The Role of Social Science in the Education of Professional Practitioners

John Astley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351021111
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Role of Social Science in the Education of Professional Practitioners explores the inter-relation between the social sciences and professional practice, particularly in areas of health and social welfare, and the form that professional education takes. The key issue of who provides for our health and welfare needs in the community is considered, as are the values and education that drive those people to give service in society, and how those professionals can come to a full and open understanding of their role. It focuses on the value orientation, identity development and sense of self that will enable practitioners to develop their understanding of clients' needs in the community.

The book is divided into chapters that consider the educational and learning theories that underpin professional education, and how those ideas have shaped the development of the curriculum for professional practice education. Astley provides an in-depth discussion of the nature of professional roles, and how the making and taking of those roles is historically influenced by politics and policy making. The nature and dynamics of the communities in which we live, including who has power, is addressed, with special reference to how the health and social welfare needs of citizens in those communities is assessed, planned for, and provided.

This book will be vital reading for academics and professionals in the fields of health and social care professions' education, social and behavioural sciences, higher education, professional development and identity formation.

Chapter 1

An introduction

My aim in this essay is to explore what form the education of professional practitioners takes. As the title of the essay confirms my focus is on the role that social science has played and can play in these educational processes. As a sociologist I will be concentrating on the contribution of sociology and how this discipline can help us to make sense of ourselves as professional practitioners.

In my view sociology is a symbiotic science. Its promise is to give back to people what it takes from them. This is true of all culture but sociology more than any other discipline promises to make this a practical truth.

(O’Neill 1972 p. 7)

I wanted to include this quote from O’Neill’s Sociology as a Skin Trade because it sums up well one of the key questions that should be posed to all aspiring welfare-oriented professional practitioners when they begin their educational programme: ‘What is the nature of the social upon which we are working?’ Social scientists are of course well situated to both pose and address this question. Not for us are the ideologically driven pronouncements of the state bureaucracy, or the blindingly obvious and narrow motives of the business world, or the ‘fish and chip paper’ rhetoric of the media. Our approaches to these issues are founded in reason!

However, in the post-Enlightenment world, the era of the rational and the age of reason, it has been commonplace to see the academic disciplines that make up the social sciences as purely existential, and an individual activity. Fortunately, however, we have been saved by education. In my case as a sociologist I have spent the last decades doing my best to promote an educational, and vocational, role for sociology. As a consequence there have been several of us, including I hope many of my students, who have avoided journeying down the cul-de-sac of intellectual irrelevance, hoping indeed to avoid the fate of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who according to his 1950s contemporary, C. Wright Mills, was always ‘packing his bags but never making the journey!’

The important aspect of the journey I have made in many years as an educationalist has been to engage my many and diverse students in the pleasures of action research, as argued by O’Neill, cited above. The ‘action’ dimension is certainly about reflection in action, i.e. the process of research is a dialectical one in that thinking, questioning and responding goes on during the time scale of the research process. Being reflexive, reflecting and taking action are constant themes in this essay. Essentially the research process begins and ends with the focus on the wider public domain needs of those who are the ‘subjects’ of the research. In working with the members of a ‘community’ sociologists bring their general knowledge and understanding of key factors, previous research and so on, of those matters that concern the local populace. Collaboration can then determine the nature of the research process; priorities, time scales, means and ends, key agents for (and against) desired change. This should be an educational, practical, liberating and transformational process. For the professional social scientist/researcher there is virtue in this practice, and I will be discussing this key issue as an aspect of ‘making sense of ourselves’ later in this essay.

Not the least of the issues raised will be about practicing in the public sector, where a life’s work is often more purpose than personal achievement. There are crucial links here with ideas about empathy and a utopian vision for the ‘good society’. Those of us reflecting on role performance in professional practice recognise how empathy can create a space in thought and deed where seeing beyond the status quo becomes feasible.

Professional practitioners play a range of key roles that touch all our lives. This is particularly true of those practitioners involved in welfare provisions in the widest sense. For some members of society the interventions that these practitioners make are an aspect of the significant transitions that they, as voluntary or involuntary clients, are making in their life cycle.

(Astley 2006 p. 5)

There are several places in this essay where the idea of ‘civil society’ is addressed as an aspect of our general thinking about the form of the society in which we all live and practice. It would be useful therefore to offer a brief definition at this point of my discussion. Civil society is usually defined as a society considered as a community of citizens linked by common interests and collective activity. Clearly this is true of life in the UK, but also, depending on any one person’s or cultural group’s perspective, decidedly wide of the mark. This standard and paradigmatic definition sits alongside equally dominant ideas about the pluralist state that benignly presides over us all and takes care of our security and our needs. Both these ideas are a key aspect of the post-war (1945) ‘settlement’ between the interests of labour, capital and the state, where a plurality of power exists between these vested interests. The people, those citizens of civil society make regular choices of representatives to sit in the legislature, the law-making body that shapes and protects our collective interests. The post-war settlement, ushered in by the Labour government in 1945 was cemented together by a ‘welfare state’ to replace the necessary ‘warfare state’. The ‘deal’ was that certain guarantees would be given to the people, as citizens, for example, full employment and access to a range of health and welfare provisions the like of which the majority of people in the UK had never experienced before. Professionals were widely seen as one key element to this re-balancing of access and opportunity because of their role as experts in their respective fields, and in place to give service to the whole of civil society without fear or favour.

The role of professionals, and the various claims to the equanimity in everyday life, has over the following decades been closely watched and argued about. There are several places in this essay where this pluralistic explanation of the management of society is questioned and the many changes to the roles and performance of professional practitioners examined.

Before looking deeper at the issue of curriculum development with regard to professional practice I should seek to explain my approach to contextualising the processes of thinking about designing a curriculum.

Throughout this essay I will be considering the issue of ‘making sense of ourselves’, which emphasises the need for professional practitioners to understand and become self-aware reflectors in action. For me the use of the word ‘making’ emphasises a process of development. The experimental and the experiential come into this dialectic.

I shall be exploring a range of issues concerned with curriculum, including assumptions about, and the creation of a curriculum. If we look at all (or certainly most) curricula for the education/training of professionals, we will find that social science is an integral part of that curriculum, but exactly what ‘part’ has changed, and is changing, will be addressed. The disciplines that tend to dominate are sociology and psychology, but economics can be found there to, for example linked in with the study of social policy. Political science, political economy and political history in one form or another will also often be linked with policy and social and public administration aspects of a curriculum. It is also the case that the generic discipline of social policy has consistently been on the professional practice curriculum, and although often in addition to sociology has been usually taught by sociologists, myself included. I should add here that there was an extraordinary growth in sociology between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. This happened across the whole spectrum of schooling (including plenty of social studies–type courses at CSE level) and education. The specific growth of sociology departments and lecturers in higher education reflected both an institutional enthusiasm for the subject, especially so in the new post-Robbins universities, and student demand. In addition to that, and depending on where we might look there will be (social) geographers, particularly on demographic issues, and anthropologists on cultural and ethnic diversity for example. The growth of interest within social science of a cultural time/space/globalisation/ecology dimension to the human condition is a major factor here. (See for example Anthony McGrew in Stuart Hall et al Modernity and its Futures1992). This was also the era of considerable growth in national social science teaching associations and networks, and the increasing influence of research bodies like the social science research council. From the late 1970s onwards Thatcher & Co. embarked on a quest to reduce the influence of the social sciences in general and sociology in particular.

Who gets to have a piece of any curriculum development will be influenced by the membership of any specific curriculum design team in a particular place and time, which in turn will reflect both the discipline diversity of any institution and the desire of academics to actually be involved in this field of research and education. Also, any design team will almost certainly contain those people who have a specific vocational interest in the education of professional practitioners, their research and teaching bound up in a reciprocal dimension. In my experience over recent decades it is increasingly the case that the curriculum for professional education is often designed by people who have been, or still are, actually working in a specific professional practice, for example nursing or social work.

Whose responsibility is it to communicate and implement research? Should researchers be held responsible for ensuring that the results of their work are incorporated into day-to-day professional practice? Is it an organisational responsibility for providers of health and social care …? Or is it perhaps the responsibility of individual practitioners to keep up to date with the latest evidence in their field and change their practice accordingly.

(Needham 2000 p. 131)

Or all of the above? Professional ‘social capital’, that deep cultural reservoir of knowledge, allied to ‘human capital’ and a striving for possessive individualism is one possible outcome that is discussed below.

It is also the case that several of the pioneers of a more higher education–led social work training curriculum argued that these education processes should happen within a social science context. Indeed some prominent providers, for example A. H. Halsey at Oxford University, argued that social work was a social science. A supporting motif for this line of argument was the importance placed upon community work. This was particularly so in the era of ‘generic’ social work and creation of local authority social services departments – the Seebohm years from the late 1960s into the 1970s. The complexity of ideas and practice in this period included continuous debates about whether social work, and certainly community work, was or was not a profession.

For a very full discussion on the Oxford contribution to these developments see Social enquiry, social reform and social action: one hundred years of Barnett House, George Smith et al 2014. I make reference to this department’s current courses later in this essay.

It is also important to suggest here that social scientists have often found great(er) virtue in designing and delivering educational programmes for professional practice, particularly so for welfare-oriented practice, than in their engagement in social policy making. Unfortunately working with, for, or hoping to influence policy makers can be very frustrating. Not the least of the issues here is the endless short-termism of politicians, in government or opposition. Politicians (and almost by definition the political parties they are part of) also exhibit an amnesiac character that for practising social scientists, with their debt to ‘history’ (the past in the present) and reasoned argument, can be difficult to take. I cannot be alone in the experience of attending meetings where some official and/or politician suggests that some area of policy needs inquiry and research, only to be told by people like me that there is already an extensive (and often ignored) body of top-quality research in the public domain! One aspect of this that many politicians and policy makers do not enjoy being reminded of is that we all need to consider the unintended as well as the intended consequences of policy. (For more on this vexing issue see Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The Blunders of Our Governments 2013.)

It is not surprising therefore that many social scientists who are concerned enough to play a role in the social and welfare policy context of our everyday lives do so precisely because of the direct access that this practice of research-based curriculum design and delivery gives them to professional practitioners. Indeed there have been several occasions in the past that groups of social scientists designing curricula for professional practice have been accused of being subversives, ‘Trojan horses’ and worse, by those of a more conservative political allegiance. Education studies at the Open University in the 1970s and 80s is an example that comes to mind.

It has be to acknowledged that the further we in the UK, but with plenty of examples elsewhere in Europe, have moved away from the paradigmatic and pragmatic social democratic ideology of the 1940–60 period, that many more social scientists have decided to work in the commercial/business sector, adding to the ‘soft power’ dimension of those organisations in the struggle over the legitimation aspect of for-profit social science practice. Nor were/are these shifts in allegiances peculiar to social scientists; just consider for example the public service role of architects and planners in that same 1940s–60s period compared to now. In this regard I would remind the reader that many professionals, individually and collectively, have moved from a social democratic nuanced role in the public sector to one in the private sector; architects and dentists come to mind. Yet again values playing a key role, as the impact of ‘the century of the self’ oriented many towards the commercial nexus.

Given these changes in social science and other professional practice, there had to be a response, and later in this essay I will be examining how critical theory increasingly became an approach favoured by social scientists in general, and especially so by those of us engaged in the education of professional practitioners.

Critical theory refuses to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought. It questions the hidden assumptions and purposes of competing theories and existing forms of practice. It has little use for what is known as “perennial philosophy”. Critical theory insists that thought must respond to the new problems and the new possibilities for liberation that arise from changing historical circumstances. Interdisciplinary and uniquely experimental in character, deeply sceptical of tradition and all absolute claims, critical theory was always concerned not merely with how things were but how they might be.

(Bronner 2011 p. 1/2)

And although this is a general and rather basic definition it serves to indicate where my argument is going to travel.

As a consequence of the significant changes in political ideology, there was gradually, and is now, a much more informed awareness that global capitalism, and the power of its many advocates, is part of the problem and not part of the solution for achieving a more just and fairer society. What this has meant is that approaches to education increasingly incorporate a critique of neo-liberalism and market-led educational methodologies, while giving students first-hand skills in analysis and critique, to enable self-sufficiency in their professional lives.

Public communication has broken down to the point where we lack the means to establish an accurate account of the world as the basis for common deliberation. This breakdown is most obvious in the near-universal acceptance of the fantasy that an unrestrained private economy could be relied on as the provider of public goods. But it can be seen too in the state and the corporations’ efforts to shape personality, culture and opinion, and the way private categories – character and competence – dominate the description of politics.

(Hind 2010 p. 6/7)

Dan Hind’s remarks are a timely reminder of the overwhelming need for ‘communicative action’, an open and transformational discourse, a concept developed by Jürgen Habermas, the German sociologists and ‘baby’ of the Frankfurt School critical theorists.

One clear context for differences of opinion over the aims and nature of professional education is related to the increasing influence of the ‘social model’ in the everyday practice of health and social care along with most other ‘people workers’ within the welfare domain. Briefly put, for now the ‘social model’ suggests that professional practitioners should engage with the psycho-socio-economic and cultural contexts of the everyday lives of their clients. There is also here a tendency to comprehend the ‘holistic’ person as someone who thinks, behaves and develops, or not, because of the nature of the society in which they live. The very form that society takes at any one time and place has a major and significant influence on people’s everyday lives. Also to be considered is the acculturation process encouraging the individual social being to adopt a taken-for-granted-ness to the way things are, and reinforcing the inevitable ‘snakes and ladders’ nature of life and living.

A notion of the organic takes on a series of meanings here that seek to emphasise the inter-relationship between ourselves as unique individuals and the variety of cultural groupings to which we belong by choice or otherwise. Any discussion about choices, and our freedom to make them, our agency, will then inevitably require us all to embrace a concern with the nature and role of political ideologies that act as contexts to this. Discussions about ethics, empathy and empowerment follow from this perspective, and will pose serious questions for practitioners in both their value orientation to a role, and with the relationships built, or avoided, with clients in need. There are moral and legal contexts to our lives regardless of what role we play in all these processes.

This crucial issue about the conceptualisation of the practitioner-client relationship has been discussed for some time. For example in an essay on ‘Social Workers: Training and professionalism’ (1972). Crescy Cannan emphasises two key concerns with the focus of both practice and education for it. Firstly there is the potential danger of separate disciplines like psychology and sociology offering very divergent explanations of human actions, rather than seeking an integrated approach to conceptualisation that develops the strengths and insights of both disciplines. Besides anything else this should allow the student to assess the relative merits of different conceptual approaches, and se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction
• 2 Thinking about curriculum theory
• 3 Curriculum issues
• 4 On roles
• 5 The community, providers and professional practice
• 6 A conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index