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This chapter presents the theoretical and ethical premises of the PAP. It starts with a discussion of what it means to think paradigmatically and continues with a detailed presentation of three paradigms: the conservative, the structural and the PAP. The first two are the dominant paradigms in the field, and they are compared with the third, which I am suggesting. The conservative paradigm, I claim, essentialises people in poverty as Others. Through its focus on the weaknesses and deficits of individuals as the cause of their poverty, it inspires direct practice that aims at changing the characteristics of individuals. Contrastingly, the structural paradigm sees societal failures as the cause of poverty, recommending a politics of redistribution as the solution to poverty. The structural paradigm has had a great influence on macro-practice but much less so on direct practice. Building on the structural analysis, the PAP adds to it the concept of recognition – derived from current relational psychoanalysis – in order to offer a detailed blueprint for direct practice. The three paradigms have strong links of mutual influence between practice and theory.
Introduction
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. (Dom Helder Câmara, quoted in McDonagh, 2009: 11)
Asking about the reason for people’s poverty causes discomfort in those who call the Brazilian Catholic archbishop who inspired Latin America’s ‘liberation theology’ a ‘communist’. Giving food does not evoke a similar response because it seems neutral, apolitical. However, every practice is, in fact, political. What makes the provision of food to the poor seem apolitical is not its essential nature, but its proximity to hegemonic ideas regarding what poverty is and what the ways to combat it are. There is no escape from being political; thinking through the framework of paradigms helps us to expose the political component of practice.
During the last two decades, social work scholars in the UK (Craig, 2002; Jones, 2002; Davis and Wainwright, 2005; Mantle and Backwith, 2010; Parrott, 2014; Cummins, 2018; Featherstone, 2016; Gupta et al, 2017), Belgium (Boone et al, 2018, 2019), the US (Deka, 2012; Reisch and Jani, 2012), New Zealand and Australia (Waldegrave, 2005; Beddoe and Keddell, 2016; Morley and Ablett, 2017), and Israel (Rosenfeld, 1993; Rosenfeld and Tardieu, 2000; Strier, 2009; Krumer-Nevo, 2009, 2015, 2017; Strier and Binyamin, 2010, 2013) have started calling for a restructuring of the relationships between social workers and people in poverty, based on a social justice agenda that emphasises rights, democracy, inclusion and respect. The ‘Poverty-Aware Social Work Paradigm’2 (PAP) translates this agenda into specific theoretical and ethical principles.
Why do we need a paradigm? Or, thinking paradigmatically
A paradigm is a comprehensive ‘set of basic beliefs … that deals with primary principles’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994: 107) and connects ideas regarding the nature of the world (the ontological premise), what is considered valid knowledge and how it is acquired (epistemological premise), and ethics (axiological premise) (Heron and Reason, 1997). The ontological premise is an answer to the question: ‘What is the world?’ In our case, this is a question of ‘What is the nature of poverty?’ and ‘What are the characteristics of people in poverty?’ The epistemological aspect refers to the question: ‘How do we know?’ Specifically, in our case, ‘What kind of knowledge is needed when working with people in poverty?’ Finally, the axiological aspect raises the question of ‘Why?’ or ‘For what purpose?’ – in our case, ‘What is the ethical purpose of our practice with people in poverty?’
The structure of a paradigm emphasises the strong connection between theoretical, epistemological and ethical assumptions, on the one hand, and practice, on the other. This connection makes for a dynamic equilibrium in which theory and practice mutually influence one another. This means that the answers to the three questions – ‘What is the nature of poverty?’; ‘What kind of knowledge is needed when working with people in poverty?’; and ‘What is our ethical purpose?’ – stand at the heart of and inform every practice. The paradigmatic structure highlights the relationship between practice and its underlying basic assumptions, and emphasises questions as to ‘why’ and ‘for what purpose’ practice is done as crucial questions that shape the way in which it is actually done.
Thinking paradigmatically means carrying out an ongoing, reflexive examination of the theoretical and ethical principles behind every decision regarding intervention. This examination can take place in two ways. One can start with looking at a real-life practice and analysing its theoretical and ethical premises, that is, asking the aforementioned ontological, epistemological and ethical questions about that practice. This process of critical reflection, which starts from practice and analyses its hidden assumptions, helps professionals to develop awareness of actions they take for granted (Fook and Gardner, 2007). Alternatively, one can start from thinking about the paradigmatic questions and imagine practice that is grounded in the answers to these questions. In this case, practitioners might start with asking themselves: ‘What are the characteristics of the people I am working with?’; ‘What kind of knowledge do I need?’; and ‘What is the purpose of my activity?’ Based on the answers they give, practitioners might think of different ways of doing practice, and then choose the one that suits them best from among them.
Grounding practice in theory and ethics, rather than seeing it simply as a module or a set of actions, has far-reaching implications for social work. Yet, the theoretical and ethical context of practice is seldom discussed or examined. Therefore, practitioners mistakenly think that they can adopt certain practices without considering the paradigmatic assumptions that they imply. However, this is a huge mistake because different paradigmatic assumptions lead to different ways of doing practice, even if the practice looks superficially the same.
As an example, let us take the practice of home visits. Home visits can be approached from a supervisory stance, seeking to gauge the functioning of the family or the risk to their children. This stance will shape the home visit in a particular way that, as we shall see later, is more suited to the basic premises of a conservative paradigm but contradicts the principles of the PAP. Home visits are a staple in the PAP but the paradigmatic principles will shape them in a totally different way than those emanating from the conservative paradigm. According to the PAP, the purpose of the visit is to gain familiarity with the family’s actual life context (see Saar-Heiman et al, 2017) and establish a close relationship that will enable the social worker to become relevant for the family and to stand by it in its struggle against poverty and hardship.
Thinking about home visits through a paradigmatic lens leads us to ask: ontological questions, such as ‘How do I perceive need or risk?’ and ‘How do I perceive the problem or difficulty that led me to carry out a home visit?’; epistemic questions, such as ‘What kind of knowledge do I seek to gain during a home visit?’; and ethical questions, such as ‘What is the set of values according to which I conduct the home visit?’ and ‘How do I position myself in relation to the situation?’ Different answers to these questions dictate the specific way in which the social worker presents herself to the family, looks at the house and sits and talks to the family members.
Just as a home visit can be carried out in very different ways, and for very diverse reasons, the same applies to material assistance, a therapeutic session or rights-exercising practice. In fact, all the various social work practices, including policy practice, stem from theoretical and ethical principles, whether they are acknowledged or not.
My experience tells me that dealing with poverty raises a surfeit of issues, the critical discussion of which in professional circles is very difficult. Motivation to work, welfare dependency, material assistance and child abuse/neglect are all explosive issues. It is hard to discuss them because they give rise to very strong feelings, and because a professional climate that glorifies evidence-based practice ignores questions of ethics. In contrast, the paradigmatic structure facilitates this discussion because every claim made can be responded to with the questions that comprise the paradigm: ‘How do you perceive the problem?’; ‘How do you know what the problem is?’; and ‘What is the goal of intervention?’
Once it is understood that theory, values and practice are closely connected, two dominant paradigms can be identified in the field of social work in relation to poverty: the conservative and the structural. I will now compare these two paradigms with the PAP that I am suggesting. To facilitate the process, I will describe the three premises of each paradigm – the ontological, the epistemological and the axiological (see Table 1.1) – and the practice that derives from them.
Table 1.1:The three paradigms
| | Ontology | Epistemology | Axiology |
| The conservative paradigm | Poverty is a culture that is manifested in the psychological, familial and communal characteristics of poor people | Positivist, professional knowledge as objective truth (directed to the pathologies and deficits of human subjects) | The poor exhibit a serious deviation from social and moral norms, and live off the productivity of the normative members of society |
| The structural paradigm | Poverty is a problem of societal inequality, the consequence of unequal social structures and institutions | Positivist, professional knowledge as objective truth (directed to the deficits of society; at the level of direct practice knowledge, directed to human subjects’ strengths) | Poverty is incompatible with a just society Ethics of redistribution |
| The PAP | Poverty is a violation of human rights. People in poverty are agents who resist poverty under conditions of a severe lack of economic and symbolic capital | Critical-constructivist, obtained through relationship with service users | Ethics of solidarity, minimising otherness and extending the group of ‘we’ |
The conservative paradigm
Ontology
The conservative paradigm is grounded in the historic notion of the ‘undeserving poor’. The influential historian Michael Katz (1986, 1990, 1992, 1995) claims that American social policy in the 20th century kept the 18th-century distinction between the deserving (mainly disabled people, war veterans and widows with children) and the undeserving poor (characterised by behavioural and moral problems). Although the distinction originally derived from the pragmatic need to allocate scarce resources and did not carry moral judgement, it acquired a moral connotation during the 19th century. The ‘undeserving poor’ were treated with a mixture of disciplinary, punitive and educational strategies in order to modify what was perceived as their moral inferiority and negative behaviour.
During the 20th century, rules of public discourse did not allow an explicit distinction to be made between the deserving and undeserving poor. However, Katz (1990) traces how this distinction permeated policies and regulations, for example, in work requirements and eligibility restrictions imposed on welfare recipients. At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, the concept that prevailed in poverty discourse, though not without controversy, was the concept of ‘the culture of poverty’. Coined by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1966) in his foundational text ‘The culture of poverty’, it substantiated the existence of poor people riddled with an accumulation of specific problematic behaviours on the personal, familial and community levels, as well as in their relationships with society as a whole. According to this thesis, in all these spheres, poor people who are part of the culture of poverty have psychological, moral, behavioural and cultural pathologies or deficits. Lewis (1966: 25) summarised it in these words: the culture of poverty ‘does not provide much support or satisfaction; its pervading mistrust magnifies individual helplessness and isolation. Indeed, poverty of culture is one of the crucial traits of the culture of pover...
