Perspectives in Social Work

Noel Timms, Rita Timms

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138365223
• eBook ISBN: 9780429774270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Perspectives in Social Work was originally published in 1977 and provides a text for social workers in training to use. The book argues for a more philosophical approach to both understanding and doing social work and seeks to establish simple and basic elements in social work, asking questions such as: what should a social worker be able to do? What should a social worker know and believe? Does social work actually work? In answering these questions the book offers a wide ranging and critical review of literature of the time and looks at social work as a method of altruism. This book is still topical today and acts as a useful document on the subject of social work both through the discussions within, and through the lens of modern change. It will be of particular interest to those studying the history and changes in social work.

1
The approach of this book

For many subjects it appears possible to produce one or more textbooks which outline the main features of an area of study and summarise the essential content under a limited number of subdivisions. Such an undertaking in social work is much more difficult, at least at the present time, and there are obvious practical reasons why this should be so. It is far from easy to know what to exclude from a range of theories in a number of disciplines -psychology, sociology and even economics (ideas of costs, rationing and so on) and social philosophy. Legislation increases in scope and the social worker must at least know his or her way through and also around a growing number of acts and regulations. The scope of social work itself changes, so that residential work, for instance, now counts as a form of social work, whilst it remains unclear whether community work is part of social work or whether social work itself is best seen as part of community work. Finally, ways of doing social work or preferred models of practice change so quickly that several commentators speak of changes in fashion.

These difficulties in deciding what is inside and what is outside social work are obvious, but not less obstinate because of this. A further difficulty is, however, of more significance, and it is because of this that our book developed its present form. Previous books concerned with social work practice have attempted to indicate generally or in considerable detail what social workers should do. This is to put the cart before the horse. Prescribing social work techniques or analysing in minute detail what is called the social casework relationship are secondary matters. The primary question for the social worker is: What is it that I am doing when I practise social work?, rather than: How do I practise social work? Assuming the first question (what is it I am doing?) goes a long way to answering the second (how can it be done?). This is because achieving a description under which a set of activities (social work) is seen or establishing the reasons for doing these activities establishes a perspective which is crucial to action and which often justifies the action. If we know the perspective from which a social worker acts a great deal of the detail of his or her activity can be read off that position and a great deal concerning how the activity can be carried out.

Let us try to make this more concrete. What a social worker does can be described in a limitless number of ways. We could consider certain physiological processes at work as the social worker goes to visit an old person in an Old People’s Home; we could describe bodily movements or we could answer the question, What is a social worker doing? by saying, ‘He is interviewing or meeting an old person.’ A more significant description, however, is to say something like ‘He is trying to assess need or ascertain wishes or appraise the interests of a person’. If the social worker was trying to answer the question ‘What are you doing in the case of that old man?’ he could not with any conviction apply the ‘Come and watch me doing . . .’ technique. He could not, in other words, say at any one point ‘Come and watch me now at this minute trying to assess the need of a person’. Yet the reason for his action and very often the description under which his action is received by both the user of social work help and the social worker are central for the perspective of both social worker and client. What has to be done in detail are those things that count as assessing the needs (or wishes or interests) of a person.

We can perhaps summarise the difficulty in the idea of a textbook for social work by saying that it is simply not possible to put between two covers a compendium of what a social worker should know. It is, however, possible to describe and discuss what has to be grasped. It is with this end in view that this book has been written.

It examines ideas that have to be entertained and appreciated before social work can be intelligently grasped and effectively practised. It emphasises the critical appraisal of key concepts. In order to show that the concepts chosen are not arbitrary and in order to place the beginning of our discussion firmly within social work practice, we begin with what is usually called case material. It is somewhat unusual in that it is an account of experience of residential work and what is still termed field social work from the viewpoint of a resident. The account shows how firmly the main concepts from which social work is built up are embedded in a simple but articulate description of the experience of receiving social work help. We have in mind ideas such as need, emotion, respect, equality, friendship, justice, membership, community, human, and so on.

A residential centre for the physically handicapped

The following is a description of life in a hostel for eighteen men and women with varying degrees of disability. The writer was 24 when she entered the hostel. The account is given nuder sub-headings suggested by this user of residential and field social work.

Difficulties of regimentation

(a) Direct conflict between individual needs and administrative framework No one minds eating, bathing, getting up and going to bed at set times for most of the year - it is the never of watching of television after 9.30 p.m. - the never of returning later from a theatre, party, social gathering, etc. In the ‘outside’ world life after work does not start until 7.30-8.00 p.m. so that it was usually necessary to refuse invitations unless one could go through with the embarrassment of breaking up the gathering. There were ‘special occasions’, but the pleasant staff looked so dog-tired by the evening that to prevent them going off-duty at 10 seemed brutally caddish and the not-so-pleasant staff, also tired, were openly hostile.

I have enlarged on this because it seemed to me and my friends at the time, and to me now at a distance of four years, as by far the greatest single disadvantage of residential care. This limitation only affected those who needed help and we acknowledged our blessings when we learnt from two visitors, able wheelchair users, that where they lived all the residents, independent or not, had to be indoors and upstairs by 6.00 p.m. as the lift man went off-duty then. Fatuous and pathetic but perfectly authentic.

(b) A strengthening of the isolating tendency Every obviously disabled person is fighting, sometimes consciously often unconsciously, the concept that because of his physical disability he is a second-class human being. This latter statement will often shock and be violently repudiated by both able-bodied and disabled because our society makes strenuous and laudable efforts to deny its validity. But it is as strong as the concept of social colour and as deep-rooted, presumably, as prehistory. This is inflamed by residential care and shows itself in ways such as the following.

1 A fierce, disproportionate expression of independence-rudely rebuffing offers of help, etc.

2 The opposite - ‘My individuality is lost in the group -1 will assert it by demanding help.’

3 Division in the community - US . . . decent, sensible ready-to-make-the-best-of-it disabled, and THEM . . . unmentionably privileged on account of their unimpaired physique, lazy, insensitive, power-crazed staff. ‘It’s no good telling the welfare lady. She’s very nice but she’s really one of “them” and she’ll betray you behind the shut door of the office. Anyway, she doesn’t live here and she believes all they say. You’ll only get yourself branded as a malcontent. . . .’

(I must emphasise and reiterate that it was in a newly formed hostel, founded and run on very liberal lines.)

I only had two contacts with visiting Welfare Officers which could qualify to be called confrontations. The first was in the early days when lip-service was still being paid to the idea that residents should and could (fantastic, revolutionary, dangerous notion) have a small share in running the hostel. I was chairman of the Residents’ Meeting (which soon atrophied for lack of effective power to influence anything or anybody). We had one or two ‘Old hands’, experienced opters-out, and I had been warned by the boss that they would find themselves moving on if they didn’t co-operate. I passed this on in general terms at a meeting, with what I thought were rallying and encouraging comments. The response was a revelation. The cap had fitted the non-cooperator, X, who had written pathetically to the Welfare Officer complaining of victimisation and insecurity. The latter, whether seeing a vision of internal pressure gangs and rackets I never knew, arrived to pour out a storm of angry scorn over my head which mainly circulated around the two points that I had abused my great power and ‘made X’s life a hell for weeks’, and that because of my public school education I was not worth ‘the little finger of X’ It scarcely seemed a dignified or profitable position for either of us.

The other was a charming Officer who acted always on the principle that nothing must be individualised because it would lead to dangerous precedents and jealousy. So very little was ever accomplished. She drove me to hidden volcanic fury because she gave one the feeling that everything one said was a label enabling her to pigeonhole one according to type, and the name on the pigeonhole determined her response. It was like talking to a glamorised computer.

Now all this is trivial stuff, typical of the tea-cup storms in all communities, but it is responsible for unhappiness and a strengthening of the helpless sense of inferiority. Not only are you physically inferior but you are forced by that to be socially so. The repugnance we have for the very words and phrases demonstrates my point. I avoid the use of ‘patient’, ‘Home’, ‘institutional care’, ‘matron’, ‘victim’. As the good lady said, ‘Let us go and take one of the poor polios out from the home.’ Anonymity added to social apartness and inferiority.

Residential care is a second-best as far as my experience goes. Though a tremendous, immeasurable advance on chronic wards it should be a stepping stone to integration ‘Outside’. An alternative is the experimental kind of amalgamated units. Sophisticated equipment can make this possible even for the very severely disabled.

Staff status needs raising enormously to attract a reasonable type. At present they may comprise men on the run from marital commitments, swindlers and tricksters (the same X was years later relieved gently of her £20 savings by a hard luck story followed by an offer of marriage from one of the latter), junkies, ESN types, grubby slatterns and many obviously in need of psychiatric help. This is grossly unfair on the many generous, patient and highly competent attendants.

4 (belatedly!) The ‘opters-out’, as X above. Usually strong characters with a lifetime of disability behind them. They form a fiercely preserved ‘private life’, no matter within what small confines, have their own rigid routine and, being convinced that they are different and separated from ‘normal’ people, refuse to be flexible or to ‘co-operate’ in a society. What profit can there be? And they might be imposed upon, lose what individuality they have managed to preserve.

5 The disabled vegetables. So brainwashed by physical disability that they are carried by the community, never needing to make a decision, increasingly incapable of any initiative, convinced that what ‘They’ say has cosmic backing - sort of extreme fatalists. (Actually, any initiative is hard to take in a community. There are so many interests to consider, so much consultation to be done that it’s easier not to. The passionate, bursting energy to achieve is very rare - I had to have sustained pushing from friends and relatives before eventually starting a course of study.)

(c) Enervation - as immediately above. Like hospitalisation, etc. As a foot may hurt for a while in a wrongly shaped shoe but end by being moulded so that it doesn’t hurt - at the expense of a certain amount of deformity - so the personality may rage for a while against regimentation but changes to an acceptance of it as a habit of life and, sometimes, to a dependence upon it. Many of the disabled residents had led far more active lives before they came to the hostel - but how can they cook if the kitchen’s barred, garden if there are no facilities, machine with no space, or take in the occasional private pupil for coaching if they are not allowed ever to monopolise a room for the purpose of earning money? Things improve all the time, but very slowly, and often bedevilled by the completely fallacious fear that arrangements for one to pursue an activity will make the others jealous. I never ran into this at all; rather the opposite, a vicarious pleasure in someone else’s different activities and achievements and a wonderful and heart-warming willingness to help. I should never have been able to pursue my course without the tremendous help I received from other residents - or, indeed, accomplish any of the ordinary things of life, as for instance doing up Christmas presents and cards. I was one of the most favoured residents as I had a wonderful family and friends. I tended to go out more and have more visitors and I virtually monopolised the ‘Quiet Room’ for study but the others were always friendly and interested.

Advantages of regimentation

(a) A useful common denominator and communal factor in a community consisting of such varied people.

(b) A solid structure which gave one a measure of stability and security within which one could live one’s own life without the nagging worries of ‘being a burden’ or of having to struggle beyond one’s capabilities.

There was a considerable bond of kindness between residents -even the rows had to blow over for everyone had to go on living there; we couldn’t, as somebody caustically put it, give in our notice. And there was a respect, which grew rather than diminished through the years, for residents who coped valiantly with their individual disabilities, a considerable tolerance and compassion. We had our different ‘escapes’: a session of heart-to-heart gossip, radio/television, gambling, smoking, going to the pub, reading, staring into the goldfish pond, falling in love, sitting on the telephone, writing angry letters, going out to work, having another illness, going for a ride in your own car, away on holiday (despite pressure on staff and accommodation, time away was beginning to be limited just before I left because local authorities aren’t keen on paying for someone who’s not there - as if they save somehow when they are! - but this may have altered).

Being fond of reading and talking I was well catered for. Also I had a family and friends who assured me, unspokenly, that I was a real person, and had my own valid individuality as a human being on the same plane as themselves. This was undergirded by fellowship with other residents and fine, sensitive friendship from members of a remarkable Friends’ Association. Also, I had/have a religious faith which adds a new set of dimensions.

When I had repaired the communications bridge to X and convinced her that I was one of US and not a quisling in THEIR pay, we had a strong bond, later sharing a room with three others and then with each other. For many moons she devotedly did all my washing and mending and I listened to her side of the unfortunate and prolonged infatuation with the conman.

It all boils down to the old ‘dignity of the human individual’ -and the staffing difficulties, which are often pretty desperate. Having disposed of many old abuses don’t let’s fall into thinking that material benefits (important and pleasurable) compensate a disabled person for the not-quite-degradation of being labelled and segregated on account of the one thing which they fight to forget and surmount - a stigmatising and irrelevant physical inadequacy.

PS. We decided, at the hostel, that mixed degrees of disability were essential; that mixed ages and sexes were desirable; that mixed backgrounds were a good thing - more natural - but that the numbers should be ideally larger to enable people to find friends of like interests - otherwise small mixed groups of like interests.

I think I survived difficult moments with such dull mental tricks as: it’ll all be the same in a hundred years’ time; it doesn’t really matter; this is good for the soul - make the most of it; she/he is a boorish pathetic clot, anyway; only another hour and I’ll be in bed; I could always write to the Daily Mirror; what right have I to live anyway - I’d have been left to die in the Neolithic Age; it’s much worse for old so-and-so; shut up doing mental harangues and say something - it’ll speed the moment into the past . . . etc., etc.!

Another odd thought occurs to me to support the second-class human point. We always had the strong feeling that everything concerning life in the hostel was discussed by the resident Olympian gods - sometimes in consultation with visiting gods and goddesses -(like Odysseus and company, we didn’t always consider that the deities filled their positions with wisdom, maturity or even an ordinary measure of sensitivity and benevolence). It was rather like being in the fourth form and seeing the staff file into the principal’s study, occupying oneself with futile speculation, until suddenly new desks arrived or everybody was told they must eat a ration of cod liver oil and malt every day before breakfast. The visiting gods would chat pleasantly with us over tea, hiding their worried frowns, but we would rather have discussed steps to improve staff conditions, worried with them about the sewage problem, or the heating, or the best kind of new equipment.

Present state of social work theory and practice

The situations and the responses in this account appear reasonably simple to grasp. No corresponding simplicity is evident if we ask about the present condition of social work practice and theory. Social work presently suggests in fact a bewildering picture, especially to those in training for the occupation. As we have already noted, the so-called methods of social work are on the increase; not only are we now presented with the possibility of casework, groupwork, community work and residential social work, but particular approaches within each of these are sometimes accepted as dominant or even exclusive. Crisis intervention was in this position a short while ago, and a task-centred approach in casework and in groupwork now receives a great deal of attention. Within some of the methods it is possible to see the sustained development of a comparative theoretical approach, so that students can begin to choose in social casework, for instance, between the functional school, developed in America and emphasising personal will and the social work agency, and a behaviour therapy approach based on numerous experiments designed to test aspects of learning theory. Different theories are less well developed in residential work or community work, but different models have been proposed which claim the allegiance of social workers. If we glance at the theories social workers are urged to use in the description and explanation of human behaviour we discover a similar apparently ever-increasing range of choice -variations of psychoanalytic theory, systems theory, role theory, labelling theory, theory of anomie, and so on.

Some of these terms will be clarified later (either in the text or through the guidance to further reading at the end of each chapter) but at this point it is worth mentioning one of the ways in which social work writing and spoken discussion can make these or similar terms even more complicated. ‘Theory’ is quite often used in social work in an ambiguous way, referring as it does to at least three possibilities: theory about what constitutes or justifies social work, theory about how to do social work and theory in the sense o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The approach of this book
• 2 Taking bearings on social work
• 3 Does social work work?
• 4 What should a social worker be able to do?
• 5 What should a social worker know? Some general considerations
• 6 Social work knowledge - some neglected key concepts
• 7 Social work knowledge - findings and theories
• 8 Social work beliefs and attitudes
• 9 A social worker takes bearings
• Bibliography