Best Practice in Social Work

Critical Perspectives

Karen Jones, Barry Cooper, Harry Ferguson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781403985019
• eBook ISBN: 9781350313224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Social work has laboured too long under a 'deficit' model that focuses on failings and problems of practice. Emphasising best practice, strengths and collaborative partnership this ambitious book seeks to redress the balance. Undergraduate and post-qualifying social work students alike will find it a useful resource.

Part I

Critical Best Practice: Critical Perspectives

1 The theory and practice of critical best practice in social work

HARRY FERGUSON

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the notion of a critical best practice perspective on social work which is at the core of this book. It is the first of five chapters in Part I of the book which outline and discuss the concept of critical best practice perspectives and various theoretical issues, while focusing on practice. As was pointed out in the editors’ introduction, social work has become dominated by a ‘deficit approach’ where the focus is on what does not get done (well), and on how social work supposedly ‘fails’. So great have these problems become in the United Kingdom that following a recent very high profile inquiry into the death from abuse of 8–year-old Victoria Climbie, the profession was pronounced by the Times newspaper (January 29, 2003) to be ‘in terminal decline’. The central aim of a critical best practice (CBP) perspective is to promote positive learning about social work by setting out examples of best practice; that is, outlining and analysing instances where it is argued that what social workers did was done well, with all the benefits that can accrue from this for service users.

The ‘critical’ element here arises from how social theory is used to critically analyse and develop understandings of such best practice. Indeed, a key reason why such practice can be regarded as ‘best’ is because it contains a ‘critical’ component where social workers have used their powers and capacities to critically reflect in a way that is both skilful and deeply respectful to service users, being mindful of their often marginalised social position and vulnerability, while at the same time using good judgement and authority. This approach constitutes a strategic attempt to develop a more positive perspective on researching, learning about and, most importantly, doing social work, from critical perspectives. Deficit culture has left us without a knowledge base of best critical practice and devoid of a tradition of celebration, pride or sense of achievement on which to build or fall back on and has helped to create a context where governments can feel able to ride roughshod over social work. Social work needs to showcase what it routinely does well by developing knowledge of best practice on which to base learning and positive growth by making this visible both within the profession and to the public. This is the essential aim of a CBP perspective. The first part of the chapter outlines the development of critical perspectives in social work and the theoretical basis of CBP perspectives. The chapter then develops the discussion through an analysis of CBP in an actual case.

IN SEARCH OF ‘BEST PRACTICE’

What does it mean to speak of and search out ‘best practice’? There is and never can be a fixed definition of best practice in social work. It is a product of its time and place. Social work has existed as a profession since the end of the nineteenth century, and while the language of ‘best practice’ is quite new, every era since has had its own standards of what it consisted of (Means and Smith, 1998; Ferguson, 2004). In effect, best practice is a social construction. This means that even within particular times and places what constitutes best practice is contested and open to debate. Moreover, the entire idea could be contested on the basis that if one believes that society is riddled with conflicts and inequalities how is it ever possible or legitimate to say that anything can be ‘best’ or worth celebrating? This raises the key question of ‘best’ according to whom and what criteria? A classic example of how the answers to such questions change over time is that for many today the inclusion of the service user’s perspective is seen as vital, which is quite different to 30 years ago when it was the policy maker, social worker and the academic as ‘experts’ who had the monopoly on defining what was best.

Another sign of our times is the significant development of the ‘evidence-based practice’ movement. In the United Kingdom, government policy now asserts that decisions in professions like social work should be based less on ‘opinions’ and much more on data about ‘what works’, on ‘evidence’ (Department of Health, 1998). Here the ‘evidence’ for what is ‘best’ is that which can be proved scientifically to be so. The key approach to achieving this is the ‘experimental’ research design known as the randomised control trial. Control groups which do not receive the intervention are included to permit a more robust evaluation of the precise impact of the intervention in question (Macdonald, 2001). Its focus tends to be on the use of bigger samples randomised into experimental and control groups and the outcomes of particular interventions in terms of statistical averages, probabilities and calculations based on numerical data (MacDonald and Sheldon, 1992).

Such approaches can have something valuable to offer, especially if combined with other, qualitative, research methods (Strange et al., 2001). But unlike health care where they are extensively used and it is far easier to measure the impact of a treatment on patient’s well-being, experimental designs have serious limitations in social work. They tend to be monopolised by researchers as experts to the exclusion of the voice of service users (Margison, 2001). A major problem is that the scientific notion of ‘evidence’ contains a very limited view of what practice actually is and how it is created (Shaw, 1999; Webb, 2001). Best practice is not the same as ‘what works’ in that its conception of practice is about more than outcome. It is about social action, process and the nuances of how practice is done. It includes critical attention to those processes which may not be amenable to or even seen as relevant to measurement but which are the essence of what social work is. For instance, a user who is involuntary and not cooperating with the service can be constructively engaged in a best practice way, even though positive performance indicators about them as (good enough) parents/ carers/patients/citizens and the outcome of intervention (as good enough) may be absent. While the very designation ‘best’ implies that often the intervention has worked, many lessons about best practice can be drawn from what in a strict scientific sense of outcomes has not worked.

The case study I provide below exemplifies this in how a huge amount of social work and other professional practice goes into situations where outcomes are messy, unclear, even poor, yet the practice was skilfully done and in a manner which upholds social work’s democratic value base. A crucial aim of a CBP perspective is to capture the very ‘work’ that is social work, the actions taken, what gets said and done and with what consequences, which constitute particular kinds of practice. In the chapters that follow, countless such examples of how such good work gets done are given, ranging from the use of gestures, types of questions, the management of emotion, the constructive use of statutory powers, to changing professional attitudes and dominant beliefs about situations, management and organisations, providing advocacy, practical and material support, and changing users beliefs and behaviours.

Producing such knowledge means adopting theories and methods that give primacy to trying to understand people’s experience and the meanings it has for them. Compared to the deductive reasoning which underpins positivist experimental research approaches, this is a more inductive process of knowledge building. Theory and understandings of practice are developed out of the everyday experience of professionals and service users and people’s capacities for ‘critical reflection’ (Fook, 2002). This type of approach is reflected throughout this book in the gathering and analysis of people’s ‘narratives’ to make sense not merely of practice, but best practice. Crucially, what constitutes achievable standards of ‘best’ is determined not from a single source, such as agency rules and policy, but from a range of sources, including service users, managers, front-line professionals. How the practice was (co-) constructed and given meaning by these different actors can then be explored. A key challenge of CBP analysis is to build from these diverse narratives a unifying representation of (best) practice. Practice may mean different things to different people, but it is possible to identify and make claims about what constitutes ‘best’. However, the search for best practice is not about some unqualified celebration of ‘good works’, but a standard for evaluation of ‘best’ which is rigorously, sociologically critical. Crucially, the focus is not on idealised images of best practice, but attainable ones within the possibilities of current working realities. This means a commitment to profiling the best practice that can be found to be going on and critical analysis of such practice.

IN SEARCH OF THE ‘CRITICAL’

All of this raises the key question of what is meant by ‘critical’? What then is and should be the relationship between theory, ‘criticality’ and social work? At first sight, the notion of CBP seems like a contradiction in terms. For how can one be critical of something that is best? ‘Critical’ here is meant in the sociological sense of critique as opposed to being negative. This does not mean always trying to be ‘nice’ and constructive. Asking awkward questions and being a nuisance in questioning the way society is structured, the nature of power and so on, is a vital part of what intellectual debate involves (Fuller, 2005). ‘Critics’, as Ian Shaw (2005: 1244) observes of social work, ‘are not universally liked’. Here ‘critical theorising’ is seen as involving a commitment to using such critique to not merely understand the world but to try to change it, for the betterment of service user’s lives.

The radical or ‘critical’ imagination in social work began to engage in such critical theorising with the birth of the ‘radical social work’ movement in the early 1970s. It emerged in response to a profession then dominated by social casework with its alleged tendency, under the influence of theories such as psychoanalysis, to reduce all problems to the individual failings of clients. Social work courses were dominated by psychological theories, with minimal use of ideas drawn from areas such as sociology or politics. At the same time social work was professionalising and its training became embedded in the increasingly popular critical social sciences in the expanding university sector, which critiqued power relations in society and the place of service users, professionals and the state within it. Social work, or at least the traditional ways of doing it through social casework, was now scorned by radicals as a method to control the poor and the oppressed and began to be seen by radicals as part of the problem rather than a possible solution to social ills. In a classic political cartoon of the time two ‘slum kids’ hold a conversation: ‘We’ve got rats’, says one; ‘Shit man’, says the other, ‘we’ve got social workers’ (Pearson, 1975: 133). Drawing on the work of Karl Marx, the message was that state social work ‘cooled out’ the anger of working class people blocking the revolutionary potential of political change. The radical social work movement helped engineer an inversion of values. Now social workers were characterised as ‘social policemen’; it was they, not their ‘problem families’ who could not be trusted.

Bailey and Brake’s pioneering text Radical Social Work defined it as being about ‘understanding the position of the oppressed in the context of the social and economic structure they live in’ (Bailey and Brake, 1975: 9). At first, radical social work was concerned solely with social class, and drew heavily from the theories of Karl Marx. Corrigan and Leonard’s (1978), Social Work Practice Under Capitalism: A Marxist Approach exemplified this singular focus on state social work as a means to demonising and controlling the poor to benefit the ‘ruling classes’ and the reproduction of capitalism (on this perspective in social work today, see Ferguson and Lavelette, 2004, 2006). Responses at that time typically involved expressions of a new identity politics which were premised on ways for social workers to show solidarity with excluded minorities and clients. In 1978, while on my first ever social work placement, the first senior social worker from social services I ever met just happened to be a proudly out gay man. Among the team of social workers he supervised was a man who insisted on wearing woolly jumpers and jeans full of holes and whose hair and beard were long and often dirty. At first I mistook him for a homeless client and wondered how he had managed to get inside the office! This is precisely as he wanted it. Radicals consciously dressed down to show support with and try not to alienate agency clients, leaving no doubt as to whose side they were on (Wilson, 1985).

The actual number of radical social workers always appeared to be quite low (at least if applying the woolly jumper test). Yet a process had been established through which the value base of social work firmly embraced the view that diversity and difference were to be affirmed not feared or excluded (Thompson, 1993; Dalrymple and Burke, 1995). In the 1980s, with the influence of feminism and the women’s movement, gender, sexism and sexuality reached the radical agenda, while racism (Dominelli, 1988), disability rights (Oliver, 1990) and gay and lesbian rights would soon follow (Brown, 1997; Hicks, 2000). Thus by the 1990s, the focus of radicalism in social work had broadened as it absorbed the influence of new developments in social theory and new social movements. This kind of critical awareness of tackling discrimination has been crucial in enabling social work to try to respond respectfully to the diverse needs of all social groups. Notions of anti-discriminatory practice, anti-oppressive practice and empowerment became part of the mainstream of theory and practice. The upshot has been a loosening of the traditional classifications and boundaries between ‘us’ (professionals) and ‘them’ (clients/service users), of ‘the boundaries set up to distinguish what is external to and what is internal to a collectivity’ (Lash and Urry, 1987: 297). The ethical imperative became one of needing to include clients within the social work collectivity, an outcome of which is that in the 2000s the language has become one of ‘service users’ who it is expected will routinely be worked with in dignified and empowering ways.

However, huge problems continue to surround the way in which critical social work theory has too often remained at the level of negative critique, idealistically prescribing what should not be done, while the actual practicalities of what can and often should be done, and how is ignored or left at the level of aspiration. Thus it has largely avoided any encounter with best practice, leaving out how critical practice can be done well. This has also contributed to the deficit culture in which the dominant view is that there is always something inherently wrong with social work, that practice is never (quite) good enough. Sometimes it is not. But, we contend in this book, it sometimes is, and we need to learn from such instances of best critical practice. In a similar vein, Shaw (2005) draws attention to how ‘critical’ in social work too often means ‘censoriousness’, where a legitimate agenda to pursue social justice and social transformation is adopted without reflexive careful judgement. Shaw regards the introduction of the practitioner voice in the research process as a key way to achieve such judgement, wisdom and grounded knowledge of cri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introducing critical best practice in social work
• Part I - Critical Best Practice: Critical Perspectives
• Part II - Critical Best Practice: Interventions and Interactions
• Part III - Critical Best Practice: Practice Settings and Cultures
• Index