The Routledge Handbook of Social Work Theory

Malcolm Payne, Emma Reith-Hall, Malcolm Payne, Emma Reith-Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351811521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sullo sviluppo globale

The Routledge Handbook of Social Work Theory provides an interdisciplinary and international introduction to social work theory. It presents an analytical review of the wide array of theoretical ideas that influence social work on a global scale. It sets the agenda for future trends within social work theory.

Separated into four parts, this handbook examines important themes within the discourses on social work theory, as well as offering a critical evaluation of how theoretical ideas influence social work as a profession and in practice. It includes a diverse range of interdisciplinary topics, covering the aims and nature of social work, social work values and ethics, social work practice theories and the use of theory in different fields of practice. The contributors show how and why theory is so important to social work and analyze the impact these concepts have made on social intervention.

Bringing together an international team of leading academics within the social work field and newer contributors close to practice, this handbook is essential reading for all those studying social work, as well as practitioners, policymakers and those involved in the associated fields of health and social care.

Part 1

The aims and nature of social work

1
Social work theory, knowledge and practice

Malcolm Payne and Emma Reith-Hall

Introduction: social work theories as stories and knowledge management

Theory tells stories about social work. Each set of theoretical ideas expresses how we may represent some of the aims and practices of important aspects of social work. No one theory represents all social work; rather, each theory is brought together around important facets selected from the whole. In the first part of this Handbook, discussions of theoretical thinking are constructed around important areas of social knowledge that influence ideas about the nature of social work, such as biomedicine, culture, psychology and the social. Theoretical thinking in the second part coalesces around important value concepts that influence social work ideals, such as caring, autonomy and human rights. The third part explores a series of discrete formulations that theorize important ways of doing social work in practice. And in the fourth part, theoretical ideas formed around some selected human groups and services important in social work disclose another reconstruction of concepts explored elsewhere in the Handbook. In every part there would have been other perspectives, theorizations or analyses that could have been included, but we have tried to present a wide and representative range of ideas current in social work debate.

Theory is constructed in stories because the connections between different facets of social work cannot be defined only in one way; rather the stories show how they are linked and perceived in many ways. Some theoretical constructions may be of sequences. Examples are a story about how the ideas of social work as eclectic or integrated changed in a central European country over 25 years (Chapter 2), stories about the development of psychology as an influence in social work (Chapter 3) or about developments in critical thinking (Chapter 26). Other theoretical constructions are less linear and more complex, as befits accounts of human life and action, where there are constant intersections of knowledge from many different sources.

The stories that theories offer therefore show us encounters between ideas. Theories and the writings about them challenge, intertwine with and elude each other. Interconnected theories form groups that share many ideas and approach social work similarly. Examples of such groups are approaches based on positive psychologies (chapters 18–22) and critical approaches to social work (chapters 26–31). But each theoretical position within such groups elaborates the shared perspectives in different directions. In the positive psychologies group, strengths perspectives focus on positive contributions from peoples’ social networks and relationships, solution-focused practice on positive thinking, motivational interviewing on developing positive energy and narrative practice on exploration in peoples’ experiences. In the critical theory group, critical perspectives focus on ways of contesting the ‘taken for granted’; macro perspectives on interventions working with social groups; empowerment engages with how people may take up and use the power available to them; anti-discrimination practice is about how to surmount social barriers and advocacy theory is concerned with helping people find ways of strengthening their influence and voice to make progress in their lives.

Theory groups that confront each other take genuinely different views of intervention in human lives but within the same framework of thought. Examples are the cognitive sciences (Chapters 16–17) and the positive psychologies (Chapters 18–22) as a basis for practices. Sometimes, these opposing theories speak past each other, not clashing but irrelevant to each other’s concerns. They are operating at different levels or in different contexts of thinking. If we examine Chapters 15 and 16 on systems and cognitive behavioural therapy in social work, for example, we can see different ways of thinking about social work compared with Chapter 27’s account of macro practice. The social work that each discusses is of a very different nature, and these ideas do not engage with each other.

Social work abounds in theoretical variety. This is because the array of possibilities offered by theoretically diverse stories assists its practitioners and scholars in knowledge management. Doing social work, teaching it and researching it means drawing information from the people engaged in the human situations that we are dealing with and evaluating and organizing that information. How does a practitioner choose what questions to ask of an applicant for service or what things to say to a resident of a care home? How does a social work educator decide what is most useful and appropriate for helping students learn to practice social work? How does a researcher decide important areas of the social work world to investigate and explain? Their choices reflect different theoretical positions and tendencies.

Healy (2014), noting that theory constantly evolves, identifies three important discourses that shape theoretical positions:

• Dominant discourses in services providing for health and well-being: medicine, law, economics and new public management. Healy neglects education, which is significant in some national systems of social work and in some social work theories.
• Behavioural and social science discourses that are important to social workers but are less significant than the dominant discourses: psychological and sociological ideas.
• Alternative discourses that are available but that she claims are not yet influential on the dominant discourses: citizens’ rights, religion and spirituality and environmental and green perspectives.

How do we position alternative perspectives as part of the whole panoply of social work? This depends on where we come from and where we are aiming. For example, ecological systems theory was conceived as a more social form of practice than preexisting relationship-based practice. Coates and Gray argue, however, in Chapter 14, that it does not adequately represent environmental and green perspectives that are now important in social thought. Their contribution thus becomes part of the interaction between discourses. It asks questions. What are our ‘social’ objectives in ecological or green practice? How has that changed as theory has developed? And we may ask, looking at other chapters’ stories about theory, do they adequately conceptualize the ecological: the macro focus on the political, for example, in Chapter 27? Hudson in Chapter 15 documents changes in systems thinking which also demonstrate limitations in social work’s ecological systems theory. It is inadequate in the context of current systems thinking. And while social pedagogy (Chapter 24) and local social development practice (Chapter 25) are both represented as macro practices, Ferguson’s account of macro practice in Chapter 27 would place them more at the mezzo level. Again, while Ferguson’s conceptualization of macro practice and Wendt’s account of feminist practice in Chapter 31 are clearly within the bounds of critical theory (Chapter 26), Ferguson (Chapter 27) expresses concerns about the limitations of identity politics as a foundation for macro practice. Differences of focus throughout Chapters 26–31 on critical theory suggest there is a complex of interacting connections, dissenting voices and confounding issues among these broadly consonant sets of ideas.

Social work knowledge in practice, discipline and profession

Social workers therefore have many sets of theoretical ideas to choose from and many nuances to apply. Why is this? We suggest that it is because social workers in practice are always generalists in a complex world. Social work educators and researchers, therefore, draw from a broad range of human sciences to inform and stimulate their practice. Pawson, Boaz, Grayson, Long and Barnes (2003), in an important research study, identified five knowledge sources that social workers use:

• Organizational knowledge, from the agency.
• Practitioner knowledge, from their practice experience.
• Policy community knowledge, about legal and policy information.
• Research knowledge, from systematic research.
• User and carer knowledge, gained from the experience and views of service users.

Social workers have to organize knowledge from all of these sources to carry out any act in their practice. The profession and discipline of social work must also bring together wide ranges of knowledge to organize and facilitate their use in professional actions.

A profession is an identifiable occupational group carrying out widely recognized social responsibilities by implementing practices that build on understanding derived from its discipline. A profession such as social work must therefore formulate those responsibilities into a recognizable and recognized system of practice that social workers are able to carry out in their daily practice activity. Theory informs the systemization of a profession’s practice and facilitates practitioners in implementing practice appropriate to the profession.

Healy’s (2000) valuable distinction between social work practice and practices points to the difference between the profession’s system of practice and the social worker’s practice activity. Practice, to Healy, is what social workers do when they interact with clients on behalf of and as part of social work agencies. Meeting a member of the public to ‘do an assessment’ or to ‘safeguard a child’, a social worker must perceive and collect complex practical information about many different issues and ally it to human understanding. They work in the context of public policy and as part of an organization, alongside colleagues from their own and other professions. To do all this, they must manage many different sources of knowledge and package their findings into clear decisions about intervention in human and social situations. They must then take action that requires collective engagement of carers, clients and colleagues. Social work educators and researchers must similarly incorporate into academic discourses a whole range of these complexities, co-producing with practitioners and clients the stories that will construct social work practice and theory.

Practices are the social processes that social work engages in through that practice and those agencies. Among other things, Healy refers to emancipation, creating and representing social identities, influence, power and social regulation. Discussing theorizing in social work, Thompson (2017) notes that one helpful aspect of theory is how it may help us to make sense of, understand and connect the practice with the practices. Thus, in practising with individuals, families and communities, social workers deal in people’s social identities as gendered individuals with ethnic identities. These identities affect the identities conferred by their membership in family and community. But, unlike journalists, policymakers or politicians, social workers are not managing ideas of gender and ethnicity or of family and community at the level of policy, but in the impact of those ideas as they affect individuals and groups in their daily lives. The social work profession is one of several professions that practise within services that care for and help people within a social sphere that includes professions such as the church, clinical psychology, counselling, law, medicine, nursing and teaching. Social work’s professional identity and its practice overlap with aspects of these professions and with community and youth work. Similarly, the services within which social workers practice interact with education, health, housing, social security and other services in the public sphere and with social institutions such as churches and religious organizations, the courts and criminal justice organizations and government and political structures.

Consequently, social work actions are ‘distributed’. That is, they are carried out in networks of relationships in people’s homes and communities and in networks with other organizations and professions. Social work actions are not part of an institution such as a centralized bureaucracy paying social benefits, a hospital or a school in which practitioners are enveloped in and protected by conformity to an established authority deriving from legal requirements (Orlikowski, 2002). Because what they do always involves discretionary action in an uncertain social world, social workers must, using theory from their profession, manage complex knowledge to achieve organized activity among a collective of people who may have differing aims and roles. They must negotiate dilemmas among a variety of participants. Their theory and the education and research that develops that theory must in turn enable them to explore and use the knowledge that contributes to discretionary action in an uncertain and complex world.

Having a range of ideas available through social work’s theoretical stories therefore helps practitioners to manage information and decisions, disentangling competing interests and concerns. And research and education in such a field must reflect and respond to the complexity that practitioners must deal with. If the stories offered by theory allow social workers to manage the diversity of the knowledge as they practice and take part in social practices, social work’s disciplinary discourse and their professional organization must also deal in that range. A discipline is a branch of knowledge and understanding, created through debate and critical analysis founded on empirical observation and research. The scholarship involved in theory and theorizing contributes to that discipline, since it shows ways of bringing together and using theory.

A professional discipline is not like an academic discipline: its disciplinary knowledge and understanding are created to be used in carrying out its practice, providing the services that meet the social responsibilities that fall within its sphere of concern. Social work practice and services therefore interact with and influence the discipline, which in its turn informs and structures the practice and services. They are nothing without each other. Disciplinary knowledge and understanding are only worthwhile if they usefully inform practice, but to be professional, practice must implement the discipline because a profession only exists where it is informed by a discipline.

But professional practice in the social sphere is not wholly defined by its discipline because practice also involves artistry and craft. This is because social work objectives and scholarship do not generate just ‘do this-do that’ actions. Instead, they require practitioners to use empathy and judgement to produce results that are experienced positively by the people involved. Artistry is about using imagination to create an outcome that people experience as worthwhile, emotionally and socially right. Craft focuses on practitioners’ capacities to bring together different skills to achieve the results they and their clients want. Social work often involves making an application, following a procedure or carrying out some administrative action, but it is never only that. It also involves finding a satisfying and worthwhile outcome to these procedures and actions for practitioners’ clients. ‘Satisfying’ implies achieving a positive emotional response to both the work’s outcome and the processes pursued to achieve that outcome. ‘Worthwhile’ implies a value judgement about the personal and social outcomes of the work. The profession, discipline and practice are not only judged by clients and the people who surround them and by practitioners themselves. They are also evaluated by their community, political and social institutions that commission the profession and its practice and the other professionals and participants in the society that surrounds the practice.

Theory as ideas

Theory is about ideas, and exploring theory helps us understand the ideas...