Social Work Theories and Methods

Mel Gray, Stephen Webb, Mel Gray, Stephen Webb, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781446208601, 9781446208595
• eBook ISBN: 9781446289624
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

The second edition of this celebrated book by two of the world?s leading researchers in social work introduces readers to the main theories, theorists and perspectives that contribute to the debate on social work theory and social work methods. It brings together some outstanding international researchers in social work to challenge the reader to critically question how they think about social work.

The new edition includes a focus on the psychosocial perspective, with three new chapters on:

- Cognitive behavioural approaches

- Attachment theory and psychoanalytic social work

- Ecological approaches

Each chapter allows the reader to relate the theories and methods discussed to their own personal experiences. This reader friendly book includes student questions, glossaries and recommended reading so that students and practitioners can reappraise and expand the knowledge they have learned.

This book will be valuable for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in social work theory and research methods, social work interventions and perspectives as well as post qualifying students and researchers in social work.

PART I

THEORISTS

1

JÜRGEN HABERMAS

STAN HOUSTON

INTRODUCTION

Jürgen Habermas was born on 18 June 1929 in Dusseldorf, Germany. His father was an industrialist. As a teenager, Habermas joined the Hitler youth along with many of his peers. However, after the war ended he was shocked and appalled when he learned of the Nazi regime’s barbarity. He was also frustrated by Germany’s slow progress in moving towards a new, democratic state. That said, the intellectual climate of postwar Germany flourished. Against such a backdrop, Habermas read voraciously. His interests were wide ranging. Books and tracts on political philosophy, psychology and economics were widely available at the time and Habermas soon realised his appetite for discursive enquiry.

In 1949, he began to study philosophy, psychology and German literature in Göttingen, Zurich, and then in Bonn. Developing a taste, early on, for critique, he initiated an excoriating assault on the existentialist Martin Heidegger, whom he believed had given intellectual credence to the Nazi regime. This episode highlights Habermas’s enduring concern that Germany has failed to take ownership of its past.

The year 1956 was to see a formative move in his fledgling academic career. By joining the prestigious Institute for Social Research – known colloquially as the ‘Frankfurt School’ – he came into contact with a number of illustrious social theorists, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. However, Habermas subsequently left the school to develop his own ideas. He was particularly concerned about the school’s drift into social pessimism and political scepticism following the onslaught of fascism, the debasement of Marxist ideas in Russia and the rampant success of capitalism in the West. Faced with an implacable instrumental rationality in the modern world, his mentors in the school had embraced the enfeebled idea that social redemption lay in the empowering media of art, literature and music. For Habermas, this descent into aesthetics would lead to a philosophical cul-de-sac. Specifically, the adoption of a limited, and ultimately negative, view of rationality and antidote to the ills of the time would fail to bring about the ideals of the Enlightenment – modernity’s unfinished project. By way of contrast, a more developed notion of rationality was required to expose false ideologies in society. Moreover, he laid claim to the seminal idea that language provided the soil in which the seed of rationality could germinate. By recovering and developing this faculty, humankind could build a better world order, thus realising Marx’s vision of a society free from alienation and material inequities.

KEY IDEAS

Habermas’s ideas have developed over the course of a long, studious and perhaps febrile career. Yet, in spite of some astringent attacks from modish postmodernists, he has retained a firm belief in the power of reason to expose injustice and oppression and direct our thinking about alternative ways of living. In this chapter, we consider how this challenging, centripetal insight has shaped aspects of his early, middle and later work.

IDEAS ON LANGUAGE

Habermas, following the philosopher Wittgenstein’s lead, has taken the ‘linguistic turn’. By this I mean that he sees language as the key medium for constructing reality. From this standpoint, he has made a number of very important observations about the way we communicate with one another. Central, here, are speakers’ attempts to validate what they say through reasoned argument.

Exploring this idea further, Habermas suggests that there are three kinds of validity claim in normal language (we will address Habermas’s views on the abnormal form later on in the chapter). First of all, we can assert that something is the case based on our reading of the evidence. For example, we may say, with some conviction, that all spiders have eight legs because we have undertaken a study of arachnids. Here the speaker is attempting to validate what she or he is saying on the grounds that it is true.

Second, we can validate what we say by being sincere. If I say that I am fond of you and this remark is congruent with my non-verbal presentation and inner disposition, then the statement is likely to be accepted because it comes across as genuine to the hearer.

The final validity claim invokes moral appropriateness. If I make the claim that homophobia is wrong, I might do so on the grounds that discrimination against alternative sexual identities contradicts a fundamental right to self-determination. Thus, there is an ethical dimension to the statement that could be upheld on the basis of reasoned, principled argument.

Habermas believes that this inbuilt tendency to validate what has been said emanates from an ineluctable quest for understanding and agreement in social interaction; or, to put this in Habermasian speak, ‘our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus’ (Habermas, 1968: 308). This ontological thrust for mutuality is the inherent telos of communication, its driving goal.

Habermas provides complex arguments to support his core thesis that speakers are fundamentally attuned to understanding and agreement. He draws on the work of the social behaviourist George Herbert Mead (1962 [1934]), to substantiate his claims. For Mead, the human subject develops a capacity to ‘role-take’ with others. Role-taking is a technical term for the prosaic notion of putting ourselves into another’s shoes, of seeing the world from his or her unique position. This takes us beyond emotional and social development into the domain of moral advancement. To endorse the point, Habermas additionally draws on Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1981) theory of moral development and Robert L. Selman’s (1980) theory of perspective-taking in social life. Within this body of work Habermas finds sustenance for his view that moral maturity is attained when norms are not just accepted but also scrutinised objectively, reflexively and linguistically.

These preliminary comments on validity claims and the reciprocity of perspectives form the supportive pillars for Habermas’s chief construct – communicative action. Communicative action occurs when two or more individuals reach a consensual understanding on goals and actions. This form of speech acts as a coordinating mechanism facilitating the expression of all three validity claims and reasoned argument. Because the speakers sign up to the need for mutual understanding and agreement, they put the brakes on the temptation to engage in bumptious diatribe, point-scoring invective or clever sophistry. Quintessentially, communicative action denotes accountability – that is, it invokes my responsibility to you to make claims that are truthful, sincere and morally appropriate and your responsibility to me to do likewise. Importantly, when institutionalised, communicative action strengthens social integration and solidarity in social networks and society at large. For Habermas, social order could not exist without it.

When communicative action occurs in the context of:

• agreement that is forged on the force of the better argument;
• participants, who are capable of speech and action, being allowed to engage in the discussion;
• participants being allowed to call into question any proposal in the discussion;
• participants being allowed to introduce any proposal into the discussion;
• participants being allowed to express their attitudes;

then, according to Habermas, we have achieved the ideal speech situation. This is a normative situation and should be used to identify ‘disorders of discourse’, where speech has fallen short of the expressed criteria. Thus, it can be seen that there is a counterfactual dimension to the ideal speech situation. In other words, it can be used as a moral yardstick to signal unfair practices in all their guises and disguises.

The full significance of communicative action in social life, and its extension into the ideal speech situation, only becomes fully apparent when it is absent. Here, Habermas directs our attention to an aberrant derivate of communicative action called strategic action. Following John Austin (1962), the latter occurs when speakers move away from mutual understanding, consensus and agreement and become strategic – that is, out for their own desired ends. A goal arises and the strategic communicator is consumed by the most efficient way of realising it.

Strategic action is commonplace in business and professional life. Here, it can be purely functional, in the sense that corporate objectives have to be met and business plans conceived to guide the employee’s actions. However, strategic action can also take the form of one-upmanship, courting favour with the boss and creating alliances when rumours abound of takeover bids and so on – hence the ubiquity of the manufactured compliment or, perhaps, the sycophantic opening gesture or even the gratuitous retreat from praise in order to feign humility. By way of contrast, backstage behaviour happens when the actor is alone or with trusted companions. Here, cynicism is vented, anger expressed and inner ambivalence revealed.

Whatever form strategic action takes, it is to be viewed as a pathological departure from communicative action. This is not to say that there is no role for strategic action in today’s complex world. Clearly, for Habermas, our modern way of life could not be sustained without a means–ends form of rationality. The administration of corporate areas of business, industry and social life would simply crumble without it. However, what worries Habermas is the scale and predominance of strategic action in the modern world. Critically, it has eclipsed its forerunner – communicative action.

IDEAS ON SOCIETY

In his magnum opus – The Theory of Communicative Action (1987) – Habermas identifies two core spheres of social reproduction. In practice, these spheres are joined together, but they are analysed separately by Habermas so that he can identify their discrete effects on social life.

The first sphere is termed the lifeworld. Borrowing from Alfred Schütz, it refers to the subterranean or background reservoir of shared, and often taken-for-granted, meanings that, through language, shape our personalities and group identities. It is here that we find daily incidents of communicative action. Hence, people meet and interact on the basis of shared definitions of tasks, duties and expectations. Most of these encounters are unproblematic and approached without conscious deliberation. Family reunions, for example, often start with shared rituals. Greetings may be intimate and conversations might start with a review of what has occurred since the last meeting and so on. Other cultures might follow different scripts, but, whatever happens, events are likely to be predictable for the actors concerned.

The other sphere – the system – by way of contrast, refers to areas of life that are organised and controlled by the State. Formative here are the political and economic subsystems that govern important aspects of our lives. Whereas the lifeworld is concerned with cultural integration and socialisation, the system focuses on material reproduction. Consequently, it is dominated by power, money and strategic action. Take the day-to-day activities of a stock market. Here, the pursuit of money and power reaches its apogee as harassed, but ambitious, traders ply their trade. These incumbents revel in strategic action. Making expeditious decisions, outwitting the opposition, beating the market at its own game – all these things add to the allure of this cut-and-thrust role. This is not to say that communicative action is obliterated in this environment as traders must communicate and understand each other if they are to perform their tasks effectively, but the scales will clearly tip towards strategic action.

As capitalism developed, both the lifeworld and system became progressively differentiated and rationalised in markedly different ways. Habermas sees this as a necessary step from an evolutionary point of view. Nevertheless, there was a downside to the progression because the two spheres developed out of kilter with one another.

Let us examine more closely Habermas’s ideas on the rationalisation of both spheres. As the lifeworld became more evolved, traditional customs and practices that had been inherited from the past began to recede and lose their influence – particularly when they could not be defended on rational grounds. For example, whereas in the past religion shaped morality, in the modern, pluralistic world, people increasingly have to resort to reason to resolve ethical dilemmas. This presents opportunities for existential growth, but also leads to existential uncertainty. Habermas also sees the formerly homogeneous lifeworld developing into a number of distinct subspheres incorporating aesthetics, ethics and science (the beautiful, the good and the true). Each of these subspheres rests increasingly on communicative action to sustain its validity. No longer at the behest of tradition, they advance through increasing secularisation, reflexivity and social criticism.

As to the system’s rationalisation, it is important to point out, first and foremost, that it emerged from the lifeworld in much earlier times. As society evolved, though, it became more autonomous from its progenitor. Put another way, the system uncoupled from the lifeworld. In doing so, it spawned three distinct subsystems: the economy, political administration and the judiciary.

Habermas then takes us to a critical stage in society’s development. Having uncoupled from the lifeworld, the all-powerful system re-enters it, this time to colonise its functions. This means that instrumentality, rationality, money, bureaucracy and power – the trappings of the system – usurp communicative action as the chief means for resolving issues and problems in the lifeworld. As a consequence, social life becomes increasingly monetarised, commodified and bureaucratised. In short, entropy sets in. An example of colonisation is the bureaucratisation of schools, where league tables and other performance criteria undermine the practice of education as a communicational discipline.

Habermas makes similar points in relation to the welfare state. By offering mainly bureaucratised interventions to those who are in need, it erodes earlier traditions of care, such as are found in neighbourhoods and social networks, and also undermines the informal, communicational mechanisms that coordinate them. More than this, the system uses social welfare as a protective mechanism to ward off discontent in the lifeworld. This occurs mainly when there are legitimation crises in the economy and the disparities between rich and poor become most acute. To offset the crisis, and mollify discontent, the welfare state provides social assistance and other benefits.

Habermas (1987: 355) goes on to suggest that it is important to protect the autonomy of the lifeworld: ‘It is a question of building up restraining barriers for the exchanges between lifeworld and system and of building sensors for the exchanges between lifeworld and system’.

In each of these examples of colonisation, we can find experts or professionals who are trained to carry out the system’s functions. Imbued with technocratic consciousness, these representatives of the State find solace in convening meetings, applying procedures, following checklists, adhering to performance indicators and implementing eligibility criteria. Rather than approaching issues from the standpoint of communicative action – the domain of the face-to-face interchange – they favour instrumentalism.

To conclude, what Habermas envisages is not an all-out war between lifeworld and system. Rather, he wants to restore some kind of balance between the two spheres so that they become mutually enriching and en...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the editors and contributors
• Introduction
• PART I THEORISTS
• PART II THEORIES
• PART III PERSPECTIVES FOR PRACTICE
• References
• Index