Systems Theory for Social Work and the Helping Professions

Werner Schirmer, Dimitris Michailakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429663987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Social systems occur in many contexts of social work. This book provides an easy-to-read introduction to systems thinking for social workers who will encounter social problems in their professional practice or academic research. It offers new insights and fresh perspectives on this familiar topic and invites creative, critical, and empathetic thinking with a systems perspective.

Through introducing systems theory as a problem-oriented approach for dealing with complex interpersonal relations and social systems, this book provides a framework for studying social relations. The authors present a strand of systems theory (inspired by sociologist Niklas Luhmann) that offers innovative, surprising, and practically relevant understandings of everyday social life, inclusion/exclusion, social problems, interventions, and society in general.

Systems Theory for Social Work and the Helping Professions should be considered essential reading for all social work students taking modules on sociology and social policy as well as students of nursing, medicine, counselling, and occupational health and therapy.

1

Communication

An answer we often get when asking first year students why they study social work is that they would like to work with people. What does “working with people” actually mean? Immediately one thinks of helping people, i.e. offering them counselling and supporting them in difficult situations, listening, mediating, providing safety and caring at women’s houses, retirement homes, and other types of welfare agencies. Certainly, social work practice is much more than interaction with people in need of help (Shaw, 2005). In their daily work, social work practitioners are in constant need of coordination and negotiation with colleagues and supervisors within their own organisation and they exchange information with representatives from other helping professions, with teachers and pedagogues, with priests, with lawyers, judges, and police officers, with clients’ relatives and friends, and many more.

All of this implies work with people, not only with the immediate recipients of help but also with those who make organised help possible in the first place. Naturally, there are differences in what the “daily work” entails, dependent on specific cases and interventions that range from finding living space for newly arrived and lonely refugee children or checking whether an ex-convict on probation behaves in accordance with the legal stipulations to discussing an action plan to improve a pupil’s suboptimal performance at school with the parents. From all these examples we can distinguish a common denominator for what “working with people” actually means: working with people means communication. We have used formulations such as “provide counselling and support”, “exchange”, “interact”, “listen”, “coordinate”, “negotiate”, and “discuss”, and all of them involve communication of one type or another.

Communication is a central aspect in this book because it is the foundational element of all social systems (Luhmann, 1995). We can even claim that any interaction between people – and this, of course, includes the interaction between social workers and clients or colleagues – either is a system or happens within systems. Expressed in general terms, communication is a social system, and inversely, every social system is a communication system. What we mean by this is what this chapter is about.

What people often mean by “communication”

Communication is a basic requirement for social co-existence, for technological and cultural development, and for human creativity. Both as a concept and a process, communication has been the object of interest for several disciplines: cybernetics, anthropology, humanities, psychology, sociology, linguistics, cognitive sciences, communication and media sciences, and others. There are, however, different ways to define what communication is. Among other things, the meaning of the concept of communication depends on the purpose inscribed to it. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle approached the phenomenon of communication through rhetoric. They understood communication as a process in which the speaker, equipped with linguistic skills, directed his utterances to an audience with the goal of achieving a certain result: to influence the audience’s attitude toward certain subjects. We recognise this type of communication from politicians who give speeches, from department managers in their motivational talks with employees, from sales people who try to sell us merchandise we actually do not need, or from religious activists who try to persuade us to share their beliefs.

It is obvious that this type of communication is utilised when somebody tries to convince us to believe something we actually have no opinion about, do something we are wavering about, or to buy something we simply do not want, respectively. Here, communication works as an instrument to achieve tactical and strategic goals or to attain advantages at the cost of others, for example in bargaining situations. Sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Habermas, 1991) has argued that such cases should rather be understood as instrumental action – even if they use language. Habermas explicitly distinguishes instrumental action from communicative action. The latter corresponds to communication as a dialogue in which the interlocutors take each other seriously as communication partners, rather than as potential adversaries or instrumental executors. If this type of communication has a purpose, then it is mutual understanding. Attempts at persuasion can be subsumed under this type of communication if there is dialogue and mutuality. It is, then, the factually (or sometimes morally) superior argument that determines the outcome, not the power position or social background of the interlocutors. In ideal cases, such communication is characterised by a “discourse free of dominance” (Habermas, 1991, 1992b) in which the better argument wins.

Everyday notions of communication are very close to this ideal type of Habermasian communication. We can see this in the ubiquitous situation of leadership in organisations. A typical claim is that the boss does not communicate but only “gives orders”. Similarly, more traditional parental styles that entail reprimanding children for their wrongdoings are portrayed as showing a lack of communication. Even if some criticism may be justified in both cases, we consider this concept of communication as too narrow. Such a constricted concept only emphasises the “good”, positive sides of the relation between people. The notion of “communication” becomes reserved for a very limited number of aspects of the complex social interplay, while commands, bargaining, and instrumental persuasion must be seen as different from communication. Thus, communication becomes a moral, value-laden expression, which in everyday language is not problematic.

This is a different story in professional – particularly pedagogical and therapeutic – contexts where a lack of conceptual precision can do harm. In the following paragraphs, we argue for the benefits of using a notion of communication that includes any interaction between people – the well-meaning and constructive interactions as well as the manipulating and antagonistic ones. In this chapter, we discuss communication as a social system and we describe how communication works in accordance with some systemic rules (not etiquette rules). These rules apply both to cooperation and conflict, to exertion of power and deliberations among equals, to cultivated conversations and the aggressive verbal exchanges preceding a fist fight, to small talk between strangers on a train and romantic love talk in a flirting situation. Communication can lead to the solution of a problem (“Great that we talked about this; now I understand you better!”) but likewise it can be the cause or amplifier of a problem (“It was not nice of you to say these kinds of things. Could you just keep this to yourself next time?”) and communication can point to problems the other does not want to know about, which more often than not can trigger conflicts.

The transmission model and its shortcomings

In order to understand what it means to say that communication is a system and that it complies with systemic rules, we have to discuss some folk concepts of communication. When we asked our students to write down words they associated with the word “communication”, among the most common answers were “talk”, “conversation”, “message”, “sender”, “receiver”, “medium”, and “understanding”. In everyday language, communication can have a positive or negative connotation although the positive ones are more common. But regardless of whether one associates communication with something positive (because it can lead to mutual understanding) or something negative (such as commands or insults), the common core is that communication refers to an exchange of thoughts, ideas, knowledge, experiences, or feelings. The notion of communication as exchange is based on the so-called transmission model.

It is called the transmission model because it is built on the assumption that communication is basically a transmission of information from a sender to a receiver. In the terminology of communication theory, one could say that the information to be transmitted must first be coded in such a way that the receiver can decode it successfully, i.e. understand the information. This model of communication is often associated with the mathematicians Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1972), who developed a solution in telecommunication technology for the problem of how a coded (or disturbed) signal can be decoded by a receiver in a way that gives him/her access to the transmitted information. Actually, the Shannon–Weaver model (as it is also called) is a mathematical model to be applied in technological contexts, mainly communication among machines. However, it has been applied to social relations (particularly media) because communication theorists in social sciences believe it to be very relevant for modelling communication among humans (Fiske, 1990).

Within the transmission model we can distinguish different means to code and different media or channels to transmit the information. One channel is oral transmission (for instance a dialogue in a theatre, a sermon, or a political speech); another is written transmission (for instance a letter, a printed book, or a website). All these cases are verbal to the extent that they utilise language. There are also, according to the transmission model, non-verbal transmissions of information, which include body language, gestures, Morse code, images, music, and dress style; even odours can be a medium for a message (Hall & Knapp, 2013; Mehrabian, 2007). When it comes to coding and decoding, non-verbal messages are much more difficult to understand because rules for decoding are much less clear and accessible than in verbal language. The latter only requires that both partners can speak the same language. Later in this chapter we will come back to this point when we discuss analogue and digital communication.

From a systems-theoretical perspective (Luhmann, 1992), the transmission model has a few shortcomings that limit its value for understanding and analysing social situations (and hence its value for application in the social sciences). One problem is the very image of transmission, simply because communication is not transmission. If I know something and want you to know it, too, I can tell it to you. Let us assume I know that a mutual friend is getting married, and after I tell you about it, you know it, too. However, this is not transmission. To transmit something requires that I have something (a virtual or real thing) that I give to you – something that I have first and then, after the transmission, you have it but I no longer do. Let us take a bank transaction as an example: my money goes to your account, which means it is gone from my account. In other words, after the transaction I have the same amount less money that you have more. Transmission in this meaning works fine in technical contexts (think of the cut and paste function on computers: you copy a file and transmit it from one folder to another, or from a USB stick to the hard drive). But this image of transmission does not correspond with information in social contexts. He who tells something does not lose this information. I still know that the friend is getting married after I tell you about it. What you want to inform about does not disappear; on the contrary, it is via communication that it becomes a social fact. Rather than cut and paste, the message from a sender through a channel to a receiver in social contexts seems to resemble file-sharing or copying of the information.

Strictly speaking, communicating is not the same as copying information either. This leads us to the next and even more serious issue with the transmission model, and that is the matter of coding and decoding. Not only does the sender not get rid of the information by communicating it; the receiver does not get the information either – at least not in the way the transmission model assumes. Let us consider a relatively mundane example. The sender feels that she is cold (information) so she codes it into the message “it’s cold” and she says (utters) this to the receiver through regular oral communication. The receiver hears it, but it is anything but clear what information he has received: maybe that the weather is cold, but it could also be the case that the sender feels cold regardless of the factual temperature; the utterance could also be interpreted as an indirect request to have the heating turned up, to give her a blanket or a warm drink. Maybe the receiver has guessed but not received the intended information (“I’m cold” in contrast to the utterance “it’s cold”). A possible objection to our argument could be made now: the sender coded the message the wrong way or chose the wrong channel and should instead have expressed herself more clearly by saying something like “I’m cold” or “Could you please turn up the heating?” Likewise, one could object that the receiver did not choose the “right” decoding routine and should (thanks to better decoding) have understood what the sender meant when she said she was cold, namely that she actually wanted the heating turned up.

Indeed, in contrast to communication between computers, in human communication receiving is not only decoding but also a process of interpretation. And when something requires interpretation this is so because the message is not unequivocal (Gadamer, 2004 [1960]). In this regard, the example of our friends’ wedding mentioned earlier is misleading insofar as it assumes simplicity and unambiguousness that is often not given in our everyday communication. Often, communicating is more complex than simply uttering and spreading some news that can be received rather free from interpretation. The issue becomes yet more complicated when we think about how we communicate feelings and experiences. It is apparent that the latter cannot be transmitted, and in contrast to knowledge and news, they cannot even be sent or received. If I feel a headache and tell you about it, this does not mean you get a headache, too, does it?

The complexity of communication

From a systems perspective, the transmission model is not very suitable for describing human communication. The idea of a sender that sends a message to a receiver is not entirely wrong, but it is a coarse simplification that misses most of the complexity of communication. We have seen how the sender can mean or think something, try to find a good way to express this, and hope that the receiver comprehends it in exactly the intended way. It is precisely this expectation that guides much of the communication we participate in on a daily basis. And when people in everyday communication hear (or see) the receiver’s reaction it is not uncommon that they wonder why the receiver does not understand correctly, why he does not do what is expected, why he does not reply with what they wanted to hear. In other words, the receiver actually did not receive the intended information but did something else. In the “I’m cold” example from the previous section we demonstrated that the receiver does not receive but interprets the message. Therefore, “addressee” is a more fitting word than “receiver”. A person that communicates does so in line with her own ideas, previous experience, assumptions, values, cultural background, and a number of other variables. The same is true for the addressee. What the addressee ultimately understands is neither random nor arbitrary but on the basis of the previously mentioned variables it is less likely that the message intended by the sender “comes across” at all.

On the other hand, sometimes the addressee “understands” something, but reads something into the communication that was not intended by the sender whatsoever; sometimes the sender is not even aware of having “communicated” anything in the first place. Imagine someone next to you starts coughing and you wonder whether that was a signal directed at you to behave, for example to watch your words, to close your fly, or to go away. So you ask, “What do you mean?” and suddenly there is a dialogue:

A: What do you mean?

B: Mean what?

A: You coughed. What did you want to tell me?

B: Did I cough? I didn’t realise, but I didn’t want to say anything; why should I?

Quickly, such a dialogue can turn awkward or absurd. And if the other does not admit that she wanted to convey anything by coughing you have no way to figure out what this means. Was it a message or not? In any case, it was not the alleged sender who started the communication (not even by the act of coughing) but it was you, the alleged addressee who started the communication by interpreting the behaviour of the alleged sender as an utterance and by replying. If we want to split another hair, you were not even an addressee but only believed you were.

That is the crux of the matter regarding communication from a systems perspective: often communication comes into being not because somebody wanted to utter something but because somebody else understands something as an utterance and acts accordingly. But even if the sender wanted to say something, it is the addressee, with his way of interpreting and understanding, who determines how the communication will continue. The addressee’s new interpretation takes place guided by a few unknown factors, which in turn increase the momentum of communication as a system. We will retur...