Reflecting on Social Work - Discipline and Profession

Karen Lyons, Robin Lovelock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351905954
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Social work has always been a contested activity and its status as an academic discipline remains uncertain. There is currently renewed interest in the theoretical and research dimensions of social work, at a time when significant changes in the broad social, political and economic context in which practice takes place require a re-evaluation of social work's role and a re-examination of its identity. This timely book brings together leading social work academics to examine the state of social work at the beginning of the 21st century. With their focus on the relationships between research, theory and practice, they reflect critically on the nature of social work as a discipline in higher education and the importance of this to the profession as a whole. The book represents an exploratory conversation among social work academics about the current state and future aspirations of the discipline and the profession. It aims to stimulate wider debate about the dominant constraints and opportunities for social work in the 21st century.

Chapter 1

Social Work, the Public Sphere and Civil Society

Bill Jordan and Nigel Parton

The central aim of this chapter is to focus on what we see as an increasingly paradoxical feature of social work in the UK. Essentially the paradox recognises that the core skills associated with social work – creative, interpersonal, interactive, and concerned with negotiating and mediating over issues of interdependence, power and obligation – have somehow come to be at a discount in practice in public-sector social work agencies, yet in demand in other agencies and organisations, even including other branches of the public services. It is as if public-sector social workers are becoming little more than organisational functionaries in ‘their own’ agencies, being subject to (often seemingly alien) assessment, audit and inspection, along with increasing managerial oversight; yet in other kinds of public-sector organisations, and in the voluntary sector, their capacities, principles, ethics and approaches are at a premium, and adopted or borrowed by other occupational groups (Jordan, 2000; Parton and O’Byrne, 2000).

To understand what is happening, and perhaps to act to influence it in certain directions, we need to analyse a number of different processes that have been occurring more or less simultaneously. The first is the transformation of the whole public sector in the UK. This has occurred more quickly and more thoroughly than in other European countries, and even than in some other English-speaking countries, such as Australia (Harris and McDonald, 2000). The second is the transformation in social work itself, as a professional activity, in its organisation and methods, and in its education and training programmes. Because of UK social work’s primary location in the public sector since the Second World War it has been more influenced by the first process than have its counterparts in most other countries, so that the changes to the discipline and profession itself have also been more rapid and more profound than elsewhere. Finally, there are changes in ‘civil society’, and in the relationship between non-government organisations (NGOs), associations and community groups, and the public sector.

These changes have not taken place spontaneously, or through the action of impersonal forces beyond human control. Like others (‘globalisation’, for example, or ‘climate change’) they have been partly the result of programmes pursued by governments and transnational organisations (including commercial firms), and partly the consequences of strategies pursued by groups and individuals (Jordan, 1996, chapter 2). Individuals, in turn, are not simply ‘givens’ in these processes; they are moulded by institutions, and governments often seek to ‘reconstruct’ them, as citizens, claimants, members of communities, economic actors, or whatever. They also respond to new opportunities and constraints in their environments and in these processes reconstruct themselves.

In this chapter, we relate the paradoxical situation of social work to the changed role of the public sector in the political, social and economic life of the United Kingdom. In the post-Second-World-War welfare state, the public services were seen as crucial elements in the maintenance of a cohesive society, sustaining the balance between freedom and security, restraining wasteful competition, dampening dangerous conflicts and ensuring adequate equality. In this sense, the public sector shaped the ‘public sphere’ – the polity, the economy and society – by providing the institutional and moral context for citizens’ interactions with each other. Here we argue that the reforms of the public services, instituted by the Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and consolidated by New Labour under Tony Blair, have fundamentally changed these relationships.

Before 1979 the most important distinction widely made in discussing the broad structure of Britain was between the ‘private sphere’ of the family and household, and the ‘public sphere’ of political and economic activity, organised and served by public-sector services. After 1979 the most relevant distinction lay between the state and society, with the latter split between a market economy, and a ‘civil society’ made up of non-government bodies (voluntary organisations, associations and informal groups). Margaret Thatcher and her advisers were determined to reduce the role of the public sector, and to confine the state as far as possible to a regulatory role. Hence the aim was to transfer as many as possible of the functions of the public services either to the commercial sector, through market mechanisms, or to the voluntary organisations of civil society.

Social work provides an illustration of the problems and pitfalls of these ambitious aims. In the first place, as we will show in the next section, although social work had come to be located predominantly in the public sector, it had always resided in a space between the private sphere of the household and family, and the public sphere of economy, polity and society. In this sense, social work illustrates that the lines between ‘private’ and ‘public’ are moveable, permeable to some extent, and constantly being redrawn, both in the realm of ideas and in practice (Pateman, 1989).

Second, when it came to the reform of local authority social services departments (the Children Act, 1989, and the NHS and Community Care Act, 1990), the regulatory responsibility of the public services could not be separated from two other functions – the detailed assessment of needs and risks by trained professionals, and the allocation of public funds on the basis of such assessments (‘purchasing’ – now crucially contrasted with and split from ‘providing’ services directly, a role which local authorities were progressively to shed). Hence the continuing requirement for public-sector social services practitioners to be involved in the everyday relationships of family and communal life, albeit in a mainly assessing and rationing role. Indeed, the skills required for this work have been recognised as needed by a range of other public-service staff in new or reformed state agencies under New Labour.

Third, the restructuring of the public services created new opportunities for strategic action by citizens, in search of competitive advantage (Jordan et al., 1994). Changes aimed at improving cost-effectiveness and efficiency (‘value for money’) not only transformed the ethos of the public services themselves, by introducing quasi-market principles; they also altered the attitudes and behaviour of citizens. Social services users were encouraged to see themselves as consumers, as choice and quality were promoted, at the expense of participation and solidarity.

Fourth, the relationship between ‘reformed’ (Thatcher/Major) or ‘modernised’ (Blair) public services and civil society organisations is very complex. The term ‘civil society’ itself has changed its meaning over time (Ashenden, 1999), and refers to or ‘contains’ both agencies closely involved in maintaining the extant social order and ones concerned with transformation and resistance. In the contemporary UK and elsewhere, while some of these rely on state funding and work closely with the public services, others are fiercely autonomous and even hostile to the state.

Social work’s historic role and function involve it in all these ambiguities and conflicts, which are being worked out at the present time. This chapter explores these developments, and the scope for social workers to influence them.

‘The social’ and the public sphere

The emergence of social work (and of social policy more generally) was associated with the political and economic transformations that took place from the mid nineteenth century onwards, in response to a number of inter-related anxieties about the family and community (Parton, 1994). It developed as a hybrid in the space, ‘the social’ (Donzelot, 1980; 1988), between the private sphere of the household, and the public sphere of the state and wider polity. It operated in an intermediary zone. It was produced and is reproduced in new relations between the law, social security, medicine, the school and the family. The emergence of ‘the social’ and the practices of social workers, who were to be among its key actors, was seen as a positive solution to a major problem for the liberal state (Hirst, 1981) – how the state could sustain the healthy development of family members who were vulnerable and dependent, while promoting the family as the ‘natural’ sphere for caring for those individuals, and without intervening in all families. Social work developed at a midway point between individual initiative and the all-encompassing state. It provided a compromise between the liberal vision of unhindered individual freedom and private philanthropy, and the socialist vision of a planned, collectivised society that would take responsibility for all citizens’ needs.

Thus one of social work’s enduring characteristics is its essentially contested and ambiguous nature (Martinez-Brawley and Zorita, 1998). Most crucially, this ambiguity arises from its commitments to individuals and families and their needs on the one hand, and its allegiances to and legitimation by the state, in the guise of the court, and its statutory responsibilities on the other. This ambiguity captures the central but often submerged nature of modern social work as it emerged from the late nineteenth century onwards. Social work occupied the space between the respectable and the dangerous classes, and between those with access to political and speaking rights and those excluded (Philp, 1979; Stenson, 1993). Social work fulfilled an essentially mediating role between those who were – are – actually or potentially excluded and the mainstream of society. Part of what social workers have traditionally sought to do is to strengthen the bonds of inclusive membership by trying to nurture reciprocity, sharing and small-scale redistribution between individuals, in households, groups, communities and so on. Social work has also in part been concerned with the compulsory enforcement of social obligations, rules, laws and regulations. The two dimensions are intertwined and invariably the latter provides the ultimate mandate for the former – it is in this context that social work involves both care and control. While it has always been concerned to liberate and emancipate those with whom it works, it is also concerned with working on behalf of the state and the wider society to maintain social order.

For state, or public-sector social work to operate quietly and in a relatively uncontested way, it required a supportive social mandate together with an internal professional confidence and coherence. In many respects this was the case in the UK during the period of social work’s rapid development in the post-war period, up until the early 1970s and the establishment of local authority social services departments. The post-war welfare state was based on a particular model of the economy and the family. Not only did it assume full male employment, it also assumed a traditional role for the patriarchal nuclear family. The family was also assumed to be white. The notion of the ‘family wage’ was central, linking the labour market to the distribution of social roles and dependency by age and gender within the family.

Within the family, women were to trade housework, childbirth and child rearing, and physical and emotional caring as a ‘labour of love’, in return for economic support (Finch and Groves, 1983). In practice, therefore, much welfare work was expected to be undertaken within the family, either using the family wage to buy goods and services, or by women caring for children and other dependants. The system of state welfare was intended to support the patriarchal nuclear family, which was seen as central, positive and beneficent.

However, local authority social work was also able to partake of the ethic in which public services were seen as serving the ‘public interest’, and shaping the ‘common good’. Like other staff in these services, social workers tended to define their work as a ‘vocation’, and to regard it as making a special contribution to the community and to a sense of solidarity among its members. Support for, as well as work in, the public services represented a kind of public morality, the residue of which is still present in the UK, as was evidenced in an extensive survey carried out by the Guardian in March 2001 and replicated the following year (Guardian, 21 March 2002). At its most ambitious, this morality might be seen as providing the cultural resources from which citizens could generate some coherence out of their shared lives, and get a sense of belonging together, and of what they owed to each other.

Thus in the post-war period, social work in the UK seemed to have marked out a clear position and to have established an increasingly unified identity in the public sector as part of the wider welfare state. Yet this apparent strength, as part of a system of collective, compulsory solidarity and of a strategy of equality, turned out to be a potential weakness. Once the consensus around redistribution and the importance of public services began to erode, this apparent security was one of the first casualties.

The compromise solution to liberalism’s problems which was embodied in the welfare state, though virtually universal in the First World of developed capitalist states, was by no means uncontested and unchallenged, nor did it take the same form in all of these regimes. In most countries, the voluntary sector continued to provide the bulk of social work services, albeit with state funding and within a legislative framework laid down by the state (Badelt, 1990; Jones and May, 1992). It was only in the UK and the Scandinavian countries that the public-sector social work agencies became dominant, defining the nature of the profession, and its training agenda. Indeed, in the UK the local authority social services departments have, since the early 1970s, been the ‘fifth social service’ (Townsend et al., 1970), operating as partners (albeit junior partners) to education, health, housing and social security, as part of the public infrastructure of British citizens’ lives.

The public sector: critique and reconstruction

It is this public infrastructure that has been purposefully redesigned by UK governments since 1979, and that is still being adapted and fine-tuned by New Labour according to the same set of principles. We need to look behind the details of such changes to understand the assumptions behind the reforms, and the intended and unintended consequences that they have produced. The whole new institutional landscape is not simply designed for greater efficiency (according to market measures), it is intended to reconstruct all the actors within it – managers, bureaucrats, professionals and service users – to change their beliefs, behaviour and orientations towards each other.

The theorists who informed this whole shift were committed to a reconstruction of the public sector, which they approached along the lines of the micro-economic analysis of markets, as systems for co-ordinating decisions about the production and distribution of private goods and services. That said, these theorists recognised that, although some of the activities of the public sector could be handed over to commercial companies, and other parts entrusted to voluntary organisations, the role of the state would always go beyond regulation through law and enforcement. Hence they looked for a way in which public services might be allocated efficiently, in ways more consistent with the priority they gave to individual freedom and choice.

The theory of markets holds that production and distribution will find their optimum equilibrium spontaneously when individuals and firms are free to move around in search of the best returns on their resources (assets and skills). They behave as rational economic actors, i.e. bargain hunters looking for the best available deal, and are directed by Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to bring about the most efficient possible allocations overall. The counterpart for the public sector is called public choice theory, and was pioneered by economists committed to holding down taxation and ‘taming the Leviathan’ of government spending and regulation (Oates, 1985).

In the post-war ‘golden age of welfare states’ (Esping-Andersen, 1996), it was taken for granted that citizens would look to their government for protection from the contingencies of the life cycle, the arbitrary outcomes of the labour market, and the bad luck of illness and disability. The bigger and stronger the state, the more it was able to require both capital and labour to submit to its redistributive plans, the more reliable was this protection, and the bigger the welfare dividend. Public choice theorists set out to challenge this whole order, aided by the fact of its destabilisation during the 1970s oil shocks, fiscal crises and economic downturns. It is im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Social Work, the Public Sphere and Civil Society
• 2 The McDonaldization of Social Work – or ‘Come Back Florence Hollis, All Is (or Should Be) Forgiven’
• 3 The Politics of Social Work Research
• 4 Gender and Knowledge in Social Work
• 5 Social Work Research and the Partnership Agenda
• 6 Taking Sides: Social Work Research as a Moral and Political Activity
• 7 Qualitative Research and Social Work: The Methodological Repertoire in a Practice-Oriented Discipline
• 8 Research as an Element in Social Work’s Ongoing Search for Identity
• 9 ‘Knowing How to Go On’: Towards Situated Practice and Emergent Theory in Social Work
• 10 Habermas/Foucault for Social Work: Practices of Critical Reflection
• Index