Criticism of social work as a controlling skilled regime involved with the administration of the threatening lessons will not be new (Maylea, 2021). At greatest, social work has confirmed to be an ambiguous occupation:
For instance, it is not uncommon to state the intentions of social work as serving to folks to accommodate to the established order and as difficult the established order by making an attempt to result in social change. This dissonance is intrinsic to social work, to its essence. (Epstein, 1999, p.9)
Social staff ‘see’ the implications of systemic inequality and this expertise has the potential to radicalize and gasoline dissent.
Mainstream little one and household follow is a response to the inherent failings of capitalism: the unequal social struggling that’s produced and reproduced via structural exploitation. Nonetheless, it’s a ‘skilled’ response from the capitalist state versus a response pushed by communities of resistance. Accordingly, social staff are caught in a bind – within the tensions and challenges produced by this existential dilemma.
I don’t assume the story ends right here – that we’re confronted with both accepting that social work features to protect unequal relations of energy or abolishing the sector altogether. Nonetheless, I do assume that (into the longer term) social work must develop into one thing else in the identical means that wider capitalist society must develop into ‘one thing else’. These progressive change processes are associated, one to the opposite.
Traditionally, a lot of the methodology of social work has been influenced by the remedial soft-policing position assigned to it. Over forty years in the past Philp (1979) argued that social work features, inside set limits, to re-include these on the margins of society via a story course of – re-framing and ‘re-presenting’ excluded topics as worthy of citizenship: “This particular person or household is protected – they’re alright now”.
This individualized ‘fact to energy’ advocacy has the potential to affect the way in which during which the circumstances and behaviours of ‘purchasers’ are understood by programs of authority and management: the way in which that they’re heard by those that administer the mechanisms via which entitlement is set (Dominelli, 2004). It’s, to hazard a guess, a course of acquainted to most practising social staff.
Parton (2014) means that this template served the humanistic / humanising operate assigned to social work within the context of the Anglo welfare states from the mid-twentieth century. On this sense it may be argued that the standard ‘case-work’ intent and performance of social work was, a minimum of probably, an inclusive freedom-enhancing venture: freedom as permission to re-enter liberal capitalist race in the event you like.
This was (and is) not the one attainable type of social work – it’s merely the one endorsed by the state. Scattered efforts, over time, to push the boundaries of follow to embody neighborhood engagement and empowerment are proof of a much less central, but resilient, thread within the weave of social work id.
Vital commentary has, understandably, mourned the demise of social work inside the new liberal political context that has been dominant for 4 many years now (Rogowski, 2010). It’s argued that social staff have come to carry out more and more instrumental features geared toward disciplining drawback populations. It’s this type of disillusioned evaluation that prompted Maylea (2021) to counsel that it’s time for the failed and decrepit occupation of social work to be ‘pushed into the ocean’.
Maylea’s arguments usually are not with out color of fact. The method of ‘talking for’ those that are constructed because the purchasers of social work has occurred in a wide range of methods over time, and in hindsight a lot of this has been a controlling and disenfranchising course of. There are high quality traces between care, benign authoritarianism and coercive management.
That is evidenced graphically within the distorted formally authored life histories of kids in care revealed within the present historic abuse in care inquiry. Social work and social staff had been donkey deep on this harmful course of in Aotearoa. We have to interrogate and perceive our skilled illusions within the mild of this actuality. Because the cliché goes, the identical exercise will generate the identical outcomes.
After we hear the direct voices of whānau on the receiving finish of state social work intervention (albeit fleetingly and in occasions of disaster), as we did within the post-Hastings OT inquiries, there’s usually a a lot completely different counter-narrative of worry and loathing. As Garrett (2021) has acknowledged, state social work within the Welfare State period was not a golden age of kindness and compassion. Energy to liberate is energy nonetheless and might simply be used to dominate and punish. I’ve usually thought that those that benefit from the train of authority ought to by no means be given any.
I imagine we have to digest this critique with out being disabled by it. The integrity of social work is all the time weak as a result of it’s too near the capitalist state. Nonetheless social staff could be concerned in progressive social change. They’re positioned near these on the underside of the social and financial heap and there’s potential, regardless of the percentages, to work in solidarity with those that are topic to structural drawback – to work with and for moderately than on.
This endeavor entails politically knowledgeable advocacy and organisation and it’s seldom a straightforward street. Medals for dissent are issued sometimes. Politically knowledgeable, progressive follow will not be written into job-descriptions – but it surely may very well be, a minimum of partially.
The social and financial world as we all know it’s more likely to shift on its axis over the following thirty years in response to the accelerating local weather disaster. All bets are off and there’s a nice deal at stake – we can’t afford to be disengaged. Sure, inequality of energy and outcomes are reproduced however they’re additionally challenged and altered – you /we don’t win on daily basis, however we win a number of the time and I wish to assume each win is cumulative.
Picture credit score: ian carolino
References
Dominelli, L. (2004). Social work: Idea and follow for a altering occupation. Cambride, Polity Press.
Epstein, L. (1999). The tradition of social work. In A. Chambon, A.Irving, & L. Epstein (Eds.), Studying Foucault for social work (pp. 3-26). New York, NY: Columbia College Press.
Garrett, P.M (2021). ‘A World to Win’: In Defence of (Dissenting) Social Work – A Response to Chris Maylea. British Journal of Social Work, 51 (4). 1131-1149.
Maylea, C. (2021). The tip of social work. British Journal of Social Work, 51(2), 772-789.
Parton, N. (2014). Little one Safety and Politics: Some Vital and Constructive Reflections. British Journal of Social Work, 44(7), 2042-2056.
Philp. M. (1979). Notes on a type of data for social work. Sociological Assessment, 27 (1), 83 – 111.
Rogowski, S. (2010) The Rise and Fall of a Occupation? Bristol: Coverage Press.
