The Ethical Foundations of Social Work

Stephen Cowden, Annie Pullen-Sansfacon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781408224434
• eBook ISBN: 9781317862390
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Work

The Ethical Foundations of Social Work provides you with an engaging, theoretical and practice-based grounding in social work ethics. The authors first examine when, how and why principles and debates historically emerged, then explicitly map them onto everyday ethical challenges and situations in social work practice. As a result, the book promotes an ethically conscious approach where principles can be flexibly and confidently applied as tools to help you with critical problem solving.

Part 1

What is Social Work?

Chapter 1

Social work histories

Chapter outline

In this chapter we will:

• Begin by considering some different definitions of social work

• Think about the reasons for this in terms of understanding the different trends within social work

• Seek to understand the way these have developed historically, seeing the different social and political forces that have influenced social work

• Focus on two historic periods – the 1890s and 1970s – as illustrations of the different ways in which ideas about what ethical practice in social work means have been manifested

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

Attributed to Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)

Introduction

When we talk about social work, what are we talking about? One of the complications of defining the nature and content of social work practice is that what it is varies considerably according to where it takes place. Sarah Banks has noted that:

Social work has always been a difficult occupation to define because it has embraced work in a number of different sectors (public, private, independent, voluntary), a multiplicity of different settings (residential homes, area offices, community development projects), with workers taking on a range of different tasks (caring, controlling, empowering, campaigning, assessing, managing) for a variety of different purposes (redistribution of resources to those in need, social control and rehabilitation of the deviant, prevention or reduction of social problems; Banks 2006: 1).

There are social workers employed by Social Services Departments, those who work in national voluntary organisations for children, and others who work in small, grass roots organisations with homeless people. Are they all doing social work? Can they all call themselves social workers? Can we define social work independently of its context of practice? Just as the question of what activities actually count as social work has never had different kinds of answers, so equally we find different definitions of what social work is. Consider for example the following definitions:

Social work is ‘a profession which promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being … Principles of Human Rights and social justice are fundamental to social work’ (The International Federation of Social Work [IFSW] quoted in Horner 2003: 2).

Social work is ‘a very practical job. It is about protecting people and changing their lives, not about being able to give a fluent and theoretical explanation about why they got into difficulties in the first place’ (Jacqui Smith, former UK Minister of Social Care, quoted in Horner 2003: 2).

When we think about these two definitions it becomes apparent that their authors are emphasising quite different conceptions of social work. The first definition, from the International Federation of Social Work, evokes a concept of the social worker as the agent of individual and social change, placing their skills at the service of the excluded and disempowered. While this definition sounds very positive and democratic, how much like the real world of social work do you think it is? The second definition from Jacqui Smith, former UK Minister for Social Care, by contrast, does not talk about social change, empowerment or liberation – instead it emphasises that social workers need to be ‘practical’. This definition promotes the idea that social workers should be ‘doers’ rather than ‘theoreticians’. At first glance that may sound a lot more realistic, but then we need to ask ourselves, if we are to practice ethically, don’t we need to be ‘thinkers’ as well as ‘doers’? Isn’t there a danger in putting emphasis so much on doing that we fail to ask the question of what it is we are supposed to be doing? These are the sorts of questions we will be addressing throughout the chapters of this book, but the key point which will be explored in this chapter is that these different definitions are not just about people being confused about what social work is – rather this situation comes about because people’s ideas are based on different assumptions about the role of social workers, which are themselves a result of different assumptions about society in general. Are social workers advocates and campaigners against injustice, or is their role simply to be putting together ‘care packages’ as quickly and efficiently as possible? Who are social workers supposed to serve – the organisations they work for or the service users they work with? Is the wider purpose of social work to serve the nation or to serve the citizen? In this chapter, we have approached this question by looking at the emergence of social work historically. We have done this because it enables us to see that social work never was and probably never will be just one thing – but that there have always been different and even radically opposed conceptions of the role and purpose of social work.

Social work ethics in history

Philanthropy, which means the process of helping others without expectation of personal gain, is as old as human society itself. Almost all societies have to deal with the fact that there are problems which manifest themselves on an ongoing basis and which will simply become more and more serious if some kind of help, assistance or relief is not provided. In his study of the origins of social work, Malcolm Payne noted that dating back to Ancient Greece and Rome there were important traditions of charity and philanthropy; these emerged from the need to deal with their own social problems, such as divorce, child abuse, abortion and prostitution (Payne 2005: 13). In medieval Europe, as well as in China and India, organised religion was not only one of the most powerful forces in society, but it came to be a focus for charitable work because of the association between religious virtue and assisting the more vulnerable in the community. Throughout history, there have been people who became involved in charitable work and set up organisations which sought to help individuals in difficulty. However, while the motivation to practice social work today may derive from these same underlying concerns for vulnerable others, social work as a structured profession existing within the contemporary welfare state has a more limited history, and it is this which is the focus of this chapter. As a formal profession, social work only came to exist in a small number of Western countries in the latter half of the twentieth century; it was not recognised formally in Britain until after the setting up of the welfare state and National Health Service after the Second World War. In terms of understanding social work’s origins it is therefore important to understand the specific context in which social work as a profession emerged, and in which social work-type activities came to assume a certain importance and significance in a particular society. Social work as a profession therefore needs to be understood as something historically specific and which takes place within a particular context.

Before beginning to look at this history it is worth asking why a book on social work ethics might begin by talking about the need to have an understanding of the history of social work. The reason for this comes back to one of the key arguments we put forward in the introduction, which is that ethical practice in social work never exists in a vacuum: ethical choices are always grounded in a particular historical moment, a particular political period and a particular society. Take for example the issue of child labour. The vast majority of people who live in the economically developed world regard this practice as cruel and exploitative – they believe that children are too young for this type of work and that the right place for these children should be in school. Yet for many decades in Britain, children worked in mines, factories and farms. The rationale at the time was that poor families needed to have as many members of the family as possible working and bringing in an income: children just as much as adults were seen as capable of work. Employers themselves had absolutely no problem with the morality of child labour; as a campaigner against the practice noted in 1908:

Child labour being regarded by the manufacturers as absolutely essential to the speedy piling up of fortunes, the morality of which no-one questioned, it was universally employed in the cotton mills and factories which sprang up in the land. Manchester, specifically the seat of the cotton trade from its earliest days, was a positive employer of child labour … A positive majority of the workers in the cotton mills were young children (Dale [1908] in Alexander 1988: 53).

It was only after major campaigns aimed at eradicating child labour throughout the early twentieth century, in addition to very significant changes in society in which attending school became to be seen much more important than working at this particular age, that child labour came to be seen as ‘unethical’. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia today child labour is practiced for much the same reasons as it was in Europe last century; poverty is widespread, there is little or no enforced regulation governing employment practices, and education is seen as the preserve of children from wealthy families. The key point here is that the very basis of what we regard as an ethical issue is specific to the kinds of assumptions and expectations people have of the way they will live their lives. In that sense, ethical issues are always grounded in a particular context, so the value of having a historical understanding is that it allows us to look beyond our own immediate situation and values and situate those within a wider context.

Reflection break

Are ethical issues universal or relative?

One of the big debates in the field of ethics is the question of whether issues are universal, that is applicable in all situations, or relative, which means specific to particular contexts. In terms of this debate consider the following:

1 Child labour is now outlawed in most European countries, but does that mean that child labour was and is always wrong from the perspective of social justice? What is it about child labour that makes it morally objectionable?

2 Many religious organisations object to women who have unwanted pregnancies obtaining abortions on the basis that they consider this to be the ‘taking of life’, a major offence in the eyes of their religion. Consider a situation where group-based social housing for young people seeking to overcome drug problems is being provided by such a religious organisation. If the funding for this housing provision comes from the government, should the religious groups providing the housing be allowed to refuse to carry literature or information which gives young women advice about obtaining a termination? Would you consider the refusal to carry this information a legitimate expression of faith, or should the state, as funder, insist that women from all communities have access to information about the termination of a pregnancy if they require it? Finally, what are the mechanisms or principles we would use to decide on an issue like this?

This chapter does not offer a full history of social work from its origins until the present day, and readers who are interested in this may want to look at Malcolm Payne’s 2005 book as a starting point for following this up. Instead we have chosen to focus on two key moments in the history of social work. These two – one from the 1890s and one from the 1970s – have been chosen because they were moments in which noticeably different conceptions of what social work was or should be came out into the open; what you might call struggles over the meaning of social work; what social work was for in a fundamental sense. We have chosen to focus on these two because they highlight not only the grounded but also the inherently political nature of ethical dilemmas in social work. This chapter begins with a discussion of the way social work in its current form emerged as a strategy for dealing with the consequences of social deprivation in urban capitalist societies, and then moves on to talk about the two historical moments. The first concerns the period of the 1890s where different ideas of what social work should be about emerged – the Charity Organisation Society (COS) and the Settlement Movement. These are both important for the way they influenced what became social work as an established profession within the welfare state. The second moment is concerned with the movement for Radical social work in the 1970s.

Social work as a ‘product of modernity’

As already noted, the motivation which some people feel to help and assist those in distress is something which is universal to all societies, and probably to human existence itself. However, social work’s arrival on the historical stage in the particular form which it now takes is a product of a particular history, and having a historical perspective allows us to grasp the way in which social work’s existence is related to the emergence and persistence of particular kinds of social problems. It is in this sense that social work can be thought of as a ‘product of modernity’. We can think of modernity as a set of historical experiences based on capitalism as an economic system, industrial production, urbanisation and particular ideas about the political rights of citizens, which themselves emerged from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century.

What is modernity?

Austen Harrington notes that the word modernity derives from the Latin word modus, meaning ‘of our time’; here and now, as opposed to the past. It is this meaning that we evoke when we refer to something as ‘very modern’.

However, the term can also be used to refer to a particular period, as we do here, where it refers to the influence of the Industrial Revolution, and the spread of the ideas from the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment (Harrington 2005: 17).

Prior to the emergence of modern urban societies of the sort we now see across the economically developed world, the vast majority of the population survived through subsistence farming and people lived in small communities rather than in large cities. In medieval Europe people would not even have much of a sense of ‘society’, and Peter Knapp and Alan Spector argue that this idea is itself a feature of modernity. This is because what we think of as modern was defined in relation to the tradi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Introduction
• part 1 What is Social Work?
• part 2 The Social Dimensions of Social Work Ethics
• part 3 Theorising Ethical Practice
• Conclusion
• References
• Index