Globalization and International Social Work

Postmodern Change and Challenge

Malcolm Payne, Gurid Aga Askeland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317127055
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization challenges social work with constant social change, making a social worker's job and the task of social work education more complex and uncertain. Post-modern thinking suggests that social workers must learn to cope with complexity in ways that are in tension with the increasingly managerialist organization of the social services. The authors explore and question the concepts of 'postmodern', 'international' and 'global' in light of growing interest in international social work in the early 21st century. Emphasizing the importance of critical reflection, they argue that educational colonization can be challenged and effective anti-discriminatory and pro-equality practice and education promoted. Each chapter provides direct examples of how students and academics can apply these ideas in practice and in their learning, and how they can respond to and influence the challenges and changes that are taking place. The authors also examine educational and practice issues arising from attempts to incorporate international understanding into national practice and education systems. The book is designed to be stimulating to academics interested in international social work while remaining accessible to practitioners and students without international experience.

Chapter 1
International Social Work Practice and Education in a Globalized Postmodern World

Introduction

Social work has always been international. Recently it has become more so; a trend that continues. In this book, we aim to examine what is happening, some of the explanations of why it has come about, some consequences of this internationalization for social workers, their profession and their education and what we think they might do about it.

In this book we are asking, and trying to answer, a series of questions about international social work in the context of postmodern globalized societies. To what extent is there an international social work? If there is, is it any more than Western social work influencing the wider world through postcolonial cultural hegemony? Is postcolonial hegemony an outcome of economic, political and cultural globalization affecting welfare policy, social work knowledge and social work education? What could we do to create an international social work that is more open to local cultural requirements?

Social work education is an important focus in international social work. We have given it considerable attention for this reason. We have done so also because it is a significant context in which knowledge is developed for social work and because education is an important social structure in which social work becomes part of a globalized international market.

Social work is a product of modernism in Western states as industrialized economies developed in the late 19th century. That is, it emerged from an idealist belief (Offer, 2006) that the state could overcome social problems, using science and knowledge to resolve social problems. In most countries, therefore, it is part of state services and claims a rational evidence as the basis of its practice. In rich Western countries social work is substantially part of the state: it is organized public welfare provision. This is so even where services are offered by profit or not-for-profit organizations, because they are mainly funded by states. Its commitment to science means that social work as a profession and as a way of intervening in people’s lives relies on the assumption that it can develop universal knowledge. Such knowledge seeks to provide explanation and understanding about human beings, their behaviour and their society. The idea is that universal knowledge will apply to everyone, in whatever culture or society they live. Therefore, it can provide firm evidence for deciding how best to act when intervening with any human beings. Relying on a claim to universal knowledge assumes, uncritically, that such knowledge may be transferred from Western societies in which most of it is developed to societies in the South with markedly different cultures and access to resources. Please refer to ‘The words we use’ at the beginning of the book to understand what we mean by ‘the South’.

In the 21st century, globalization leads to changes that challenge social work practice and education, and the idea of postmodernism challenges the validity of a universal knowledge base. This is because where societies are built on different cultural and social assumptions postmodernism raises questions about the dominance of any particular set of ideas, both generally and in social work.

Postmodernism proposes that social phenomena such as social work vary according to the social and historical context in which they operate. An international social work, therefore, raises questions about whether Western models of social work practice and organization are universal in their application. We argue in this book that they may provide a framework for understanding social work, but that different cultural assumptions and social needs require different social works.

Among the most important consequences of the development of postmodern, globalized social works is inequality within and across societies. This is important because inequalities create social strains between different groups and psychological stresses for individuals. Social work has a commitment to social justice. Our experience as social workers dealing with individuals and small groups leads us to concern about the impact of the social on the personal. Social work that deals only with psychological problems fails to handle the consequences of unfairness and inequality and with social factors that lead to the problems. Social processes that create inequality and injustice constantly change. This means that practice and education need to be aware of inequalities created by new social trends, to understand them and how they affect individuals and communities. That is the reason for this book: globalization, postmodernism, and postcolonialism are current issues in interpersonal relations between people.

In this book, we explore how these issues affect the people that social workers work with and how social work can respond. We are concerned with ideas that affect the everyday practice of social workers, social work students and their educators, so while this is not a how-to-do-it book, ideas about a practice will have an effect on that practice. This is because social work is always a practice as well as a set of ideas. Practice always arises from the ideas that we have about what we want to accomplish and how we want to do it. So, this book aims to achieve a social work that contextualizes practice within the current changes that affect our world.

In this book, we explore, reflect on, analyse and seek to influence the conception of social work as an activity in an increasingly globalized, postmodern society. Usually, social workers see their practice and education as mainly formed by local issues and national policies. Increasingly, though, international trends and pressures influence it. We focus in this book on the implications of the interaction of the international, the national and the local for social work practice and education. We argue that this requires a concern for practice, because that is what all social work ultimately aims at: to intervene usefully in the lives of troubled people and in the current social changes that trouble them. However, we also say that this requires a concern for social work education, because this is the main instrument by which knowledge and social understanding becomes incorporated into practice. Therefore, we have to look at education, and how it responds to globalization and postmodernism, because it is a crucial element of how we may enable social work practice to respond to these ideas and explanations.

Students who read this book are in a university or college, or in practice placements aiming to prepare for practice. International currents affect their future practice and present education; they need to be understood. Educators who read this book seek to prepare students and offer educational resources in the best way to help their students. We start from the need to understand the settings that they work in and the opportunities that they have to help students pilot their way through the uncertainties that social change challenges them with. Social work practitioners who read this book are also educators because they are practice teachers, and, as part of teams providing social work services, they offer a context for education. We start from the need to understand the international currents affecting their work and to see their local practice as part of a wider picture.

International Social Work

Most social work students, educators and practitioners do not cross national borders in their work, so can we say that they work internationally? International social work refers to a number of different activities:

• Working in development agencies in the South – Examples of development agencies might be non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Save the Children, Caritas, and Médicin Sans Frontiéres. Many people make careers in international agencies working in the South, or commit parts of their lives when they are young, as ‘time out’ or in retirement to such work. In some countries, development work in the South would not be considered social work, while elsewhere it would.

• Working for official international agencies – Examples of international agencies might include a range of United Nations agencies, the European Commission or aid departments of national governments. As with development agencies, there would be similar differences in how such work is viewed; in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) and some other countries, work in such agencies would not be viewed as social work.

• Working for agencies dealing with cross-national issues – Examples might be agencies dealing with international adoption or family matters such as abduction of a child from one legal jurisdiction in family disputes. Some service user organizations, for example for disabled and mentally ill people, have staff working on international links.

• Working for international social work organizations – Examples might be the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and the International Association of School of Social Work (IASSW) or people employed in countries on projects for or linking with such organizations.

• Participating in international conferences, educational or professional visits, exchanges and placements and research;

• Working as a social worker in a country that is foreign to them;

• Working with refugees and immigrants in their own country.

In the South, social workers will often experience directly poverty, inequalities and social and personal problems that arise from the impact of globalization in their societies. Even though the average Western practitioner does not work internationally, daily practice may lead them to experience some of the local consequences of globalization: international migration, asylum seeking, and refugees. They may also experience concern about forced marriage, cultural conflicts and terrorism that are a product of the social trends of globalization. The uncertainty about how to evaluate and respond to them emerges from the impact of postmodern ideas in Western societies.

Our analysis starts from experiences in Western countries, where social work originated and developed most strongly, and where it is most firmly established. However, it is developing fast in a diverse range of other countries – in Africa, China, Eastern European countries – that have little connection with and reliance on Western culture and social structures. Inevitably, those developments in other countries and cultures challenge dominant Western ways of thinking about social work.

We argue for seeing this interaction in these ways:

• Western social work is not necessarily relevant to non-Western countries and its relevance should always be challenged.

• Western social work should be influenced by non-Western social work, which will inevitably have different values and practices. Nevertheless, Western cultural and economic power means that we have to establish ways for it to achieve that influence.

• Non-Western countries should and do create their own social works, and may, but should not need to, compare them with or justify them against Western values and practices.

A worldwide view of social work might be richer if it included ideas from and perceptions in non-Western countries. For example, Graham’s (2002) work on African worldviews suggests alternative perspectives on family and community that might lead Western social workers to value shared experience and collective spiritual, family and community engagement in resolving social and personal problems. Western cultural, economic and social power has given social work ideas from the West too much influence in other countries and cultures.

The fact that there are international social work organizations suggests that there is an international social work. This has been promoted over the years by an ‘internationalist view’ held by activists in the international social work organizations, particularly IFSW and IASSW. It may be seen, for example, in the successive reports about social work education across the world by Alice Salomon (1937), Eileen Younghusband, and Katherine Kendall (1978). The international view proposes that there is one diverse social work, with local variations, rather than local social works that share some common elements.

Around the millennium, the international associations began to pursue these projects by devising and promoting an international definition of social work (IFSW, 2000; IASSW, 2001), and international standards for education and training in social work (Sewpaul and Jones, 2005). Sewpaul (2005), a significant figure in the education project, accepts that postmodernism challenges such endeavours towards a ‘grand narrative’ of social work. Gray (2005) suggests that there is a risk that promoting global standards for social work education may lead to Western models of practice being seen as universal ideals to be reached. She notes that it may be possible to consider an international model of practice or education as a touchstone for comparisons, without trying to gain international agreement to definition or standards.

There is evidence that alternative forms of social work are available for adoption or adaptation. This questions the internationalist view, because it says that there are different forms of social work with different cultural roots, rather than variations on a common social work. Walton and el Nasr (1988) suggested that two parallel processes of interaction between international and local forms of social work may occur:

• indigenization of non-local social work practice, by adapting imported ideas to make them relevant to local practice;

• authentization of local practices to form a new locally-relevant structure of ideas.

Gray (2005) argues that indigenization is a cross-cultural practice. However, it may be an outgrowth of the history of colonialism, since it works from a largely Western conception of practice.

Gray and Fook (2004) propose that in considering international social work, we should think about four tensions, between:

• globalization and localization – the tendency for globalizing and localizing tendencies to occur together

• Westernization and indigenization – the balance between Western and alternative conceptions of practice

• multiculturalism and universalization – the implication and response to in-built cultural biases

• universal-local standards – the incorporation of both universal and localized conceptualizations of social work within our thinking.

It is important to examine the issues represented in these tensions. Some argue that they are not necessarily oppositions. Sewpaul (2005) for example, sees a universal definition of social work and a universal standard for social work education as assisting the integration of social work into countries where it is underdeveloped or insecure. In this way, universal and local standards can support each other. Similarly, Western approaches may become a touchstone against which local practices may be authentized. Nimmagadda and Cowger’s (1999) study of authentization and indigenization in Indian social work agencies is an example of such a process. They look at how Western practices such as giving advice, family intervention, confrontation and reassurance are adapted by Indian social expectations and concepts of Dharma and Karma. For example, mainly female workers, who were not expected to act assertively, were not always able to confront the behaviour of mainly male alcoholics, as Western social workers would. Advice-giving, which was contrary to Western social work values of self-determination and non-directiveness, was accepted because Indian values acknowledge the duty of workers to take authority in particular situations.

In summary, we argue that social workers need an understanding of international social work as part of their profession. Even if they are not international social workers themselves, their daily practice and the needs and problems that users of their services face will be affected by international social trends. Students and educators will also be aware that the international element in the literature and practice that they study questions universal validity of knowledge and practice.

Conclusion: The Plan of this Book

From such accounts, we can see the vital importance of detailed analysis of how Western and local ideas adapt to one another. Generalized assumptions of an increasingly universal and international social work do not represent the complexities of the interaction of globalization, postmodernism and postcolonialism. As we commented in this Chapter, few people are actively involved in international social work practice. Globalization is affecting the organization of the social work profession and its knowledge base, however. Globalization is also a way of understanding social change that is sweeping the world and affecting the issues and particularly the inequalities that social workers deal with, even if they do not step across a national border. ‘Post’ ideas, particularly postmodernism and postcolonialism, provide helpful analyses of the insecurity, alienation and loss of identity that many people, and the social work profession, feel facing the social consequences of globalization.

What can social workers do? Is social work and its education out of control under globalization and in a postmodern era?

In this book, we argue for ways of using knowledge in social work to understand these complex issues, incorporate them into our practice and develop strategies to begin to tackle them. These are major social changes: practitioners who claim to help people struggle with personal difficulties and social injustices affecting their lives must respond to them.

In Chapter 2, our focus is globalization, postmodernism and related concepts. Globalization and postmodernism are theories and ideas that seek to explain social changes in societies across the world around the beginning of the new millennium. However, these general social changes and explanations have personal causes and consequences, which affect and are affected by the people social workers work with and social workers themselves. We ask: how should social agencies be organized and social workers act to serve their clients best in the midst of these changes?...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• The Words We Use
• Glossary of Abbreviations
• 1 International Social Work Practice and Education in a Globalized Postmodern World
• 2 Globalization, Postcolonialism and Postmodernism: Conflicts and Connections
• 3 Critical Reflection to Promote Contextual Social Work Practice and Education
• 4 Racism, Social Exclusion and Cultural Translation
• 5 Knowledge Production: What is Valid Knowledge?
• 6 Social Work’s Identity in Postmodern Agencies and Universities
• 7 Piloting through the Challenges of Globalization
• 8 Exchanges and Cross-national Activities: Broadening the Mind
• 9 Technology-based Social Work Education and Practice
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index