Narrative Social Work

Theory and Application

Baldwin, Clive, Clive Baldwin

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781847428264
• eBook ISBN: 9781447309833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Interest in the contribution narrative can make across many disciplines has been booming in recent years, but its impact in social work has been limited.It has mainly been used in therapeutic intervention such as narrative therapy, social work education or personal accounts.This is the first book to extend the narrative lens to explore the contribution of narrative to social work values and ethics, social policy and our understanding of the self in social, cultural and political context.The book firstly sets out theoretical concerns and then applies them to specific areas of social work, including child protection, mental health and disability.The author argues that narrative is a richly textured approach to social work that can enhance both theory and practice.As such the book will be of interest to social work students, practitioners and educators, policy makers and those interested in the application of narrative to professional practice.

Part I
Narrative

Introduction

It is common now to talk of the narrative turn – the use of narrative concepts and methods – in a wide array of disciplines. Seemingly we find narrative under every stone and in every nook and cranny – narrative ethics, philosophy, theology, biology, history, anthropology, gender studies, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, rhetoric, management and leadership, and even the ‘hard sciences’ of mathematics, chemistry and physics. One cannot but find narrative wherever one wanders.

In social work, however – a profession that is, I think, so obviously narrative in nature – the literature on narrative is surprisingly limited. In their review of the narrative and social work literature, Riessman and Quinney (2005) found that for the largest part the literature concerned itself with narrative as a method, followed by narrative and social work education and then by autobiographical accounts. With regard to the use of narrative concepts and methods in social work research, Riessman and Quinney were disappointed by their limited use and by the variable quality of the narrative research they found. It is worth noting, however, that one exemplar that Riessman and Quinney cite explores storytelling at team meetings and addresses how cases are made through storytelling (White, 2002). This process of constructing cases through narrative has also been explored by Hall (1997), Urek (2005) and myself (Baldwin, 2005). Both Hall and Urek use narrative as a means of understanding social work per se, rather than simply an adjunct to its primary practices. This is in contrast to other authors who use narrative in a more limited fashion. Wells (2010) and Poindexter (2002), for example, use narrative simply to analyse the accounts of service users as a means of understanding those service users; Roscoe (2009) and Roscoe et al (2011) articulate narrative as a therapeutic intervention; and Gorman (1993), embraces both of these approaches; all fail to understand the fundamental narrative nature of social work. While narrative can be useful in analysis and as therapy, I believe that social work in its working up of cases, assessments, care plans, reviews and their presentation to supervisors, panels and courts is, essentially, a narrative activity. Coming closer to this view are authors such as Pithouse (1987) and Pithouse and Atkinson (1988), who analyse conversations in a social work office in terms of narrative construction, and Hall et al (2006), who explore the day-to-day language practices employed by social workers. The strengths of this form of discourse analysis lie in its focus on micro-interactions and structures in talk, analysing these from a variety of angles. A narrative approach, however, even if seen, as it is by some, as a subfield of discourse analysis, offers something unique in its concentration on the structures that shape stories and storytelling practices, as well as being able to explore the work performed by stories within and between discourses. So while the kind of narrative analysis in which I engage here may seem to rub up against the field of discourse studies, my interest is wider and draws from literary analysis (using concepts such as genre, plot and characterisation), philosophical undertakings such as rhetorical construction, social structures and identity formation as they emerge in and through narrative, and sociological concerns with the work that narratives are called on to do in the wider world.

It is, perhaps, Parton and O’Byrne (2000) who come closest to this view of narrative and its place in social work in their discussion of what they term ‘constructive social work’. In many ways this book shares their underlying assumptions and commitments to a constructivist stance, but while their text focuses on social work practice, I have attempted to provide a wider overview of how narrative shapes social work through being interwoven with social work’s values, through its understanding of the individual and the individual’s relationship to society, through policy development and analysis, in its ethics and, finally, through its understandings of, and applicability to, three key areas of social work practice: child protection, mental health and disability.

This approach may appear as rather different from the more traditional approaches to the use of narrative theory, and indeed it is. The rationale for adopting this approach is that as a method, perspective, process and product narrative asks new questions of, and casts new light on, not only how social work is done (akin to the works on narrative and medicine such as Hunter, 1991, and Engel et al, 2008) but also on the narrative environments in which social work is practised. In other words, this approach allows us to develop insights into social work that other, more traditional approaches, do not. By providing a language that addresses both theory and practice, that helps us understand different levels of experience and social work practice and by encouraging, if not demanding, reflexivity, narrative can provide an integrated framework for understanding fields as complex as social work. As Czarniawska (1999, p 16) says, ‘narrative knowledge is an attractive candidate for bridging the gap between theory and practice. A narrative is able to produce generalizations and deep insights without claiming universal status.’ My purpose in writing this book is to demonstrate the narrative nature of social work and, in so doing, promote a more critical appreciation of how social work constructs narratives about service users, about the context in which social work is done, and about social work itself. With this in mind, some preliminary remarks about the importance of narrative are in order.

For some authors, such as Barthes (1977), there is no escaping narrative:

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting … stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives…. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes, 1977, p 79)

Given the ubiquity of narrative, it is understandable that a narrative approach is hailed as a comprehensive way of understanding the world and ourselves. From being the subject of study and understanding, narrative has become the lens through which we study and understand, whether the subject for study and understanding is our Selves, others or the world about us.

Narratives thus operate within complex stages, associations and spheres of influence. Put another way, we can say that they simultaneously implicate different levels of experience and knowledge, each overlapping and affecting the others. These levels range from personal attitudes and emotions to our connections with our families and friends to our geographical locations and chosen communities to more general societal pressures (see Figure 1), or even any other level deemed significant to a person’s situation. Usually, the stories told by our family and friends are most familiar and understandable, offering frames and schemes with which to judge input by other spheres such as community and society.

Figure 1

This intricate relationship can be illustrated by the following example:

The elated Girl Scout went home,

her mother proud of her for having sold all of her boxes of cookies,

those inescapable icons of capitalism,

its methods and assumptions hardwiring our children to value the power of selling in almost their every activity,

methods and assumptions championed by some and resisted by others.

Adapted from Landon (2008)

The scenario progressively moves from describing the emotional state of a sole Girl Scout to depicting the activity in which she was engaged – selling cookies – and her mother’s reaction, before demonstrating that activity’s links to wider social developments, in this case the ideological influence of capitalism on children. In each consecutive statement, the narrative expands from the level of the Girl Scout to broader social and cultural themes. However, as we identify the levels of narrative involved, we also weigh the successive statements against the former, measuring their validity against personal frameworks of knowledge and interpretation. Similarly, outer levels can influence how we understand and tell stories in inner levels. For instance, if a widespread social attitude argues that I should conceive of myself as a free human being with great productive capacity, I will view how I do both my work and my daily activities differently than if I were told I was a serf bound to my noble’s will.

The varying levels of narrative remind us that any story we tell is always linked to a multitude of other ones. Any given story has a number of dimensions that it implicates at a given moment, such as with the Girl Scout example. In particular there are what Nelson calls ‘master narratives’ (what I call meta-narratives) that ‘serve as summaries of socially shared understandings’, often consist of ‘stock plots and readily recognizable character types’ and act as ‘repositories of common norms’ (Nelson, 2001, p 6). Each of the levels, outside of the individual, indicated earlier may have its own master narrative or narrative within which experience is shaped. Stories about ‘what our family is/does’ may promote the telling of some stories and hinder others – a feature seen recurrently in the family feuds depicted in soap operas such as EastEnders; stories about communities equally so – witness the master narratives around crossing picket lines among mining communities during the industrial unrest in the UK of the 1980s; and societal stories of what it means, say, to be British, that find their way into public policy debates or the master narratives in orthodox economic thinking of the need for development and growth. Attention to master narratives can provide insight into the values, norms and practices of a particular group, whether that group be religious, scientific, political – or social workers. We discuss master/meta-narratives in detail in Chapter 8.

The constant presence of narrative in all levels of experience is summarised by Czarniawska (2004) under the rubrics of enacted narrative as a basic form of social life, narrative as a mode of knowing and narrative as a mode of communication – in other words, as addressing ontology, epistemology and interaction. What I term the ‘ontological stance’, a stance that sees narrative as constitutive of the world, is reflected in writers such as Bruner (1987a, 2006), Schechtman (1996) and Ricoeur (1991), who see narrative as fundamental to being human in that we live and understand our lives in narrative fashion. But narrative is not only a way in which we understand ourselves in the world but a way of knowing, an epistemological standpoint, one which is explored by Lyotard (1984) and later Bruner (1987b) as standing in contrast to a scientific way of knowing, and by Spence (1982) and Polkinghorne (1988) as a way of knowing and a form of truth in the human sciences. Further, narrative is seen by some as fundamental to human communication and interaction (Fisher, 1984, 1985; Bruner, 1990). This way of understanding narrative – as ontology, epistemology and communication – coupled with the notion of narrative constituting different levels of experience, forms what I term the ‘strong programme’ of narrative thought.

The weaker version of the narrative turn holds to the view that while narrative is useful as a means of understanding individuals and the world, it does not act in a way so as to constitute those individuals and that world. The difference can be illustrated as follows, if I were to tell you a story in which, say, I rescued another person at great risk to myself. The weaker position on narrative would see this as recounting events in which I acted heroically, while the stronger position would see this narrative as performing the task of constructing myself as a hero. Or, as we shall see in Chapter 4, narrative can be seen as an adjunct to ethical reasoning in that eliciting narratives from those involved can provide rich data on which to base ethical decision-making, or narrative can be used as a means of ethical reasoning in and of itself, in which the ethical thing to do emerges from the story itself.

In locating this book within the strong narrative programme I am hoping that it will also function as an argument for that position. While there are undoubtedly difficulties associated with this position – and I will return to these later – it is one that I find fundamentally convincing. In what follows I will explore how the strong position on narrative can provide insights for the theory and practice of social work.

This strong position is, however, not always simple to understand or appreciate. When I teach my students about narrative it is relatively easy to engage them in the idea of narrative, in the weaker sense, for who does not enjoy stories and who does not have a story to tell? It is harder, at times, to help them understand the strong position, as it is less intuitively attractive and more conceptually abstract. So the question becomes, what is the relevance of the strong position on narrative to their chosen profession? It is a fair question as most of my students wish to become practising social workers rather than academics.

First, social work as a profession seeks to understand the individual in her or his social, cultural and political contexts as the baseline from which to promote social change, individual empowerment and well-being and to resolve problems in human relationships. Earlier it was indicated that narrative operates at all these levels and that a narrative approach helps us understand the theory and practice of social work. In what follows, I argue, in Chapter 2, that if we understand ourselves through narrative, then understanding the stories that individuals tell about themselves is an important way of understanding how individuals perceive themselves. If we live within a narrative environment, or web of interlocution, as Taylor (1989) phrases it, then understanding the stories circulating around individuals is important in understanding how they see others and the world. It follows, then, that if we can learn about the stories people tell, we are better placed to intervene in those narratives. If we know, for instance, that an individual feels vulnerable in certain situations, then we might wish to avoid placing her/himself in those situations until such time when we might help them address their vulnerability. If we know the types of stories that are permissible in a family and the ones that are not, then we can reflect on the best way to intervene (or whether to intervene at all). If we know the stories of different cultures, then we can act and speak appropriately in our interactions with others. And if we understand the political stories behind the situations with which we are faced, we can more effectively assess those situations and plan accordingly.

Second, if narrative is a means to understanding others, then it is also a means to understanding ourselves. Self-understanding, self-reflection and the use of Self are all core competences for social work practice, with the social work relationship and the ‘self’ acting as the medium through which to facilitate change (see, for example, Ramsay, 2003; Heydt and Sherman, 2005; Mandell, 2007; Reupert, 2007). Understanding who we are is, in essence, understanding the stories of which we are part (see, for example, MacIntyre, 1984, and Taylor, 1989). As social workers we are part not only of our personal stories and personal narrative environment but also part of professional narratives and the social work narrative environment. Social work as a profession has certain core narratives that influence the practice of social work and the organisations in which social workers are employed also have their own narratives – for example, many voluntary sector agencies have stories or creation myths about their founding (Schwabenland, 2006). Understanding our particular narrative environment as well as its possibilities and limitations is part and parcel of understanding ourselves in that environment and exploring the convergences and tensions between our own personal narratives and those of the organisation for which we work.

A third reason why I think narrative is important in social work is that it opens the door to examining the work that goes into creating narratives. Stories, for all their apparent naturalness, are constructions – stories have an author (or authors) who are seeking to appeal to readers. Stories do not just happen, they are made. Events are selected for inclusion, arranged in a particular order according to the purpose of the text, given meaning or causal relationships, organised into patterns or made to stand independently and recounted in particular language – processes that I shall explore in Chapter 6. The exact configuration of these processes is a choice made by the author, with the intended readership in mind. Narrative is thus a lens through which to understand social work as authorship, authorship that restores agency and intent to social workers in their day-to-day practice.

Fourth, thinking about the wider narratives that operate in society helps to understand how social workers locate their practice in terms of how they see society. In the 1960s and 1970s there were a number of influential texts that attempted to develop an overtly Marxist understanding of social work (see, for example, the series published by Macmillan in ‘Critical texts in social work and the welfare state’). While Marxism as an explanatory narrative has faded, other such narratives continue to have a significant impact on social work (for example, see Mullaly’s 2007 discussion of various social theory narratives) and understanding the meta-narratives – widely circulated narratives with powerful social force in explaining events and ideas – through which social workers perceive the world, helps us understand their choice of social work theories and methods. Such meta-narratives are not always overtly political – they also operate on the level of discourse: the medical model of disability and the social perspective model of mental distress are equally meta-narratives as these frame our understandings of the phenomena with which we are dealing.

Stories also help us understand groups. Groups often have core stories to which members are expected to adhere, and knowing these stories helps us understand the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Part I: Narrative
• Part II: Narrative and social work
• Part III: A pplication
• Conclusion
• References