Social Theory for Social Work

Ideas and Applications

Christopher Thorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781135985585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Prestazione di assistenza sanitaria

Trying to understand how the world looks through the eyes of individuals and groups and how it shapes the ways they think and act is something social workers do all the time. It is what social theorists do too. This book identifies and explains in a highly accessible manner the absolute value of social theory for social work. Drawing on the theoretical ideas and perspectives of a wide range of classical and modern social theorists, the book demonstrates the insights their work can bring to bear on a wide range of social work practice scenarios, issues and debates.

Departing with the work of the classical theorists, the book covers a diverse range of theoretical traditions including phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, feminism and globalization theory. Putting to work ideas from these different perspectives, a range of social work scenarios, issues and debates are opened up and explored. The final chapter brings together the various theoretical strands, and critically considers the contribution they can make towards realizing core social work values in a rapidly globalizing world.

Demonstrating exactly how and in what ways social theory can make important and enduring contributions to social work, Social Theory for Social Work is essentialial reading for social work students, practitioners and professionals alike.

1
Why Social Theory Matters for Social Work

Philosophy and the study of the real world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.

– Karl Marx (1998 [1845–46]: 253)

Of all the quotations you might expect a book about social theory and social work to open with, one that makes reference to ‘sexual love’ and ‘onanism’ (masturbation) might not strike you as the most likely. The questions ensue: why was the decision taken to use that quote to open this book? What was the purpose of doing so? How does it relate to the theoretical ideas, concepts and discussions that fill the ensuing pages? These questions may well be in the forefront of your mind. The idea the quotation is intended to express is certainly a provocative one! Why use it to open a book about social theory and social work? Let us begin by taking a moment to explain why the decision was taken to use that quotation and how it relates to the relationship between social theory and social work in the present day.

Born in 1815, in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx was a foundational figure in the development of social theory. As a young philosophy student at the University of Berlin, Marx quickly established a reputation as a highly critical and provocative thinker. Surveying the philosophical scene of the day, Marx was convinced his contemporaries had lost sight of the true purpose of philosophy. Up until now, proclaimed Marx (1998 [1845–46]), ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways – the point, however, is to change it!’ Marx was despairing of what he regarded as the overly abstract questions and debates posed by academic philosophers. In his view, philosophy had become little more than self-indulgent mental stimulation – mental masturbation as he likens it – an activity he considered even more reprehensible because it was divorced from people in the real world, whose lives it did little to serve or positively change.

That philosophy had come so far off course, claimed Marx, was because philosophers had lost sight of the fact that for any kind of speculation about human life to take place at all, certain real world factors already had to be in place. These include cultural factors e.g. the normative ideals and values out of which philosophical speculation and debate arise; social factors e.g. the relationships between individuals and groups that unify and divide different communities; and material factors e.g. certain basic needs such as food and shelter. Furthermore, how these factors interact with one another, Marx claimed, directly shapes the types of questions posed by philosophers and the ideas they develop in response to them. It was clear to Marx that to understand how and why human agents think and behave as they do – this includes philosophers no less – analysis needed to be trained back onto the real world, not away from it. Taking real people in the real world as his starting point, the body of work left by Marx played a definitive role in laying down the conceptual foundations of a new and distinct approach to the analysis of human social life. That form of analysis is social theory.

Fine. But why choose that quotation by Karl Marx for this book? What does it have to do with social theory and social work? Marx claimed that philosophy had become little more than a form of self-indulgent abstract speculation. In recent years, a similar conception of social theory has begun to take hold among social work professionals, lecturers and students with the result that social theory has come to seem much like the kind of abstract speculation Marx intended it to replace. Social theory appears overly abstract, esoteric and inapplicable to social work. As a generation of social workers whose careers spanned the social and political activism of the 1960s and ’70s enters retirement, recognition of the importance of social theory for social work is going with them. For the current generation of social work students and professionals alike, the value of social theory for what they do requires to be identified, explained and demonstrably applied. This book aims to do exactly this.

Social workers have not always held such an uninspired view of social theory. In 1902, attempts to formalize the education of social workers led to the founding of the School of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Sociology and social theory were central to the education of social workers (Jones, 1996, 1983). More than half a century later in 1964, the highly influential social worker and co-founder of the Council for Training in Social Work, Dame Eileen Younghusband (1964: 39), defined social work as centring ‘around social problems arising from the interrelation between man and his social environment’. As part of government changes to social work education led by the Younghusband Report (1957), sociology was established as one of the cognate disciplines within social work together with social policy and psychology. During the social and political unrest of the 1960s and ’70s, social theory provided the intellectual underpinnings behind the radical social work movement, in particular feminist and Marxist-inspired streams of social work. Grounded in the critical impulses and emancipatory politics of the ‘radical turn’, the emergence of community-based, anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory social work began to take root and develop (Langan, 2002). These different but related streams of social work continue to inform mainstream social work theory and practice in the present day.

Since the late 1980s, the perceived value of social theory within social work has steadily declined. This is evident in the progressively fewer, narrow-ranging and sporadic ways social theoretical ideas feature in the social work curriculum, textbooks, monographs and academic journals. Today, social work theory and practice draw far more on individual-centred conceptual paradigms and forms of analysis e.g. psychological, psychoanalytic and existential models and modes of reasoning (Houston, 2014; Levin, Haldar and Picot, 2015). This is particularly true of social work in many parts of Western Europe, North America and Australia. The shift in thinking and practice away from social towards individual factors is the result of the complex interplay of a number of wider changes to modern society of which the most significant include: the spread of neo-liberal economic ideology and policy; increasing bureaucratization and managerialism; advancing governmentality and surveillance; and the intensification and acceleration of globalization. Understanding exactly how these developments have impacted on social work forms the subject matter of this book.

The social and cultural context in which the relationship between social work and social theory is positioned has changed radically. As both cause and effect of these changes, the rise and rise of individualism is particularly significant in accounting for the negative light in which social theory has come to be cast. The advanced capitalist societies of modern Western Europe and beyond are characterised by very high levels of individualism (Durkheim, 1964 [1893]; Elias, 2001 [1981]; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Individualism refers to a cultural condition that emphasises the moral sanctity and autonomy of the individual. In a culture of individualism, our individuality, uniqueness and autonomy strike as a social fact – as something natural, self-evident and, therefore, for the most part, beyond question. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, however, there is nothing natural or necessary when we conceive of ourselves and others in this way – as individuals. Our individuality is sociological not ontological. Prior to modernity, and in more collectively based cultures still today, the self-conception and identity of individuals was, and continues to be, rooted in wider social collectives such as the family unit and community.

Far from being an inevitable aspect of what it means to be human, individualism is a direct consequence of changes to the organisation and structure of modern society. The classical social theorist Emile Durkheim (Chapter 2) regarded the rising individuality characteristic of modern society as a fundamentally positive development. At the same time he was wary of it too. A situation in which members of society are insufficiently integrated with one another can become pathological (Durkheim, 1964 [1893]). In a culture of pathological individualism, the ways and extent to which social factors shape individual behaviour are (mis)understood and (mis)represented in ways that fail to grasp the significance of the former for explaining the latter. Instead, social factors appear of secondary importance for understanding how individuals think, act and interact. As we shall explore in greater depth, many of the issues and problems faced by social workers and service-users can be seen as having their roots in the excessive, if not already pathological, levels of individualism characteristic of modern society.

In a culture of pathological individualism notions of the social and society are understood in increasingly narrow and constricted terms. The fact that as human beings we are biologically ‘individuated’ – quite literally, that each of us has our own mind and body – leads us to think that society is something outside of us, something aside from and external to the individual we imagine ourselves to be. In contrast to this view, a far more instructive way of understanding the relationship between the social and the individual involves reimagining society as comprising two forms: on the one hand, organisations, institutions and material artefacts such as books, technology, consumer goods and so on; and on the other, the culturally learned and socially patterned dispositions all human agents come to embody through socialization. In short, the socialized body, what we refer to as the individual, ‘is not opposed to society: it is one of its forms of existence’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 15).

Since the mid to late 1980s, social work theory, policy and practice have increasingly been (re)organised around the individual at the expense of the social. Individual social workers draw increasingly on individual-centred concepts and theories to assist individual service-users. The ‘rising’ individualism within social work has not gone unnoticed. Social work academics, professionals and service-user groups have all voiced critical concerns about the rising levels of individualism permeating the profession (Jones, 1996; Kahn and Dominelli, 2000; Ferguson, 2001; Ferguson, 2009; Ferguson and Lavalette, 2004). They are critical of this tendency which they claim has led to a number of negative and unintended consequences, including:

• the tendency within social work in the U.K. since the late 1970s towards the ‘theoretical stripping out of the social work curriculum’

(Jones, 1996)

• the increasing trend among social work academics to ‘pull away from seeing what contemporary developments in social theory have to offer practitioners’

(Singh and Cowden, 2009: 480)

• the narrowing and reduction of social work education and training to a concern with ‘practical competencies’

(Dominelli, 1997)

• an over-emphasis on individual reflexive practice which ‘does little to equip social work students with the critical analytic skills they need to address the multi-layered complexity of their clients’ problems’

(Applegate, 2004: 33)

Attempts to resist the ideological individualism at the heart of contemporary social work have met with limited success. Furthermore, as the organisation and delivery of social work around the individual first and foremost continue, a danger exists that it becomes normalized, taken-for-granted, and passes unchallenged by future generations of social workers. This book seeks to interrupt and intervene in this process, which it aims to do by realizing the following aims and objectives:

• to examine how and why changes within modern society have led to a culture of individualism and rationality
• to explain how these changes have led to the rising dominance of individual-centred forms of theory and practice within social work
• to identify and critically appraise the limits of individual-centred theoretical paradigms and knowledge

This book will achieve these aims by:

• identifying how and demonstrating why social theory is an essential accompaniment to social work theory and practice
• demonstrating the relevance and applicability of social theoretical ideas across a range of social work practice scenarios, issues and debates
• drawing attention to the possibilities and limits contained within different social theoretical paradigms and concepts
• explaining social theory in a way that is current, applied and devoid of academic jargon

Defining social theory

In a general sense, social theory is a body of knowledge aimed at making sense of human life, both from a broad historical perspective and specifically too in the forms it takes in society today. Social theory is made up of concepts from, as well as supplying ideas and concepts to, a range of academic disciplines. Of these disciplines, social theory is aligned most closely with sociology. Many of the concepts dealt with in this book were developed by sociologists. But this is not the whole story. Social theory is an intellectually inclusive and versatile body of ideas. Social theory draws on and informs a wide range of academic disciplines including philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, anthropology, history, economics, education studies, literary theory cultural studies and so on. A good example of how social theory has shaped and been shaped by ideas from adjacently positioned disciplines is captured by the ideas of the Austrian psychoanalyst and thinker Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). It would be hard to overestimate the influence Freud’s ideas have had on the development of modern social theory. (Freud’s ideas have strongly influenced social work theory and practice too.) Freud emphasised the unconscious dimensions of the human mind as crucial for understanding how individuals think, feel and interact. His model of the human psyche draws attention to the formative role social and cultural processes play in shaping the mind in ways that for the most part bypass the conscious awareness of individuals. The idea that social and cultural factors influence how human agents think and act in only partially conscious ways is a recurrent one within modern social theory as we shall see.

Aside from the intellectual content of his ideas, Freud’s work is instructive in another important way. Freud’s account of the human mind draws on ideas and themes taken from what are now considered different academic disciplines e.g. psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc. The same is true of social theory. Social theory draws on ideas and concepts taken from a wide range of academic disciplines. The points at which those ideas...