Towards Glocal Social Work in the Era of Compressed Modernity

Towards an Era of Distorted Modernity

Timo Harrikari, Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138225541
• eBook ISBN: 9781315399249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the change of social work in the frame of modernisation. Through Mary Richmond's classical idea of social work, the book seeks to set current societal trends affecting social work into the context of a long historical line, opening spaces for the new debates within the social work discipline as well as proposing and taking some new directions in the current era of compressed modernity. From the viewpoint of social work, there still is an individual in a situation, however, the situation has profoundly changed during the past hundred years.

Divided into seven chapters, topics covered include, firstly, the rethinking of Richmond's original idea, revisiting the modernisation theories and social transformations as well as discussion on the social work theories and mandates according to the chosen classics. Secondly, the book continues with sketching the pillars of compressed modernity and rethinking the global and local relations. During the era of glocalisation, polycentrism, digitalisation and hybridisation, the previous conceptualisations of social theory have to be reconsidered. Finally, a proposal for glocal social work vision is represented by setting questions which should be taken under scrutinity.

Academics, researchers, practising social workers and students of social work, as well as of social policy, administration, social law and other social sciences, will find this book to be an essential text for understanding the current societal changes, trends and tendencies. The book provides a lot of information for policymakers and citizens interested in the background knowledge for the contemporary societal situation.

1 Introduction

In social diagnosis, there is the attempt to arrive at as exact a definition as possible of the social situation and personality of a given client. Investigation, or the gathering of evidence, begins the process, the critical examination and comparison follow, and last come its interpretation and the definition of the social difficulty. – Investigation enters into diagnosis, it enters into the laborious and learned seeking for truth which deserves to be termed social research, and it forms an important part of the many inquiries into social conditions which do not meet the exacting requirements of research but which may properly be described as social investigations.

(Richmond 1917, 51–52)

In her work, Social Diagnosis, one of the classics of social work, Mary Richmond describes her conception of the principles and methods of compiling a social diagnosis of a social work client. Richmond, as a broadly enlightened person and civil activist, defines social work as a professional activity which applies a scientific method while investigating a client’s everyday environments. The methods could be adopted from the spheres of multiple disciplines, such as psychology and history, but as Richmond notes, investigating and working with social ties, relations and interdependencies would be at the heart of the professional social work. Consequently, she includes social work among the social sciences with a specific pragmatic agenda, a combination which has continued to the present.

This book addresses social work as an academic discipline and a professional practice in the light of modernisation processes. Throughout this work, we will emphasise the general tendencies of modernisation and reflect them through the long-term developments and trends of social work, in particular focusing on the conceptualisations of social work as a scientific discipline and professional practice. Since Richmond’s times, social work has been included with the social sciences as an academic discipline. Throughout its history, as a professional activity practised within social service systems, it has had a strong relation to social policy programmes, whose goals, in the first phase, were tightly connected with the processes of replacing family- and community-based agrarian social protection arrangements with nation-based income transfers and public social services.

In particular, the aim is to introduce social as the characteristic dimension in social work. This will be introduced by focusing on how social work, as a discipline and practice, developed through the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. Subsequently, we will set up a debate about current trends in Western societies and will question where social work, as a discipline and professional practice, is heading. We will ask how social work is taking shape at the beginning of the twenty-first century in a context where state borders, national-based institutions and their regulatory machineries are challenged by transnational and supranational developments. These current tendencies are captured by the concept of ‘globalisation’, which refers to a borderless economic space, understood as an increasing political, economic and environmental interdependency which flows between and, further, beyond nation states. However, the concept of ‘global’ has been increasingly discussed in a critical sense during the last few years. Instead of speaking solely about the impacts of being global, the focus has shifted towards the dynamics and tensions between ‘global’ and ‘local’. Hence, we are seeking for the theoretical dimensions of social work through trajectories conceptualised as glocal, a concept launched and discussed in the context of the economy as a combination of global and local activities in the field of trade. Recently, the dynamics of local–global relations and the paradigm of glocal social work has been debated in scholarly social work discussions as well (e.g. Livholts and Bryant 2017; Lyons and May-Chahal 2017). As we see it, the ongoing debate reflects the need for new conceptualisations in the current historical context where national structures are pressured by globalising tendencies.

Hence, our hypothesis is that an accelerating transformation process of social work is currently going on in Western societies – a transition from nationally anchored social work towards not yet discovered positions in the global context as well as towards uncertainties in the forefront of complex transnational phenomena and tendencies. More than offering answers, let alone the right answers, we will seek to set current developments into the context of a long historical line, opening spaces for new debates within the social work discipline as well as proposing and taking some new directions. In this respect, we are dealing with a phenomenon which touches societal developments after the second modernity debate, as the classical writers on reflexive modernisation, such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, wrote their works nearly three decades ago. As we see it, it is time to stretch the modernisation debate gradually beyond the debate of the 1990s and to question what is going on in the Western societies and social work of the 2020s. Our daring question is, can we speak about a third phase of the modernisation process, especially related to the concept of the compressed modernity of which we are on the threshold in the first decades of the twenty-first century?

Contextualising modernisation and social work

Modernisation is used to describe the narrative on the changes in the Western societies. These changes have been addressed by writers of several social theory classics, such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Karl Marx. These classics have shed light on various aspects of modernisation which, together, build our understanding of key societal changes in the Western world; modernisation is used to introduce a continuum from the pre- and early modern eras to the first and second era (e.g. Hobsbawm 1962; Fukuyama 2014). The classical texts dealt with the transition from the premodern era to the first modern era – the shift from the agrarian mode of production, bartering and feudalism, political autarchy and the social security provided by local communities towards the modern societies touched by industrialisation and urbanisation, monetary exchange and capitalism, mandatory democracy and nation-based social security systems. And parallel to these developments, the new organising of the whole societal order was also occurring.

During the first era of modernity, from the end of the nineteenth century until the first decades of the twentieth century, industrialisation-based mass production was established, and the interstate system was created to advance and regulate the capitalist economy. Technological and engineering development, especially in Great Britain, was the key factor in industrialisation, factory-based mass production and industrial division of labour. Parliamentary democracy was both an outcome of and a prerequisite for the civic society; social movements, trade unions and non-governmental organisations were the essential actors in launching democratic development. The nation state formed a platform for democratic practices and institutions, and political parties started struggling for power within the state. In democratic systems, the political and social interests represented by civic actors and political parties were the starting point for reform policies. Social policy issues have been of interest since the very beginning of democratic order. The agrarian social security systems and measures based on kinship and charity did not match the new industrial relations. In the capitalist order, the nation state played an important role as facilitator and regulator of industrial and market relations, but it also played a role in the field of societal policies, social policy included.

The evolution of the first phase of modernity with its factory industries was a rapid and efficient process which permeated all Western countries at a varying pace. Industrialisation opened opportunities for urban life, a two-generational family, urban housing and everyday living. The spheres of family and employment were separated, and the agrarian divisions of labour were displaced by industrial relations, leading to the differentiated spheres of public and private. The birth of the working class brought with it a new stakeholder to the political stage and demonstrated a tendency towards democratisation, where the efforts of the civil society, trade unions and other working-class organisations intertwined. This led, for instance, to new state regimes, especially in the Nordic states, as a close connection between civil society and nation state formation was regarded as a prerequisite and basis for a high level of common trust and welfare state development (Rothstein 2010; Korpi and Palme 1997; Sipilä 1997).

The first organisational basis for a modern welfare state was the interstate system between the nation states, established in the wave of nationalistic movements of nineteenth-century Europe. One of the strongest ideas in establishing a nation state was to represent it as a value community; the basis for the contemporary division of ‘them and us’ was created, and within the nation state, the population had to share the idea of its territory, borders, language, national symbols and cultural character. The Western apparatus of social protection, the institutional systems anchored on a competent nation state and its rule of law, were built during the twentieth century (Anderson 2013).

The organising of comprehensive and vocational education was a prerequisite for a successful enforcement of the modern industrial order. Science-based technology, rational planning and effectiveness as principles of production offered the basis for modern reasoning. The methods and applications of the engineering sciences steered the industrial processes. The labour force took shape in two spheres, production and reproduction, following the distinction launched by Marxist theory. Reproductive work was performed outside the industrial system, providing an auxiliary activity for maximising surplus value in production. Multiple early social policy programmes were based on this setting of the mutual dependence of industrial relations. The new setting actualised the negotiations on gender relations and new gender contracts. The tendency of democratisation and in particular the movements in civic society opened access to public arenas for women. Early activists of the women’s movement emphasised women’s rights to education, labour and societal participation but could not combat the formation of labour segregations. Even today, the two-breadwinner-family model dominates, but while exploring women’s entrance into public and private employment, the segregation of jobs is still visible; women have been employed in the sectors which were dominated by women in agrarian societies, while the technological and economic sectors have been male-dominated. Today, this remains an issue which labels social work activities.

The first period of modernisation included two world wars and bloody conflicts both inside and outside the Western world. The political development in Europe between the First and Second World Wars has been widely discussed, but the question remains: how was it possible that many European societies moved into authoritarian and racist regimes and deployed their industrial machineries in warfare and repressive policies (Bauman 1989)? In the aftermath of the Holocaust of the Second World War, a strong political will was aroused to develop democracy and a more humanitarian approach towards the people who had suffered in the war. There was a demand for rule-of-law-based constitutional societies which could protect people from dictatorship and repression, and the formation of the European welfare state was an effort to accelerate industry and rebuild the societies to compensate people for the opportunities they had lost during extreme oppression and war. The constitution of West Germany enacted the state as a social state; the same idea was applied in different countries, especially in the Nordic countries, which have succeeded in providing both dynamic capitalism and a welfare state.

The 1960s was an era when the first modernity arrangements were placed under heavy criticism. The Western liberal, radical and left political movements started to criticise not only nation-state-anchored capitalistic politics but also the whole global capitalist order. On the one hand, the role of the nation state was challenged, especially in the frame of criticisms of capitalism, which interpreted the state, capitalist industry and the market as an intertwined corporation (Midgley 1981). On the other hand, as the global economic market was gradually extending its impact on nation states, attention was increasingly paid to supranational institutions and corporations. Television made the poverty of non-Western countries widely visible, and the global responsibility towards poor countries was launched by social movements. However, exporting the Western economy and institutional orders to ‘the third world’ was considered imperialistic, destructive, unethical, insensitive and irrelevant. In this context, social work was seen as part of the colonialist order and of professional imperialism (Righard 2013, 140; Midgley 1981).

After the 45-year bipolar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, including their allies, the collapses of the Soviet socialist order and the Iron Curtain in 1991 were followed by a victory of the capitalist economy. The capitalist order has succeeded in permeating the former socialist countries, even, perhaps surprisingly, China as well, where no kind of collapse or even weakening of the communist regime has happened. In general, this change, intertwined with multiple parallel tendencies, has been conceptualised as a shift from the first modernity towards the second one. The most daring theorists have suggested that the change was initiated immediately after the Second World War, had been strengthened since the 1970s and culminated in the 1990s. A hypothesis on the second modernity is a meta-level social theory debate, but it contains multiple parallel developments, such as globalisation, free global markets, neoliberal governance and the actualisation of environmental issues. Consequently, these developments have all changed the mandates, organisation and conditions of social work, setting some ultimate challenges for social work to face and solve.

In the history of modern capitalism, the concept of progress has been one leading idea; capitalist expansion has been argued for as enabling endless and everlasting progress, which provides a common good for all societal groups on all continents. Ulrich Beck was among the first theorists who problematised the progressive and optimistic visions of the modern project. In his work, Risk Society, Beck (1986) claimed that environmental risks and threats, uncertainties in governing global-scale systems and the fragilities and deficiencies of the democratic order connected with the weakening of nation-state regulations are the issues which raise questions about the relevance of progress. With respect to political and economic changes, the debate on reflexive modernity has highlighted the changing status of the interstate system established during the first modernisation. The existence of the nation state, and, among other things, its parliamentary democracy and administrative bodies, has been seen as a self-evident entity over the past few decades, but recently, the role of the nation state has been diminishing, not only due to supranational state unions but also global market actors. Consequently, this has raised questions about what is happening to nation-state-based social protection, including social work. The modern institutionalised social services constructed within the nation states have become fragile and fragmented, because of global competition and its impacts on the national economies as well as due to neoliberal governance. This has forced the states to become involved in global competition since the end of the Cold War era (1945–1991) in a way similar to that of international enterprises and the stock market.

As the sphere of the capitalist order and its impacts has extended over the nation states, including even Communist Party-ruled China, the concepts of global capitalism and neoliberal doctrine have been discussed. Michael Reisch (2011, 218) has emphasised the importance of recognising the distinction between current global capitalism and the internationalisation of commerce as a thousand-year global practice. Today, the global economy is based on a rapid mobility and liquidity of capital connected ultimately with quick online information concerning changes in the finance market and the interests of competitors. Agility and being well-informed are the main competencies in managing the stock market. The short-term nature of investments and the pursuit of short-term growth and profits instead of long-term strategies are also dominant features in the activities of transnational corporations and enterprises. At the same time, there are interlocking relationships among national economies, their currency systems and the industrial sector. Consequently, it seems that nation states do not have enough ability and power to challenge the dominance of the global market. National political structures have diminished their capacity to address the effects of an aggressive market ideology and its actors. The taxation rights of nation states are weakening, while the international capital market is seeking global tax-free and free trade opportunities. The problem is that the social sector, social services, organised within and by nation states as well as the regional and local welfare service institutions, tends to be subsumed and marginalised in the current economic-political system.

Neoliberalism, in turn, is usually understood as an economic theory which, after the Cold War, has gained a hegemonic position among economists and politicians in their interpretations of the current global and national economy. Neoliberalism claims market fundamentalism as its essential ideology; the global market is introduced as the motor of the globe. Neoliberalism is not only an economic theory but also a political ideology, policy paradigm and social imagining (Evans and Sewell 2013). In a word, it is a specific form of governance. For social policy and social work, these other three facets of neoliberalism are important while they offer frames within which to understand contemporary social problems and trajectories for solutions. On the one hand, the neoliberal doctrine has strengthened the consideration of people as individuals, and thus, it may have promoted personal freedoms and rights. The issues of minorities, the previously marginalised and oppressed people have received global attention. On the other hand, the question remains of how to combine the interests of individuals, states and market actors, as we have noticed an increasing tendency towards the individualisation of social problems and risk across the Western world.

In addition, definitions such as ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) and ‘high modernity’ (Giddens 1998) have been introduced to describe the changing character of societies after the Cold War era. Some theorists, such as Francis Fukuyama (1992), have spoken about the postmodern era and the end of ideologies and history. In this respect, neoliberal governance has been a rather pragmatic and overwhelming economic paradigm, apart from specific policies, but at the same time, it has been viewed as a solution for creating prosperity all over the globe and as such, a new history of humankind. However, Bauman (2000) suggests in his Liquid Postmodernity that the era of global capitalism has divided people into the globalised rich and the local poor. Glocalisation leads to the polarising development where riches and power accumulate to the market actors, but at the same time, local people and communities are forced to adjust to and cope with the consequences of the market processes.

The question of the labour market concerns people not only in poor areas but also in the Western world. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘There is an individual person in a situation’
• 3. Modernity and social transformation revisited
• 4. Social work: pioneers, theories, mandates
• 5. Towards compressed modernity?
• 6. Global and local: sketching conceptualisations of the ‘glocal’
• 7. Glocal social work: new emphasis, new directions?
• Index