families to protect
children may be greeted with horror and also be seen as transgressive.
And because these societal values exist not only outside of us but also inside our
own heads, social workers need to be prepared not only for the condemnation of oth-
ers, but also for powerful feelings of guilt.

Values in tension
Social workers are called upon to perform many complex tasks that involve difficult
human interactions and in some instances involve overruling what would normally
174 Chris Beckett et al.

Societal Agency
values values

Social work
tension

Professional Personal
values values

Figure 27.1 Competing values.

be regarded as an individual’s rights (compulsory detention under mental health leg-

islation or separation of children and parents under childcare legislation being case
in point). In trying to come to the right decision about how to respond in any given
situation, the social worker struggles not only with her own personal feelings, the
limitations of her own skill and knowledge, and the constraints imposed by the real
world of limited options, she also struggles with a plethora of competing values -
societal values, personal values, professional values and the prevailing values of her
agency (see figure 27.1. competing values).
This struggle may be experienced as conflict within the individual between differ-
ent and competing personal values and/or internalised societal values. But the strug-
gle between competing values may also take the form of disagreements with others.
For instance, it can involve disagreement with colleagues about how to proceed … it
may entail disagreements with service users … It may involve struggles with managers
or other agencies. There are endless arenas, internal and external, within which value
conflicts are played out. Figure 27.2 attempts to illustrate these wider complexities.

What do we mean by ‘ethics’?

Although we have explored the word ‘values’, we have not yet attempted a definition
of ‘ethics’. It is a word with several meanings, but all of them rather narrower and
more specific than that of ‘values’. Ethics relate not just to our overall stance on life,
or to our general notions of what is important, but to actual rules, codes or princi-
ples of conduct. Since these rules and principles will always ultimately be based on a
 What are values and ethics? 175

Other cultural Other agencies’

values values

Societal Agency
values values

Social work
tension

Professional Personal
values values

Values of other Other people’s

professions personal values

Figure 27.2 Competing values: the wider picture.

values system of some kind, ethics can be seen as the practical application of values.
‘Human life is sacred’, for example, is a pretty universal value, from which flows the
ethical principle that it is wrong, at least in most circumstances, to kill. Likewise,
‘privacy is important’ is a value which forms the basis of professional obligations
to respect the confidentiality of clients. Dubois and Miley (2008: 111) suggest that
‘whereas values are the implicit or explicit beliefs about what people consider good,
ethics relates to what people consider correct or right.’
In social work, a distinction can also be made between, on the one hand, profes-
sional ethics - the principles of conduct, enshrined in various codes, which are broadly
similar to those followed by other professions - and, on the other hand, the ‘emanci-
patory values’, broader and more political in character, which are particularly char-
acteristic of social work. This reflects the fact that while other professions (teachers,
doctors, lawyers) work with people from across the whole of society, social workers’
particular focus is on the least powerful groups in society.
176 Chris Beckett et al.
References
BBC News (2009) ‘Saudi sex boasts man apologises’. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
world/middle_east/8171135.stm/ Accessed July 2016.
Children’s Legal Centre (2008) ‘The Law on smacking’. Available at www.bab.org.uk/
downloads/Smacking_Leaflet.pdf/ Accessed September 2016.
Dubois, B. and Miley, K. (2008) Social Work: An Empowering Profession, 6th edn. London:
Pearson.
Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment of Children (2016) ‘States which have pro-
hibited all corporal punishment’. Available at: www.endcorporalpunishment.org/progress/
prohibiting-states/ Accessed September 2016.
Svensson, K. (2009) ‘Identity work through support and control’. Ethics and Social Welfare,
3(3): 234–48.

Further reading
Banks, S. (2012) Ethics and values in social work, 4th edn. Basingtoke: Palgrave
Banks, S. (2016) Everyday ethics in professional life: social work as ethics work. Ethics &
Social Welfare 10(1): 35–52.
Clark, C. L. (2000) Social Work Ethics: Politics, Principles and Practice. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Eagleton, T. (2009) Trouble with strangers: A study of ethics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Graham, M. (2007) Black issues in social work and social care. Bristol: Policy Press/BASW.
Hugman, R. (2012) Culture, values and ethics in social work: Embracing diversity. London:
Routledge.
Ryde, J. (2009) Being white in the helping professions. London: Jessica Kingsley.
28 Green social work in theory and
practice
A new environmental paradigm for
the profession
Lena Dominelli

In this chapter, Lena Dominelli, Canadian scholar and activist (now working in
Scotland), asserts that green social work offers a ‘new environmental paradigm’ for
social workers. She demonstrates that green social work rests on and advances sev-
eral core social work values, processes and practices, including, for example, trans-
formation, transdisciplinarity, co-production, prevention and community work.
Nevertheless, she acknowledges that social work’s capacity for transformative prac-
tice is much contested. Undeterred by these obstacles, Dominelli’s challenge to the
reader is that green social work is for everyone and needs to now become embedded
across social work curriculums and across routine, mainstream practice.
From: Lena Dominelli, Bala Raju Nikku and Hok Bun Ku (eds) The Routledge
Handbook of Green Social Work (2018) London: Routledge: 9–20.

Introduction
Green social work (GSW) is a transdisciplinary, holistic approach to environmental
crises that has challenged the social work profession to incorporate its principles, val-
ues and concern over environmental degradation, and the disasters associated with
this into daily, routine, mainstream practice. Whether arising through air, water and
soil pollution caused by industrial contaminants or ‘natural’ hazards, these have dam-
aged people’s health and well-being, and exploited the environment for the gain of
the few. Thus, environmental crises perpetrate environmental injustices that must
be eradicated before their deleterious effects become irreversible. The green in green
social work highlights the imperative of caring for the beautiful living planet human
beings inhabit. The earth that sustains us has its bounty currently exploited by 1 per
cent of the population for itself. Its destruction impacts heavily on the 99 per cent.
Poor people live and work in the degraded environments that feed the industrial
system. Adults simultaneously struggle to obtain basic necessities including food,
clothing, housing, healthcare, social services, and education for themselves and their
children; and sustain their communities and geographical spaces. This calls for a
rethinking of the economy – how it distributes goods and services; how it uses the
earth’s physical resources; how it uses and treats human labour, animals and plants;
how the products of human labour are distributed; and what economic alternatives can
be developed to meet the need of each human being now to enjoy a decent standard of
living, without destroying the earth for future generations. Neoliberalism, the current
socio-economic system, is not fit for purpose within countries or globally. Neoliber-
alism is steeped in inegalitarianism. Thus, a new system has to be redistributive and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-33
178 Lena Dominelli
regenerative. It has to ensure that every human being has his/her share of the earth’s
goods and services, and that the earth’s capacity to regenerate itself is maintained.
The global trends towards hyper-urbanisation and hyper-industrialisation, and crea-
tion of ugly urbanity for people to live in, must stop.
Why are these concerns a matter for all social workers? The answer is simple.
Social workers are the professionals responsible for the health and well-being of those
with whom they work. Their practice engages those whose lives are undermined by
the lack of access to resources and opportunities in myriad settings. Thus, they have
a professional and moral responsibility to examine why service users are in such sit-
uations and work with them for transformative change. Also, social work services
should be universal. Within this framework, social workers should also work with
the 1 per cent who own more than they can possibly use, and engage them in thinking
about how they can contribute to the development of new, alternative economic sys-
tems that do not exploit people or the earth – its flora, fauna, minerals and physical
environment.
Consequently, green social workers can ask awkward questions about the direction
of humanity’s travel: Who benefits from the current socio-economic arrangements
and governance systems? Who loses? How can the earth’s bounty be shared more
equitably? How can the geographic spaces within which people’s sense of identity
and belonging reside be enhanced and preserved? To contribute to answering these
questions, green social work includes the incorporation of environmental justice
within the profession’s social justice agenda, alongside that of critiquing neoliberal
socio-economic forms of development and highlighting the duty to care for the earth
in sustainable ways so that it can meet the needs of contemporary and future gener-
ations. Such commitment is embedded in acknowledging and addressing the inter-
connectedness and interdependencies that exist between living beings and inanimate
things and maintaining a sustainable planet.
Addressing environmental concerns allows social workers to adopt a number of
diverse roles ranging from being coordinators of practical assistance to developing
community and individual resilience in responding to disasters throughout the disas-
ter cycle – prevention, preparedness, immediate relief, recovery, and reconstruction.
And, it challenges social workers to understand the porous borders between ‘natural’
and (hu)man-made disasters and include environmental rights in their conceptual
framework of social justice at the local, national, regional and inter- national lev-
els (Dominelli, 2012). There is no area of human life that is beyond the remit of
green social workers. Their interventions are based on engaging victim–survivors of
disasters to coproduce solutions to problems that are defined by those in the com-
munities within which they are working. These should be inclusive and innovative.
Green social work has initiated a paradigm shift in conceptualising environmental
social work, away from leaving knowledge in the hands of environmental scientists
into mutual sharing of scientific and lay expertise and embedding the coproduction
of disaster action plans in mainstream social work values and empowering practice.

Developing the Green Social Work Framework

[…]
Social justice is an integral part of social work, and strongly embedded in its value of
equality. The inclusion of struggles for environmental justice within an environmental
 Green social work in theory and practice 179
framework is a critical and significant part of green social workers’ activities. It sur-
faces when redressing complex issues involving environmental degradation, vulnera-
bility among marginalised populations, and disaster responses. Contributing to these
involves green social workers in highlighting the:

• Human rights violations that go hand-in-glove within degraded environments.

• Socio-economic political systems that fail to hold multinational corporations
accountable for destroying environmental resources and perpetuating structural
inequalities.
• Inadequate governance structures that discourage local communities from acting
as co- producers of solutions to the environmental problems they encounter.
• The global, inequitable distribution of the world’s physical resources and con-
flicts that ensue among those seeking to acquire a share of the earth’s ‘natural’
resources.
• Neglect of cultural diversity including the undermining of aboriginal, indigenous
and/or nomadic lifestyles, knowledges and expertise.
• Lack of environmentally friendly, sustainable socio-economic developments.
• Absence of local environmentally friendly community relationships that acknowl-
edge interdependencies between people and the environment.
• Inadequate care of natural resources and poor environment-enhancing regional
and national policies.
• Lack of universal publicly funded provisions for health and social care services
that promote the well-being of people and their capacity to prevent, mitigate and
recover from disasters.
• Lack of care for the physical environment in its own right (i.e. as an end in itself).
• Disregard of the environmental damage caused by armed conflicts including the
carbon dioxide discharged and ensuing environmental degradation.
• Lack of recognition of the interdependencies among peoples, and between people
and the biosphere/ecosystem.
• Absence of resilient built infrastructures, resources and communities (Dominelli,
2012).

Addressing these issues requires social workers to engage with the knowledge and
expertise held by other disciplines and community residents. Accordingly, green social
workers have sought to develop transdisciplinarity to highlight the links between the
physical and social sciences in ‘doing science differently’ (Lane et al., 2011) with local
communities
[…] Transdisciplinarity involves a number of disciplines working together on a spe-
cific project using a common holistic theoretical and practice framework. Specific
endeavours are made to develop joint understandings about a problem that draws on
the: local, indigenous, and expert knowledges; development of new approaches; con-
siderations about how an issue might be resolved through coproduced solutions that
engage with all forms of expertise; and that provides for changes in current policies
and practices.
[…] Green social workers also support people who are inured physically and psy-
chosocially during disasters and provide practical help such as water, food, medi-
cine, clothing, shelter and family reunification. They also assist in repairing damaged
environments and facilitate longer-term transformative initiatives that develop
180 Lena Dominelli
environmentally just, sustainable, life-enhancing forms of being and doing through-
out the disaster cycle. Doing this in the reconstruction phase when preventative meas-
ures are being considered is especially important because most external actors and
civil society organisations leave a site within six months of a disaster. Also, for those
whose mental health is undermined by disasters, social workers provide psychosocial
support (IASC, 2007). Indeed, this dimension is the area of social work intervention
most often embedded in public consciousness.
Additionally, in completing community-based coproduced actions, green social
workers carry out duties such as:

• Assessing need among victim–survivors and disaster-affected communities.

• Coordinating and delivering goods and services to alleviate individual suffering
and rebuild communities.
• Assisting family reunification, and ensuring children’s rights are safeguarded and
that they are well-cared for, preferably in families and communities with whom
they already have a relationship or they know.
• Supporting individuals and communities in rebuilding their lives, developing
resilience and building individual and community capacities to minimise future
risks and better prepare people to survive future calamitous events.
• Advocating, lobbying and mobilising for changes that protect the environment
and all other living things, mitigate future disasters and reduce losses in this
sphere.

The Green Social Work Framework encourages practitioners to become involved

with confidence in environment-enhancing activities, because green social work is
not completely outside their knowledge-base. It draws on generic social work skills
known to all social workers.
Green social work reshapes social work’s generic skills by emphasising the copro-
duction of knowledge and action in transdisciplinary, empowering processes that
operate before a disaster, throughout it and afterwards in reconstruction endeavours.
It does so by engaging local residents in the development of resilience as people and
communities recover from the impact of a disaster. Green social workers are driven by
egalitarian values and have the capacity to intervene in all types of disasters, adding
to their personal knowledge-base by forming transdisciplinary partnerships.
The steps that green social workers undertake in their interventions are visually
encapsulated in the green social work model. Its framework for practice is an iter-
ative one in which interventions are constantly being co-evaluated through reflec-
tive thought and community engagement, and altered as appropriate after collective
co-evaluation involving practitioners and local residents. The steps undertaken in this
process are expressed in Figure 28.1.
Green social work is a form of community social work that addresses both
(hu)man-made disasters including poverty because that condition exacerbates vul-
nerabilities, and natural hazards which lead to disasters such as earthquake-induced
ones. The green social worker engages community residents and other relevant stake-
holders. These can include local government officials, elected representatives, civil
servants, civil society organisations and businesses to coproduce research, documents
and solutions to the issues they face. Together, they begin by identifying and then
 Green social work in theory and practice 181

Figure 28.1 The green social work model: a framework for practice.

assessing the hazards and vulnerabilities which are evident in their social, cultural,
political, economic and physical environments to compile their risk assessments. Hav-
ing done that, they then focus on coproduced resilience-building exercises.
[…] The usefulness of generic social work skills in green social work means that
mainstream social workers do not have to feel intimidated by moving into a new area
of practice […]. The roles that green social workers can play in reducing environmen-
tal degradation and mitigating environmental and social vulnerabilities are those that
they are also familiar with.

Conclusions
[…] Green social work provides a new paradigm for environmental issues to be tack-
led by social workers. It asks them to go beyond their traditional comfort zone by
becoming engaged in sustainable, coproduced transformative social change that
creates a living, viable earth with equitably shared and distributed resources and
opportunities. Thus, green social work is redistributive and regenerative. Green
social workers endeavour to develop preventive and responsive emergency services
before, during and after disasters. Like other responders, their overall objective is to
reduce the number of deaths and casualties among people, animals and plants; and
to assess the needs of people. It transcends these by including other living things with
which people share the physical environment and the inanimate world itself within
its remit. Green social work, therefore, is conducted to promote a healthy and sus-
tainable physical environment and biosphere; enhance resilience in the social, phys-
ical and built environments; and enable disaster survivors to flourish in the future.
[…] Its complexity highlights the significance of green social workers engaging all
stakeholders – 100 per cent of the earth’s population, in developing the new socio-
economic alternatives needed, and raising questions to ensure that no one group is
privileged above another.
182 Lena Dominelli
References
Dominelli, L. (2012) Green social work: From environmental crises to environmental justice.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lane, S. N., Odoni, N., Landström, C., Whatmore, S. J., Ward, N. and Bradley, S. (2011)
‘Doing flood risk science differently: An experiment in radical scientific method.’ Transac-
tions, 36, 15–36.
IASC (Inter-Agency Standing Committee (2007). The IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and
Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings. Available on www.who.int/mental_health/
emergencies/guidelines_iasc_mental_health_psychosocial_june_2007.pdf [Accessed 21
April 2017].

Further reading
Dominelli, L. (2021) ‘A green social work perspective on social work during the time of
COVID-19.’ International Journal of Social Welfare 30(1): 7–16.
Drolet, J., Wu, H., Taylor, M. and Dennehy, A. (2015) ‘Social work and sustainable social
development: Teaching and learning strategies for ‘green social work’ curriculum.’ Social
Work Education 34(5): 528–43.
Marlow C. and Van Rooyen C. (2001) How green is the environment in social work? Interna-
tional Social Work, 44 (2): 241–254. DOI:10.1177/002087280104400208.
Part III

Practice in Social Work

Commentary Three

This final section brings us to practice in social work, and it does so from the perspec-
tive that practice is much more than a set of skills and methods that can be taught
and replicated in all settings. Instead, practice is context specific. What is regarded
as ‘good practice’ changes across settings and times, and it reflects the values, culture
and history of individuals and societies. In that sense it is political, as well as personal
and professional. A better word for this might be ‘praxis’, because it demonstrates
that theory, values and skill come together as practice is enacted, embodied and takes
place in the very particular ‘real world’ in which we find ourselves. As David Kolb
argues:

[…] the creation of knowledge and meaning occurs though the active extension
and grounding of ideas and experiences in the external world and through inter-
nal reflection about the attributes of these experiences and ideas (1984: 52).

As in the two previous sections, it has been challenging to find a way through the
material that might be included in this section of the Reader. All the readings that
have been selected for inclusion value the individual, whilst seeing that person in the
context of their biography, their family, their community and their society. They also
bear witness to our underlying commitment to social justice. Readers are invited not
only to follow up the extracts in full for themselves, but also to explore the Further
Reading, which seeks to bear witness to the importance of different voices, includ-
ing those of Black people and people of colour, as well as those who use social work
services.

Key Questions

1 Can good social work practice be taught, and if so, how?

2 Pick one of the chapters in this section and think: what is it about it that
speaks to you most and why?
3 What do we need to do to ensure that social justice remains at the heart of
the social work agenda?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-35
29 On the nature of practice
Michael Whan

Michael Whan wrote this paper when practising as a social worker at the Watford
Child and Family Psychiatric Clinic in England. In it, Whan draws an important
distinction between technical and practical ‘know-how’ in helping professions and
makes use of Aristotle’s concept of ‘phronesis’ to re-assert social work as a form of
practical, moral engagement. In doing so, he helps us think about important issues
of objectivity and subjectivity in ‘people work’, our relentless quest for certainty and
the place of values and moral action in good social work practice.
From: British Journal of Social Work 1 6 (2): pp.243–50 (1986).

Social workers are essentially people who do things with, to and for other people.
Even when all they do is to talk with others, this is still a form of doing. Social work-
ers are engaged in practice or a nexus of practices. There have been many attempts
to provide a rational account of the practice of social work. These attempts have
drawn upon a wide variety of subject disciplines and forms of knowledge: psychology,
psychoanalysis, sociology, social policy, systems theory; and various modes of phi-
losophizing, moral, political and existential. This need for a rational account arises
for a number of reasons. For instance, the aspiration to be regarded as a profession
requires that social workers can point to a corpus of knowledge and skills concerning
human need and troubles. Equally, the altruistic motive gives rise to the necessity
for ­‘knowing-how’ as well as ‘knowing what’ in one’s helping response. Rationality
enables us to clarify the relationship between means and ends. A rational account of
social work is thus not only for reasons of description, to be able to say intelligibly
what, how and why one is doing this or that thing, but also for reasons of prescrip-
tion, that one may know or learn how to do something.
It is my contention, however, that the idea of ‘know-how’ has taken on a certain
meaning in social work, as it has with the other helping professions, in which a confu-
sion has occurred between the technical and the practical (Gadamer, 1979, pp. 278–
289; Bernstein, 1983, p. 188). The search for a knowledge-base for practice has led
in the direction of method and technique. This confusion, of course, is not confined
to the helping professions, but reflects the dominant ideology within society. This
prevailing mode of consciousness is basically technocratic in form. We conceive of the
human being and the various predicaments that constitute his or her lot in ways that
conform to technocratic and technological principles. […] The essence of this techno-
cratic consciousness is, it seems to me, instrumentalization. That is to say, the value
of ways and means, as well as people and things, becomes wholly defined in terms of
use, function, utilitarian ends. In the technocratic mode of consciousness doing and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-36
186 Michael Whan
practice as moral engagement, ethical action, are subverted in terms commensurate
with the ‘internal logic’ of technique.
So, in order to retrieve or preserve the normative idea of the person, we have to
make a distinction between the practical and the technical. We have to define the
daily encounter with clients not as a matter of technique or method, but as a practical-
moral involvement. Social work, as with the other helping professions, is a form of
service to others. […] It acts as a norm against which we measure our own and oth-
ers’ actions and intentions. Implicit in the act of service, of helping the other, is some
version of the good. When asked to account for what one does, when asked to justify
one’s actions, it is to an idea of the good that we turn. It is by this idea of the good,
then, that we describe the practice as what it is. It is a legitimating idea, against which
we can expose our more dubious interests, and is therefore a critique of what we say
and do. In this way we retain or restore a moral or ethical sense to our acts.
One of the consequences of the technocratic way of looking, reflecting and doing
things is that reason itself has come to be characterized in technological terms. To
reason, to reflect has come to mean following a certain method or set of techniques,
which have been formulated and legitimated as the ‘correct’ way of arriving at knowl-
edge and understanding. […]
But if the knowledge that informs the practice of understanding and helping oth-
ers is to be distinguished from technical knowledge, what is its nature? In an effort
to open this question up, I shall draw upon Aristotle’s concept of phronesis and the
discussion of it in the work of the German philosopher, Gadamer. It is an attempt in
which I hope to give a sense of the moral-practical nature of practice.

The Concept of Phronesis

The notion of phronesis is found in Book Six of Aristotle’s, The Nichomachean Eth-
ics. In one translation this term is defined as ‘prudence’, ‘practical wisdom’ or ‘prac-
tical common-sense’ (Aristotle, 1982, p. 209, 369). Aristotle identifies it specifically
with moral knowledge. For it means to deliberate on what is ‘conducive to the good
life generally’ (Aristotle, p.209). Phronesis is also contrasted with scientific knowl-
edge (episteme) and with art or technical skill {techne). Aristotle states that phrone-
sis is concerned with the variable, with that which could be otherwise, rather than
with necessity or invariability. The latter is the domain of scientific knowledge. The
nature of this ‘wisdom’ or ‘judgment’ has to do with the purpose for which something
is done; the good which is its intention. Thus it is associated with virtue, meaning
to deliberate and act towards some purpose or end which belongs ‘in the sphere of
human goods’ (Aristotle, p.210). Phronesis is the kind of knowledge with which one
mediates between the universal and the particular. It points towards the nature of
human action as distinct from techne and scientific causality; it is concerned with
judgment, choice and reflection on what constitutes the good for which one acts.
Gadamer’s discussion of phronesis appears in the context of his massive study of
interpretation and understanding, Truth and Method. He regards the concept of
phronesis as a ‘model’ for understanding how knowledge is applied, that is, how
knowledge mediates between the universal and the particular. The person who is
trying to understand something cannot disregard himself and his ‘particular herme-
neutical situation’. For it is one’s own horizons (‘prejudices’) of understanding that
 On the nature of practice 187
opens up the phenomenon one wishes to know. Such horizons are, however, not only
subjective, but are fundamentally historical.
Gadamer reviews Aristotle’s concern for moral being and the nature of the good as
it relates to ‘the specific form of the particular practical situation’ in which one finds
oneself. […] The nature of moral being in relation to a person’s consciousness means
that the responsibility for understanding, deciding and acting cannot be shifted
onto something extraneous to the person: ‘the person acting must himself know and
decide and cannot let anything take this responsibility from him’ (Gadamer, 1979,
p.279). In terms of our discussion on the nature of practice, then, in whatever way it
is expressed, such practice cannot be a method or a technique applied to a person or
a thing in which the practitioner remains untouched in his or her being, but is one in
which the person is intrinsically involved. Moral knowledge is not therefore a matter
of purely observing and knowing something; it is not ‘objective’ knowledge in which
the observing, knowing subject stands over and against the person or thing known.
To know something morally is a requirement to act in a certain way with regard to
that knowledge. What matters is not only what we know, but what we are.
[…] Therefore to conduct oneself in an ethical way entails the requirement to know
oneself: to know not only what one does, but that by which and for which a thing
is done. Self-knowledge indicates a change in one’s relationship to oneself. For it sig-
nifies the difference between being and doing something in an unknowing way, and
being and doing something consciously. This change in relationship to one’s own self
also alters the relationship one has with the other person. The practice of helping
implies we act towards him or her responsibly and in respect of his or her good, which
requires self-knowledge in ascertaining how what we do relates to the other person’s
good.
[…] the relationship between means and ends differs between moral and techni-
cal knowledge: ‘moral knowledge has no merely particular end, but is concerned
with right living in general, whereas all technical knowledge is particular and serves
particular ends (Gadamer, p.286). In many ways what were formally recognized as
moral issues and dilemmas have, under the sway of technocracy, become no longer so.
Instead they are treated as issues necessitating a technical ‘problem-solving’ approach.
Life’s ‘problems’ have been reinterpreted in terms of ‘know-how’ and methodology.
Values have been reified in the technocratic ideology.[…]
Neither can we decide about means on the grounds of expediency (Gadamer, 1979,
p. 287). For moral knowledge is a concern which includes both means and ends and
how they relate together. […]
[…] There are considerable implications in this for the kind of knowledge which
can rightfully inform practice. It means that the theoretical foundations of the prac-
tice of the helping relationship cannot be accounted for ‘scientifically’ in the usual
sense of the term: that is to say, as ‘experience-independent’ knowledge. Rather, such
foundations or theoretical accounts are themselves located in or dependent upon the
flux of human experience that goes to make up the finitude of the human condition.
Conceiving things in this way means going beyond the alienation of thought from
being, theory from life; or perhaps returning to a mode of reflection which is ontolog-
ically prior to the separation of subject and object. Whether we see this movement as
‘progress’ or ‘renaissance’, it is a bringing together of thought and life in the notion
of practice, doing, act: praxis. Practice improperly authorizes itself in drawing upon
188 Michael Whan
so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge; it distorts its character as moral action. Therefore
if we are to base what we do upon the human sciences, they need to be defined and
practised as moral sciences. Anything else is mystification.
[…] In our moral actions we involve not only ourselves, we involve others as well.
Such is the nature and basis of the helping relationship. […] One cannot fully under-
stand without hearing the other’s reasons and grounds. In giving this hearing, one
expresses a tacit respect for what the other has to say, even if one then disagrees
with it. […] Understanding is not therefore a relationship in which one stands apart
in ‘objective detachment’, but rather, a moral engagement with the other person: a
phenomenology.

Conclusions
In this review of the notion of phronesis I have tried to delineate a sense of practice in
which a distinction is clarified between the practical and the technical. Practice is seen
in these terms as both a pragmatic and moral endeavour. In many areas of human life
technique has become the dominant response and ideology. The helping relationship
has become a form of ‘social engineering’. The ideology of technique deeply pervades
the various disciplines to which social workers turn for a knowledge-base from which
to practise. It has been argued that it is not technique, however, which is the problem,
but domination. This though overlooks the fact that technique imposes itself in such a
way that it enters into all areas of human life, into the very intimacies of relationship
and the privacies of the human psyche. Techniques are applied within a powerful and
increasingly centralized ideology which not only sanctions their use, but redefines
the nature of human being in such a way as to conform it to its technocratic logic of
control and calculation. The helping relationship is then no longer conceptualised
as a social one, but becomes a technical matter to be dealt with through this or that
method. The fundamental decisions, issues and actions which belong to this rela-
tionship are consequently mystified in the technocratic ideology. Social worker and
client lose sight of the moral character of their mutual involvement. It is a sense of this
pragmatic, moral character that I have tried to establish as the essence of the helping
relationship. However, as Maclntyre has written: ‘We possess indeed the simulacra of
morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely,
if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality’
(Maclntyre, 1982, p. 2). If this is so, then this attempt to recollect the moral nature
of practice is also a kind of failure, the sign of a deeper disorder than what is written
here could hope to remedy.

References
Aristotle. (1982) Ethics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
Bernstein, R.J. (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gadamer, H.G. (1979) Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward.
MacIntyre, A. (1982) After Virtue. London: Duckworth.
 On the nature of practice 189
Further reading
Martinez-Brawley, E. E. and Zorita, M. (1998) ‘At the edge of the frame: Beyond science
and art in social work.’ The British Journal of Social Work, 28(2): 197–212. https://doi.
org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a011323
Munro, E. and Hardie, J. (2019) ‘Why we should stop talking about objectivity and sub-
jectivity in social work.’ The British Journal of Social Work, 49(2): 411–427, https://doi.
org/10.1093/bjsw/bcy054
Parton, N. (2000) ‘Some thoughts on the relationship between theory and practice in and for
social work.’ The British Journal of Social Work, 30 4): 449–463.
Schön, D. A. (1983) The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York,
NY: Basic Books.
Taylor, C. and White, S. (2006) ‘Knowledge and reasoning in social work: Educating for
humane judgement.’ British Journal of Social Work 36(6): 937–954.
30 ‘Radical Social Work’ by
Roy Bailey and Mike Brake
A classic text revisited
Steve Rogowski

A great deal has been written from a radical perspective (sometimes called a ‘critical’
or ‘structural’ approach), since the first publication of Bailey and Brake’s seminal
work in 1975; we have contributed to some of this writing ourselves at different
times. We have chosen to introduce this classic text with a book review from chil-
dren and families’ social worker and author Dr Steve Rogowski. What follows is an
informative, compassionate and ultimately honest account of the impact this book
has had on the author and on social work practice in the years since its publication.
From Steve Rogowski, ‘Radical Social Work’ by Roy Bailey and Mike Brake: A
Classic Text Revisited. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work (2017) 29(4): 97–101

‘Radical Social Work’ appeared in 1975, the year I began my social work career in
the U.K. by being seconded by Derbyshire County Council to Lancaster University
to complete a Diploma in Social Work (Certificate of Qualification in Social Work). I
had previously worked in the Civil Service as an employment adviser with (the then)
Department of Employment which genuinely, as compared to what happens now,
tried to help unemployed people obtain suitable employment. In discussions with
‘claimants’ as they were then called, what struck me were the various other problems
that many faced in addition to unemployment, for example in relation to physical and
mental health issues. I wanted to do more to help in these other areas, hence eventu-
ally embarking on a career in social work when it was still the rising star of the human
service delivery professions (Rogowski, 2010).
One of the first books I was introduced to was ‘Radical Social Work’, with one
of the lecturers referring to a possible Robin Hood role for social work; essentially
by having to tackle the rich to help the poor. The blurb on the cover refers to such
matters as unemployment, poverty, urban decay, delinquency and alienation effecting
advanced industrial countries and how social workers, ‘the frontline workers of the
welfare state’, might paradoxically find that the justification for their profession lies
in the maintenance of a social and economic system that is the cause of the ills they
are employed to confront - and to which their everyday experience renders them fun-
damentally opposed. I well recall how I used to, somewhat idealistically, argue that as
a social worker I would be practicing to do myself out of a job by working towards a
more just and equal society where social workers would not be needed.
The blurb continues that the book is radical in that the essays explore ways in
which social ills may be resolved rather than concealed, and that it challenges received
ideas in social work/education, many of which are seen as rooted in the rapacious
benevolence of Victorian philanthropy. Other key questions addressed include how

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-37
 ‘Radical Social Work’ by Roy Bailey and Mike Brake 191
far the requirements for political organization and conscientization of the oppressed
can override the immediate need to ease the distress of one family or individual? In
addition to the editors, the contributors are impressive, all being stalwarts of social
work in the U.K. and elsewhere – Geoffrey Pearson, Peter Leonard, Stuart Rees,
Stanley Cohen, Don Milligan, Crescy Cannan and Marjorie Mayo. Specific topics
covered include homosexuality, welfare rights and community development, as well
as more general issues concerned with social work and the welfare state.
The editors’ introduction sets the scene by adopting a Marxist approach in their
analysis of the development of social welfare and social work. They emphasise the
need to understand social welfare history and the state itself, the latter intervening
in an attempt to solve problems intrinsic to capitalism, with both the problems and
the intervention being integral to the capitalist mode of production. As for the his-
torical development of social work, there are references to such matters as the eco-
nomic changes associated with the industrial revolution, the growth and fear of the
poor leading to the Charity Organization Society and poverty relief administrators
(the precursors of professional social workers). It is argued that individual aspects of
poverty causation were the focus rather than structural and economic factors; this
emphasis being ultimately associated with the development of Freudian-influenced
casework. This orientation continued as the welfare state was established after the
Second World War, culminating in the establishment of Social Services Departments
in 1971. Meanwhile, social work courses also focussed on casework, mostly in an
uncritical way with, for example, the ‘caring’ rather than the ‘controlling’ aspect
emphasised. Instead, the argument here and in ensuing chapters is for a radical social
work, one that considers and addresses the structural elements of poverty, depriva-
tion and injustice that function to maintain capitalism. All the ensuing chapters are
important, interesting and remain relevant today (see for example Lavalette, 2011).
For me three stand out.
First, Peter Leonard’s chapter outlines a radical praxis for social work by utilizing
Freire ‘s concept of conscientization, a form of liberating education which creates crit-
ical consciousness. He advocates an integrated model of practice based on a revised
systems theory (for example, Pincus and Minahan, 1973) which identifies four basic
systems with which social workers interact: change agent, client, target and action.
This schema widens the potential for social work activity linked with conscientiza-
tion, which is designed to develop praxis by critical reflection on reality and subse-
quent action upon it. Such critical consciousness develops from an acknowledgement
of the existing consciousness of the oppressed and from a mutual dialogue between
all those concerned with the task of liberation. In terms of radical practice, there
are four aims. First, education involves contributing to the development in people
of a critical consciousness of their oppression and of their potential, with others,
to combat it. Second, linking people with systems involves facilitating the connec-
tion between individuals and those systems which might serve their interests. Third,
building counter-systems involves facilitating linkages between people and various
informal and formal systems. And fourth, there must be individual and structural
responses to issues, this refers to responding to individual problems and difficulties
but also including activities designed to further the critical consciousness of the indi-
vidual concerned; it amounts to social workers working both within and against
the current capitalist system or, put another way, being in and against the state
(London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group 1980).
192 Steve Rogowski
Second, Stanley Cohen’s chapter highlights the importance of providing political
and sociological manifestos for social work action. He discusses the relationship
between sociology, particularly the sociology of deviance, and social work including
the oft quoted remark from practitioners when confronted by academics about their
work: it’s alright for you to talk. This refers to arguments about social work essen-
tially being about social control with practitioners merely being agents of the state
apparatus. More positively, deviancy theory and orthodox Marxism are offered as
ways forward. Regarding deviancy theory, and related interactionism and labelling
theory, there is a need not to label and thereby create and amplify deviant careers,
with radical non-intervention being the result (see for example Schur, 1973). As for
Marxism, rather than social control, practitioners should forge links with deviants
and seek to provide general support for working class struggle. Clients/service users
become political allies with the social worker being their defender, organiser and
information provider. This approach is linked to the notion of the ‘unfinished’ which
refers to practice being based on what does not yet exist i.e. fundamental societal
change. From all this, the key advice from Cohen is for radical practitioners to ‘Stay in
your agency..... Take every opportunity to unmask its pretentions and euphemisms.....
In practice and in theory stay ‘unfinished’. Don’t be afraid of working for short-term
humanitarian or libertarian goals, but always keep in mind the long-term political
prospects’ (p. 95). Like Leonard, being in and against the state is advocated.
The third chapter that particularly interested me was Marjorie Mayo’s on com-
munity development, an aspect of practice work which, in turn, was a key method
of social work in the U.K. - notably under the guise of community social work in
the 1980s. She outlines its history in the British Empire, notably in India and Africa,
in the U.S.A., particularly the ‘War on Poverty’ in the 1960s, and the Community
Development (CD) Programme in the U.K. Regarding the latter, twelve CD projects
were established in areas of multiple deprivation in 1969. They had a dual responsibil-
ity to both local people and the local authority, which led to various tensions and dif-
ficulties. Not least, their findings argued that multiple deprivation be re-defined and
reinterpreted in terms of structural constraints rather than psychological motivations,
so it is no surprise that they were wound up during the 1970s. Essentially, Mayo
argues that community development is not necessarily radical in that it can be used
to co-opt and repress rather than liberate or empower local groups and communities.
Nevertheless, it can have radical possibilities as these CD projects indicate. Impor-
tantly, although working with local people might not necessarily be ‘the spearhead of
the movement for fundamental change in the economic, social and political structure
of society [there are] fewer doubts about the potential contribution [this] can make to
the struggles around immediate needs’ (pp. 142–143).
One might ask what influence did ‘Radical Social Work’ have on my subsequent
social work career which involved mainly working with children and families across
five decades, mostly in Oldham, N. W. England? I have repeatedly dipped into the
book over the years and having read it again for this article, I was certainly struck
by how many of its ideas and arguments have guided my practice (see, for example,
Rogowski, 2013, 2016). This has included: establishing and working with claimants’
unions and representing people at tribunals; group work with single parents, parents
who had children on the child register/subject to child protection plans, young offend-
ers and their parents; and work with local communities on issues they felt needed
addressing. Then there has, of course, been the more usual casework approach to
practice with numerous individuals and families.
 ‘Radical Social Work’ by Roy Bailey and Mike Brake 193
[…]
Although group and community work strategies are now rarely used by social work-
ers in the U.K., politicisation and consciousness raising strategies can still be pursued,
albeit on an individual basis, by talking with clients/service users and others about the
societal, structural issues that lie at the root of their struggles and of social problems
in general. In short, ‘Radical Social Work’ certainly still retains its relevance.

References
Bailey, R. and Brake, M. (eds) (1975) Radical Social Work and Practice, London: Edward
Arnold.
Lavalette, M. (Ed. (2011) Radical social work today. Social work at the crossroads. Bristol:
Policy Press.
Pincus A. and Minahan A. (1973) Social Work Practice: Model and Method. Itasca, Illinois:
Peacock.
Rogowski, S. (2010) Social work. The rise and fall of a profession? Bristol: Policy Press.
Rogowski, S. (2013) Critical social work with children and families. Theory, context and
practice. Bristol: Policy Press.
Rogowski S. (2016) Social Work with Children and Families: Reflections of a Critical Practi-
tioner. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Further reading
Corrigan, P. and Leonard, P. (1978) Social work practice under capitalism: A Marxist
approach. London: Macmillan.
Cottam, H. (2018) Radical Help. London: Virago Press
Cree, V.E., Clapton, G. and Smith, M. (eds) (2015) Revisiting moral panics. Bristol: Policy
Press.
Ferguson, I. and Woodward, R. (2009) Radical social work in practice: Making a difference,
Bristol: Policy Press.
Gray, M. and Webb, S.A. (2009) ‘The return of the political in social work,’ International
Journal of Social Welfare 18: 111–15.
Healy, K. (2014) Social work theories in context: Creating frameworks for practice. Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jordan, B. and Parton, N. (eds) (1983) The political dimension of social work. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Langan, M. and Lee, P. (eds) (1989) Radical social work today, London: Unwin Hyman.
McLaughlin, K. (2008) Social Work, politics and society: From radicalism to orthodoxy.
Bristol: Policy Press.
Lishman, J. (2015) ‘Structural approaches to social work’, in J. Lishman (Ed.) Handbook for
practice learning in social work and social care: knowledge and theory. 3rd edition. Lon-
don: Jessica Kingsley, 50–60.
McCulloch, T. (2020) Co-producing desistance: The role of peer support. In Loeffler, E. &
Bovaird, T. (eds.) Palgrave Handbook on Co-production of Public Services and Outcomes.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 409–426.
Mullaly, B. (1997) Structural social work: Ideology, theory and practice. 2nd edition, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Rogowski, S. (2020) Social work. The rise and fall of a profession? 2nd edition. Bristol: Policy
Press.
Webb, S.A. (Ed.) (2019) Routledge handbook of critical social work. London: Routledge.
White, S., Fook, J. and Gardner, F. (eds) (2006) Critical reflection in health and social care.
Maidenhead: Open University Press.
31 The critical role of street level
bureaucrats
Michael Lipsky

The notion that social workers (alongside other public service employees) are best
understood as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ has been a familiar part of the social work
landscape since this book was published over 40 years ago. The concept is more
nuanced than it might seem. Lipsky argues that because public service workers are
under-resourced and the demand for their services vastly exceeds supply, they often
deal only with the ‘bureaucratically relevant’ aspects of the person they are working
with, in spite of their wish to treat citizens as ‘whole’ people. Yet in practice, they
exercise wide discretion and operate with relative autonomy. Lipsky therefore pro-
poses that practitioners must look to their own values and professionalism, not rely
on bureaucratic control of their practice. We can only agree. The selected passages
are from the beginning chapter, which explains what he means by the term ‘street-
level bureaucracy’ and why it matters.
From: Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services
(1980): Pages 3–5; 6–8 and 9–12.

Public service workers currently occupy a critical position in American society.

Although they are normally regarded as low-level employees, the actions of most
public service workers actually constitute the services “delivered” by government.
Moreover, when taken together the individual decisions of these workers become,
or add up to, agency policy. Whether government policy is to deliver “goods” - such
as welfare or public housing - or to confer status - such as “criminal” or “mentally
ill”- the discretionary actions of public employees are the benefits and sanctions of
government programs or determine access to government rights and benefits.
Most citizens encounter government (if they encounter it at all) not through letters
to congressmen or by attendance at school board meetings but through their teachers
and their children’s teachers and through the policeman on the corner or in the patrol
car. Each encounter of this kind represents an instance of policy delivery.
Public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs,
and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work are called street-
level bureaucrats in this study. Public service agencies that employ a significant num-
ber of street-level bureaucrats in proportion to their work force are called street-level
bureaucracies. Typical street-level bureaucrats are teachers, police officers and other
law enforcement personnel, social workers, judges, public lawyers and other court
officers, health workers, and many other public employees who grant access to govern-
ment programs and provide services within them. People who work in these jobs tend
to have much in common because they experience analytically similar work conditions.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-38
 The critical role of street level bureaucrats 195
The ways in which street-level bureaucrats deliver benefits and sanctions structure
and delimit people’s lives and opportunities. These ways orient and provide the social
(and political) contexts in which people act. Thus every extension of service benefits
is accompanied by an extension of state influence and control. As providers of public
benefits and keepers of public order, street-level bureaucrats are the focus of political
controversy. They are constantly torn by the demands of service recipients to improve
effectiveness and responsiveness and by the demands of citizen groups to improve the
efficacy and efficiency of government services. Since the salaries of street-level bureau-
crats comprise a significant proportion of nondefense governmental expenditures,
any doubts about the size of government budgets quickly translate into concerns for
the scope and content of these public services. Moreover, public service workers have
expanded and increasingly consolidated their collective strength so that in disputes
over the scope of public services they have become a substantial independent force in
the resolution of controversy affecting their status and position.
Street-level bureaucrats dominate political controversies over public services for
two general reasons. First, debates about the proper scope and focus of governmental
services are essentially debates over the scope and function of these public employ-
ees. Second, street-level bureaucrats have considerable impact on peoples’ lives. This
impact may be of several kinds. They socialize citizens to expectations of government
services and a place in the political community. They determine the eligibility of cit-
izens for government benefits and sanctions. They oversee the treatment (the service)
citizens receive in those programs. Thus, in a sense street-level bureaucrats implicitly
mediate aspects of the constitutional relationship of citizens to the state. In short, they
hold the keys to a dimension of citizenship.

Conflict over the scope and substance of public services

In the world of experience we perceive teachers, welfare workers, and police officers
as members of separately organized and motivated public agencies. And so they are
from many points of view. But if we divide public employees according to whether
they interact with citizens directly and have discretion over significant aspects of cit-
izens’ lives, we see that a high proportion and enormous number of public workers
share these job characteristics. They comprise a great portion of all public employees
working in domestic affairs.
Much of the growth in public employment in the past 25 years has occurred in the
ranks of street-level bureaucrats. From 1955 to 1975 government employment more
than doubled, largely because the baby boom of the postwar years and the growing
number of elderly, dependent citizens increased state and local activity in education,
health, and public welfare.
The poorer people are, the greater the influence street-level bureaucrats tend to
have over them. Indeed, these public workers are so situated that they may well be
taken to be part of the problem of being poor. Consider the welfare recipient who lives
in public housing and seeks the assistance of a legal services lawyer in order to rein-
state her son in school. He has been suspended because of frequent encounters with
the police. She is caught in a net of street-level bureaucrats with conflicting orienta-
tions toward her, all acting in what they call her “interest” and “the public interest.”
People who are not able to purchase services in the private sector must seek them
from government if they are to receive them at all. Indeed, it is taken as a sign of social
196 Michael Lipsky
progress that poor people are granted access to services if they are too poor to pay
for them. Thus, when social reformers seek to ameliorate the problems of the poor,
they often end up discussing the status of street-level bureaucrats. Welfare reformers
move to separate service provision from decisions about support payments, or they
design a negative income tax system that would eliminate social workers in allocat-
ing welfare. Problems of backlog in the courts are met with proposals to increase
the number of judges. Recognition that early-childhood development largely estab-
lishes the potential for later achievement results in the development of new programs
(such as Head Start) in and out of established institutions, to provide enriched early-
childhood experiences.
The growth of the service sector represents the furthest reaches of the welfare state.
The service sector penetrates every area of human needs as they are recognized and
defined, and it grows within each recognized area. This is not to say that the need is
met, but only that the service state breaches the barriers between public responsibility
and private affairs.

Conflict over interactions with citizens

A defining facet of the working environment of street-level bureaucrats is that they
must deal with clients’ personal reactions to their decisions, however they cope with
their implications. To say that people’s self-evaluation is affected by the actions of
street-level bureaucrats is to say that people are reactive to the policy. This is not
exclusively confined to subconscious processes. Clients of street-level bureaucracies
respond angrily to real or perceived injustices, develop strategies to ingratiate them-
selves with workers, act grateful and elated or sullen and passive in reaction to street-
level bureaucrats’ decisions. It is one thing to be treated neglectfully and routinely
by the telephone company, the motor vehicle bureau, or other government agencies
whose agents know nothing of the personal circumstances surrounding a· claim or
request. It is quite another thing to be shuffled, categorized, and treated “bureaucrati-
cally, “ (in the pejorative sense), by someone to whom one is directly talking and from
whom one expects at least an open and sympathetic hearing. In short, the reality of
the work of street-level bureaucrats could hardly be farther from the bureaucratic
ideal of impersonal detachment in decision making. On the contrary, in street-level
bureaucracies the objects of critical decisions – people - actually change as a result of
the decisions.
While people may experience these bureaucracies as individuals, schools, precinct
houses, or neighborhood clinics are places where policy about individuals is organ-
ized collectively. These administrative arrangements suggest to citizens the possibility
that controlling, or at least affecting, their structures will influence the quality of indi-
vidual treatment. Thus we have two preconditions for successful community organ-
ization efforts: the hope and plausibility that individual benefits may accrue to those
taking part in group action and a visible, accessible, and blamable collective target.
Community action focused on street-level bureaucracies is also apparently moti-
vated by concerns for community character. The dominant institutions in com-
munities help shape community identity. They may be responsive to the dominant
community group (this has been the traditional role of high schools in Boston) or they
may be unresponsive and opposed to conceptions of community and identity favored
by residents, as in the case of schools that neglect the Spanish heritage of a significant
 The critical role of street level bureaucrats 197
minority. Whether people are motivated by specific grievances or more diffuse con-
cerns that become directed at community institutions, their focus in protesting the
actions of street-level bureaucracies may be attributed to the familiarity of the agency,
its critical role in community welfare, and a perception at some level that these insti-
tutions are not sufficiently accountable to the people they serve.
Finally, street-level bureaucrats play a critical role in regulating the degree of con-
temporary conflict by virtue of their role as agents of social control. Citizens who
receive public benefits interact with public agents who require certain behaviors of
them. They must anticipate the requirements of these public agents and claimants
must tailor their actions and develop “suit-able” attitudes both toward the services
they receive and toward the street-level bureaucrats themselves. Teachers convey and
enforce expectations of proper attitudes toward schooling, self, and efficacy in other
interactions. Policemen convey expectations about public behavior and authority.
Social workers convey expectations about public benefits and the status of recipients.
The social control function of street-level bureaucrats requires comment in a dis-
cussion of the place of public service workers in the larger society. The public service
sector plays a critical part in softening the impact of the economic system on those
who are not its primary beneficiaries and inducing people to accept the neglect or
inadequacy of primary economic and social institutions. Police, courts, and prisons
obviously play such a role in processing the junkies, petty thieves, muggers, and oth-
ers whose behavior toward society is associated with their economic position. It is
a role equally played by schools in socializing the population to the economic order
and the likely opportunities for different strata of the population. Public support and
employment programs expand to ameliorate the impact of unemployment or reduce
the incidence of discontent; they contract when employment opportunities improve.
Moreover, they are designed and implemented to convey the message that welfare
status is to be avoided and that work, however poorly rewarded, is preferable to
public assistance. One can also see the two edges of public policy in the “war on
poverty” where the public benefits of social service and community action invested
neighborhood institutions with benefits for which potential dissidents could compete
and ordinary citizens could develop dependency.
What to some are the highest reaches of the welfare state are to others the furthest
extension of social control. Street-level bureaucrats are partly the focus of contro-
versy because they play this dual role. Welfare reform founders on disagreements
over whether to eliminate close scrutiny of welfare applications in order to reduce
administrative costs and harassment of recipients, or to increase the scrutiny in the
name of controlling abuses and preventing welfare recipients from taking advantage.
Juvenile corrections and mental health policy founder on disputes over the desirability
of dismantling large institutions in the name of cost effectiveness and rehabilitation,
or retaining close supervision in an effort to avoid the costs of letting unreconstructed
“deviants” loose. In short, street-level bureaucrats are also at the center of contro-
versy because a divided public perceives that social control in the name of public order
and acceptance of the status quo are social objectives with which proposals to reduce
the role of street-level bureaucrats (eliminating welfare checkups, reducing parole per-
sonnel, decriminalizing marijuana) would interfere.
From the citizen’s viewpoint, the roles of street-level bureaucrats are as extensive
as the functions of government and intensively experienced as daily routines require
them to interact with the street ministers of education, dispute settlement, and health
198 Michael Lipsky
services. Collectively, street-level bureaucrats absorb a high share of public resources
and become the focus of society’s hopes for a healthy balance between provision
of public services and a reasonable burden of public expenditures. As individuals,
street-level bureaucrats represent the hopes of citizens for fair and effective treatment
by government even as they are positioned to see clearly the limitations on effective
intervention and the constraints on responsiveness engendered by mass processing.

Further reading
Ellis, K. (2011) ‘“Street-level bureaucracy” revisited: the changing face of frontline discretion
in adult social care in England.’ Social Policy and Administration 45(3): 221–244.
Evans, T. and Harris, J. (2004) ‘Street-level bureaucracy, social work and the (exaggerated)
death of discretion.’ British Journal of Social Work 34: 871–895.
Evans, T. (2010) Professional discretion in welfare services: beyond street-level bureaucracy.
London: Routledge.
Hjorne, E., Juhila, K. and van Nijnatten, C. (2010) ‘Negotiating dilemmas in the practices of
street-level welfare work.’ International Journal of Social Welfare 19(3): 303–309.
Hupe, P. and Hill, M. (2007) ‘Street-level bureaucracy and public accountability’. Public
Administration 85(2): 279–299.
Lima-Silva, F., Sandim, T.L., Magri, G.M. and Lotta, G. (2020) ‘Street-level bureaucracy in the
pandemic: the perception of frontline social workers on policy implementation.’ Revisita de
Administração Pública 54 (5) Sep-Oct 2020. https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-761220200529x
32 Assessment in the twenty-first
century
Judith Milner, Steve Myers and Patrick O’Byrne

The following extract is from the first chapter in Judith Milner, Steve Myers and
Patrick O’Byrne’s revised book on assessment, in which they confront the situated,
conservative and professional-centric nature of assessment as it has been practised
in social work. They explore social work’s longstanding tendency to individualise
social problems, as well as the impacts of changing legal and policy contexts and
the rise of evidence-based practice as an apparent antidote to the complexities of
working with risk. Woven throughout the chapter (which we recommend reading in
full) are extensive examples to illustrate the assertions made. The authors conclude
by encouraging readers to embrace the uncertainties that are an inevitable part of
assessment. Whilst the focus of this chapter is assessment of people who use services,
we have included one suggested Further Reading that critically examines the assess-
ment of Black students in social work education.
From: Assessment in social work (5th edition) (2020), London: Macmillan, pp 1–18.

Our definition
Assessment in social work is a five-stage process of exploring a situation by:

1 Preparing for the task.

2 Collecting data, including perceptions of the service user, the family and
other agencies of the problem and any attempted solutions.
3 Applying professional knowledge (practice wisdom as well as theory) to
seek analysis, understanding or interpretation of the data.
4 Making judgements about the relationships, needs, risks, standard of care
or safety, seriousness of the situation, and people’s capacities and potential
for coping or for change (is the progress good enough?).
5 Deciding and/or recommending what is to be done, plus how, by whom and
when, and how progress will be reviewed.

[…] Described thus, it seems almost simple, but of course it is anything but in most
cases. Even the question of what data to collect, what is relevant, what is enough, and
so on, makes the very start of the process difficult and many of the frameworks that
have been written are little more than checklists […]

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-39
200 Judith Milner et al.
However, gathering information, sifting it carefully and coming to an ‘objective’
and ‘accurate’ conclusion are by no means […] unproblematic; assessment has never
been the scientific, easy-to-learn activity that many writers pretended. […]
Viewing assessment as unproblematic and unbiased in itself creates a gap between
theories of problem causation and intervention, a gap in which the service user is
often squeezed to fit the social worker’s ideas about the nature of people and how best
their problems could be addressed. This has been recognized for some time in social
work practice. Denney (1992), for example, found in his study of probation reports
that many of the assessments seemed to contradict the form of work being advocated.
The most commonly used interventions were largely individual rather than social […]
Why the preoccupation with individual casework? […] Given that resources avail-
able to social workers have always been restricted, it is not surprising that they have
been lured into locating the solution within the individual. There are several reasons
why social workers find a broad, social assessment particularly difficult to undertake
and present successfully to their managers.
Assessment of individual need is affected by expediency because there is pressure
on workers to construct their assessments so that they fit into existing resource pro-
vision. […] For example, Bebbington and Miles (1989) found that a combination of
poverty and lack of available social support led to children being accommodated;
Bilson et al. (2017) found that deprived families experience significant levels of child
protection investigations; and Bywaters et al. (2016) found that poor socio-economic
circumstances are a contributory causal factor of child abuse and neglect confirming
that ‘most people enter residential care because of the relationships they have, or do
not have, in their social circumstances and not just because of their individual char-
acteristics’ (Smale and Tuson, 1993, p. 26). […]
When one is faced with the miseries of poverty, inadequate housing and poor
employment conditions, it is easier to seek psychological explanations for events rather
than explore complex interactions between the social and psychological dimensions
of problems. The ‘psychologizing’ of social problems in this wat has been referred to
as ‘therapy to help you come to terms with your rats’ by practitioners who are only
too aware of the fate of an accurate assessment. Agency function rarely permits social
workers to address major problems rooted in social deprivation and, at the same time,
hold them responsible for attempting to operationalize a care plan that is not founded
on a realistic social assessment.
Equally damaging is sociological reductionism (attributing all social phenomena to
social structures alone), as a number of child deaths in families of different cultures
demonstrate (see the Climbié report as an example of these). Indeed, research shows
that a different approach to child protection assessments is taken depending upon
whether the subject of inquiry is a case of physical or sexual abuse – the former lead-
ing to focus on parents and the latter on children (Corby, 2000) […] Scourfield (2003)
looks at how working hypotheses are developed from feminist sociological research
into sexual violence, with men seen as a threat to children. He found that social work-
ers interpreted the research in a way that formed a rigid template for assessing safety:
sexual offenders were viewed as inherently recidivist and thus exempt from the funda-
mental tenet of social work: universal respect; thus, women who refuse to leave such
partners are constructed as failing to protect rather than as women in need. This dis-
torts the reality of sexual abuse for mothers, who typically vacillate between believing
their partner’s assertions of innocence and their children’s disclosures (Milner, 2004).
 Assessment in the twenty-first century 201
This does not necessarily mean that a mother is either in denial or failing to safeguard
her children […].
There remains a rightful place for psychological explanations in assessments; the
real issue is to remain cautious (Sutton, 2000) and avoid blaming or pathologizing
individuals by ascribing to them the cause of their difficulties that stem from injustice,
disadvantage and deprivation. Barber (1991) clearly argues that external difficulties
cause and interact with internal difficulties.
How does this happen? The ‘social’ frequently becomes ‘psychological’ and vice
versa; the disempowered develop ‘learned helplessness’, for example, and resource
improvement may not be a helpful solution on its own. Many service users either
‘lack the purchasing power to seek solutions to their problems or are constrained by
the courts to submit to social work’ (Barber, 1991, p. 29). Common to both instances
is a lack of control over some of the important events in their lives, and therefore a
‘psychology of empowerment’ is useful. Powerlessness generates despair, listlessness
and lethargy, people internalizing the views of oppressors, blaming themselves and
developing dysfunctional, self-defeating thought processes and behaviours so that, in
Freire’s (1972) terms, ‘the oppressor lives inside’.
[…]
Thus, service users’ potential and possible solutions are often ignored. This leads
to social workers clinging to their hypotheses and intervention in the face of consid-
erable failure. […]
While social workers remain within a problem-solving narrative which pays little
attention to the complexities of assessment, it is very difficult for them to make social
rather than individual assessments, as the former would highlight what is currently
well hidden; that is, the moral issues involved in making judgements about what is
and what is not desirable social behaviour. It is not surprising, therefore, that social
workers tend to drift towards psychological reductionism, to analyzing and working
on the individual service user. And this service user was for a long time most likely to
be a woman. […]

The changing legal context and its impact on practice

The sweeping reforms embodied in the welfare and education legislation enacted in
England in the early 1990s, with the emphasis on the family and its informal net-
works as an essentially private arena for the provision of care – a view of the family
as an independent economic unit, clarified the distinction between assessment and
intervention but added a new set of values for social workers. (The legislation var-
ied in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland […] see Cree and Myers, 2008.) These
included partnership, empowerment, multi- agency cooperation and value for money.
Assessment was separated from intervention, which became ‘care planning’, the for-
mer being focused on the identification of the objectives of care and the problems to
be tackled, and the latter being focused on the actual selection of appropriate means
to meet these needs.
However broadly welcome the new legislation was to social workers, it had two
major influences on assessment practices. First, by separating assessment from inter-
vention and social workers from much ‘hands-on’ intervention, it removed them from
the source of their practice theory. Second, it made their values explicit. It did not
increase resources, suggest new interventions or state how the people social workers
202 Judith Milner et al.
traditionally ‘individualized’ were to be increasingly valued by society. While pro-
viding much-needed definitions of assessment, the new legislation had the effect of
leaving social workers in a vacuum between the old and new styles of working and/
or encouraging a checklist mentality. However some of the blame lay with agency
management, whose role was to equip staff for change; the law itself cannot directly
govern practice. […]

Evidence-based practice
A further complication in assessment work is the growing trend to promote evi-
dence-based practice. While the definition of this is being widened to include not only
research but also government guidance, the work of theorists and other writers, and
practice wisdom and experience, there are two main strands to evidence-based prac-
tice; the first is research evidence into problem causality, evaluation for knowledge as
opposed to accountability […]. This ‘evidence’ influences the ‘facts’ selected during
the assessment process, determining whether the focus is on needs, risks, potential
or resources. For example, the evidence from attachment studies provides an expla-
nation for dysfunctional behaviour at any stage of the life span (for an overview, see
Howe, 1995) and is widely used in assessments, particularly in adoption, guiding
and informing a range of interventions aimed at fulfilling attachment needs. Other
evidence provides possible indications of increased risk, for example, the link between
early cruelty to animals and subsequent abusive behaviour in adulthood […]. In the
case of the former, biases necessarily creep in – mainly to do with neglecting the wider
social context of families as intrapersonal relationships are explored […]; in the latter,
a checklist mentality is encouraged – despite prediction checklists being shown to be
crude and unreliable measures of risk […] This denies the service user the possibility
of participating fully in an assessment. When given this opportunity, they often define
themselves differently
The second strand of evidence-based practice takes a more pragmatic view, being
concerned primarily with effective practice. Chapman and Hough (2001) see this
concern as arising partly from an increase in the probation service’s caseload which
coincided with pressures of cash limits and partly as a reverse of the ‘Nothing Works’
pendulum. Outcome research has indicated that some probation interventions were
more effective than others […] and this shifted the focus of assessment work away
from needs in favour of extensive assessments of risk of harm, offender motivation,
and the targeting of effectiveness-based work using specific models […]. Caution has
been expressed in social work that evidence-based practice can ignore the reflective,
interactive and creative process of the work, leading to formulaic interventions that
roll out the same approach to all those categorized as having the same problem. As
Plath (2013) notes, this privileging of approaches that lend themselves to easy meas-
urement does have the potential to reduce complexity and is of limited value, as many
situations

‘… require multifaceted responses for which standardized treatment evaluations

are generally inappropriate. The implementation of evidence- based practice in
social work entails more than replicating standardized interventions. It involves
a critically reflective decision- making process, informed by a range of relevant
research and other evidence.’ (p. 234)
 Assessment in the twenty-first century 203
[…] Paradoxically, the drive to deliver approaches supported by current evidence
may well exclude the introduction of approaches that have the potential to be more
effective. Lack of evidence for an intervention may be due not to its ineffectiveness
but rather to the lack of adequate resources available for the evaluation (research is
expensive and time-consuming), the limitations of the evaluation processes (research
is complex and fraught with methodological differences) or the difficulties of trying
to bring order to understanding the ‘messiness’ of people’s lives. […]

Handling information overload

Despite the growing volume of frameworks and checklists, for the busy social worker
trying desperately to keep up to date with all the new information contained in the
research literature and the procedures and responsibilities laid down in government
guidance, selecting what information is relevant to them remains the biggest problem
in assessing for a specific purpose (either risk or needs) and being fair. The social
work literature, research evidence and government guidance have been, and some-
times remain, vague about how this task is to be undertaken, yet they are central in
that the process controls the nature, direction and scope of social work intervention,
an intervention that may well affect a service user’s entire life.
It is rarely possible to have a single purpose when dealing with families in trouble.
Their real-life situations involve the assessing social worker in attempts to achieve a
satisfactory balance between diverse needs, recognized risks and restricted resource
provision or between considering whether some intervention should be attempted as
against the restraints of time. And there always exists the tendency to drift not only
towards psychological reductionism as a placebo solution to inadequate resources but
also towards risk assessments as a response to continuous public castigation of social
work efforts. Despite the principle that individuals should be allowed to assess the
risks to themselves, should an older person be found to have died alone at home, it is
likely that social work will be found culpable.
Whatever the difficulties with the effectiveness research, it has at least identified
the core skills of successful assessment work. These include being punctual, relia-
ble, courteous, friendly, honest and open […] Similarly, the DoH (1999) identified
listening, being non-judgemental, having a sense of humour, straight talking, and
being trustworthy as essential elements of good professional practice (3.40). This
brings assessment work back to basic social work principles and considerably clarifies
the task.
Being straightforward with people and embracing the complexities of their lives
actually help make sense of the sometimes competing requirements in assessment
activity. Despite their similarities, people are actually very different in how they deal
with their difficulties and so do not fit neatly into existing categories of service pro-
vision. Nor do they define themselves as carer or cared-for, or abused or abuser, or
competence or vulnerable. These categories are more blurred in the everyday realities
of their lives. Service users are capable of making assessments about their own needs
and risks and the resources they would find useful […] This is recognized in the
guidance on adult abuse (DoH, 2000b), […] reflecting what Lymbery (2001) refers
to as the breaking down of barriers between service users and social workers to cre-
ate a ‘new professionalism’ that encompasses values of empowerment, advocacy and
anti-oppressive practice as part of everyday social worker thinking. […]
204 Judith Milner et al.
As for uncertainty, we see it as a positive element. We invite social workers to resist
the pressure for certainty because uncertain is how things are. It is striving for certain
ground under our feet, not the uncertainty itself, that causes stress. […]

References
Barber, J. G. (1991) Beyond casework. London: Macmillan/BASW.
Bilson, A., Featherstone, B. and Martin, K. (2017) ‘How child protection’s ‘investigative turn’
impacts on poor and deprived communities.’ Family Law 47: 316–319.
Chapman, T. and Hough, M. (2001) Evidence based practice. A guide to effective practice.
London: H.O.I.P.
Corby, B. (2000) Child abuse. Towards a knowledge base. 2nd edition. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Cree, V.E. and Myers, S. (2008) Social work. Making a difference. Bristol: Policy Press.
Denney, D. (1992) Racism and anti-racism in probation. London: Routledge
Department of Health (1999) Me, survive, out there? New arrangements for young people
living in and leaving care. London: DoH.
Department of Health (2000b) No secrets. Guidance on developing and implementing mul-
ti-agency policies and procedures to protect vulnerable adults from abuse. London: DoH.
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Lymbery, M. (2001) ‘Social work at the crossroads.’ British Journal of Social Work 31: 369–84.
Masocha, S. (2015) ‘Reframing Black social work students’ experience of teaching and learn-
ing.’ Social Work Education 34(6): 636–649. DOI: 10.1080/02615479.2015.1046429.
Milner, J. (2004) ‘From “disappearing” to “demonized”: the effects on men and women of
professional interventions based on challenging men who are violent.’ Critical Social Policy
24: 79–101.
Plath, D. (2013) ‘Evidence-based practice’. In M. Gray and S. A. Webb (eds) Social work the-
ory and methods 2nd edition. London: Sage.
Scourfield, J. (2003) Gender and child protection. London: Red Globe Press.
Smale, G. and Tuson, G., with Brehal, N. and Marsh, P. (1993) Empowerment, assessment,
care management and the skilled worker. London: National Institute for Social Work.

Further reading
Barry, M. (2007) Effective approaches to risk assessment in social work: An international
literature review. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.
Mainstone, F. (2014) Mastering whole family assessment in social work: Balancing the needs
of children, adults and their families. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Navratil, P. (2019) ‘Epistemic discourses of “explanation” and “understanding” in assessment
models. In M. Payne and E. Reith-Hall, The Routledge handbook of social work theory
(pp.41–54). London: Routledge.
Williams, C. and Graham, M. (2016) Social Work in a diverse society. Transformative prac-
tice with black and minority ethnic individuals and communities. Bristol: Policy Press.
33 The significance of African-
centered social work for social
work practice
Tricia Bent-Goodley, Colita Nichols Fairfax
and Iris Carlton-LaNey

Aware that so much of the practice literature in social work has been written by older
white men, we have sought to include a chapter that explores the significance of the
contribution of African ideas to practice. The chosen extract introduces a journal
special issue, and readers are encouraged to follow up the other articles in the special
issue. We have also, however, opted to include much of the lengthy reference list, as
a way of documenting the sheer scale and range of writing on this hugely important,
and yet often neglected subject. Finally, our further reading documents some of the
most cited literature that has emanated from Black voices in the UK.
From Tricia Bent-Goodley, Colita Nichols Fairfax & Iris Carlton-LaNey (2017)
The significance of African-centered social work for social work practice, Jour-
nal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 27:1–2, 1–6, DOI: 10.1080/
10911359.2016.1273682

Afrocentricity is a concept that existed long before it was named and identified by
scholars. […] documenting, discussing, and advancing African-centered knowledge is
more about claiming what is known than about amassing new knowledge. As a viable
theory for social workers to use in practice, Afrocentricity utilizes African philoso-
phies, history, and culture as a starting place of interpreting social and psychological
phenomena to create relevant approaches of personal, family, and community healing
and societal change. […]

African-centered social work practice, education, and research

The Afrocentric paradigm provides an important organizing principle for social work
knowledge development on the individual, community, societal and global levels
(Schiele, 1996). While it speaks to the unique contributions, strengths and capacity of
African people throughout the Diaspora, it also highlights the importance of human-
ity (Bent-Goodley, 2005). It reminds social workers of the need to address the human
condition and to be committed to the development of people regardless of their race,
ethnicity, gender, social or geographical location (Harvell, 2010). In doing this, it pro-
vides a worldview that is inclusive of others while simultaneously highlighting what it
means to be a part of the African Diaspora.
[…] Key elements of African-centered thought include promoting the fundamental
goodness of people, recognizing the importance of family and community, encour-
aging individual and collective functioning, understanding the role and significance
of spirituality, and acknowledging the critical ways that people are interdependent
(Bent-Goodley, 2005; Schiele, 2013). These concrete notions of fortitude and linkages

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-40
206 Tricia Bent-Goodley et al.
encourage a sense of agency that can be interjected into practice, policy and research
and in different fields of practice (Borum, 2014; Byrdsong, Mitchell, & Yamatani,
2013; Schiele, 2010).
The African-centered practitioner understands how to utilize these ideas to inform
innovative practices and programs. These practitioners will create best practices that
highlight the significance and potential contribution of the individual, family, com-
munity and group unit (Bent-Goodley, 2014; Borum, 2007; Manning, Cornelius, &
Okundaye, 2004; Mickel, 2013, 2005; Moore, Madison-Colmore, & Moore, 2003;
Roberts, Jackson, & Carlton-LaNey, 2000; Stewart, 2004; Valandra, 2007; Wang,
Wong, Tran, Nyutu, & Spears, 2013). For example, in noting the important ways
that spirituality can be interwoven into the practice experience, the African-centered
practitioner will recognize spirituality as a protective factor and will understand
how to use spirituality as a tool for intervention, understanding, and relationship
building (Daniels, 2012; Edgell, 2007; Martin & Martin, 2002; Wheeler, Ampadu &
Wangarl, 2002).
The African-centered policy maker will understand that crafting policy is not just
an exercise, but that policy is an interdependent process. This statement means that
the African-centered policy-maker will understand that when one makes a policy
there is an interdependence - an intermingling - that takes place between peoples
regardless of whether or not it was specifically designed for that population (Stepteau-
Watson et al., 2014). In short, not only does policy matter, but it also impacts peo-
ple differentially. Policy then becomes an expression of values that are critical,
particularly to the individuals who develop, promote, and implement them (Everette &
Chipungu, 2004; Kumah-Abiwu, 2016; Schiele, 2010). Unintended consequences
must therefore be contemplated thoughtfully with an understanding of how they
affect people differently.
The African-centered researcher is committed to advancing research that pro-
motes the voice of its participants. It starts from the premise that people’s experi-
ences are unique and that their stories matter to knowledge generation. Consequently,
research is conducted that respects and honors the individual and community (Davis,
Williams, & Akinyela, 2010; Reviere, 2001; Zentella, 2015). The researcher sees her-
self or himself as interdependent with the community. The idea of conducting research
that is not community connected, informed and sanctioned defies African-centered
research. Moreover, the researcher has a responsibility to the community that lasts
well beyond the research concludes.
African-centered social work education is also critical for students to develop a critical
perspective. Students often leave their social work programs without having been
exposed to the important contributions of African American and Black social work
and social welfare pioneers (Pellebon, 2012). As a result, they are limited in their
knowledge of contributions made by persons from a different group which distorts
their reality and allows them to believe that seminal contributions to the profession
only came from those in the White community. It also diminishes awareness of diverse
ways of thinking about the profession and its role in responding to human and social
conditions. By exposing students to African-centered and Black Social Work, students
have an opportunity to learn diverse ways of thinking and identifying interventions
that could have relevance and applicability today. Subsequently, African-centered
social work practice, education, and research have important roles to play in solving
contemporary and historical problems.
 The significance of African-centered social work 207
Afrocentricity is not just a practice principle or idea, it is also a way of think-
ing, acting, and living to advance social justice and human rights (Bent-Goodley,
2009; Dyson & Smith Brice, 2016; Hopkins, 2013). It can inform various relation-
ships with diverse communities, and can create space for important dialogues to
take place that start with respect and a genuine commitment to build understand-
ing and create bridges between groups. It is important to remember that African-
centered social work has not been created in response to any other form of practice.
Instead, African-centered social work has been ever present in the experience of
African people across the Diaspora. It is only recently that the profession has told
that story.

References
Bent-Goodley, T. B. (2005). An African centered approach to domestic violence. Fami-
lies in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 86, 197–206. doi:10.1606/
1044–3894.2455
Bent-Goodley, T. B. (2009). A Black experience-based approach to gender-based violence.
Social Work, 54, 262–269. doi:10.1093/sw/54.3.262
Bent-Goodley, T. B. (2014). In circle: A healthy relationship, domestic violence and HIV Pre-
vention intervention for African American couples. Journal of Human Behavior and the
Social Environment, 24, 105–114. doi:10.1080/10911359.2014.848675
Borum, V. (2007). Why we can’t wait! An Afrocentric approach in working with African
American families. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 15, 117–135.
doi:10.1300/J137v15n02_08
Borum, V. (2014). African Americans’ perceived sociocultural determinants of suicide: Afro-
centric implications for public health inequalities. Social Work in Public Health, 29, 656–
670. doi:10.1080/19371918.2013.776339
Byrdsong, T. R., Mitchell, A. B., & Yamatani, H. (2013). Afrocentric intervention paradigm:
An overview of successful application by a grassroots organization. Journal of Human
Behavior in the Social Environment, 23, 931–937. doi:10.1080/10911359.2013.831298
Daniels, T. L. (2012). Decision making in Eurocentric and Afrocentric organizations. Journal
of Black Studies, 43, 327–335. doi:10.1177/0021934711424492
Davis, S. K., Williams, A. D., & Akinyela, M. (2010). An Afrocentric approach to build-
ing cultural relevance in social work research. Journal of Black Studies, 41, 338–350.
doi:10.1177/0021934709343950
Dyson, Y. D., & Smith Brice, T. (2016). Embracing the village and tribe: Critical thinking for
social workers from an African-centered approach. Journal of Social Work Education, 52,
108–117.
Edgell, M. S. (2007). Afrocentric Christian worldview and student spiritual development:
Tapping a global stream of knowledge. International Journal of Christianity & Education,
11, 49–62. doi:10.1177/205699710701100106
Everett, J. E., & Chipungu, S. S. (Eds.). (2004). Child welfare revisited: An Africentric per-
spective. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press.
Harvell, V. G. (2010). Afrocentric humanism and African American women’s’ humanizing
activities. Journal of Black Studies, 40, 1052–1074. doi:10.1177/0021934708325380
Hopkins, R. (2013). African cultural consciousness and African-centered historiography as
preconditions for Wilson’s new world order. Journal of Pan African Studies, 6, 2–3.
Kumah-Abiwu, F. (2016). Beyond intellectual construct to policy ideas: The case of the Afro-
centric paradigm. Journal of Pan African Studies, 9, 167–187.
Manning, M. C., Cornelius, L. I., & Okundaye, J. N. (2004). Empowering African Americans
through social work practice: Integrating an Afrocentric perspective, ego psychology and
208 Tricia Bent-Goodley et al.
spirituality. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 85, 229–
235. doi:10.1606/1044–3894.325
Martin, E.P. & Martin, J.M. (2002). Spirituality and the black helping tradition in social
work. Washington D.C.: NASW Press.
Mickel, E. (2005). African centered family therapy in transition: Healing cycle as an answer to
terrorism. International Journal of Reality Therapy, 24, 33–37.
Mickel, E. (2013). African-centered reality therapy parenting: An alternative paradigm. Jour-
nal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 23, 278–286. doi:10.1080/10911359.
2012.747347
Moore, S. E., Madison-Colmore, O., & Moore, J. L. (2003). An Afrocentric approach to
substance abuse treatment with adolescent African American males: Two case examples.
Western Journal of Black Studies, 27, 219–230.
Pellebon, D. (2012). Is Afrocentricity marginalized in social work education? A survey of
HBSE instructors. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 22, 1–19. doi:
10.1080/10911359.2011.588573
Reviere, R. (2001). Toward an Afrocentric research methodology. Journal of Black Studies,
31, 709–728. doi:10.1177/002193470103100601
Roberts, A., Jackson, M. S., & Carlton-LaNey, I. (2000). Revisiting the need for feminism and
Afrocentric theory when treating African-American female substance abusers. Journal of
Drug Issues, 30, 901–917. doi:10.1177/002204260003000413
Schiele, J. H. (1996). Afrocentricity: An emerging paradigm in social work practice. Social
Work, 41, 284–294.
Schiele, J. H. (Ed.). (2010). Social welfare policy: Regulation and resistance among people of
color. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Schiele, J. H. (2013). Human services and the Afrocentric paradigm. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Stepteau-Watson, D., Watson, J., & Lawrence, S. K. (2014). Young African American males
in reentry: An Afrocentric cultural approach. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social
Environment, 24, 658–665. doi:10.1080/10911359.2014.922801
Stewart, P. E. (2004). Afrocentric approaches to working with African American families. Fam-
ilies in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 85, 221–228. doi:10.1606/
1044–3894.326
Valandra, V. (2007). Reclaiming their lives and breaking free: An Afrocentric approach to
recovery from prostitution. Affilia, 22, 195–208. doi:10.1177/0886109907299052
Wang, M., Wong, Y., Tran, K. K., Nyutu, P. N., & Spears, A. (2013). Reasons for living, social
support, and Afrocentric worldview: Assessing buffering factors related to black Americans’
suicidal behavior. Archives of Suicide Research, 17, 136–147. doi:10.1080/13811118.2013.
776454
Wheeler, E. A., Ampadu, L. M., & Wangari, E. (2002). Lifespan development revisited:
­A frican-centered spirituality throughout the life cycle. Journal of Adult Development, 9,
71–78. doi:10.1023/A:1013881302284
Zentella, Y. (2015). African centered research methodologies: From ancient times to the pres-
ent. Journal of Third World Studies, 32, 325–327.

Further reading
Bernard, C. and Harris, P. (eds) (2016) Safeguarding black children: good practice in child
protection. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Bernard, C. and Harris, P. (2019) Serious case reviews. The lived experience of black children.
Child & family social work 24(2): 256–263.
Graham, M. J. (1999) The African-centered worldview. Journal of Black Studies, 30, 103.
doi:10.1177/002193479903000106
 The significance of African-centered social work 209
Graham, M. (2002) Social work and African-centred worldviews. Birmingham: Venture
Press.
Graham, M. (2002) Creating spaces: exploring the role of cultural knowledge as a source of
empowerment in models of social welfare in black communities. British Journal of Social
Work 32(1): 35–49.
Graham, M. (2007) Black issues in social work and social care. Bristol: Policy Press.
Robinson, L. (2009) Psychology for social workers. Black perspectives on human develop-
ment and behaviour. London: Routledge.
Robinson, L. (1998) ‘Race’, communication and the caring professions. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Williams, C. and Johnson, M.R.D. (2010) Race and ethnicity in a welfare society. Berkshire:
McGraw-Hill, Open University.
Williams, C. and Graham, M. (2014) ‘A world on the move’: Migration, mobilities and social
work. British Journal of Social Work 44(1): i1-i17.
Williams, C. and Graham, M.J. (2016) Social work in a diverse society. Transformative prac-
tice with black and minority ethnic individuals and communities. Bristol: Bristol University
Press.
34 Bridging past and present to the
future of crisis intervention and
crisis management
Kenneth R. Yeager and Albert R. Roberts

‘Crisis intervention’ has all but disappeared from recent social work theory text-
books, and yet its ideas are central to current approaches, including, for example,
solution-focused brief therapy (see Milner and Myers, 2017; Shennan, 2019). ‘Crisis
intervention’ offers a way of responding to people whose normal coping mechanisms
have broken down; Albert R. Roberts (1944–2008) has been one of its foremost
champions. Like task-centred practice, it is a problem-solving approach, drawing on
the early work of Helen Perlman (1957). Both task-centred and crisis intervention
theories argue that it is better to work with people who are in trouble in a short-
term, focused way, rather than offering open-ended, longer-term support, which, it
is argued, may lead to dependency. The selected extract gives no attention to issues
of ‘race’, but ‘crisis’ is a term that is frequently applied to the experience of Black
people, as the Further Reading explores.
From: Crisis Intervention Handbook: Assessment, Treatment, and Research, edited
by Kenneth Yeager and Albert Roberts, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015):
12–15 and 19–25.

Crisis Reactions and Crisis Intervention

A crisis can be defined as a period of psychological disequilibrium, experienced as
a result of a hazardous event or situation that constitutes a significant problem that
cannot be remedied by using familiar coping strategies. A crisis occurs when a person
faces an obstacle to important life goals that generally seems insurmountable through
the use of customary habits and coping patterns. The goal of crisis intervention is
to resolve the most pressing problem within a 1- to 12-week period using focused
and directed interventions aimed at helping the client develop new adaptive coping
methods.
Crisis reaction refers to the acute stage, which usually occurs soon after the haz-
ardous event (e.g., sexual assault, battering, suicide attempt). During this phase, the
person’s acute reaction may take various forms, including helplessness, confusion,
anxiety, shock, disbelief, and anger. Low self-esteem and serious depression are often
produced by the crisis state. The person in crisis may appear to be incoherent, dis-
organized, agitated, and volatile or calm, subdued, withdrawn, and apathetic. It is
during this period that the individual is often most willing to seek help, and crisis
intervention is usually more effective at this time (Golan, 1978).
Crisis intervention can provide a challenge, an opportunity, and a turning point
within the individual’s life. According to Roberts and Dziegielewski (1995), crisis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-41
 Bridging past and present to future of crisis intervention and management 211
clinicians have been encouraged to examine psychological and situational crises in
terms of “both danger and opportunity” (p.16). The aftermath of a crisis episode
can result in either a highly positive or a highly negative change. Immediate and
structured crisis intervention guided by Roberts’s seven-stage model facilitates crisis
resolution, cognitive mastery, and personal growth, rather than psychological harm.
A divorce, a robbery, a broken engagement, being the victim of a domestic assault,
and being the close relative of a person killed in an automobile accident or a plane
crash are all highly stressful occurrences that can result in an active crisis state. The
persons involved may exhibit denial, intense anxiety, and confusion; they may express
anger and fear, or grief and loss, but they can all survive. Crisis intervention can
reduce immediate danger and fear, as well as provide support, hope, and alternative
ways of coping and growing.
Persons in acute crisis have had similar reactions to traumatic events, from initial
feelings of disruption and disorganization to the eventual readjustment of the self.
During the impact phase, survivors of victimization and other crisis-producing events
often feel numb, disoriented, shattered, fearful, vulnerable, helpless, and lonely. The
survivors may seek help, consolation, and advice from friends or professionals within
several hours or days after the traumatic or stressful life event.
Helping a person in crisis - in the aftermath of a violent crime, a suicide attempt,
a drug overdose, a life-threatening illness, a natural disaster, a divorce, a broken
romance, or an automobile crash - requires exceptional sensitivity, active listening
skills, and empathy on the part of the crisis intervenor. If a hot-line worker, crisis
counselor, social worker, or psychologist is able to establish rapport with the person
in crisis soon after the acute crisis episode, many hours of later treatment may be
averted (Cutler, Yeager, & Nunley, 2013).

Defining a Crisis and Crisis Concepts

Crisis may be viewed in various ways, but most definitions emphasize that it can be
a turning point in a person’s life. According to Bard and Ellison (1974), crisis is “a
subjective reaction to a stressful life experience, one so affecting the stability of the
individual that the ability to cope or function may be seriously compromised” (p. 68).
It has been established that a crisis can develop when an event, or a series of events,
takes place in a person’s life and the result is a hazardous situation. However, it is
important to note that the crisis is not the situation itself (e.g., being victimized);
rather, it is the person’s perception of and response to the situation (Parad, 1971,
p. 197).
The most important precipitant of a crisis is a stressful or hazardous event. But two
other conditions are also necessary to have a crisis state: (a) the individual’s percep-
tion that the stressful event will lead to considerable upset and/or disruption; and (b)
the individual’s inability to resolve the disruption by previously used coping methods
(Cutler, Yeager, & Nunley, 2013).
Crisis intervention refers to a therapist entering into the life situation of an indi-
vidual or family to alleviate the impact of a crisis to help mobilize the resources
of those directly affected (Parad, 1965). In conceptualizing crisis theory, Parad and
Caplan (1960) examine the fact that “crises have a peak or sudden turning point”;
as the individual reaches this peak, tension increases and stimulates the mobilization
of previously hidden strengths and capacities. They urge timely intervention to help
212 Kenneth R. Yeager and Albert R. Roberts
individuals cope successfully with a crisis situation. Caplan (1961) states that “a rel-
atively minor force, acting for a relatively short time, can switch the balance to one
side or another, to the side of mental health or the side of mental ill health” (p. 293).
There is a general consensus among clinical social workers, counselors, psycholo-
gists, and emergency services workers that the following characterize a person in
crisis:

1 Perceiving a precipitating event as being meaningful and threatening

2 Appearing unable to modify or lessen the impact of stressful events with tradi-
tional coping methods
3 Experiencing increased fear, tension, and/or confusion
4 Exhibiting a high level of subjective discomfort
5 Proceeding rapidly to an active state of crisis—a state of disequilibrium

The term crisis as it has been described here is applicable to most of the clients of
the social workers, psychologists, emergency service workers, disaster mental health
workers, and professional counselors who prepared chapters for this handbook. The
definition of a crisis stated previously is particularly applicable to persons in acute
crisis because these individuals usually seek help only after they have experienced a
hazardous event and are in a vulnerable state, have failed to cope and lessen the crisis
through customary coping methods, and want outside help. […]

Basic Tenets of Crisis Theory

As mentioned earlier, a crisis state is a temporary upset, accompanied by some con-
fusion and disorganization, and characterized by a person’s inability to cope with a
specific situation through the use of traditional problem-solving methods. According
to Naomi Golan (1978), the heart of crisis theory and practice rests in a series of basic
statements:

Crisis situations can occur episodically during “the normal life span of individ-
uals, families, groups, communities and nations”. They are often initiated by a
hazardous event. This may be a catastrophic event or a series of successive stress-
ful blows which rapidly build up a cumulative effect.
The impact of the hazardous event disturbs the individual’s homeostatic bal-
ance and puts him in a vulnerable state...
If the problem continues and cannot be resolved, avoided, or redefined, tension
rises to a peak, and a precipitating factor can bring about a turning point, during
which self-righting devices no longer operate and the individual enters a state of
a disequilibrium... (an) active crisis. (p. 8)

Duration of the Crisis

Persons cannot remain indefinitely in a state of psychological turmoil and survive.
Caplan (1964) noted, and other clinical supervisors have concurred, that in a typical
crisis state equilibrium will be restored in 4 to 6 weeks. However, the designation
of 4 to 6 weeks has been confusing. Several authors note that crisis resolution can
take from several weeks to several months. To clarify the confusion concerning this
 Bridging past and present to future of crisis intervention and management 213
period, it is useful to explain the difference between restoring equilibrium and crisis
resolution.
Disequilibrium, which is characterized by confusing emotions, somatic complaints,
and erratic behavior, is reduced considerably within the first 6 weeks of crisis inter-
vention. The severe emotional discomfort experienced by the person in crisis propels
him or her toward action that will result in reducing the subjective discomfort. Thus,
equilibrium is restored, and the disorganization is time limited.
[…] crisis intervention is viewed as the process of working through the crisis event
so that the person is assisted in exploring the traumatic experience and his or her
reaction to it. Emphasis is also placed on helping the individual do the following:

Make behavioral changes and interpersonal adjustments.

Mobilize internal and external resources and supports.
Reduce unpleasant or disturbing affects related to the crisis.
Integrate the event and its aftermath into the individual’s other life experiences
and markers.

The goal of effective crisis resolution is to remove vulnerabilities from the individual’s
past and bolster him or her with an increased repertoire of new coping skills to serve
as a buffer against similar stressful situations in the future. [...]

Crisis Intervention Models and Strategies

Several systematic practice models and techniques have been developed for crisis
intervention work. The crisis intervention model applied in this book builds on and
synthesizes those developed by Caplan (1964), Golan (1978), Parad (1965), Roberts
(1991, 1998), and Roberts and Dziegielewski (1995). All of these practice models and
techniques focus on resolving immediate problems and emotional conflicts through
a minimum number of contacts. Crisis-oriented treatment is time limited and goal
directed, in contrast to long-term psychotherapy, which can take several years to
complete.
Crisis intervenors should “adopt a role which is active and directive without taking
problem ownership” away from the individual in crisis pre-maturely (Fairchild, 1986,
p. 6). The skilled crisis intervenor displays acceptance and hopefulness in order to
communicate to persons in crisis that their intense emotional turmoil and threatening
situations are not hopeless and that, in fact, they (like others in similar situations
before them) will survive the crisis successfully and become better prepared for poten-
tially hazardous life events in the future (Roberts & Yeager, 2009, pp. 40–47).
In order to become an effective crisis intervenor, it is important to gauge the stages
and completeness of the intervention. The following seven-stage paradigm should be
viewed as a guide, not as a rigid process, because with some clients the stages may
overlap.
Roberts’s (1991) seven-stage model of crisis intervention has been utilized for help-
ing persons in acute psychological crisis, acute situational crises, and acute stress
disorders. The seven stages are as follows:

1 Plan and conduct a thorough assessment (including lethality, dangerousness to

self or others, and immediate psychosocial needs).
214 Kenneth R. Yeager and Albert R. Roberts
2 Make psychological contact, establish rapport, and rapidly establish the relation-
ship (conveying genuine respect for the client, acceptance, reassurance, and a
nonjudgmental attitude).
3 Examine the dimensions of the problem in order to define it (including the last
straw or precipitating event).
4 Encourage an exploration of feelings and emotions.
5 Generate, explore, and assess past coping attempts.
6 Restore cognitive functioning through implementation of action plan.
7 Follow up and leave the door open for booster sessions 3 and/or 6 months later.

1 Plan and conduct a thorough psychosocial and lethality assessment. In many cases,
Stages 1 and 2 occur at the same time. However, first and foremost, basic information
needs to be obtained to determine whether the caller is in imminent danger. […]
2 Make psychological contact and rapidly establish the relationship. This second
stage involves the initial contact between the crisis intervenor and the potential client.
The main task for the clinician at this point is to establish rapport by conveying gen-
uine respect for and acceptance of the client. […]
3 Examine the dimensions of the problem in order to define it. It is useful to try to
identify the following: (a) the “last straw,” or the precipitating event that led the client
to seek help; (b) previous coping methods; and (c) dangerousness or lethality. Crisis
counselors should explore these dimensions through specific open-ended questions.
The focus must be on now and how rather than on then and why. For example, key
questions would be: “What situation or event led you to seek help at this time?” and
“When did this event take place?”
4 Encourage an exploration of feelings and emotions. This step is closely related to
examining and defining the dimensions of the problem, particularly the precipitating
event. […] The primary technique for identifying a client’s feelings and emotions is
through active listening. This involves the crisis intervenor listening in an empathic
and supportive way to both the client’s reflection of what happened and how the client
feels about the crisis event.
5 Explore and assess past coping attempts. Most youths and adults have devel-
oped several coping mechanisms—some adaptive, some less adaptive, and some
­inadequate—as responses to the crisis event. Basically, an emotionally hazardous
event becomes an emotional crisis when the “usual homeostatic, direct problem-­
solving mechanisms do not work” (Caplan, 1964, p. 39). Thus, attempts to cope fail.
One of the major foci of crisis intervention involves identifying and modifying the
client’s coping behaviors at both the preconscious and the conscious level. […] Specif-
ically, it is useful to ask the client how certain situations are handled, such as feelings
of intense anger, loss of a loved one (a child or spouse), disappointment, or failure.
Solution-based therapy should be integrated into crisis intervention at this stage. […]
Integrating strengths and solution-focused approaches involves jogging clients’ mem-
ories so they recall the last time everything seemed to be going well, and they were in
a good mood rather than depressed and/or successfully dealt with a previous crisis in
their lives. […] It is important to help the client to generate and explore alternatives
and previously untried coping methods or partial solutions. If possible, this involves
collaboration between the client and the crisis intervenor to generate alternatives. It is
 Bridging past and present to future of crisis intervention and management 215
also important at this stage to explore the consequences and the client’s feelings about
each alternative.
6 Restore cognitive functioning through implementation of an action plan. […]
The crisis clinician who uses a cognitive approach helps the client focus on why a spe-
cific event leads to a crisis state (e.g., it violates a person’s expectancies) and, simulta-
neously, what the client can do to effectively master the experience and be able to cope
with similar events should they occur in the future. Cognitive mastery involves three
phases. First, the client needs to obtain a realistic understanding of what happened
and what led to the crisis. […]. Second, it is useful for the client to understand the
event’s specific meaning: how it conflicts with his or her expectations, life goals, and
belief system. […] The third and final part of cognitive mastery involves restructur-
ing, rebuilding, or replacing irrational beliefs and erroneous cognitions with rational
beliefs and new cognitions. This may involve providing new information through
cognitive restructuring, homework assignments, or referral to others who have lived
through and mastered a similar crisis […]
7 Follow-up. At the final session the client should be told that if at any time he or
she needs to come back for another session, the door will be open and the clinician
will be available.

References
Cutler, D. L., Yeager, K. R., & Nunley, W. (2013) ‘Crisis intervention and support’. In
K. R. Yeager, D. L. Cutler, D. Svendsen and G. M. Sills (eds) Modern community mental
health: An interdisciplinary approach (pp. 243–255). New York: Oxford University Press.
Golan, N. (1978) Treatment in crisis situations. New York: Free Press.
Milner, J. and Myers, J.S. (2017) Using solution focused practice with adults in health and
social care. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Parad, H. J. (1965) Crisis intervention: Selected readings. New York: Family Service Associ-
ation of America.
Perlman, H.H. (1957) Social casework. A problem solving process. Chicago Il: University of
Chicago Press.
Roberts, A. R. (1991)’ Conceptualizing crisis theory and the crisis intervention model.’ In
A. R. Roberts (ed.) Contemporary perspectives on crisis intervention and prevention
(pp. 3–17). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Roberts, A. R. & Dziegielewski, S. F. (1995) ‘Foundation skills and applications of crisis inter-
vention and cognitive therapy.’ In A. R. Roberts (Ed.) Crisis intervention and time-limited
cognitive treatment (pp. 3–27). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Shennan, G. (2019) Solution-focused practice in social work. In M. Payne and E. Reith-Hall
(eds) The Routledge handbook of social work theory. London: Routledge: 224–235.

Further reading
Cornelius, L.J., Simpson, G.M., Ting, L., Wiggins, E. and Lipford, S. (2003) ‘Reach out and
I’ll be there: Mental health crisis intervention and mobile outreach services to urban African
Americans.’ Health & Social Work 28(1): 74–78.
Gingerich, W. J. and Peterson, L.T. (2013) ‘Effectiveness of solution-focused brief therapy:
a systematic qualitative review of controlled outcome studies.’ Research on Social Work
Practice 23(3): 266–283.
216 Kenneth R. Yeager and Albert R. Roberts
Jeraj, S., Shoham, T. and Islam-Barrett, F. (2015) Mental health crisis review – experiences of
black and minority ethnic communities. London: Race Equality Foundation. Available at:
https://www.basw.co.uk/system/files/resources/basw_112248-9_0.pdf/ Accessed 21 Octo-
ber 2021.
Jordan, A., Allsop, S. and Collins, P.Y. (2021) ‘Decriminalising being Black with mental
illness.’ The Lancet. Psychiatry 8(1): 8–9. DOI: 10.1016/S2215–0366(20)30519-8.
Marsh, P. and Doel, M. (2005) The Task-centred book. London: Routledge.
O’Hagan, K. (1986) Crisis intervention in social services. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Reid, W.J. and Epstein, I. (1972) Task centred casework. New York: Columbia University
Press.
35 The contemporary context of
relationship-based practice
Gillian Ruch

It is easy to take relationship-based practice for granted. After all, isn’t it something
that we all do, or at least, all aspire to do? It is so often said to be ‘at the heart of
practice’ (as the title of this book demonstrates) that we might ask why do we need
to give it any additional attention? And yet, as all social work practitioners know, it
has become increasingly difficult to make it a reality in recent years, in a world dom-
inated by case-management, by IT and computers-systems, and as social workers
struggle to work in ways they feel are authentic and aligned to their personal and
professional values and to the promise of relational practice. Additionally, it would
also be naïve not to acknowledge the ever-present power imbalance between service
users and social workers, which inevitably impacts on the kind and quality of rela-
tionships that result, as explored in the Further Reading.
From: Relationship-based social work: getting to the heart of practice (2018)
2nd edition, edited by Gillian Ruch, Danielle Turney and Adrian Ward. London: Jes-
sica Kingsley, pp.25–35.

A relationship-based model of social work practice

Relationship-based practice is not a new phenomenon and the mode we are propos-
ing draws partly upon the psychoanalytic influences informing child care and mental
health social work from the 1940s onwards and the psychosocial model associated
with Hollis (1964). Key features of these earlier models include:

• recognition that past experiences affect current attitudes and behaviour

• understanding that we do not always consciously realise how our experiences
affect our behaviour
• realisation that professional relationships and the feelings they evoke can be asso-
ciated with other, often unconnected and not always conscious, earlier experi-
ences (Stevenson 2005, p.xi).

We consider that these ideas still have resonance and see them as important features
of the model, but in developing a more inclusive theoretical approach, psychoanalytic
perspectives are complemented by ideas rooted in systems theory and attachment the-
ory. This theoretical framework concurs with McCluskey and Hooper’s (2000, p.9)
definition of psychodynamic thinking as:

an approach informed by attachment theory, psychoanalysis and systems theory,

which together offer ways of understanding the complexity and variability of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-42
218 Gillian Ruch
ways in which individuals develop and relate to one another within particular
social contexts, via a focus on their past and present relationships.

In adopting an inclusive theoretical stance, the model reflects the opening up and
‘cross fertilisation of ideas, research findings and the testing out of ways to apply this
growing understanding [of psychodynamic thought] to practice across the range of
caring professions’ (Brearley 2007, p.87). Burke and Cooper (2007, p.194) similarly
underline the importance of social work approaches embracing diverse perspectives
and specifically highlight the creative potential of systemic and psychoanalytic ideas:

Social work is the ideal terrain on which to create a dialogue between systemic
and psychoanalytic approaches. It has always been a pioneering profession in
attempting to bridge the gap in the theorising of the connection between the per-
sonal and the social. It is in social work practice that ideas are applied of how the
wider societal context shapes subjectivity and personal relationships. If neither
psychoanalytic nor systemic ideas are disqualified in the process of attempting to
create a dialogue, nor banal similarities drawn, our thinking should be enriched.

Alongside this shift to a more theoretically inclusive approach, the model has sought
to respond to a key criticism levied at earlier models of relationship-based practice:
that they had a tendency to pathologise service users, to individualise problems and
to position the professional as ‘expert’. Some of the more radical or overtly politi-
cal critiques of a narrowly defined psychodynamic approach focused on the lack of
acknowledgement of the broader social/economic/political context within which lives
are lived and an underestimation of the impact on individuals of structural problems
such as poverty, racism and homophobia.
These criticisms of relationship-based approaches in the 1980s were important to
acknowledge, and they changed the terms of some of the discussions about the role
and meaning of the professional relationship. However, an undesirable consequence
was a significant shift towards predominantly socially orientated practice which paid
insufficient attention to the psychological dimensions of people’s lives. Such exagger-
ated swings in professional emphasis are not uncommon in response to external fac-
tors, but they are invariably unhelpful because they do not acknowledge the critical
balance of psychological and social perspectives that social work endeavours to hold
in tension and which distinguishes its activities from other professional groups. The
model we are proposing seeks to redress these polarised positions. Developments in
relation to anti-oppressive practice, understandings of power in professional relation-
ships and the importance of working in ways that utilise service users’ knowledge,
and facilitate partnership and collaboration, are recognised as integral components of
relationship-based practice and of respectful and empowering relationships.
From this inclusive perspective, the model proposed is characterised by the follow-
ing key understandings of social work practice:

• Human behaviours and the professional relationship are an integral component

of any professional intervention.
• Human behaviour is complex and multi-faceted. People are not simply rational
beings but have affective (both conscious and unconscious) dimensions that
enrich but simultaneously complicate human relationships.
 The contemporary context of relationship-based practice 219
• The internal and external worlds of individuals are inseparable, so integrated
(psychosocial), as opposed to one-dimensional, responses to social problems are
crucial for social work practice.
• Each social work encounter is unique, and attention must be paid to the specific
circumstances of each individual.
• A collaborative relationship is the means through which interventions are chan-
nelled, and this requires a particular emphasis to be placed on the ‘use of self ’.
• The respect for individuals embedded in relationship-based practice involves
practising in inclusive and empowering ways.

The model proposed seeks to offer a joined-up way of thinking about relation-
ships that acknowledges the visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious com-
ponents that comprise all relationships, and recognises the important connections
between the intrapsychic, interpersonal and broader social contexts in which they are
embedded. It aims to help practitioners engage in meaningful practice which makes
sense of the uniqueness of individuals’ experience and behaviours. In so doing, the
focus of interactions is not simply on their content but is also on the process and
dynamics involved. Importantly, it recognises that both practitioner and service user
bring a range of experiences and emotional responses into the encounter and that each
participant’s understanding of themselves and the ‘other’ will have a bearing on the
relationship and its meaning (Turney 2012). This allows practitioners to keep in touch
with both their thoughts and feelings about the relationship and to be alert to not only
the cognitive but also the affective responses which inform how the uniqueness, risk
and uncertainty that characterise all social work relationships are addressed.
Attention to depth, as opposed to surface understandings is of importance given
the widespread recognition that shortcomings in practice have been attributed to
practitioners not engaging effectively with service users. This emphasis on the word
‘effectively’ highlights how it is not simply a question of engagement but the quality
of the engagement that matters. Following the death in 2000 of Victoria Climbié,
Cooper (2005, p.8) commented on how difficult it is for professionals who encounter
unimaginable aspects of human behaviour and their tendency to see, but not see,
and to ‘turn a blind eye’. Similar dynamics can be identified in relation to the death
of Peter Connelly, initially reported in the media as Baby Peter in London, in 2007,
who, despite ‘being seen’ on 60 separate occasions by a range of health and social care
professionals at home and in professional settings, was not removed from his abusive
carers. Practitioners using relationship-based approaches should be able to develop
what Ferguson (2005, p.791) refers to as ‘deep’ relationships and to move beyond
surface understandings and interactions. In placing the relationship at the heart of
social work practice, the model focuses on the relationship as the vehicle through
which interventions are mediated, as well as potentially being of intrinsic value as an
intervention in its own right.
It is not enough, however, to propose a model for relationship-based practice with-
out attending to some of the obstacles to its effective implementation. Paradoxically,
it is precisely because of these obstacles that there is the need for such a model to
become more widely established in practice. The challenge to relationship-based ways
of working arises from the contemporary social and political context in which prac-
tice is located, and it is this wider context that has in recent decades inhibited its
development. […]
220 Gillian Ruch
Reconfiguring the service user and practitioner
One way of understanding and conceptualising the shift towards marketised and
managerialist practices in the social work profession is as a defence against the anxie-
ties inherent in the nature of the work being undertaken. From this perspective, with
its over-reliance on bureaucratic interpretations of practice, the increasingly imper-
sonal nature of the social work relationship protects practitioners and managers from
the emotionally demanding and distressing dimensions of individuals’ circumstances.
The risk of adopting such a stance, however, is considerable as it may impair profes-
sional judgements and decision-making by constricting the professional relationship
and reducing the amount and type of knowledge that is drawn on to inform critical
decisions. Up-to-date computer records do not equate to good practice, yet the fear
expressed by social workers (Ferguson 2005), if they fail to comply with the adminis-
trative demands of their work, can directly impact on their involvement with service
users. Under such pressure, the professional relationship is at serious risk of being
compromised.
In his exploration of the nature of contemporary social work practice, Ferguson
(2005) highlights how the managerialist culture has impacted on how service users
are understood and related to. The ‘sanitisation’ of social work practice and the fear
of acting oppressively have resulted in tendencies within social work to avoid engag-
ing with the distasteful and difficult aspects of practice (Ferguson 2005). Such con-
strained forms of engagement are inevitably ineffective as they fail to address the
core issues under the guise of wanting to sustain a ‘professional’ relationship and be
non-discriminatory. Avoiding addressing, for example, the personal hygiene issues
associated with a service user, or challenging an individual’s aggressive and threaten-
ing behaviours towards professionals, can potentially have the opposite effect and be
oppressive on the grounds of failing to engage with the whole person and establish
a meaningful and honest relationship. Being anti-oppressive as a practitioner does
not mean abandoning professional value positions but requires these positions to be
negotiated through the medium of honest and meaningful relationships that address
the more challenging aspects of an individual’s life. […]
For relationship-based practice to take hold, there needs to be a significant shift in
how individuals are perceived. The realisation that people are not simply commodities
within a market system, or objects that can be reduced to a computer record, but are
unique individuals with complex intersubjective experiences needs to be reclaimed.
Recognition of the inability of computerised systems to capture the complexity of
human lives is beginning to be accepted (Pithouse et al. 2009; Parton 2008) and there
is evidence, at least within academic circles, of a shift from the ‘electronic turn’ in
social work practice (Garrett 2005) to a ‘relational turn’. An important feature of this
reconfiguring of individuals from rational to relational beings is the acknowledge-
ment that this reconfiguration needs to embrace professionals as well as service users.
The reduction of practitioners to care managers and commissioners denies the
emotional dimensions of their professional experiences and relationships and over-
looks the necessary resources they need to undertake their work effectively. Recon-
ceptualising the practitioner means acknowledging their emotional responses and the
emotional impact of practice on them. The anxieties that arise from the complexity,
ambiguity and uncertainty of contemporary practice need containing, not only for
service users but also for practitioners.
 The contemporary context of relationship-based practice 221
Offering such containment is not an easy task. The paucity of attention given, until
quite recently, to relationship-based practice in social work settings can be understood
in part as a result of the dominant market and bureaucratic forces shaping models
of practice. It can equally be understood in terms of the operation of defence mecha-
nisms. Relationship-based practice requires practitioners, managers and policymak-
ers to engage with the messy realities of practice. Avoidance and denial are common
responses which enable individuals and organisations to defend against troubling and
unacceptable aspects of experience. Any attempts to reorientate social work practice
to a more relationship-based position risks provoking defensive responses. In advocat-
ing a shift in emphasis in practice from managerialist to relational approaches, with
less emphasis on procedures and legalistic responses and more on uniqueness and rela-
tionships, professionals are forced into less familiar territory and required to confront
aspects of practice which up until now they may have avoided. Given this situation,
to realise widespread acceptance of relationship-based approaches to practice at all
levels within organisations – policymaking, management, practice – requires sensitive
handling. The work of Menzies-Lyth (1988) on the social systems that organisations
develop to defend against anxiety (…) is very pertinent for social work settings and
for understanding the resistance that can arise to embedding ­relationship-based prac-
tice within the organisation.

Dealing with defences

Awareness of these defensive dynamics underlines the importance of identifying and
providing the necessary support structures that will enable practitioners and managers
to sustain relationship-based approaches (…). In contrast to current permutations of
practice which rely heavily on technical-rational, prescriptive and bureaucratic inter-
ventions, relationship-based approaches require practitioners to rely more heavily on
their practical/moral knowledge base, grounded in their intersubjective experiences.
As a consequence, it is essential that appropriate sources of support are provided that
will enable practitioners to make sense of their experience. It is almost impossible to
overestimate the demands of relationship-based practice. To engage meaningfully,
responsibly and effectively in relationship-based practice requires practitioners to be
theoretically informed and equipped with practice skills that can recognise, tolerate
and make sense of the complexities and ambiguities of human experience.

Conclusion
Since the inception of social work, the importance attributed to the relational aspects
of social work practice has varied in response to sociopolitical forces and theoretical
trends. Developments over the past two decades have pushed the relational aspects of
practice to the margins, although there are now grounds for optimism. The limita-
tions of practice that fails to embrace sufficiently the role of the professional relation-
ship are beginning to be recognised and responded to. It is never helpful, however,
to polarise issues, and building new approaches to relationship-based ways of prac-
tising should not preclude the potentially positive contributions that management
systems and bureaucratic procedures can make. Crucial to the effectiveness of such
integrated relationship-based approaches is the recognition of the human dimension
of social work’s primary task. There is an urgent need for practitioners, managers and
222 Gillian Ruch
policymakers to be both intellectually and practically equipped with the knowledge,
skills and values required to realise this task […]

References
Brearley, J. (2007) A psychodynamic approach to social work. In J. Lishman (ed.) Handbook
for practice learning in social work and social care. Knowledge and theory. London: Jessica
Kingsley Publishers.
Burke, C. and Cooper, A. (2007) ‘Dialogues and developments in social work practice. Apply-
ing systemic and psychoanalytic ideas in real world contexts.’ Journal of Social Work Prac-
tice 21(2); 193–196.
Cooper, A. (2005) ‘Surface and depth in the Victoria Climbie inquiry report. ‘Child and Fam-
ily Social Work 10(1): 1–11.
Ferguson, H. (2005) ‘Working with violence, the emotions and the psycho-social dynamics of
child protection. Reflections on the Victoria Climbie case.’ Social Work Education 24(7):
781–795.
Garrett, P. (2005) ‘Social work’s “electronic turn”: Notes on the deployment of information
and communication technologies in social work with children and families.’ Critical Social
Policy 24(4): 529–553.
Hollis, F. (1964) Casework. A psychosocial therapy. New York: Random House.
McClusky, U. and Hooper, C.A. (2000) Psychodynamic perspectives on abuse: the cost of
fear. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Menzies-Lyth, I. (1988) Containing anxiety in institutions: Selected essays Volume One.
London: Free Association Books.
Stevenson, O. (2005) ‘Foreword.’ In M. Bower (ed.) Psychoanalytic theory for social work
practice: Thinking under fire. London: Routledge.
Turney, D. (2012) ‘A relationship-based approach to engaging involuntary clients: the contri-
bution of recognition theory.’ Child & Family Social Work. 17(2): 149–159.

Further reading
Beresford P., Croft, S. and Adshead, L. (2008) ‘We don’t see her as a social worker’: a service
user case study of the importance of the social worker’s relationship and humanity’. British
Journal of Social Work, 38: 1388–1407.
Ingram, R. and Smith, M. (2018) Relationship-based practice: emergent themes in social work
literature. Iriss Insight 41. Glasgow: Iriss Available at: https://www.iriss.org.uk/resources/
insights/relationship-based-practice-emergent-themes-social-work-literature/ Accessed 28
June 2021.
Ride, J. (2009) Being white in the helping professions. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Ruch, G., Winter, K., Morrison, F., Hadfield, M., Hallett, S. and Cree, V.E. (2020) ‘From
communication to co-operation: Re-conceptualising social workers’ engagement with chil-
dren.’ Child & Family Social Work 25(2): 430–438. DOI: 10.1111/cfs.12699.
Smith, R. (2010) ‘Social work, risk, power.’ Sociological Research Online 15(1): 4. DOI:10.5153/
sro.2101.
36 The ecological systems metaphor in
Australasia
Kieran O’Donoghue and Jane Maidment

We have chosen to retain this chapter from the first edition of the Reader because
it usefully brings together two approaches with distinct histories and backgrounds
(ecological and systems approaches), while at the same time giving respectful atten-
tion to the need to address indigenous ideas and experience. In the extract, Kieran
O’Donoghue and Jane Maidment, both social work academics in New Zealand,
discuss the pros and cons of using an ecological system approach in practice in
Australasia.
From: M. Nash, R. Munford and K. O’Donoghue (eds) Social work theories in
action, London: Jessica Kingsley (2005) pp.39–45.

Key ecological systems concepts

Ecological concepts
Ecology is described as concerned with the interrelationship and adaptation of organ-
isms with each other and with their surroundings, be they organic or inorganic
(Mattaini and Meyer 2002; Ungar 2002). Central to this interrelationship and adap-
tation is the concept of level of fit, which concerns the degree of balance and rec-
iprocity between the person’s needs, capacities and aspirations and the resources
and expectations accessible and available in their environment (Gitterman 1996a).
According to Gitterman (1996b), when the degree of balance and reciprocity between
these two aspects is positive, the level of fit achieves the condition of adaptedness, in
which the exchanges or interactions between them is likely to facilitate the actualiza-
tion of both human and environmental development. However, when the personal
and environmental exchanges are not positive they are described as dysfunctional and
have the potential to inhibit, frustrate, damage and oppress both human and environ-
mental potential (Gitterman 1996b). When people perceive an imbalance between the
demands of their environment and their ability to mobilize resources to manage such
demands, the result is stress. According to Gitterman (1996b, p.391), stress can only
be relieved by improving: a) the level of person and environment fit through change in
the person’s perception or behaviour, or b) the environment’s response to the person,
or c) the quality of exchanges between both person and environment.
The second key ecological concept is that of the environment. The environment
is a multidimensional entity, which contains physical, social and cultural aspects
(Germain 1979; Kemp et al. 1997). It contains dynamic and interactive features that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-43
224 Kieran O’Donoghue and Jane Maidment
are mediated through place, time and space, as well as human beings’ perceptions,
structures, relationships and meaning-making activities. According to Kemp et al.
(1997, p.85), the levels of the environment include the following:

the perceived environment, that is, the environment as constructed in individual and
collective systems of meaning and belief
the physical environment, both natural and built
the social/interactional environment, comprised largely of human relationships at
various levels of intimacy, and including family, group and neighbourhood net-
works and collectivities
the institutional and organizational environment
the cultural and socio-political environment.

The ecological concepts of habitat and niche are important terms for understanding
the impact of the environment on people. A person’s habitat is the location where a
person is found and will involve all of the levels of the environment described above,
but particularized to their locale. A person’s niche, on the other hand, involves the
person’s place and status within the habitat.
According to Rapp (1998), a niche can be either entrapping or enabling. An entrap-
ping niche is one in which people are marginalized, with minimal available resources
or support and little prospect of social mobility and/ or belonging. An enabling niche
is the opposite of an entrapping niche and is one that provides resources and support
that enable social mobility, social belonging and social connectivity (Rapp 1998).

Systems concepts
As mentioned above, the systems concepts of reciprocal influence, circular causality,
structure and unpredictability will be briefly outlined in this section. The first con-
cept, reciprocal influence, refers to the idea that all parts of a system share an influ-
ence upon each other. A fairly common example of reciprocal influence comes to our
attention when people leave a system. The second concept is circular causality, which
sees an effect or outcome influencing its own cause (Ridley 2003). This differs from
linear causality in which an effect or outcome is caused by something specific.
Structure is our third key concept and involves the system’s patterns of organiza-
tion, which guide and maintain its functioning. Within each system there are subsys-
tems, and every individual system is also part of a bigger system or suprasystem (Agass
and Preston-Shoot 1990). Individual systems and subsystems are differentiated by
boundaries, non-physical dividers that separate one system from another. Boundaries
vary in type and in the amount of information they receive and transmit. Generally,
problems occur in systems when the boundaries are either too open or too closed and
the structure is either too rigid or too flexible (Rothery 2001).
Unpredictability is our fourth key systems theory concept and this is based upon
the circular and reciprocal nature of systems in which everything effects everything
else in a system. The terms equifinality and multifinality describe the nature of this
unpredictability well. Equifinality means that similar or the same ends are achieved
from different starting points, whereas multifinality means that similar or the same
starting points result in multiple and differing outcomes. What these terms and the
concept of unpredictability reveal is that the system’s response to the social worker’s
 The ecological systems metaphor in Australasia 225
intervention influences the outcome, and because of the complex nature of systems
and (human persons) they do not act predictably (Rothery 2001).

The ecomap
The ecomap, developed by Hartman (1978), is the most commonly used and long-
standing visual tool used by social workers to find their way through the complexity
of person and environment information. It is a diagrammatic illustration of where
the client locates him - or herself in relation to the surrounding systems, and shows
the nature of those relationships using a legend of symbols denoting differing types
of connections between the systems. Drawing an ecomap can be a useful way for the
practitioner and client together to gain an appreciation of where the major stressors
and supports exist in the client’s life. It is possible to condense a great range of complex
information succinctly in diagrammatic form. In this way, developing an ecomap can
be used as part of the assessment process, to be referred back to over time, reviewed,
and used as a means for evaluating ongoing relationships, social supports, stressors,
and changes in the level of fit between the client and their environment. Once clients
have become accustomed to illustrating relationships using ecomaps, it is not uncom-
mon for them to invent their own signs, images and symbols to describe these, which
serves further to personalize and enrich the depth of information conveyed in these
diagrams. Figure 23.1 shows an eco-map for the brief case study outlined below.
Matt (19) comes to the community mental health team for assessment, having been
referred by his GP. In the referral letter, the GP notes that Matt has just recently
returned to live with his parents after breaking up with his girlfriend, Sue (17).
Together, Matt and Sue have a daughter, Zoe, who is just a few months old.
Near the end of the first discussion with Matt, the practitioner begins to draw
an ecomap of people and institutions that currently impact on Matt’s life (see
Figure 23.1). In the centre of the ecomap is a small genogram of Matt’s immediate
family. Both of Matt’s parents, Carl and Joan, work in paid employment. Carl enjoys
his work and does not see himself retiring for some time. Joan works ‘on call’ at a
hospital canteen, work she has done for a long time. She does not particularly enjoy
the job, but continues to help ‘save for retirement’. Joan’s mother, Ida, has moderate
dementia, and although she still lives at home, needs a lot of input from Joan and
community services. Both Joan and Carl have a strong work ethic and are displeased
that Matt has just lost his job due to a prank at work that compromised health and
safety regulations. Matt has broken up with his partner, Sue, during the last month.
He has a poor relationship with Sue’s parents, and now has infrequent contact with
his daughter, Zoe.
Both Matt and Sue have had conflicted contact with Centrelink (Work and Income
[WINZ] or Social Security Department), with disputes over benefit eligibility. They
have also had some difficult contact with the Department of Human Services (Depart-
ment of Child, Youth and Family or Department of Child Protective Services) when
a neighbour reported a dispute at their flat shortly after the birth of Zoe. During
this contact, the worker from the Department organized for Zoe to attend day care
a couple of times a week. Sue has now established some good links with the staff at
the centre.
From the discussion and development of the ecomap with Matt it becomes clear
that his only really supportive and positive relationships at the moment are connected
226 Kieran O’Donoghue and Jane Maidment

Work

Domiciliary health
Music band care services

Ida
79
Tom
(2000) 80
Centrelink,
Carl Joan WINZ
60 55

Matt Sue School

17 Caroline
19 16

Zoe
Sue’s family & mths
of origin

Legend Department of
human services
Tentative

Strong Day care

center
Deceased

Figure 36.1 Ecomap of Matt’s current life.

with the band he plays in on Friday and Saturday nights. He feels his parents favour
his sister, whom he describes as ‘goody two-shoes’ and who excels at school work. He
misses Sue and Zoe, has a sense of failure about losing his job, is angry with his father
for ‘going on’ about work, and has little to do with his mother who is juggling the care
of Ida (her mother) with her own part-time work. The ecomap provides Matt and the
social worker with some clues about where to begin with intervention.

Critique of ecological systems approach

The following section provides a critique of an ecological systems approach contex-
tualized within an Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australian locale. This critique will
pay particular attention to a range of defining features that greatly influence the per-
son-in-environment transactions, some of which these two countries share, and oth-
ers that are unique to each country.

Mixed perceptions of an ecosystemic paradigm

One of the major strengths of using an ecological systems perspective to understand
client issues is that it incorporates an analysis of both formal and informal networks
around the client, including relationships with individuals, groups, family, commu-
nity and the environment as a whole. In this way, it is a perspective that can help the
worker and client gain an appreciation of the multiple factors that contribute to or
 The ecological systems metaphor in Australasia 227
inhibit client wellbeing. The examination of boundaries between the client system
and others enables a fluid interpretation in terms of what constitutes healthy relation-
ships and boundary setting within differing cultural contexts.
On a more contentious note, the degree to which an ecological systems approach
does or does not acknowledge the notions of power, oppression and marginalization
is the subject of enduring debate (Ungar 2002; Greif 2003). Since both Australia and
New Zealand share a history punctuated by indigenous dispossession and alienation
from the land, compromised indigenous human rights, and poor statistics for well-
being amongst indigenous populations, questions of authority and self-determination
are important. Early users of systems theory focused on the notions of relationship,
‘good­ness of fit’ and successful adaptation of the individual within the environment
(Ungar 2002). These early interpretations of systems and an ecological perspective
have been criticised for being dominated by a narrow focus on psycho-social impera-
tives. However, more recent applications of these ideas have emphasized the integral
connectedness between client spirituality and notions of wellbeing, acknowledging
eco­nomic and political determinants (Anglem and Maidment 2004). In this way,
emerging models of practice derived from an ecological systems analysis overtly
recognize the unique and differing cultural interpretations of how the person-in-
environment transactions might justifiably occur.
Further evidence of this evolving politicization of ecological systems analysis can
be found in literature in which the notion of ‘environment’ is redefined in ways that
explicitly acknowledge the social, political and economic determinants of powerless­
ness in individual daily living arrangements and institutional structures (Chung and
Pardeck 1997). Thus, while the perspective can be interpreted as being apolitical,
in that it does not specifically promote a particular ideological position to address
structural change, it includes a framework that can be used to identify where change
processes at micro, meso and macro levels of intervention need to occur.
For indigenous populations in both countries the relationship with the natural
environment is powerfully linked to questions of personal identity, spiritual strength
and ongoing survival (Hunter 2000; Patterson 1999; Ruwhiu 2001). An ecological
systems understanding of functioning, which integrates environmental perspectives,
is therefore particularly relevant for work with these populations. Nevertheless, it is
an approach that has also been criticized as being hard to test empirically, and overly
inclusive (Payne 1997; Wakefield 1996a, 1996b). Both of these ‘limitations’, however,
come from a non-indigenous position. This position privileges positivist inquiry, fails
to acknowledge the importance of broad kinship networks, and overlooks the integral
relationship indigenous populations have with the land and other natural habitats
such as flora, fauna and the waterways.
The ecological systems framework has been further criticized for providing no guid-
ance to practitioners in terms of suggesting what methods to use, or when and how to
intervene with the client-system (Mancoske, cited in Payne 1998; Wakefield 1996a).
This is a fair criticism, as it is not a prescriptive model of practice, and as such does
not provide a concise ‘recipe’ for client intervention in the way that task­centred social
work or brief solution-focused therapy does so well. Nevertheless, it is a perspective
that can be used by practitioners and clients to analyze and under­stand the complex
network of relationships and systems that influence the client’s world. In this way, the
framework provides the means to trace and map the major sources of client tension
228 Kieran O’Donoghue and Jane Maidment
and support, using visual cues such as the ecomap. This process promotes joint client
and worker understanding of the issues at hand, and assists with the engagement and
rapport building so necessary in the initial stages of contact.
One of the more unique features of an ecological systems perspective is that it can
illustrate and take account of the non linear passage of time and interactions between
different parts of the system in a way that other perspectives do not. This is particu-
larly important in relation to working with indigenous communities, where temporal
considerations cannot be limited to a linear understanding based on the notion of
cause and effect. In the Dreaming, ‘from any particular point in time, the past may
be the future and the future may be the present. Time does not extend back through
a series of pasts’ (Hume 2003, p.38).
As outlined above, an ecological systems approach to working with clients has both
its strengths and weaknesses. In selecting what theoretical principles to use to guide
practice, the important considerations for the worker must centre on how the client
might best be able to move forward in a positive direction, the nature of the present-
ing issues, and what framework might address these in the most constructive way.
An ecological systems analysis can be used on its own, or in conjunction with other
perspectives to inform this process.

References
Agass, D. and Preston-Shoot, M. (1990) ‘Defining the theory: A systems approach, ‘ In
D. Agass and M. Preston-Shoot (eds) Making sense of social work, London: Macmillan.
Anglem, J. and Maidment, J. (2004) ‘Introduction to assessment’, in J. Maidment and R. Egan
(eds) Practice skills in social work and welfare. Sydney: Allen & Un win.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The ecology of human development experiments by nature and
design, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chung, W.S. and Pardeck, J.T. (1997) ‘Treating powerless minorities though an ecosystem
approach’, Adolescence, 32 (127): 625–34.
Germain, C. (1979) ‘Introduction: Ecology and social work’, in C. Germain (ed.) Social work
practice: people and environments, New York: Columbia University Press.
Gitterman, A. (1996a) ‘Ecological perspective: Response to Jerry Wakefield’, Social Service
Review, 70 (3): 472–6.
Gitterman, A. (1996b) Life model theory and social work treatment’. In F. Turner (Ed.) Social
work treatment, 4th edition, New York: Free Press.
Greif, G. (2003) ‘In response to Michael Ungar’s “A deeper, more social, ecological social
work practice” debate with authors’, Social Service Review 77 (2): 306--11.
Hartman, A. (1978) ‘Diagrammatic assessment of family relationships’, Social Casework 59:
465–76.
Hume, L. (2003) Ancestral power: The dreaming, consciousness and Aboriginal Australians.
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Hunter, B. (2000) ‘Looking after country - the ACF indigenous program takes shape’, Habitat
Australia, 28: 4, 23.
Kemp, S., Whittaker, J. and Tracy, E. (1997) Person-environment practice: the social ecology
of interpersonal helping, New York: Adeline de Gruyter.
Mancoske, R. (1981) ‘Sociological perspectives on the ecological model’, Journal of Sociology
and Social Welfare, 8 (4): 710–32, cited in Payne, M. (1998) Modern Social Work Theory,
3rd edition, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 158–9.
 The ecological systems metaphor in Australasia 229
Mattaini, M. and Meyer, C. (2002) ‘The ecosystems perspective: Implications for practice’,
in M. Mattaini, C. Lowery and C. Meyer (eds) The foundations of social work practice,
3rd edition, Washington, DC: NASW Press.
Patterson, J. (1999) ‘Respecting nature: The Maori way.’ The Ecologist, 29 (I); 33–9.
Payne, M. (1997) Modern Social Work Theory, 2nd edition, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Pincus, A. and Minahan, A. (1973) Social Work Practice: Model and Method, Itasca, IL:
F.E. Peacock.
Rapp, C. (1998) The strengths model: Case management with people suffering from severe and
persistent mental lllness, New York: Oxford University Press.
Ridley, M. (2003) Nature via nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human, London:
Fourth Estate.
Rothery, M. (2001) ‘Ecological systems theory’, in P. Lehmann and N. Coady (eds) Theoret-
ical perspectives for direct social work practice: a generalist-eclectic approach, New York:
Springer Publishing.
Ruwhiu, L. (2001) ‘Bicultural issues in Aotearoa/New Zealand’. In M. Connolly (Ed.) New
Zealand Social Work, Auckland: Oxford University Press.
Ungar, M. (2002) ‘A deeper, more social, ecological social work practice’, Social Service
Review, 76 (3): 480–97.
Wakefield, J. (1996a) ‘Does social work need the eco-systems perspective? Part 1. Is the per-
spective clinically useful?’, Social Service Review 10 (1): 1–32.
Wakefield, J. (1996b) ‘Does social work need the eco-systems perspective? Part 2. Does the
perspective save social work from incoherence?’, Social Service Review 10 (2): 182–213.

Further reading
Angell, B. (2019) ‘Indigenous people and communities: a critical theory perspective.’ In
S.A. Webb (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of critical social work. London: Routledge:
171–181.
Bartoli, A. (2013) Anti-racism in social work practice. London: Critical Publishing.
Hart, M.A. (2019) ‘Indigenist social work practice.’ In M. Payne and E. Reith-Hall (eds) The
Routledge Handbook of social work theory. London: Routledge: 268–281.
Jack, G. (2000) ‘Ecological influences on parenting and child development’, British Journal of
Social Work, 30 (6): 703–20.
Pardeck, J.T. (1996) Social work practice: an ecological approach. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing.
Ungar, M. (2002) ‘A deeper, more social ecological social work practice.’ Social Service Review
76(3): 480–497.
37 The strengths perspective in social
work practice
Extensions and cautions
Dennis Saleebey

Over the last 30 years or so, the strengths perspective has been fundamental in helping
to develop a social work practice that is both person-centred and empowering; one
of its key proponents throughout this time has been Dennis Saleebey (1936–2014).
In this article, Saleebey sets out the main characteristics of the strengths perspec-
tive. He also, however, takes on its critics – those who suggest that strengths-based
approaches offer too rosy a view of human nature, or that it is too simplistic in its
assumptions about the essential good in people. Our chosen extract focuses not on
the critics, but on the detailed introduction that Saleebey offers of this life-affirming,
positive and ultimately optimistic approach to the task of social work.
From: Social Work 41(3) (1996) pp.297–304.

Elements of the Strengths Perspective

The strengths perspective demands a different way of looking at individuals, families,
and communities. All must be seen in the light of their capacities, talents, competen-
cies, possibilities, visions, values, and hopes, however dashed and distorted these may
have become through circumstance, oppression, and trauma. The strengths approach
requires an accounting of what people know and what they can do, however inchoate
that may sometimes seem. It requires composing a roster of resources existing within
and around the individual, family, or community. It takes courage and diligence on
the part of social workers to regard professional work through this different lens.
Such a “re-vision” demands that they suspend initial disbelief in clients. Too often
practitioners are unprepared to hear and believe what clients tell them, what their
particular stories might be (Lee, 1994), especially if they have engaged in abusive,
destructive, addictive, or immoral behavior. It is also important in rediscovering the
wholeness of clients to recognize that the system—the bureaucracies and organiza-
tions of helping—is often diametrically opposed to a strengths orientation. In both
formal and informal venues and structures, policies, and programs, the preferred lan-
guage replaces the clients’ own lexicon with the vocabulary of problem and disease.
Finally, the professional language and the metaphorical devices social workers use to
understand and help sometimes subvert the possibility of understanding clients in the
light of their capacities. Pursuing a practice based on the ideas of resilience, rebound,
possibility, and transformation is difficult because, oddly enough, it is not natural to
the world of helping and service. Table 37.1 contrasts the strengths approach with
conventional pathology-based approaches.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-44
 The strengths perspective in social work practice 231
Table 37.1 Comparison of Pathology and Strengths

Pathology Strengths

Person is defined as a “case”; symptoms add Person is defined as unique; traits, talents,
up to a diagnosis. resources add up to strengths.
Therapy is problem focused. Therapy is possibility focused.
Personal accounts aid in the evocation of a Personal accounts are the essential route to
diagnosis through reinterpretation by an knowing and appreciating the person.
expert.
Practitioner is skeptical of personal stories, Practitioner knows the person from the
rationalizations. inside out.
Childhood trauma is the precursor or Childhood trauma is not predictive; it may
predictor of adult pathology. weaken or strengthen the individual.
Centerpiece of therapeutic work is the Centerpiece of work is the aspirations pf
treatment plan devised by practitioner. family, individual or community.
Practitioner is the expert on clients’ lives. Individuals, family or community are the
experts.
Possibilities for choice, control, commitment, Possibilities for choice, control, commitment,
personal development are limited by and personal development are open.
pathology.
Resources for work are the knowledge and Resources for work are the strengths,
skills of the professional. capacities, adaptive skills of the individual,
family, or community.
Help is centered on reducing the effects of Help is centered on getting on with one’s
symptoms and the negative personal and life, affirming and developing values and
social consequences of actions, emotions, commitments, and making and finding
thoughts, or relationships. membership in or as a community.

Language
Certain words are key to the strengths perspective. Empowerment, rapidly becoming
a hackneyed idea and term, means assisting individuals, families, and communities in
discovering and using the resources and tools within and around them (Kaplan and
Girard, 1994). The empowerment imperative also requires that social workers help
people become aware of the tensions and conflicts that oppress and limit them and
help them free themselves from these restraints.
Resilience means the skills, abilities, knowledge, and insight that accumulate over
time as people struggle to surmount adversity and meet challenges. It is an ongoing
and developing fund of energy and skill that can be used in current struggles. Mem-
bership means that people need to be citizens—responsible and valued members in a
viable group or community. To be without membership is to be alienated, and to be
at risk of marginalization and oppression, the enemies of civic and moral strength.
As people begin to realize and use their assets and abilities, collectively and indi-
vidually, as they begin to discover the pride in having survived and overcome their
difficulties, more and more of their capacities come into the work and play of daily
life. These build on each other exponentially, reflecting a kind of synergy. The same
synergistic phenomenon seems true of communities and groups as well. In both
instances, one might suggest that there are no known limits to individual and collec-
tive capacities.
232 Dennis Saleebey
Strengths
People learn from the world around them, through formal education or through the
distilling of their day-to-day experience. Clients can often surprise practitioners (and
themselves) with the talents they have (or once had but let fall into disuse or out
of memory). Such talents, whether juggling, cooking, baking bread, or tending to
the needs of the ill, may become tools for helping to build a better life. Extremely
important sources of strength are cultural and personal stories, narratives, and lore.
Cultural approaches to healing may provide a source for the revival and renewal of
energies and possibilities. Cultural accounts of origins, development, migrations, and
survival may provide inspiration and meaning. Personal and familial stories of falls
from grace and redemption, failure and resurrection, and struggle and resilience may
also provide the diction, symbols, metaphors, and tools for rebound. Finally, people
who have overcome abuse and trauma often have “survivor’s pride” (Benard, 1994;
Wolin & Wolin, 1993). Such pride is often buried under shame, guilt, and alienation,
but it is often there waiting to be tapped into.

Resilience
Resilience should not be understood as the blithe denial of difficult life experiences,
pains, and scars; it is, rather, the ability to go on in spite of these (Rutter, 1985; Wolin &
Wolin, 1993). Damage, to be sure, has been done. Despite the wounds inflicted, for
many the trauma also has been instructive and chastening. Resilience is not a trait or
static dimension. It is the continuing articulation of capacities and knowledge derived
through the interplay of risks and protections in the world. The environment contin-
ually presents demands, stresses, challenges and opportunities. These become fateful,
given a complexity of other factors—genetic, neurobiological, familial, communal –
for the development of strength, or resilience, or diminution in capacity.

Critical factors
Many factors, highly variable, interactive, and dyamic, affect how an individual or
group will respond to a series of traumatic, even catastrophic situations. The crit-
ical factors have been termed “risk factors” (they enhance the likelihood of adap-
tive struggles and poorer developmental outcomes) and “protective factors” (they
increase the likelihood of rebound from trauma and stress). I would add “generative
factors”—remarkable and revelatory experiences that, taken together, dramatically
increase learning, resource acquisition, and development, accentuating resilience and
hardiness. […]

Community
Over the past few years, another complex of factors has emerged as important in
the transactions among risk, protective, and generative circumstances: the commu-
nity. In communities that amplify individual resilience, there is awareness, recogni-
tion, and use of the assets of most members of the community. Informal networks
of individuals, families, and groups; social networks of peers; and intergenerational
mentoring relationships provide succor, instruction, support, and encouragement.
 The strengths perspective in social work practice 233
These communities can be understood as “enabling niches” (Taylor, 1993), places
where individuals become known for what they do, are supported in becoming more
adept and knowledgeable, and can establish solid relationships within and outside
the community. In “entrapping niches” (Taylor, 1993), individuals are stigmatized
and isolated. Membership in the community is based on collective stigma and alien-
ation. In communities that provide protection and minimize risk, there are many
opportunities to participate, to make significant contributions to the moral and civic
life of the community, and to take on the role of full-fledged citizen. In these commu-
nities, high expectations of members are the rule. Youths, elders, and all members are
expected to do well, are given opportunities to do so, and are instructed in the use
of the tools needed for meeting such expectations. These expectations are related to
the life and needs of the community as well as to the developing competencies of the
individual.

Health and Wellness

The ample literature exploring the relationship between body, mind, and environ-
ment and health and wellness suggests that this interaction is complex, recursive, and
reticulate and always implicated in keeping people well, assisting individuals in regen-
erating after trauma, and helping individuals and communities survive the impact and
aftermath of calamity and ordeal. In a sense, the strengths perspective itself begins
with appreciating the body and its tremendous restorative powers as well as its powers
to resist disease. […]

Beliefs and Emotions

Positive beliefs about one’s self and condition play a significant role in health mainte-
nance and re generation. Supported by positive beliefs and a supportive environment,
the brain acts as a “health maintenance organization” (Ornstein 8c Sobel, 1987).
Emotions, too, have a profound effect on wellness and health. They may act as signals
for the body’s immune and recuperative responses. It does seem the case that emotions
experienced as positive can activate “the pharmacy within” as well as embolden the
application of reason in day-to-day life. When people believe that they can recover,
when they have an array of positive emotions about that prospect in the context of
their daily lives, their bodies often respond optimally. Under certain conditions, the
body’s regenerative powers can be augmented. These factors may operate at the com-
munity level as well.

Health Realization and Community Empowerment

The health realization-community empowerment model developed by Mills (1995)
is based on educating people and helping them recognize their innate resilience and
knowledge that can be used in achieving individual aspirations and improving com-
munity vitality. Mills’s idea is that resilience, health, wisdom, intelligence, and posi-
tive motivation are within each person and are accessible through education, support,
and encouragement. The goals of health realization and community empowerment
are to “reconnect people to the health in themselves and then direct them in ways to
bring forth the health of others in their community. The result is a change in people
234 Dennis Saleebey
and com munities which builds up from within rather than [being] imposed from
without” (cited in Benard, 1994, p.22). […]

Constructionism: Stories and Narratives

The constructionist view, in its many guises, emphasizes the importance of meaning
making in human affairs (Becker, 1968). Human beings can build themselves into
the world only by creating meaning, fashioning out of symbols, icons, and words a
sense of what the world is all about (Bruner, 1990). The building blocks of meaning
making are, for the most part, found in the edifice of culture. Culture provides the
means by which people receive, organize, rationalize, and understand their experi-
ences in the world. Central elements of the patterns woven by culture are story and
narrative. Individuals impart, receive, or affirm meanings largely through telling and
retelling stories and recounting narratives, the plots often laid out by culture. Lifting
oppression and emancipating the moral imagination, the visions and hopes, and the
life chances of people who are dispossessed involve recapturing and reconstructing
the “generative themes” (Freire, 1973) of the culture, community, neighborhood, or
family. It is a part of the work toward liberation to collaborate in the projection of
peoples’ stories, narratives, and myths outward to the institutions that have ignored
or marginalized them.

Conclusion
The strengths perspective honors two things: the power of the self to heal and right
itself with the help of the environment, and the need for an alliance with the hope
that life might really be otherwise. Helpers must hear the individual, family, or com-
munity stories, but people can write the story of their near and far futures only if they
know everything they need to know about their condition and circumstances. The job
is to help individuals and groups develop the language, summon the resources, devise
the plot, and manage the subjectivity of life in their world.
In a strengths approach, how social workers encounter their fellow human beings
is critical. They must engage individuals as equals. They must be willing to meet
them eye to eye and to engage in dialogue and a mutual sharing of knowledge, tools,
concerns, aspirations, and respect. The process of coming to know is a mutual and
collaborative one. The individuals and groups the profession assist, also must be able
to “name” their circumstances, their struggles, their experiences, themselves. Many
alienated people have been named by others—labeled and diagnosed— in a kind of
total discourse. The power to name oneself and one’s situation and condition is the
beginning of real empowerment. […]
The strengths perspective is a standpoint. Supporters believe that it offers a new
way of thinking and acting professionally. Clearly, it is not a theory. But its emerging
body of principle and method does create opportunities for professional knowing and
doing that go beyond the boundaries of the “technical-rational” approach (Schôn,
1983) so common today. Some social work practitioners may find little in this article
that is “new” and may regard these ideas as simply good social work practice. How-
ever, it is the experience of those who have worked to develop it that a strengths-based
practice does provide a richness of thought and an array of actions that go far toward
 The strengths perspective in social work practice 235
serving well those who seek help from the profession […]. Kaplan and Girard (1994)
put it this way:

People are more motivated to change when their strengths are supported. Instead
of asking family members what their problems are, a worker can ask what
strengths they bring to the family and what they think are the strengths of other
family members.... The worker creates a language of strength, hope, and move-
ment (p. 53).

In the end, it is that kind of rhetoric that preserves the possibility and promise of our
clients.

References
Becker, E. (1968) The structure of evil. New York: Villard.
Benard, B. (1994) Applications of resilience. Paper presented at a conference on the Role of
Resilience in Drug Abuse, Alcohol Abuse, and Mental Illness, Washington, DC.
Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freire, P. (1973) Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
Kaplan, L. and Girard, J. (1994) Strengthening high-risk families: A handbook for practition-
ers. New York: Lexington Books.
Mills, R. (1995) Realizing mental health. New York: Sulzberger & Graham.
Ornstein, R. and Sobel, D. (1987) The healing brain. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone.
Rutter, M. (1985) ‘Resilience in the face of adversity: Protective factors and resistance to psy-
chiatric disorder’. British Journal of Psychiatry, 147: 598–611.
Schôn, D. A. (1983) The reflective practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Wolin, S. J., 8c Wolin, S. (1993) The resilient self: How survivors of troubled families rise
above adversity. New York: Villard.

Further reading
Brice, T.S. and McLane-Davison, D. (2020) ‘The strength of black families: The elusive ties
of perspective and praxis in social work education’. In A.N. Mendenhall and M.M. Carney
(eds) Rooted in strengths: celebrating the strengths perspective in social work. Kansas:
University of Kansas Libraries: 25–37. Available at: http://www.smartstrengths.institute/
wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Rooted-in-Strengths_2020_5.pdf/ Accessed 21 October 2021.
Department of Health & Social Care (2019) Strengths-based approach: Practice framework
and practice handbook. London: Department of Health & Social Care. Available at: https://
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/778134/stengths-based-approach-practice-framework-and-handbook.pdf/ Accessed 11
August 2021.
Pomeroy, E. C. and Garcia, R.B. (2018) Direct practice skills for evidence-based social work:
A strengths perspective. New York: Springer Publishing Company.
SCIE (2015) Strengths-based approaches. Available online at https://www.scie.org.uk/
strengths-based-approaches/ Accessed 11 August 2021.
Walton, Q.L. and Oyewuwo-Gassikia, O.B. (2017) ‘The case for #BlackGirlMagic: Applica-
tion of a strengths-based, intersectional practice framework for working with Black women
with depression.’ Affilia 32(4): 461–475.
38 Personalisation through participation
A new script for public services
Charles Leadbeater

This chapter speaks to the much-debated turn in public services towards more per-
sonalised and participatory modes. It reproduces, in full, an influential pamphlet
written by Charles Leadbeater on the subject, a writer, ‘expert’ on innovation and
former journalist with the Financial Times. Published in 2004 by the cross-party
think tank Demos, it is both widely credited as having helped kick off the debate on
how to create more personalised public services and roundly criticised as a thinly
veiled attempt to advance individual responsibility for personal care. We include
it here because it provides a concise introduction to personalisation as an evolving
frame for public services while also recognising the different forms personalisation
can take. How far we want to go with personalisation – be that as state, professional
and/or public actors – remains to be seen. As a minimum, social workers need to
consider their place in and contribution to this developing project.
From: London: Demos (2004) pp.15–26. (www.demos.co.uk)

Introduction
On 24 March 2004 the [UK] Department of Health made an important announce-
ment heralding impressive reductions in heart disease: between 1997 and 2002 there
had been a 23 per cent fall in deaths from diseases of the heart and circulatory system.
Much of this reduction was due to reforms to NHS cardiac services, particularly
improved treatment of people who had suffered a heart attack, involving better med-
icines, technologies and working practices. About 1.8 million people were taking
statins, cholesterol-reducing drugs, thus reducing the number of premature deaths per
year by 7,000, the department said. But the report also acknowledged that much of
the decline in heart disease deaths was due to lifestyle changes that swept the country
20–30 years earlier, when middle class men in particular gave up smoking in their
millions. Contained in this single story are two very different accounts of how the
public good is created.
The first account is that the public good – fewer people dying young from heart
attacks – comes from the state providing services to society ever more efficiently and
effectively. The public good goes up the more effective the state becomes in solving
society’s problems for it.
The second account is that the public good – fewer people dying young from heart
attacks – comes from millions of people making loosely connected decisions in society
to change the way they live, which collectively produces a significant improvement in
the public good. In this model the state does not act upon society; it does not provide

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-45
 Personalisation through participation 237
a service. Instead the state creates a platform or an environment in which people take
decisions about their lives in a different way. This is bottom-up, mass social innova-
tion, enabled by the state. From this point of view the fact that 1.8 million people are
turning to the NHS to get statins is not a sign of success but a sign of failure. It would
be far better if these people had lifestyles compatible with low cholesterol, rather than
take drugs to deal with the problem after the event.
These two approaches to innovation – more effective top-down and more pervasive
and powerful bottom-up – are not necessarily at odds. They could be complementary.
Indeed the state’s capacity to deliver better and better services, with limited resources,
will depend on it encouraging people to become more adept at self-assessing and
self-managing their health, education, welfare, safety and taxes.
Yet these two approaches entail quite different accounts of the roles of users, pro-
fessionals and public service providers. In the first approach the users are patients
in need of timely and effective services from the NHS that are personalised to their
needs. In the second approach the users are co-producers of the good in question.
They are active participants in the process – deciding to manage their lives in a dif-
ferent way – rather than dependent users. In the first approach the professionals –
medical practitioners – must deploy their knowledge and skills in a timely and effective
way to solve a problem for the user. The more that is done in a personalised, consider-
ate and responsive manner the better. In the second approach the key is to build up the
knowledge and confidence of the users to take action themselves, to self-manage their
health without turning to the professionals. The professionals deploy their knowledge
to help the users devise their own solutions – smoking cessation programmes, exer-
cise regimes – which suit their needs. The differences between these two approaches
to generating the public good go to the heart of the debate about what ‘personalised’
public services should look like.
Personalisation is a very potent but highly contested and ambiguous idea that could
be as influential as privatisation was in the 1980s and 1990s in reshaping public pro-
vision. Privatisation started as a Conservative policy in 1984 at the height of neoliber-
alism but has since been widely adopted around the world by governments of different
political persuasions. Personalisation could have a similar impact and reach because
it could provide a new organising logic for public provision, linking initiatives of the
first type, more personalised public services, to initiatives of the second type, creating
the public good from within society.
Privatisation was a simple idea: putting public assets into private ownership would
create more powerful incentives for managers to deliver greater efficiency and innova-
tion. Personalisation is just as simple: by putting users at the heart of services, enabling
them to become participants in the design and delivery, services will be more effective
by mobilising millions of people as coproducers of the public goods they value.
Personalisation has the potential to reorganise the way we create public goods and
deliver public services. But to unlock that potential the idea needs to be taken much
further than current government thinking seems to allow. At the moment person-
alisation seems to mean providing better access and some limited say for users over
how existing services are provided in largely traditional ways. This ‘shallow’ person-
alisation offers modest modification of mass-produced, standardised services to par-
tially adapt them to user needs. ‘Deep’ personalisation would give users a far greater
role – and also far greater responsibilities – for designing solutions from the ground
up. Personalisation could just mean more 24/7 call centres, booked appointments and
238 Charles Leadbeater
timely access to standardised services. At the other extreme it could mean promoting
greater capacity for self-management and self-organisation. Personalisation could be a
sustaining innovation designed to make existing systems more personalised or it could
be a disruptive innovation designed to put the users in the driving seat as designers and
paymasters of services. It could be a programme to apply a lick of new paint to fading
public services or it could be the harbinger of entirely new organisational logic.
Personalised public services could have at least five different meanings.
First, personalisation could mean providing people with a more customer-friendly
interface with existing services: 24/7 call centres, booked appointments, guaranteed
fast response times, better basic customer service. Public service professionals should
be available to users when the users want the service, not the other way around.
Given the way that much of the public sector still works, enacting such basic reforms
to make it easier for people to get access to the services they want, when they want
them, would make a huge difference. This would be a sustaining innovation: it would
sustain support for existing services by making them more personalised.
Second, personalisation could also mean giving users more say in navigating their
way through services once they have got access to them. Thus in the health service,
ministers talk about ‘patient pathways’ through the system, and in secondary educa-
tion, children will be given more choice over the pace and style at which they learn.
Public service professionals should take more account of users in the way that they
deliver the service to them, keeping them informed and giving them ample opportu-
nities to choose between different courses of action.
Third, personalisation could mean giving users more direct say over how money is
spent. Users would be given more power to make their own decisions about how to
spend money allocated to their education or operation. Public service professionals
would not make all the decisions about how resources should be allocated but would
have to respond to user demand. A good example is the way some local authorities
allow disabled people to commission their own care packages, working with advice
from professionals. In this case, the users are far more knowledgeable about what
they need and how to get it than many of the professionals. The role of the state is
to enable such a managed market in provision to come into being: helping to inform
users about available choices and ensuring good quality supply.
Fourth, personalisation could mean users are not just consumers but co-designers
and coproducers of a service: they actively participate in its design and provision.
Good examples of this include community safety initiatives, recuperative care pro-
grammes for the elderly and many welfare-to-work schemes in which the ‘users’ actu-
ally do a lot of the work themselves because they want to find solutions that do not
leave them dependent upon the state. Public service professionals help build up the
knowledge and capacity of the users to create their own solutions.
Fifth, personalisation could mean self organisation: the public good emerging from
within society, in part, through the way that public policy shapes millions of individ-
ual decisions about how we exercise, eat, smoke, drink, save for our pensions, read
to our children, pay our taxes and so on. Many of our biggest social challenges –
reducing obesity and smoking, caring for people with chronic health conditions, pro-
moting learning, creating safer communities – will only be met if we promote a mass
social innovation within society: self-organising solutions. Public service profession-
als would help to create platforms and environments, peer-to-peer support networks,
which allow people to devise these solutions collaboratively.
 Personalisation through participation 239
As we move from the first to the fifth of these options the implications become more
radical and disruptive: dependent users become consumers and commissioners, and
eventually co-producers and co-designers. Their participation, commitment, knowl-
edge and responsibility increases. As the role of the user fills out, so the role of the
professional must change in tandem. In the first two options professionals are still
providing solutions for dependent users, albeit in a more personalised fashion. In the
fifth, the professionals are designing environments, networks and platforms through
which people can together devise their own solutions.
How far does the government want to go with personalisation? Is it just an attempt
to bring better customer service into the public sector in response to complaints about
over-centralisation and bureaucracy? Is it an attempt to woo middle class consumers
to keep them loyal to public services by giving them more choice? Or is it an idea that
could sustain waves of reform, leading from incremental innovations to existing pub-
lic services but eventually leading to more radical solutions that combine better public
services with more capacity for self-organising solutions in society?
The argument of this pamphlet is that once you start personalising public services
people will get an appetite for it. They will want more. The genie will be out of the
bottle. Rather than contain personalisation the aim should be to take it further and
deeper. The aim should not be to sustain existing, often outmoded, forms of provi-
sion. The aim should be to disrupt these models and find new, more adaptive solu-
tions. Some will argue that promotion of collaborative and self-organising solutions is
a pipe dream, the stuff of open source communities on the internet, Linux and e-Bay,
perhaps, or the mutuals and cooperatives of the nineteenth century, but not a modern
solution. But go back to the example we started with: heart disease. Further reduc-
tions in premature deaths from heart disease will come from more personalised public
services. But far more gains will come from persuading people to take more exercise,
eat healthier diets, stop smoking and not drink too much alcohol. Future big, cost-
effective reductions in heart disease will turn on self-organising solutions: the fifth
and most radical form of personalisation set out above. The challenge of personal-
isation is not just: ‘how do we create more personalised versions of existing public
services?’ The real challenge is: ‘how do more personalised public services help people
to devise their own, bottom up solutions, which create the public good?’.

Further reading
Arnstein, S. (1971) ‘The ladder of citizen participation.’ Journal of the Royal Town Planning
Institute 57 (1): 176–182.
Cottam, H. (2019) Radical Help: How we can remake the relationships between us and revo-
lutionise the welfare state. London: Virago.
Ferguson, I. (2012) ‘Personalisation, social justice and social work: a reply to Simon Duffy.’
Journal of Social Work Practice 26 (1): 55–73. DOI: 10.1080/02650533.2011.623771
Lymbery, M. (2012) ‘Social work and personalisation.’ The British Journal of Social Work,
42(4): 783–792. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs027
Morris, J. (2004) ‘Independent living and community care: a disempowering framework’. Dis-
ability & Society 19(5): 427–442. DOI: 10.1080/0968759042000235280
Weaver, B. (2011) ‘Co-producing community justice: the transformative potential of personal-
isation for penal sanctions.’ The British Journal of Social Work 41(6): 1038–57. https://doi.
org/10.1093/bjsw/bcr011
39 Collaboration and partnership in
context
Colin Whittington

This topic, like many in this section of the book, is likely to be part-and-parcel of
social workers’ daily experience in practice. Whatever the setting, social workers
today find themselves working alongside, and sometimes in competition with, those
from different backgrounds (disciplinary and otherwise) to their own. This has led
social workers, at times, to feel beleaguered and under threat, as the giants of edu-
cation and health seem set to swallow up social work and take over its core skills.
At other times, it has led to fruitful co-working that has been to the benefit of all,
practitioners and users of services (experts by experience) alike. The text we have
chosen offers an uncomplicated way of thinking about and doing collaboration and
partnership. The Further Reading invites readers to look more widely at new ideas
that are emerging about multidisciplinary work in very different world contexts.
From: Jenny Weinstein, Colin Whittington and Tony Leiba (eds) (2003) Collabora-
tion in social work practice, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp.15–38.

What is meant by collaboration and partnership?

The terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership’ are often used together in ways that
assume common agreement on their meaning and are sometimes treated as inter-
changeable. This need not be especially problematic during day-to-day practice […].
However, an attempt to distinguish them and to clarify their meaning does help to
detect dimensions that may otherwise be lost. The terms also tend to be used as
if their purpose and beneficiaries are always clear and self-evident. It will become
apparent later that the position is more complicated than that.
To begin with ‘partnership’, there are no absolutes, but working in partnership tends
to be the formal, institutional-level label attached to the idea of ‘working together’. It
is how government policies express the expectation of so-called joined-up services […].
Second, it is how agencies and professionals describe what they are doing together to
respond to service users, carers and communities whose requirements extend beyond
the responsibilities or resources of one professional group or agency. Third, it refers
to arrangements between a service or services and representatives of service users and
carers involved, for example, in planning, delivery or monitoring of services.
Turning to collaboration, this may be thought of as the more active form of ‘work-
ing together’. Collaboration is the collection of knowledge, skills, values and motives
applied by practitioners to translate the following into effective practice:

• formal systematic joint working arrangements (such as inter-disciplinary or inte-

grated teams)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-46
 Collaboration and partnership in context 241
• less formalized joint work between different professions and agencies arising in
the course of assessing for, arranging, providing and evaluating services (some-
times called multi-agency or multi-professional networks)
• the goals of participation, empowerment and social inclusion of service users and
carers.
• In summary, the following usages are suggested:
• Partnership is a state of relationship, at organizational, group, professional or
inter-personal level, to be achieved, maintained and reviewed.
• Collaboration is an active process of partnership in action.

The lexicon of partnership and collaboration contains a number of other terms. They
fall into two sub-sets and both imply degrees of shared purpose (Barton and Quinn
2001; Lupton 2001). The first sub-set is concerned with organizations and includes
terms such as multi-agency working and inter-agency or inter-organizational
working. Sometimes the word ‘team’ is appended as in multi-agency team. Govern-
ment policies have placed particular emphasis on the importance of effective part-
nership between agencies. This stance has real strengths since organizational and
inter-organizational dimensions are too easily overlooked. Professionals are naturally
concerned with their relationships with service users and with one another, yet organ-
izations frame much of what takes place in those relationships.
However, the establishment of inter-agency partnership policies will not automat-
ically lead to effective front-line partnerships between separate professions (Hudson
2002b). This is where the second sub-set of terms assists. It is concerned with the
professions or disciplines involved and with types of collaboration variously described
as multi-professional or multi-disciplinary practice and interprofessional or inter-
disciplinary practice. Again, the word ‘team’ may be added, as in inter-disciplinary
team.
A key difference within the two sub-sets is found in the prefixes ‘multi’ and ‘inter’.
The term ‘multi’ tends to be used where agencies, professions or team members work
in parallel, maintaining distinctive organizational, intellectual and professional
boundaries. The prefix ‘inter’ is associated with greater interaction, integration and
adaptation, the merging of ideas and creation of new practices. In actuality, forms of
professional and agency co-operation vary around these two types, multi and inter,
and it helps to be clear in any particular case which of them, or some hybrid form,
applies.
All of the terms in the two sub-sets above convey important dimensions, yet each
represents only part of the collaborative enterprise. Terms concerned with profession
and discipline tend to overlook the many unqualified staff of care services and to
exclude, as we have seen, the agency dimension, while none directly encompasses
collaboration with service users and carers (Nolan and Badger 2002). Some of these
limitations can be overcome by thinking more broadly of ‘collaborative practice’, an
idea that unifies many of the terms. […]

Dimensions of collaboration and partnership in care services

[…] discussion of care trusts and other structures can be summarized in the form of a
continuum of service partnerships in social care and health as shown in Figure 39.1.
This locates arrangements for delivering services by their degree of organizational
242 Colin Whittington

Separate services Jointly Pooled budgets

co-operating on an commissioned Lead commissioning Care trusts
ad hoc basis
services Integrated services

LESS INTEGRATED MORE INTEGRATED

Figure 39.1 A continuum of service partnerships in social care and health.

integration. It runs from the ad hoc co-operation of separate services where there is
little or no integration of policy, funding or personnel, through to the care trust model
where all of these are integrated into one organization and service.
A similar figure could be created to illustrate other areas – for example, services to
children and families.
The organizations and systems that provide care services are typically large and
complex. If services are to be joined up, it will take more than collaboration by staff
at a single level – that is, partnerships must be developed at multiple levels between
these organizations and be held together by multiple acts of collaboration.
Since organizational structures vary, it may help to think of them on three levels,
from strategic through intermediate to operational [Figure 39.2] and to consider the
areas necessary for collaboration if partnership is to be achieved between agencies. To
start at the upper level, there needs to be strategic joint planning and management of:
service goals; acquisition and deployment of the major resources the services require,
including the ‘workforce’; and ‘whole system’ review, learning and development. At
the intermediate level, two sets of joint activity are needed. One involves joint or lead
commissioning of services and the management of pooled budgets and integrated
services. The other involves joint work to assure quality and the participation of ser-
vice users and carers, to review and develop services and staff, and to ensure effective
information and communications systems.
At the operational level there are two broad scenarios. In the first, joint work takes
place within multi-disciplinary service teams and settings, inter-agency groupings
and projects, or integrated services. Staff members at this level are at the front line
with service users and have a key joint contribution to make to organizational review
and learning about the service (Pedlar and Aspinwall 1998). […]
In the second scenario, the cross-agency boundaries are highlighted more than
the professional ones, although again both are present. Here, collaboration takes
place between separate (that is, non-integrated) teams, departments and agencies
by front-line staff and managers, for instance in child protection. This is sometimes
described as a multi-agency network. Increasingly, the separate teams and agencies in
these networks, such as assessment and care management teams of local authorities,
employ staff from different professions although they may not be recognized as multi-
disciplinary teams. Again, the staff involved are at the front line with service users
and have a key contribution to make to ‘organizational learning’ about the service.
The two scenarios described above suggest a picture of convergence and that,
whether we are thinking of staff who work in inter-disciplinary teams or in
 Collaboration and partnership in context 243

Level Areas of partnership and collaboration

Strategic Planning and management of:
Service goals.
Acquisition/deployment of resources, including the workforce.
‘Whole system’ review and development.

Intermediate Joint and lead commissioning.

Management of pooled budgets.
Management of integrated provision.

Quality assurance, governance, regulation and standards, and

participation of service users and carers.

Focused review, research and research development.

Planning and delivery of workforce learning and development.

Development of information and communication systems.

Operational Service delivery in multi inter-disciplinary settings and services

Service delivery working across departmental and agency

Figure 39.2 Organizational levels and areas of partnership and collaboration.

Strategic
Separate agencies Care trust
linked in a multi-
Less agency network More
integrated Staff of different Inter-disciplinary integrated
disciplines co- team
operating across
team and agency
boundaries
Operational

Figure 39.3 A matrix of collaborative structures.

multi-agency networks, most if not all will be involved in collaborative working in

some way. Working with people from other disciplines and across agencies is not the
rare exception or specialist case but a core activity of the competent social and care
worker (Whittington 1999).
The two dimensions from Figures 1 and 2, respectively, of ‘more and less inte-
grated’ and ‘strategic and operational’ can be brought together to give an illustrative
matrix of collaborative structures, as shown in Figure 39.3. An example is included
in each quadrant.
244 Colin Whittington
Critical reflections on collaboration and partnership
Earlier sections of this chapter defined collaboration and partnership and described
the growing significance of collaboration between professions and agencies in care
policies. Left there, the analysis may seem to confer on these ideas an aura of neu-
trality or perhaps of unquestioning approval. Yet if they are considered in the context
of a wider set of reference points […], they become multi-dimensional, taking on
some altogether different and perhaps unexpected features. This final section will
reflect on these other dimensions, signalling possible directions for future critique
and development.
To take up the earlier discussion, collaboration and partnership are instruments
of policy, chosen to achieve particular social and political goals, such as supporting
independence of older people by seeking an effective blend of social and health care
and thereby reducing waiting lists. Underlying this and wider policies – say, on care
trusts – is an implicit theory about how to organize in order to improve system effec-
tiveness and efficiency – that is, a relationship is being assumed between a way of
organizing services and a result, such as better client care or value for money.
The confident thrust of policy and its taken-for-granted theory also masks the
­double-edged nature of the policies – that is, the outcomes of collaboration and part-
nership are not uniformly good or bad for service users and may be contradictory.
They may give clients access to services not previously available (Atkinson et al. 2002)
yet submerge genuine professional differences that would offer alternative outcomes
to a service user (Anderson 2000; Biggs 1993). They may improve prevention by early
intervention (Atkinson et al. 2002) but result in the care-oriented practices of one
agency being overridden by the control policies of the partners (Barton and Quinn
2001). They may also improve service access by bringing social care and health into
closer partnership but, where health dominates, risk the loss or dilution of social
models of care, health and disability.
Growing formal partnerships and opportunities for collaboration may be ­double-
edged for professionals too. Social workers are reported as finding great satisfaction
in multi-disciplinary working (SSI 2001) but others are cautious about the spread of
multi-disciplinary training and practice and the prospect of flexible job roles. In the
latter context, ideas of collaboration and partnership may be seen as mechanisms of
workforce control in which professional boundaries and skills of distinct professions
are dismantled, reducing the power of the occupations involved and their ability to
resist restructuring according to market pressures (Webb 1992).
Collaboration and partnership also occupy a place in a wider domain of ideas which
connects the local and the global and sees public services, companies and govern-
ments as operating in environments of continuous local, national and international
change which require more adaptive leadership, flexible governance and fluid bound-
aries (Giddens and Hutton 2001). Here, collaboration and partnership are aspects of
a strategic response to an increasingly global strategic analysis and gain in persua-
siveness from the weight and variety of their advocates. […] The more widespread
the ideas, the more they may seem self-evidently correct, especially if they carry a
business pedigree.
It appears so far, then, that while the rhetoric of collaboration and partnership
may appeal to an unquestioning commonsense acceptance of these ideas, they are
 Collaboration and partnership in context 245
anything but neutral. But what if their supposedly benign appearance actively served
to conceal potential harm to the supposed beneficiaries, the service users and carers?
Critical language study (CLS) (Fairclough 2001) alerts us to the potential of col-
laboration and partnership to function as ideology by concealing and perpetuating
unequal power relations, disadvantage and benefits to sectional interests. The ideas of
collaboration and partnership would be ideological in CLS terms if used to obscure
the chronic underfunding and inadequacies of social care services described by the
King’s Fund (Henwood 2001), by implying that more effective organization of part-
nerships alone will deliver good services and that service failures caused by lack of
funds are the result of non-collaboration by the professions and agencies involved.
[… ] If the idea of collaboration and partnership as competencies is unpacked, a
further aspect is revealed, namely that they are a particular blend of professional val-
ues and practice techniques. In this incarnation, they are found in a wide spectrum of
methods that emphasize self-determination, empowerment or liberation, such as ther-
apeutic counselling, solutions-focused techniques and some forms of group and com-
munity work. The common thread is that participation is both desirable in its own
right and fosters motivation in creating the necessary conditions for development. Yet
it is here that practitioners and their managers must also confront the limits of col-
laboration, where the voluntaristic values and techniques of care meet the imperatives
and authority of control. […]
The question now arises, in the light of the preceding analysis, what stance should
the social worker take on collaboration and partnership? Two related positions are
proposed:

• first, recognition that they have become essential elements of practice and require
competent, constructively critical application.
• second, recognition that they converge with user-centred social work values.

This convergence supplies part of the case for building them into one’s practice, but
there is more. We have already seen the powerful imperatives of government policy.
Collaboration and partnership are also now the subject of growing empirical evi-
dence. While comparative findings on their effectiveness in improving services is slow
to accumulate, there are other kinds of account. Action research and case studies
report the experience of staff and service users, identifying service benefits and how to
achieve them (Audit Commission 2002). Interviews and case studies involving profes-
sionals and their managers also report gains to service users, to agencies and to pro-
fessionals themselves from working together (Atkinson et al. 2002; Nolan and Badger
2002). In addition, there is good evidence that where services and their professional
staff fail to work together, harmful effects can and do follow.
These findings […] give empirical support to the case for building collaboration
and partnership into the practices, and organization, of social workers and other care
workers. That case, which needs substantially more empirical evidence to inform it,
is strengthened meanwhile by the convergence of values already described. Finally,
the twin strands of empirical evidence and user-centred values come together in the
clear and compelling message from service users heard earlier: professionals and their
agencies, they say, should work with them, and with one another (Audit Commission
2002; Beresford 2002). […]
246 Colin Whittington
References
Anderson, S. (2000) ‘Disagreement can be a good thing.’ Community Care 1 June, 11.
Atkinson, M., Wilkin, A., Sott, A., Doherty, P. and Kinder, K. (2002) Multi-agency working:
A detailed study. LGA Research Report 26. Slough, Berkshire: National Foundation for
Educational Research.
Audit Commission (2002) Integrated services for older people. Building a whole systems
approach. London: Audit Commission.
Barton, A. and Quinn, C. (2001) ‘The supremacy of joined-up working: A Pandora’s Box for
organizational identity?’ Public Policy and Administration 16(2): 49–62.
Biggs, S. (1993) ‘User participation and inter-professional collaboration in community care.’
Journal of Interprofessional Care 7(2): 151–159.
Beresford, P. (2002) ‘Making user involvement real.’ Professional Social Work June: 16–17.
Fairclough, N. (2001) Language and power. 2nd edition. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education.
Giddens, A. and Hutton, W. (eds) (2001) On the edge: Living with global capitalism. London:
Vintage.
Henwood, M. (2001) Future imperfect: Report of the King’s Fund care and support enquiry.
London: King’s Fund.
Hudson, B. (2002b) ‘Interprofessionality in health and social care.’ Journal of Interprofes-
sional Care 16(1): 7–17.
Lupton, C. (2001) ‘Interdisciplinary Practice.’ In M. Davies (ed) The Blackwell encyclopaedia
of social work. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nolan, P. and Badger, F. (2002) Promoting collaboration in primary mental health care. Chel-
tenham: Nelson Thornes.
Pedlar, M. and Aspinwall, K. (1998) A concise guide to the learning organization. London:
Lemos and Crane.
SSSI (2001) Modern Social Services: A commitment to deliver. London: Social Services
Inspectorate.
Webb, D. (1992) ‘Competencies, contracts and cadres: Common themes in the social control of
nurse and social work education.’ Journal of Interprofessional Care 6(3): 223–230.
Whittington, C. (1999) In support of partnership of social care and health – Supplementary
report for the national training strategy for social care. Leeds: TOPSS England.

Further reading
Bostock, L., Lynch, A., Newlands, F., and Forrester, D. (2018) ‘Diffusion theory and ­multi-
disciplinary working in children’s services.’ Journal of integrated care (26 (2): 120–129.
Chaddock, R. (2016) ‘Integrating early multi-disciplinary advance care planning into core
social work practice: Social workers’ Bread and butter.’ Journal of Social Work Practice
30(2): 129–138.
Drake, J., Kontar, Y., Eichelberger, J.C., Rupp, T.S., Taylor, K.M. (2015) Communicating
climate change and natural hazard risk and cultivating resilience. Case Studies for a Multi-
Disciplinary Approach. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG.
James, M. (2016) ‘Where is the voice of social work in the multi disciplinary palliative care
team?’ Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work. 24(2): 49–60.
McLaughlin, J. (2016) ‘Social work in acute hospital settings in Northern Ireland: The views
of service users, carers and multi-disciplinary professionals.’ Journal of Social Work 16(2):
135–154.
40 A review of Donald A. Schön’s,
The Reflective Practitioner
How Professionals Think in Action
Michael Emslie and Rob Watts

Donald Schön’s book, first published in 1983, has inspired generations of practition-
ers and educators ever since, including those within social work. We have chosen to
introduce this seminal work with a review written by Emslie and Watts from RMIT
University in which they offer an excellent summary of Schön’s ideas and of the con-
tribution that he has made to professional education, theory and practice over the
last 50 years or so. The Further Reading below contains some applications of Schön’s
ideas in the real-world setting of social work practice today.
From: Emslie, M. and Watts, R. (2017) ‘On technology and the prospects for good
practice in the human services: Donald Schön, Martin Heidegger, and the case for
phronesis and praxis’, Social Service Review 91 (2), pp. pp324–329. https://doi.
org/10.1086/692117

Donald Schön: The Crisis of Professional Practice

In 1983, Donald Schön, a philosopher and professor of urban planning at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology, published one of the most widely admired books
on professional practice in the twentieth century: The Reflective Practitioner: How
Professionals Think in Action. Schön (1983) is interested in how to achieve good pro-
fessional practice, and this includes examining the kinds of knowledge best suited to
inform good practice. In particular, Schön explores the relationship between knowing
and doing, research and practice, and thinking and acting. Schön’s book is about how
professional lawyers, teachers, doctors, social workers, and urban designers think
about and try to link their practice and theory. Schön argues that there is strong evi-
dence of a conspicuous and widespread failure on the part of these professions to live
up to their stated ethical values, to meet the expectations of their communities, and
to solve major social problems like poverty, illness, injustice, and dysfunctional cities.
He claims that this failure was evident even in the 1960s and 1970s.
Schön attributes this failure to the way in which many professionals treat theory
as a technical form of knowledge based in pure science, which they then use to guide
their practice. In effect, he is saying that too professionals believe they just need a
kind of recipe, rather like a set of instructions for building an electronic device or for
using a child’s Lego set to build a spaceship or train. […] Schön’s argument is worthy
of further exploration in part because he opens up discussion about what we mean
when we talk about theory and practice.
According to Schön, most professions have a story about how their theory and
practice work that is reliant on what he calls technical rationality. Schön (1983, 21)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-47
248 Michael Emslie and Rob Watts
argues: “According to the model of Technical Rationality — the view of professional
knowledge which has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about the profes-
sions and the institutional relations of research, education, and practice — professional
activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of
scientific theory and technique.” The technical rational model suggests that good pro-
fessional practice relies on practitioners exclusively and correctly using knowledge pro-
duced by scientific research to achieve predetermined and agreed-upon ends. According
to Schön (1983, 3–4), “Technical rationality holds that practitioners are instrumental
problem solvers who select technical means best suited toparticular purposes. Rigorous
professional practitioners solve well-formed instrumental problems by applying theory
and technique derived from systematic, preferably scientific knowledge.”
Schön argues that too many modern professionals treat theory as a body of clearly
bounded, scientific, specialized, and standardized knowledge. This conception of the-
ory relies on what has conventionally been referred to as the positivist conception of
knowledge. This is an idea that evolved in the early nineteenth century, and it insists
that the only way to say we know the truth of anything is if we have measured it and,
preferably, subjected it to some kind of experimental procedure. Under positivism,
anything that looks like it has to do with religion, feelings, or ethical ideas should be
counted out as not being scientific. For positivists since Comte (who coined the term),
the only true knowledge is grounded in a scientific experimental method. As Schön
(1983, 31) puts it, “Technical rationality is the heritage of Positivism.”
The three principal doctrines of positivism that were first outlined by Comte help us
to understand technical rationality’s reach and influence. First, there is the conviction
that empirical science is not just a form of knowledge but is the only source of positive
knowledge of the world. Second, there is the intention to cleanse people’s minds of
mysticism, superstition, and other forms of pseudo-knowledge. Finally, there is the
program of extending scientific knowledge and technical control to human society, to
make technology, as Comte said, “no longer exclusively geometrical, mechanical or
chemical, but also and primarily political and moral” (Schön 1983, 32).
The scientific method, when properly applied, avoids making religious, ethical, or
emotional assumptions because proper science is grounded in empirical observation
and rigorous mathematical testing in order to produce objective, timeless, invari-
ant, and universal laws (Holton 1988). Theoretical knowledge is, accordingly, best
expressed as laws that ideally use equations and mathematical formulations, and it is
successful when an explanation also works as a prediction written out as a theorem
(Schön 1983). Whether it is either possible or desirable that we generate this kind of
theory in the human sciences is another matter altogether. Yet, what some call “phys-
ics envy” has proved highly seductive.
As Schön goes on to explain, professional doctors, teachers, psychologists, town
planners, and social workers claim to draw on a body of theory to develop more
applied versions of that theory. This requires developing day-to-day diagnostic pro-
cedures and problem-solving techniques crafted into skill-based practices and accom-
panied by appropriate attitudes (like the doctor’s “bedside manner”) and professional
values like altruism. According to this point of view, professional practice is a sec-
ond-order activity subordinate to theory. It follows that the more basic and funda-
mental the scientific theory, the higher the status of the profession relying on that
science.
 A review of Donald A. Schön’s, The Reflective Practitioner 249
As Schön points out, this model of professionalism was already facing major
problems by the 1980s. First, positivism itself had already fallen into disfavor among
twentieth-century scientists and mathematicians in the revolution led by Albert
Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Kurt Godel. That revolution, which included the
theory of relativism and quantum physics, suggested that some core features of the
universe could not be explained by the kind of classic scientific methods favored by
positivism and that contemporary science needed to accept a degree of uncertainty
(Heisenberg) and even mathematical undecidability (Godel). This view was recognized
by Karl Popper (1979) and Thomas Kuhn (2012) and has recently been described by
Marcus du Sautoy (2016).
Second, by the 1960s and 1970s, many key professions were experiencing a crisis of
legitimacy. For Schön, the central problem is the assumption, made by too many pro-
fessionals relying on the technical rational model as a self-portrait, that the problems
they address are technical problems. As Schön puts it, “Technical rationality depends
on agreement about ends. When ends are fixed and clear then the decision to act can
present itself as an instrumental problem” (Schön 1983, 41).
But what if the problems being dealt with by professionals were neither fixed nor
clear? Worse, what if the problems being dealt with by professionals involved a com-
plex set of ethical, emotional, aesthetic, or political judgments? This might go to a
standard problem facing any doctor who has a patient facing death who he or she
can technically save but who would be left in lifelong pain and suffering. Or, it might
involve a planning decision that half of a small community wants but the other half
loathes: how does a planner resolve such a problem?
As Schön argues, real professionals in every field need to make complex judgments that
acknowledge the fact that they are working in communities divided by economic, gen-
dered, religious, and ethnic interests, differences, and inequalities. This implies that even
working out the nature of the problem often relies on a mix of technical and nontechnical
and nonrational abilities. This recognition led Schön to propose that professional practice
be redefined as reflective practice.
[…] Schön’s account of the dominance of technical rationality in professional prac-
tice is as relevant today as it was when it was published more than 30 years ago, if
not more so. The research, education, and practice of professional activities continue
to resemble the model of technical rationality that Schön describes. If anything, there
has been an intensification of research, education, and practice modeled on tech-
nical rationality since Schön wrote his seminal work. This has corresponded with
the institutional reign of neoliberalism and New Public Management, which have
become the dominant political, economic, and policy framework for many liberal
welfare states like Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand since the
1970s (Esping-Andersen 1990; Bessant, Farthing and Watts 2017). And, unsurpris-
ingly, neoliberalism and New Public Management are interdependent with technical
rationality, a link acknowledged extensively in the literature (Bessant 2004; Miller
and Rose 2008; Dean 2010). One way this can be observed is through the sort of
research that is valorized and respected by governments and policy makers. Research
aligned with the model of technical rationality, like the evidence-based practice
movement, claims to provide the knowledge and theory (through robust and rigorous
research methods that are claimed to be able to precisely and unambiguously know,
measure, explain, and predict) that is needed for the cost-efficient, value-for-money,
250 Michael Emslie and Rob Watts
auditable, and accountable service provision demanded by neoliberalism and New
Public Management (see, e.g., Power 1997; Furedi 2011). We should also remember
that the potential of technology was central to socialist and communist projects. It
appears that technology has been critical to diverse and disparate social, economic,
and political systems.

The Solution According to Schön: Artistry and Reflective Practice

While Schön (1983, 1987) highlights some of the problems with a technical rational
model of theory and professional practice, he also observes that the sort of knowl-
edge that many practitioners actually use for good professional practice has not been
clearly articulated. According to Schön (1983,1987), technical rationality is not the
way of knowing that is needed for good practice, and practitioners who do not prac-
tice according to its logic are unable to talk about the knowledge they actually use in
their practice, which is characterized by “complexity, uncertainty, instability, unique-
ness, and value conflict” (Schön 1983, 39). Schön (1983, 19–20) argues:

Professionals have been disturbed to find that they cannot account for processes
they have come to see as central to professional competence. It is difficult for them
to imagine how to describe and teach what might be meant by making sense of
uncertainty, performing artistically, setting problems, and choosing among com-
peting professional paradigms, when these processes seem mysterious in light of
the prevailing model of professional knowledge. We are bound to an epistemol-
ogy of practice which leaves us at a loss to explain, or even describe, the compe-
tences to which we now give overriding importance.

In light of his critique of professional practice modeled on technical rationality, Schön

(1983) argues for the value of an inquiry into the epistemology of practice. According
to Schön (1983), this would involve asking questions like, “What is the kind of know-
ing in which competent practitioners engage?” and “How is professional knowing
like and unlike the kinds of knowledge presented in academic textbooks, scientific
papers, and learned journals?” (Schön 1983, viii). Schön undertakes a phenomenol-
ogy of professional practice to learn about the epistemology of practice. This involves
asking “what we can learn from a careful examination of artistry, that is, the compe-
tence by which practitioners actually handle indeterminate zones of practice” (Schön
1987, 13).
Schön makes the case for an epistemology of practice based on the idea of art-
istry, which he characterizes as “an exercise of intelligence” and “a kind of knowing”
that involves “an art of problem framing, an art of implementation, and an art of
improvisation—all necessary to mediate the use in practice of applied science and
technique” (Schön 1987, 13). Schön seems to be treating the kind of knowing pro-
fessionals use as a kind of art best distinguished from the model of theory that the
technical-rational model of professional practice relies upon.
According to Schön (1983, 62), reflection in action is central to “the art through
which practitioners sometimes cope with the troublesome ‘divergent’ situations of
practice.” In other words, Schön argues that a key aspect of good practice is art-
istry, or performing artistically, in “the indeterminate zones of practice—uncer-
tainty, uniqueness, and value-conflicts—[that] escape the canons of technical
 A review of Donald A. Schön’s, The Reflective Practitioner 251
rationality” (Schön 1987, 6). And such artful practice involves reflection in action,
or reflective practice. According to Schön (1983, 68–69), when a practitioner is
performing artistically and engaging in reflective practice, he or she becomes “a
researcher in the practice context” and constructs “a new theory of each unique
case.” This involves practitioners allowing themselves to experience surprise, puz-
zlement, or confusion in the practice situations that they find uncertain or unique,
reflecting on the phenomena before them and carrying out an experiment that serves
to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation
(Schön 1983).
The real value of Schön’s (1983, 1987) work is his focus on spelling out the sort
of knowledge people use in professional practice. Schön makes the case that good
professional practice requires artistry and the nurturing of artistry in the education
and the institutionalization of practice. And he particularly makes the case for the
reflective practicum in professional education for this purpose (Schön 1987).

References
Bessant, J. (2004) ‘Risk Technologies and Youth Work Practice’. Youth and Policy 83: 60–76.
Bessant, J., Farthing, R. and Watts, R. (2017) The Precarious Generation: A Political Econ-
omy of Young People. London: Routledge.
Dean, M. (2010) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2nd ed. London: Sage.
du Sautoy, M. (2016) What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the End of Knowledge. Lon-
don: Fourth Estate.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
Furedi, F. (2011) ‘Introduction to the Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as
Consumer’ in M. Molesworth, R. Scullian, and E. Nixon (eds) The Marketisation of Higher
Education and the Student as Consumer, Abingdon: Routledge: 1–7.
Kuhn, T. (2012) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Miller, P. and Rose, N. (2008) Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and
Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Popper, K. (1979) Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Power, M. (1997) The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schön, D. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Schön, D. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching
and Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Wiley.

Further reading
Fook, J., Ryan, M. and Hawkins, L. (2000) Professional expertise: practice, theory and edu-
cation for working in uncertainty. London: Whiting & Birch.
Gould, N. and Taylor, I. (eds) (1996) Reflective learning for social work. Aldershot: Arena.
Napier, L. and Fook, J. (2000) ‘Reflective practice in social work.’ In Napier, L. and Fook,
J. (eds) Breakthroughs in practice: Theorising critical moments in social work. London,
Whiting & Birch: 1–15.
Maclean, S. (Ed.) (2021) Outlanders. Hidden narratives from social workers of colour.
Lichfield: Kirwin Maclean Associates.
252 Michael Emslie and Rob Watts
Morley, C. and Macfarlane, S. (2014) ‘Critical social work as ethical social work: Using crit-
ical reflection to research students’ resistance to neoliberalism.’ Critical and Radical Social
Work 2(3): 337–55. DOI: 10.1332/204986014X14096553281895.
Petgrave-Nelson, L. (2021) ‘COVID-19 reflection: From the diary of a black social worker.’
Journal of Social Work in End of Life & Palliative Care 17(2–3): 120–123. DOI:
10.1080/15524256.2021.1915921.
Smith, M., Cree, V.E. and MacRae, R. with Wallace, E., Sharp, D., O’Halloran, S. and Know-
les, N. (2017) ‘Social suffering: Changing organisational culture in children and families
social work through critical reflection groups.’ British Journal of Social Work 47(4): 973–
988. DOI:10.1093/bjsw/bcw087
Taylor, C. (2006) ‘Narrating significant experience: reflective accounts and the production of
(self) knowledge’. British Journal of Social Work 36: 189–206. DOI:10.1093/bjsw/bch269
41 Making things new
Distant voices and unbound at Vox
Liminis1 with Padraig O’Tuama
Padraig O’Tuama

Woven through the chapters of this book is a recognition that social work is a collab-
orative and unbound endeavour. Accordingly, attempts to capture or represent social
work through selective and bounded forms will inevitably fall short. In this final
chapter, we celebrate social work’s collaborative and unbound identity by bring-
ing together work from a creative writing project which explored reintegration after
punishment. The work is the product of a collaboration between ‘Distant Voices’
and ‘Unbound’ at Vox Liminis and Irish poet and theologian Padraig O’Tuama.
More specifically, it is a collaboration between people who have been in prison, pris-
oners on home-leave, academics, social workers, criminal justice professionals and
artists: ‘At Unbound we leave any labels at the door and just get on with doing what
we want to do’.2
As is the case for all the chapters in this Reader, what follows is merely a snapshot
of the diverse collection of voices that contribute to our knowledge and understand-
ing of social work, of what it is to be human and of what it means to give and receive
help. It is offered here in celebration of social work as a collaborative and unbound
endeavour and in recognition of the challenge of making that meaningful through
social work’s daily encounters.
From: Making things new (in press). Publisher details to follow.

There is No Such Thing as The System

My first day as a social worker, I hear that
most people don’t feel
like they belong to the system.
Most people in the system are
good. The system sometimes knows it’s the system.
The system sometimes denies
it’s the system.
When the system denies it’s the system
that’s when the system
does its most powerful work.
There are always ways to make
the system work for you
provided
the system works for you.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178699-48
254 Padraig O’Tuama
The system can change. The system
has already changed. The system
doesn’t change. The system is a story
that doesn’t know its own
story. The system’s story’s fixed. On my
first day as a social worker, I learnt about
the system and how the system isn’t
the system for everyone
in the system.

Ten Things The System Taught Me

You will be branded and it will be sore
You will be brutalised and it will be sore
You will be controlled and it will be sore
You will be told when you can eat and it will be sore
You will have limited contact.
You will be given a choice to start again and it will be sore
You will be given support but you need to comply which will also be sore
The leash will be tight which will be sore
The process will come to an end which will offer hope.
So, if you stay, a day will come when you will feel free.
Feeling free will likely feel sore.
Hope, too, is sore, the more of it you get.

Poem about Love. (iv)

My wee girl says her boyfriend
dumped her because he’d heard her mother
was inside. Sounds like a dickhead, I said, she said
no, he might have been The One.
I’d given her a ring last year, a nice one, silver,
she twirled it round her finger
while
I tried not to cry.

Bad Letter Day

I saw my sister’s writing
on the letter.
Sitting in the hall
surrounded by all the other men
— those serving sentences
— those watching those serving sentences
I felt my body trembling
as I tore it open.
All I saw was words.
Dog
 Making things new 255
Dead
Dog
Dead
Dog
Dead
I couldn’t read the sense
in what was senseless.
I couldn’t calm my mind
for all the noise from all the boys
with their spoons and forks and knives
and clattering of plates and
practicing of petty hates and rivalries.
I stared at the place
where the sunlight hits the wall
Hoping it would all go away.
I was eighteen and brave
not eighteen and crying.
Maybe people saw, maybe not.
We all got news from home from time to time
news of people dying, news of change,
news of debt and death and worry.
My sister wrote to tell me that my dog was dead.
And I was gulping sobs instead of casserole.
I’d been told I shouldn’t cry inside.
You sometimes heard a fella try to hide his weeping
maybe late at night, or you saw him fighting back his
tears while men make lots of noise.
Bad letter day? I heard the officer say.
I looked away, but not for harm, I used my arm
to wipe my face.
Take the afternoon, son, he said,
nobody will hear you in the cell.
I went,
I walked the quiet corridor
I closed the door,
I fell on to my bed
and cried
because my dog had died.
I tried to think of how to thank the man who
gave my privacies some privacy.
He’d be long retired now, a gentleman, a golfer,
a man from up the Highlands,
If I found him, I could shake his hand and thank him.
If I wrote to him, I’d write to him
and say he gave me
dignity that day.
256 Padraig O’Tuama
If I saw him I could thank him
for the way he made my bad day
the kind of bad day
I’d survive.

Notes
1 https://www.voxliminis.co.uk/.
2 https://www.voxliminis.co.uk/projects/unbound/.
Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers
followed by “n” denote endnotes.

‘9/11’ attack 25 Audit Commission 245

audit culture 47
Ablett, P. 141 Ayers, A.J. 65
Abo El Nasr, M.M. 34
acceptance 62–63, 152, 153, 197 ‘Baby P’ story 71
active listening 211, 214 Back, L. 12
activism 4, 14, 143, 156, 162 Bailey, R. 2
Addams, 54 Bamford, T. 68
Adoption Act 1958 15 banking concept 128
adult-protection 69, 110, 166 Banks, S. 41
adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) Barber, J.G. 201
116–120 Barker hypothesis 117
advocacy 20, 63, 71, 75, 93, 119, 160, Barn, R. 22
161, 168 Barr, B. 5
African-centered social work 205–207 Becker, S. 84
Afrocentricity 205, 207 Beckett, A. 4
ageing 163–164 Beck, U. 75
Ainsworth, M.D. 112 Bent-Goodley, T. 205
Allegritti, I. 53 Beresford, P. 5, 63, 86, 89, 96
Alleyne, B. 25 Bilson, A. 200
ambiguity 59, 99, 168, 220 Bilton, K. 68
Amin, I. 17 Black and in Care 20
Annetts, J. 38 BlackLivesMatter movement 4
anti-discriminatory practice 23, 62, 168 blame tree 71–72, 72
anti-oppressive practice 33, 53, 61, 66, 168, Bowlby, J. 45
203, 218 Braithwaite, E.R. 15
anti-racism, anti-racist 4, 12, 13, 18–24, 63, Brake, M. 2
142, 145, 148, 150 British Adoption Project (BAP) 15
anthropomorphism 113 British Journal of Social Work 16
anxiety 39, 82, 83, 117, 167, 210, 211 British Nationality Act 14, 19
Arruzza, C. 4 Brixton Black Lesbian Group 19
artistry 250–251 ‘brown babies’ 13
assessment 199–203 Brysk, A. 65
Association of Black Social Workers and Burke, B. 23
Allied Professionals (ABSWAP) 19 Burke, C. 218
Association of Directors of Social Services Burnham, D. 12
(ADSS) 18 Butler, I. 33
asylum seekers, refugees 13, 17, 24, 26, 27,
51, 63, 77 Campaign Against Racial Discrimination
attachment behaviour 112, 114 (CARD) 15
attachment theory 109–114; beginnings Caplan, G. 211, 212, 213
109–110; experiments 110–112 Carbado, D.W. 157
258 Index
care 22, 54, 71, 178, 200, 201, 238, 241; crisis intervention 210–211
children in 68, 69, 217; health 26, 27, Crisis Intervention Models and Strategies
119, 160, 244; homines curans 133–135; 213–215
inclusive 159–161; LGBT+ aged 159–164; crisis reaction 210
management 78, 92, 220; neoliberalism critical language study (CLS) 245
and 132–133, 135–136; policies 244; Croft, S. 5, 86, 89, 96
services 241–244, 242, 243; social 62, cross-agency boundaries 242
64, 75, 79, 99, 100, 166, 179, 219, 245;
technologies of 47, 77 Dadzie, S. 20
Care Programme Approach (CPA) 22 Dalrymple, J. 23
Carlton-LaNey, I. 205 damp housing 86–87
caseworkers 31 Davies, M. 91
Central Council for Education and Davis, A. 156, 157
Training in Social Work (CCETSW) decolonisation, decolonising 4, 57–60
16, 21, 22 democratic care 135
Chapman, T. 202 Denny, D. 21
‘charity organization’ 31, 32 deviancy theory 192
Cheetham, J. 17, 19 disability, social model of 137–139
1975 Children Act 68–69 disequilibrium 210, 212–213
1989 Children Act 69 disorganised attachment 112
2004 Children Act 70 Dobson, P. 88
citizenship 38 Dominelli, L. 21, 91
civil rights 63 Drakeford, M. 33
class 3, 37, 39, 45, 81, 95, 129, 141, 148, Dubois, B. 175
150–152, 153–154, 156, 192, 236, 239 Dziegielewski, S.F. 210, 213
Clausen, J.S. 125
Clay, A. 156 Eckbo, G. 107
Clements, L. 166 ecology 223–224
Cleveland Inquiry 69 ecomap 225–226, 226
the client speaks 94–95 ecosystemic paradigm 226–228
Climbié Inquiry 70 Ellis, K. 63, 65
Climbié, V. 24, 25, 68, 70, 219 Ely, P. 21
Clunnis, C. 22 emancipatory social work 61–63
Coard, B. 16 emphasis 213
Cohen, S. 25, 192 Empire Windrush 14
collaboration 240–245, 242, 243 Emslie, M. 247
Colonial People’s Defence Association Engels, F. 116
(CPAD) 14 environment 223–224
The Commission for Racial Equality epidemiology 116–117
(CRE) 18 equality 16–18, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 53, 61, 62,
Commonwealth Immigration Act 15, 16 64, 84, 89, 91, 98, 135, 137, 151, 161, 163,
communication technologies 47–48 168, 178
Communist Manifesto 148 Equality Act 27
community 232–233 Erikson, E. 113
community care 32 ethics 41–42; level of 172; values
Community Care Act 69 174–175, 175
community empowerment 233–234 Evans, T. 65
community movements 63 evidence-based practice 202–203
constructionism 234
Cooper, A. 218, 219 Fairfax, C.N. 205
co-production 177, 178, 180 Family Welfare Association (FWA) 95
corporal punishment 173 Fanon, F. 14
counter developments 98–99 Female Genital Mutilation Act 25
Covid-19 4, 5 feminism 148–151
Cowden, S. 141 Ferguson, H. 219, 220
crisis 3–5; basic tenets of 212; definition 210; Ferguson, I. 37
duration 212–213; of professional practice Fitzherbert, K. 16
247–250 Floyd, G. 4
 Index 259
Fook, J. 50 inequality 2, 21, 26, 39, 42, 51, 61, 65, 135,
Fraser, N. 141–146 151; economic 142; health 116, 118; issues
Freire, P. 2, 128–130, 201 of 4, 34; in mental health 25; social 152,
Fryer, P. 20 154–157; structural 32–33, 66
information and communication technologies
Garrett, P.M. 44 (ICTs) 44
gender 24, 104, 135, 141, 148–150, 153–154, Institute of Race Relations (IRR) 14
156, 159–163 international social work 51–52
generative factors 232 intersectionality 152–154; analytical strategy
Gilligan, G. 132 154–155; field of study 152; form of
Gilroy, P. 12, 19 critical praxis 155–157; race, class, and
Gitterman, A. 223 gender 153–154
globalisation–localisation debate 53 invulnerability 122–123
Global Social Work Definition Task
Force 57 Jenkins, J.M. 124
Global Social Work Statement of Ethical John, V.M. 26
Principles (GSWSEP) 58–59 Jordan, B. 40
Golan, N. 213 justice 144–145
governance 76, 77, 145, 178, 179, 244
Gray, M. 37, 42, 50, 53 Kantian moral philosophy 62
green social work (GSW) 177–178; Kaur, R. 24
development 178–181, 181 Kemp, S. 224
Kemshall, H. 76
Hall, S. 12 Keynesian-Westphalian frame 144
Harlow, H. 112, 113 Khan, V.S. 18
Harrison, A.K. 156 knowledge 44–46
Hartman, A. 225 Kohli, R. 26
Haug, E. 52 Kolb, D. 184
heady days 97 Koseda, H. 20
health realization 233–234
Henderson, P. 24 Lambert, L. 17
Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) Laming, H. 166
27 language 231
Hill, H. 107 Lash, S. 48
history 96–100 law-informed practice 167–168
Hochfeld, T. 51 legislation level 171–172
Hokenstad, M.C. 52 Leonard, P. 191
Hollis, F. 217 Lewis, G. 11
homines curans 133–135 LGTQ+ 159–164
Hooper, C.A. 217 liberal feminism 150
Hostile media 22 linking up for change 100
Hough, M. 202 Little, K. 13
human rights 61–63; consumerization and Local Government Act 15
privatization 64–65; globalization and Lorenz, K. 112
the co-option 64–65; legal and political Lorenz, W. 51
limitations 63–64; professional acceptance Lymbery, M. 203
62–63; public and political endorsement
61–62; universalism, relativism and MacIntosh, P. 12
culture 65 MacPherson, S. 84
Humphries, B. 25 Malala Yousafzai 4
Hunt, S. 86 Mama, A. 22
managerialism 74
identity politics 75 Maria Colwell Inquiry 68–69
Ife, J. 53 marketisation 145
Ifekwunigwe, J.O. 26 Marshall, T.H. 38
Immigration Act 16, 27 Martin, C. 86
Indigenisation 52–53 Marx, K. 150
individualist-reformist 91 mass-employment industry 81
260 Index
Mayer, J.E. 2, 94, 95 Plath, D. 202
May, T. 27 Platt, S. 86
McAuley, L. 38 politics 37–42; feminism 149–151
McClusky, U. 217 positive forces for change 99–100
Mendes, P. 33 positivism 248
Mental Capacity Act 26 post-modernism 2, 52, 53, 59, 66, 75
Mental Health Act 19 poverty 84–85
1983 Mental Health Act 173 power 4, 19, 41, 52, 53, 99, 106, 150, 165,
#Me Too 4 201, 233, 234, 238, 244; and duties 167,
The Mickleton Group 21 168; of human rights 65; of people 90,
Midgley, J. 34, 37, 50, 54 91; of political movement 63; poverty
Miley, K. 175 85; relationships 66, 142, 152, 154, 155,
Mills, C.W. 2 218, 245
Mills, R. 233 privatisation 237
Mishra, R. 65 ‘problem-solving’ approach 187
Moch, M. 128 profession 1, 2, 12, 31–33, 35, 40, 54, 144,
‘moments in racial time’ 11 172, 177–181, 190, 206, 207, 218, 248;
moral knowledge 187 across countries and cultures 50, 52; and
moral panic 83, 201 agencies 242, 244, 245; and discipline
Morley, C. 141 5, 241; health 32; history of 39; and
mould growth 87 legitimacy crisis 249; social work as 6,
Munford, R. 223 10, 37, 41, 57–59, 74, 93, 185–186, 220;
Munro, E. 70 values of 175, 247
Mynott, E. 25 ‘professional imperialism’ 34
protective factors 232
Nash, M. 223 psychosocial stress 118
National Children’ Homes 14 public good 236–237
nature of information 47–48 public service workers 194
neo-assimilationalist language 13
neoliberalism 132–133; democratic care 135
Noble, S. 141 Race Equality Unit 21
Race Relations Act 15, 17, 24
Occupy Wall Street movement 4 race 11–26, 138, 141, 148, 152, 153–154,
O’Donoghue, K. 223 156, 162, 205
Oliver, M. 137 race riots 15
Operation Black Vote 23 racial discrimination 16
Orange Tide movement 4 racism 19
Organisation of Women of African and Asian radical social work 190–193
Descent (OWAAD) 18 Ramon, S. 40
Osei-Hwedie, K. 53 Rapp, C. 224
recognition 143
Parad, H.J. 211, 213 reflective practice 250–251
Parekh, B. 12, 24 reflexive modernisation 75
participation 66, 85, 96, 236–239, 241, reflexiveness 90
242, 245 reflexive-therapeutic 90
participatory research 88–89 relationship-based model 217–222
partnership 240–245, 242, 243 relativism 65
Parton, N. 2 reserve army of labour 80
Patterson, S. 15 resilience 122–123, 232; and exposure to risk
Payne, M. 11, 38, 39, 90 123–124; origins 125; protective processes
personalisation 236–239 125–126; risk and adversity 124–125;
personal values 172 study 123
perspectival dualism 142 ‘the return of the political’ 42
Philp, M. 44, 45 reverse-catalytic effects 125–126
Phoenix, A. 22 Richmond, 13, 54
phronesis 186–188 Risikogesell-schaft. see risk society
Pierson, J. 11 risk factors 232
 Index 261
risk society 82; dimensions of 75–76; social work history 10
governance 76–78; re-thinking social Social Work History Network 11, 27n1
work 76 social work law 165–168
roasting old chestnuts 34–35 social work students 2–3, 59, 206
Roberts, A.R. 210, 213 societal values 173
Rowe, J. 17 sociological imagination 105–108
Rushdie, S. 21 sociological reductionism 200
Rutter, M. 114, 117 Solomos, J. 12
Soul Kids Campaign 17
Scafe, S. 20 Southall Black Sisters (SBS) 18
scandal impact 70–71 South Birmingham Family Service Unit 88
Schön, D. 247–251 Southdown Project Survey 87–88
scientific charity 31 steeling effects 125
Scottish Black Women’s Group 20 The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 24
Scourfield, J. 200 Stevenson-Hinde, J. 114
Selvon, S. 14 Strathclyde Social Work Department 84
Series, L. 166 street-level bureaucracy 194–198
service-user movements 63 strengths perspective 230; community
service users 96–97, 192 232–233; critical factors 232; language
‘settlement movement’ 31, 32 231; resilience 232; vs. pathology 231
Shafir, G. 65 Stubbs, P. 20
Shakti Women’s Aid 20 Suspended Under Suspicion (SUS) laws 18
Sheppard, M. 2 systems concepts 224–225
Short, C. 23
Smith, C. 46 Taylor, D. 24
Smith, M.A. 124 Taylor-Robinson, D. 5
social capital 31 technical rationality 221, 247–250
social care agencies 44 therapeutic social work 91
social class 38, 95 Thompson, N. 23
social control 51, 76, 98, 192, 197 timelines 12, 13–27
social engineering 188 Timms, N.W. 2, 94, 95
Social Exclusion Unit 24 Tizard, B. 17, 22
socialist-collective 91 traditional research 88
social justice 178–179 transformational social work 91, 92
social model of disability 137–139 Triseliotis, J.P. 17
social order social work 91–92 trivalent theory of justice 144
social order views 91 Tronto, J. 134
social services departments 45
social welfare 38 underside research 88–89
social work 1; body of knowledge 2; unemployed 81
with children and families 1; definition ‘unicausal moralistic-suppressive’
12; developments 33–34; emphasis approach 95
2; foundational strength 2; global universalism 50, 65
North 32, 33; history 11; identity 1; universal social work 50–51; desirability 54
insistence 2; legitimacy 33; macro-level universal values–multicultural social work
focus 32–33; micro-level focus 33; debate 53–54
occupy 1; politics of 37–42; practical user involvement 99
activity 2; principles 2; regulatory and
liberatory forms 5; structure 6; tentative values 170–171; in tension 173–174, 174
conclusions 35; three-way discourse Vicedo, M. 112, 113
90–93, 91
social work education 11, 12, 16, 20, 39, 55, Walia, H. 157
58, 59, 128, 141–146, 190, 206; anti-racist Walton, R.G. 34
approach within 22; law teaching in 165; Wang, S. 40
race equality in 21; standards for 50, 54; Watts, R. 247
and training 21, 99 Webb, S.A. 37, 42, 47
social workers 128, 129, 185 Weber, M. 77
262 Index
wellness 233 ‘Windrush generation’ 4
Westernisation 52–53 Winnicott, D. 45
Whan, M. 185 World Health Organisation 4
Whig approaches 37
‘Whig interpretation of history’ 38 Xiong, Y. 40
Whitehead, M. 5
Wickenden, J. 14 Zami 1 20
Williams, C. 23 Zito, J. 22