Social Work

Value-Guided Practice for a Global Society

Cynthia Bisman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231536882
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This innovative textbook reconfigures generalist social work practice for the twenty-first century. Incorporating historical, ethical, and global perspectives, the volume presents new conceptualizations, definitions, and explanations for social work practice and principles in the areas of assessment, relationships, communication, best practices, intervention, and differential use of self. Case studies fully discuss and illustrate the use of these approaches with real clients and provide a lens inclusive of geography and culture to promote social justice and human well-being, whether within one's own nation or across national borders. Recognizing that targeted practice with individuals is the key to successful outcomes, this textbook equips today's practitioners with the values, skills, and knowledge necessary for social work practice in a globalized world.

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Value-Guided Practice for a Global Society

An Introduction

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.

—Margaret Mead, feminist, humanist, cultural anthropologist

How could you get back what has disappeared?

—Kiki Dimoula, national poet of Greece

The world we have created is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking

—Albert Einstein

What happens here in the United States affects my family in Mexico and the worth of the euro, and what happens in Africa affects my friends in the United States; we don’t realize how we are all connected. I chose social work to make the world a better place.

—A social worker

I was adopted as a Vietnamese orphan before I was 1 year old. Raised in New York City and licensed to practice social work there, I have never been to Asia. Now I am seeking to adopt a 2-year-old girl whose mother’s custody has been terminated. Adoption social workers only want to focus on how my Asian heritage will affect my ability to parent. this child, whose birth family came to the United States from Guatemala. I found this frustrating. There were many areas of concern for me, such as the child’s abuse and trauma; ethnic background was not one of them. Shouldn’t we focus practice on “where the client is”?

—A social worker

This book has been written to extend generalist practice in ways essential to 21st-century demands. It provides readers a comprehensive text that covers the values, knowledge, and skills necessary for all social work practitioners. New definitions and explanations for the established tenets of social work concepts and principles including assessments, relationships, communication, differential use of self, best practices, and interventions are illustrated and integrated with case material for practice guided by the profession’s values and ethics. Recognizing that practice with individuals is the shared foundational skill of every social worker, this comprehensive text is unique among the many on the market in covering what all students need to know for ethical practice with individuals in a world changed by globalization.

Global Consciousness

This book explores the topic of global consciousness, introduced as a new construct for the social work profession. The global interconnectedness that increasingly defines the early 21st century has shifted populations and economic structures, requiring innovative ways to think about and implement the welfare state; this demands novel approaches from the social work profession. Toward this end, global consciousness provides an original framework for practice across systems and across ethnic backgrounds and national borders.

Global consciousness prepares social workers for contemporary practice. Extending the important and necessary framework of international social work from its underpinning in nation-states, global consciousness provides a construction to understand a world in which circumscribed national boundaries no longer suggest reasonable assumptions about culture, ethnicity, language, and norms of behavior. Global consciousness allows for practice through a continuous global perspective, regardless of the initial geographic origin or current location of clients and practitioners.

Important contributions of international social work over its long history include recognition of and advocacy for action around international issues concerning domestic practices and policies, troubles shared by nations, dilemmas emerging from large-scale displacements and migrations, and international exchanges. These activities remain relevant and necessary. Global consciousness specifically targets a changed world with boundaries obscured by globalization and technological developments. It considers social work within a context of rapidly changing populations and communities that are now simultaneously local, global, and virtual. Social work practice with a global consciousness incorporates the lens of both geographic and cultural context, drawing from the profession’s values and skills as well as from multidisciplinary knowledge and skills to respect the uniqueness of each person and situation and also to recognize the universality of shared experiences.

In these chapters, global consciousness provides a new paradigm for social work by viewing the global in the local. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) ethical Standard 6.01 states: “Social workers should promote the general welfare of society, from local to global levels, and the development of people, their communities, and their environments” (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2008 [1996], p. 21). Accreditation guidelines set by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) now require international content in the curriculum of U.S. social work programs (Council on Social Work Education, 2008). The term global consciousness has a number of meanings and practices in a range of fields. At Princeton University, global consciousness is a multidisciplinary virtual project that explores linkages between people and the earth while attending to issues of presence and activity of consciousness. The Center for Consciousness Studies in Tucson, Arizona, attends to parapsychology phenomena. Jeremy Rifkin, an economist and international affairs expert, has written numerous books on climate and the environment, offering a reinterpretation of history from an empathic lens of expanded human consciousness. He believes that as technological developments open people up to a wider world, they may also help to create a more caring world: “New developments in global Internet connections suggest that it might be possible to imagine a paradigmatic shift in human thought and a tipping point into global consciousness” (Rifkin, 2009, p. 472). Suárez-Orozco and colleagues’ (2007) approach to this term is closest to the one developed and illustrated in this book with its emphasis on learning and understanding in the global era.

This book develops and uses the following definition of global consciousness for social work:

Global consciousness is a recognition of the world as a unity consisting of complex interactions among people across the globe. In viewing the world as one ecological system, global consciousness requires critical thinking and communication that is open and sensitive to multiple meanings for the same phenomena.

For practice with a global consciousness, social workers must be able to

1. Attend to a global society with its complex mixture of people and environments. Social work’s person-in-environment perspective must be broadened across ethnic, racial, cultural, and geographic variables, incorporating the profession’s mission of human well-being, which includes both individual and social well-being.

2. Respect the uniqueness and dignity of all people and advocate for their empowerment. Through human relationships, social workers advocate for and with clients to foster self-determination and empowerment and to create change in a range of individual and social conditions.

3. Remain aware of self as simultaneously distinct from and in community with others. This requires reflexivity—looking outside of oneself from the perspective of another person while at the same time recognizing one’s worldview and membership in particular groups.

4. Convey curiosity and caring through differential use of self. This demands articulation of one’s biases and personal reactions to client situations, accompanied by flexibility and openness in reaching out to a diverse world.

5. Embrace critical thinking and critical practice. These are skills of reflection and action in using reasoning, geographic and cultural context, peer-reviewed scholarship, and the profession’s values and skills while also recognizing the client system as the best ethno-specific cultural expert.

6. Promote communication within and across borders with sensitivity and tolerance for multiple meanings attributed to the same phenomena. Recognition of and respect for differences in languages and cultures and the infinite ways of interpreting events are necessary for one’s own communications as well as for facilitating interactions among and within cultural groups and nation-states.

Global consciousness is an important new construct for social work practice. It provides an extension to international social work made necessary by globalization. Expanding the profession’s reach beyond culture, individuals, and their immediate communities, it encompasses the wider world as community. This recognizes the social world as one ecological system with multiple subsystems that are in continuous interaction, resulting in changes of culture, places, and people that may make them unrecognizable, as the Greek poet Dimoula so compellingly states in the epigraph given on the chapter-opening page. In its respect for the uniqueness and dignity of each person, global consciousness addresses issues of diversity and difference with sensitivity to a range of border crossings, such as class, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Whether in Philadelphia, London, or Nairobi, the movement of people requires a change in social workers’ ideas and perceptions, not a change in the physical locale of the social worker. The world comes to each location. Contexts of geography as well as of culture are therefore necessary components of practice in a global world; this new construct of global consciousness for social work practice promotes ethical practice on a global scale both within and across national borders.

Values, Ethics, and a Social Morality Perspective

Inherent in global consciousness is a moral perspective. Social work’s values and ethics are the profession’s distinguishing features; they provide the language for promoting the profession’s mission of social justice and human well-being locally and globally. This book translates these abstract concepts into practice to change the behavior of individuals and society—the nexus of the profession’s domain. Human rights, cultural relativism, and philosophical frameworks drawn from Appiah (2005), Kant (1785), Mill (1863 [1957]), Sen (2009), and feminist ethics of care (Koggel, 2007; Kabeer, 2012; Tronto, 2012) are examined for ethical practice in a global society. Work by various social work scholars to clarify the profession’s mission and translate the values into practice behaviors includes Dolgoff, Loewenberg, and Harrington (2005), Reamer (2002), and Reisch (2002).

The focus in chapter 3 is on the profession’s mission to advance social morality—to embrace the dual areas of individual and social well-being that together constitute human well-being; this directly reflects the person-in-environment paradigm. These perspectives inform and guide social work’s knowledge and skills, leading to the promotion of social justice. A term difficult to define, social justice means fairness and access to opportunities for social mobility and improved potential for individuals and society—a better life for all people. It requires tolerance for diversity and a broad and inclusive focus on the morality of social structures and policies as they influence both the social life and the private lives of individuals. A range of ethical codes allows examination of social work’s historical basis in morality within the context of its status as a profession. I focus on the direct linkages between its mission and the values of service, human dignity, relationships, integrity, and competence, as well as on the inherent contradictions between the ethical principles that both emerge from the values and extend them. My discussion of ethical reasoning incorporates empowerment and advocacy, and my examination of challenges and future directions discusses multidisciplinary social welfare perspectives for practice toward global social justice and human well-being.

Chapter 3 also considers the conundrum faced by the profession and especially those in practice. The profession’s social justice mission reflects a universalist or deontological view—based as it is on principles of what is right or wrong and what Reamer (2012) calls “duty-based ethics,” associated with Kantian ethics and the moral philosophy adapted by Rawls (1971) for social work. Yet social work’s strong ethical commitment to cultural sensitivity and respect for difference can lean toward a consequentialist or teleological view based on what is most beneficial for the greatest number of people, a view associated with Mill (1863 [1957]). Virtue-based ethics focuses on character and relationship—what kind of person I want to be and what I owe to others—associated with Aristotle, Confucius, Buddhism, and some religions and has received much contemporary attention for its complementing both the universalist and consequentialist views while adding the “common good” to what is “good for the individual.” Moreover, its concern with fairness can resonate with a broad range of norms in various parts of the world. Narrative- and case-based ethics also fits comfortably in this body of thinking with its emphasis on rich descriptions by clients of their stories followed by similarly rich explanations by social workers in the case studies. This book explores these challenges through case studies and analyses of practice behaviors and decision making. Banks (2006), Clifford and Burke (2009, Hugman (2005), and Butcher, Banks, Henderson, Robertson (2007) contribute perspectives critical for ethical practice.

Additional Unique Features

In addition to covering global consciousness and a values/ethics perspective, this book uses a historical context to frame the profession’s evolving knowledge base, mission, values, and practice components. History grounds those entering the profession so that they can draw from the past to shape new directions responsibly and evaluate emerging concepts. Contemporary relevance and effectiveness of the profession requires familiarity with the ideas and intentions of those who have come before.

Chapter 2 explains and illustrates the two core paradigms of social work. “Person in environment” encompasses the multiple levels of practice—people, policies, communities, and organizations—delivered through interactions with individuals, groups, and families. “Biopsychosocial” practice includes physiologic factors (chemistry, neurology, genetics, physiology), the psychological (cognitive, affective, and emotional functioning), and a special focus on the social (community resources, social supports, income, education, and housing). A historical perspective introduces social work as a profession within the broad context of professional occupations and connects the founding of social work with its contemporary paradigms. This connection to history can facilitate incorporating the new construct of global consciousness with its broadening of social work’s domain to include the biosphere, organisms, and cells along with the earlier concepts of society and culture (Engel, 2003), A framework that covers history in the context of emerging ideas allows for focus on practice that addresses specific variables such as individual predispositions, familial effects on personality, social norms, and access to resources, as well as their interactive effects on each other.

Chapter 4 covers case theories for assessment that incorporate evidence from multiple sources, including clients and the professional literature gathered by social workers to make sense of each client’s situation from a biopsychosocial perspective. These assessment methods organize the practice, shaping relationships, communication, differential use of self, and intervention. This chapter also addresses the complex ethical challenges for assessments within a globalized society, including technological developments and multidisciplinary perspectives.

Building human dignity and respect in relationships with renewed emphasis on their core significance to the profession in fostering inclusion, belonging, and caring among people within and across national bo...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Value-Guided Practice for a Global Society: An Introduction
• 2. Organizing the Ideas of Social Work
• 3. Ethical Practice Toward Social Justice and Human Well-Being: Local and Global
• 4. Evidence for Knowledge-Guided Assessments
• 5. Respect and Dignity in Relationships
• 6. Interaction and Meaning in Communication
• 7. Critical Consciousness for Differential Use of Self
• 8. Evidence and Best Practices for Strategic Interventions
• References
• Index