The scientific character of social work as an academic discipline depends largely on its capacity to provide a creditable model and programme of research that is located within the ambit of its own discipline and is capable of building theoretical models that demonstrate its character as an autonomous discipline, instead of being based on âborrowingsâ from other disciplines. It needs to demonstrate that, while being practice-based, research in social work is more than the mere anecdotal evaluation of practice experience. At the same time, social work, in contrast to other applied disciplines like psychology or medicine, is highly dependent on national contexts and receives its public mandate from specific social policy and welfare legislation frameworks that are still strongly influenced by national rather than Europe-wide or international prerogatives.
Looking at developments in the professionalization and âacademizationâ of social work in Europe over recent decades provides an opportunity to gain insight into the specific nature of this discipline which relates to a high and often confusing degree of complexity. It shall be argued in the following, however, that precisely because of this multidimensional complexity, developments in social work research have much to contribute to current debates on the need to go beyond clearly defined disciplinary boundaries in academia and on the relationship between academic research and political agenda. With regard to the latter, questions are being asked about the autonomy of academic research in view of the growing pressure on universities to finance research from external sources and from funding programmes with predetermined objectives. In terms of the former, demands for interdisciplinary approaches to research are being voiced not only as a means of counterbalancing the overspecialization that has occurred in many scientific fields, but also as a means of modelling the complexity of âreal-lifeâ contexts in which research questions arise that can never be confined to one disciplinary domain exclusively.
Nevertheless, the attempt to review European trends in social work research comprehensively is hampered by a series of interrelated factors specific to social work. First, social work as a field of practice operates under a whole variety of titles in the European languages with titles partly copying the âworkerâ element dominant in English-speaking countries, partly emphasizing the educational element of the activity regarding education or pedagogy, and partly referring more vaguely to the task of giving âsocial assistanceâ. This is by no means a mere linguistic issue but underlines the historically contingent origins of these professional activities that sometimes developed parallel professional strands within the same country or linguistic community. This diversity was, second, not standardized but deepened by the trend to root the training of these practitioners in academic contexts. Historically, the tradition of social work found a place in the ambit of social sciences whereas social work as social pedagogy training had an obvious affinity to educational sciences, as particularly in Germany and partly in Italy, the Baltic States and elsewhere. But many practice fields also include therapeutic dimensions, best exemplified by the German title âHeilpädagogikâ which in turn has much in common with the care field. This latter area, which has received much academic attention in the UK since around 2000 (Lorenz, 2008; Cameron and Petrie, 2009), can be taken as a paradigm of a practice field âin search of an academic disciplineâ, as once were all strands of social work.1
Furthermore, the affiliation with academic institutions itself is characterized by a variety of trends. There are examples of countries, such as the UK or Poland, where university-based social work training existed in the early twentieth century, while in the majority of European countries university-based training is a very recent development. In countries like Italy, Spain or the UK, but also in most Central and Eastern European countries after 1989, this was effected by the abolition of non-university social work training institutions, whereas in most other European countries training takes place both at university level and at what is now mostly called (using its English title) âuniversities of applied sciencesâ. Again, the proportional distribution of both types of academic pathways to a social work qualification varies greatly from country to country, often leading to obstacles for students with non-university basic degrees being denied access to postgraduate and doctoral courses.
Finally, there are differences in the way the professional title is awarded. In some countries, this is not linked automatically to the award of the academic title but requires an additional exam, often under the control of the professional association, which in turn has an impact on the nature particularly of postgraduate courses as being either oriented more towards academic or towards professional careers.
Behind these historical varieties lie political factors concerning the value and orientation of social work in national social policies and this means that developments in social work research interface more than those of other disciplines with politics, indirectly or directly, and this is receiving more attention in the literature. The impact of these different factors on the nature of social work research can be summarized descriptively under the following perspectives:
⢠The increasing presence of social work training at universities has brought a considerable increase in the volume of research projects in the area of social work overall. Academic staff within the discipline have stepped up research efforts within frameworks and under conditions characteristic of academic research generally, meaning the generation of larger, often international networks, the adherence to formal research procedures and particularly the number of publications in scientific journals. Since the drive for âacademic respectabilityâ in the 1990s was generated often from international contacts, which social work academics promoted dynamically, the practice of publishing in international journals became well established in the discipline, particularly in countries where this was a new phenomenon or that have a relatively small language community.
⢠Entry into the university sector also meant that the number of PhD programmes within the discipline itself could increase considerably. Where before academic teaching staff had frequently obtained their PhD in disciplines like sociology, psychology, pedagogy or law there is now gradually a young generation of social work lecturers emerging who have conducted their PhD research in the discipline of social work itself, although the relationship between university location and discipline recognition is not always in a direct one-to-one relationship. This, in turn, helps greatly to consolidate the identity of the academic discipline of social work in parallel with that of nursing, for instance, and to expand the range of research projects which manifest the characteristics of this discipline. The differentiation between a strand of PhD studies that enhances research skills and theoretical knowledge and a professionalizing strand of PhD programmes has not yet spread much beyond the UK.
⢠Access to higher education, in conjunction with the fostering of international collaboration, conferences and organizations (Chambon, Johnstone and KĂśngeter, 2015), have been classic strategies of promoting professional autonomy in social work through the wider knowledge horizon this provides. Gaining self-confidence was at the same time a means for the profession to push for social reforms at national level ever since the period after WWI. Both trends have to do with the quest for identifying universal issues, principles and theoretical paradigms that render practitioners capable of moving beyond implementing regulations and following instructions in the course of their interventions. Here, the reference to medicine has been a constant theme ever since the publication of two key textbooks, by Mary Richmond (1917) and by Alice Salomon (1923), both carrying the term âdiagnosisâ in their titles of âSocial Diagnosisâ. However, the issue of âautonomyâ has undergone significant changes and challenges since then, both at the academic level where research, not just in social work, has come under increasing pressure to demonstrate its ârelevanceâ and applicability, and at the professional level where an increasingly aware and critical public demands accountability and seeks to relate to professionals on the basis of equality, if not from the perspective of consumer choice. These changes have added a new and controversial aspect to the âtraditionalâ question of the relationship between theory and practice in social work. Academic training comes under suspicion of alienating future professionals from practice in terms of depriving them of the ability to use âcommon senseâ.
⢠Owing to the differences in titles and academic affiliations of the various forms of social work and social pedagogy at university level, there is uncertainty over the scientific characteristics of the theoretical paradigms on which they draw. Equivalents of the UK model of social work became largely associated with social science paradigms and sometimes âinheritedâ, therefore, a leaning within Anglo-Saxon social sciences towards positivism,2 although there is still a notable preference of PhD students for qualitative over quantitative research methods. Social pedagogy instead, particularly in the German tradition, has a closer association with phenomenology and hermeneutics, and research projects emerging from this paradigm place more emphasis on change processes. The necessity to reflect autonomously on epistemological models suitable for the discipline of social work is confronting researchers with increasing urgency in the light of the differentiations within the academic and the professional sphere described.
Becoming a full academic discipline for social work is associated with considerable obstacles and disadvantages which, from one perspective, could be taken as pointing to an inherent weakness of the discipline, but from another could point towards inherent weaknesses in the way quality is currently being promoted in academic disciplines. The standardization of the European Higher Education Area exemplified by the Bologna process has produced pressures to differentiate between the practice relevance of undergraduate programmes on the one hand and a greater research orientation at the postgraduate level on the other. Programmes that had previously sought to integrate both dimensions in basic courses extended over four or five years saw their creative potential curtailed. This pressure is mirrored in the context of the standardization of criteria by which the quality of academic productivity is being assessed. The price for playing their full part as academics for social work lecturers is that their performance (and often their tenure conditions) is determined by the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals, according to standards that apply transversally to a variety of disciplines (Blyth et al., 2010; VĂ zquez-Aguado et al., 2015). Not only are journals with an international academic orientation and status still not yet very numerous in social work, but for those journals that exist it is hard to receive recognition from organizations such as SCOPUS or the Thomson Reutersâ Web of Science on account of the particular characteristics of knowledge production in the social work scientific community. So, both the pressure on social work academics and their will to publish are notable features of recent developments, but this does not translate immediately into wider academic and indeed social recognition for social work research and its particular nature and concerns. This raises the issue of whether epistemological conventions that characterize academic knowledge production generally at present are capable of giving recognition to the nature of what constitutes âthe socialâ as the core subject of social work research.
This is indicative of a polarization that affects social work research across countries currently. Social concerns are increasing at an alarming rate. Social inequality is widening in European societies on practically all indicators, with rates of poverty, youth unemployment and stress-related symptoms representing the most widely discussed issues in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Whole countries like Greece have been plunged into poverty with the reduction in public social and health services incapable of providing even basic social security. And standards of child welfare, for instance, are deteriorating in many countries as the neo-liberal ideology of restricting access and entitlements to social support measures once characteristic of developed welfare states spreads to practically all European countries. In addition to that, the arrival of non-European migrants and refugees in greater numbers, discussed elsewhere in this book, has been responded to with often deliberately inadequate and punitive measures of control rather than integration, compounding the picture of a crisis, not just of political integration in terms of the project of creating a United Europe but also of social solidarity as such.
There is, therefore, a growing need to address these concerns in research to find effective measures to address those issues in the immediate practice context. But at the same time the prevailing political ideologies make it difficult to articulate these concerns as social phenomena and to study them comprehensively because political pressure amounts to a discrediting or even a denial of âthe social dimensionâ as an explanatory framework. The emphasis on individual achievement and agency rather than the consideration of structural factors which characterised educational and particularly welfare programmes has the effect of reducing the readiness to investigate social problems from structural aspects and directs attention to the role of personal and psychological factors in the causation and resolution of such issues. The margin of discretion which social workers sought to establish as a hallmark of their professionalism tends to get occupied by procedural regulations and bureaucratic objectives, compounding the role of social workers as âstreet-level bureaucratsâ (Lipsky, 1980). This increases the pressure on research programmes to concentrate on the effectiveness of methods that achieve politically given objectives rather than using research to question the wider context in which such objectives get defined (Solvang, 2016).
This has been drastically demonstrated in a study of the attitudes of social work students towards social inequalities in Greece (Dedotsi et al., 2016). At the height of the financial crisis, when austerity policies and the widespread withdrawal of social welfare and service measures had led to a drastic increase in poverty and destitution, these students nevertheless ended their social work studies largely with an orientation towards identifying individualised explanations for poverty and finding corresponding forms of individualised assistance. It can be argued that this results not just from inadequacies of the social work curriculum in the Greek context but from the disappearance of a perceptual and epistemological horizon in which âthe social questionâ has any meaning.
Social work research has become drawn into a crisis of political values, norms and strategies concerning the establishment of social bonds and collective identities. Not that the diversification of societies through a greater presence of cultures, religions, languages and lifestyle options is the actual problem confronting European societies, but the inadequacy or absence of policies which foster common social bonds while giving recognition to and negotiating the significance and legitimacy of differences. These developments correspond to a fundamental split in social work epistemology regarding the treatment of identit...
