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1 Social Work: Contemporary Challenges
Throughout the history of modern social work activists have sought to articulate the radical potential of social work. Through their critical interrogations these thinkers have contributed to the evolution and, in some instances, the subversion of social work. Very often, however, social workers experience difficulty in translating an activist commitment to practice, and the gulf between theory and practice has grown wider despite a claim to âpraxisâ in much of the contemporary social work literature. Rather than something that helps social workers understand and develop practice, theory is often experienced as, at worst, authoritarian or esoteric and, at best, an addition to practice rather than something useful to it. The venture I am embarked on in this book is to demonstrate the opportunities recent theoretical developments provide for different ways of thinking about and doing progressive social work. I will use the opportunities these contemporary theories provide for destabilizing the oppositions that have become part of the modern social work landscape, and in so doing my intention is to assist social workers think through the challenges of practising critically in the contemporary contexts of transition.
The focus of this book is an important one at this point in the history of critical social work. As we enter a new millennium, it is timely for critical social workers to reflect on the legacy bestowed via the theoretical and practice impulses that have nurtured the emergence of activist practice approaches in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is also an opportunity to take stock of the momentous contests that now beset social workers committed to progressive social change.
The contemporary climate: post-Fordist abyss or grounds for hope?
The dramatic socio-economic transformations that have occurred internationally over the past two decades provide a very different landscape for social work than when critical practice theories first came to prominence in the 1960s. Massive social and economic upheaval attendant with globalization and the large-scale withdrawal of the welfare state mean that all certainty about basic social service provision is gone and the possibilities for a progressive reorganization of welfare services seem bleak. Indeed activists who have long critiqued state welfare now look on nervously at the dismantling and restructuring of a minimalist welfare state. The language of managerialism, which first entered welfare discourse in the 1970s, has achieved ascendancy (L. Davies, 1990). As terminology such as lean production, re-engineering, purchaser/provider splits, inputs and outputs is now common parlance in the organization of social services, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to claim that the âMcWelfareâ state has arrived! The role of social workers is stripped of complexity as their functions are reduced to a bare minimum and to the management of service usersâ âcasesâ. As Parton (1994b) writing from within the British context observes: âsocial workers reconstituted as care-managers, are required to act as co-ordinators of care packages for individualsâ (p. 99).
Despite resistance to postmodern perspectives amongst many critical social workers, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the challenges levelled through them. Postmodern insights draw activists inexorably towards a recognition of the oppressive effects of the utopian ideals that have guided us. Bauman (1992) asserts that âWe, the residents of the postmodern habitat, live in a territory that admits no clear options and strategies that can even be imagined to be uncontroversially correctâ (p. 185). Postmodernists reject visions of massive social transition as a chimera and demand, instead, greater caution and constraint in the formation of critical practice objectives and processes.
It is easy to be pessimistic as the certainties that once guided activism provide little succour in the face of the challenges before us. Yet, I contend there are some, highly limited, grounds for optimism. As the truth claims and grand plans of critical social work give way under the force of political and theoretical challenges, new directions are emerging. Some of these are admittedly bleak as we stare into the abyss of a post-Fordist welfare state where the social work role is reduced to piecemeal, patch-up work with no hope of a better tomorrow. At the same time, however, the contests posed at the turn of this century can draw activists to a new pragmatism focused on local, contextual and modest proposals for change activity. Despite the activist critique of the esoteric nature and language of poststructuralism, critical elements of this school can invite the re-examination of the practical problems confronting social workers and services users in relation to local issues of power, identity and processes of change, and it is to the exploration of these possibilities that this book is committed.
In this book I will use a two part strategy. In the first part, I will overview the often unspoken but also uncontested assumptions on which critical social work depends and the consequences of these strategies for representing and performing social work practice. The second part of the strategy involves the examination of the possibilities and limitations of critical poststructural theories for thinking differently about power, identity and change in practice. My investigation will incorporate social work practice examples. It is envisaged that the use of these practice examples will increase the relevance of the current theoretical debates to the reworking and diversification of critical practice approaches.
Critical social work
While a critical tradition has been present since the birth of professional social work, it was not until the 1960s that a distinct body of critical practice theories emerged. Since that time, critical authors have persistently challenged the occupational self-image of social work as a caring profession by emphasizing the complicity of social workers in the reproduction of the oppressive conditions within the practice context and beyond it (Rojek et al., 1988; see also Sarri and Sarri, 1992). According to many activists, traditional social work assumes individual culpability for the difficult personal and social circumstances faced by clients of the welfare state. By contrast, critical social workers claim to redirect practice towards the elimination of the original structural causes of problems faced by service users.
Despite the diversity of critical social work, virtually all of these practice models draw on the critical intellectual traditions and radical social movements that gained prominence during the late 1960s and the 1970s. A variety of critical influences have contributed to powerful critiques of social work and, in some instances, to the development of alternative modes of social work (Fook, 1993; Rojek et al., 1988). There is a broad range of models that can be identified as critical, these include: anti-racist and multicultural social work, anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory social work, feminist social work, various strands of community work, Marxist social work, radical social work, structural social work, and participatory and action forms of research. Notwithstanding the significant differences and, in some instances, antagonisms between these models, critical social work approaches share an orientation towards radical social transformation.
In this book, I will use the term âcritical social workâ or âactivist social workâ to refer to practice models that incorporate an emancipatory social change orientation. Critical social work approaches emphasize:
- a commitment to standing alongside oppressed and impoverished populations (Leonard, 1994, p. 17);
- the importance of dialogic relations between workers and service users;
- the role of social, economic and political systems in shaping individual experiences and social relationships, including interactions within the practice context (Leonard, 1995, pp. 10â15);
- a commitment to the âstudy of change, the move toward changeâ and the provocation of change (Fine, 1992, p. 220). Critical practice is orientated towards the transformation of processes and structures that perpetuate domination and exploitation (Leonard, 1994, p. 17).
Marginalizing dissent in critical social work
My purpose in this book is to contribute to the reworking and diversification of critical social work understandings and practices. In order to achieve this aim, it is necessary to dismantle some of the orthodoxies that have developed about what critical social work âisâ. This is a difficult task, not only because of the complexities of progressive social work in contemporary society, but also because of the often unspoken and yet unquestionable status of many of the central truth claims of critical social work. It is astounding that while activist social workers are scathing of orthodox social work and profoundly self-critical about their own relations to the consumers of social services, there remains an âamazing confidenceâ in the emancipatory potential of critical practice models (Rojek et al., 1988, p. 55).
Some of the difficulty in mounting a critique from within activist social work arises from the representations of activist practice as inherently different from and, indeed, opposed to orthodox social work. Frequently, these oppositional representations quell dissent about critical social work by contributing to the view that those âwho are critical of radical positions must, by that fact, be for traditional forms of theory and practiceâ (Rojek et al., 1988, p. 2). Even the difficulties experienced by social workers in bringing an emancipatory orientation to bear in their work fail to lead to critical re-evaluation of the central claims of activist practice approaches. It is as though these practices are innocent of marginalization and silencing of any kind. Instead, the dissonance between critical visions and the practices of social work is attributed to a range of reasons other than the limitations of the discourses themselves. The lack of translation of radical ideas to critical practice is attributed to a variety of reasons, including: the social control function of social workers; the limited commitment to radical change amongst social workers; the lack of political sophistication of social workers (see Ife, 1997, p. 169); and, even, the limited change aspirations of the consumers of social services (see Dixon, 1989; Mowbray, 1992).
In rethinking critical social work, I begin with the proposition that critical social work, as it is currently constituted, marginalizes dimensions of activist social work. While the critical models on which activists draw allow insights that are important to social workers, they often leave little space in which to voice the contradictions, uncertainties, contextual variability within activist practice contexts and the specific demands associated with social work practice, particularly in conventional settings. The silencing of the local features of practice is not an oversight but, rather, it is intrinsic to the ways in which critical social work has represented social work practice and practice processes.
First, despite a claim to praxis, activists are often highly prescriptive about what counts as critical practice. For example, critical practices are described as âanti-authoritarianâ and âoppositionalâ (see Ife, 1997, pp. 74â5, p. 184). Very often these definitions carry with them implicit assumptions about where social workers will practice. This insensitivity to diverse practice contexts contributes to representations of activism that privilege certain kinds of practice sites, such as small community based settings, over other contexts, particularly the multidisciplinary (and multi-ideological) bureaucratic and privatized settings where most contemporary social work practices are performed. Moreover, these definitions contribute to modes of activism in which the typical demands and expectations of social work practice are ignored, if not seen as impediments to change practice. All too often, critical theories seem to avoid the urgent questions of how to bring an activist orientation to bear in settings where the overt use of worker power and authority is not only unavoidable but, in fact, central to the work that social workers do. Even the use of power mandated through critical practice theories, such as the exercise of power required to initiate consciousness raising, collective processes, the sharing of skills and the dispersion of power itself, is underplayed, if acknowledged at all, in critical social work authorsâ reflections on practice (Healy and Mulholland, 1998).
Second, the representations of workers and service users as opposites can obscure the other ways workers and service users relate to each other in practice. The caricature of the privileged social worker and the disadvantaged client leads to gross overgeneralizations about power, identity and change processes in social work practices. In activist discussions of practice, social workers are represented as replicas of other forms of professional practice, such as medicine, law and education, with little regard for the diversity of social work practices, the professionâs ambivalent relation to positivist human sciences and its gender composition, features that differentiate it from many other contemporary human service disciplines.
Third, the fixed definitions of social change devalues the change activity in which social workers are typically engaged. Critical traditions foreground social super-structures in analysis and action. The dualistic construction of the structural and local spheres leads logically to the conclusion that the local practices of social work are limited if not counterproductive for radical social change (see Dixon, 1989; Mowbray, 1992). Quite simply, radical analyses can overlook the emancipatory potential in everyday social work practices by establishing standards that devalue much of the change activity in which social workers are involved. At the same time, the emancipatory potential of other practice contexts is exaggerated because of a failure to acknowledge the extent to which the historical context of social services impacts on the kinds of practice processes that are possible (Larbalestier, 1998).
Critical poststructural theories can make an important intervention in terms of highlighting and destabilizing the orthodoxies that have become unquestioned features of modern critical practice discourses. In its emphasis on the local and the contextual, critical poststructural theory can begin the reworking of critical practice theories by destabilizing the opposition between social totality, where the causes and solutions to social problems are assumed to be, and the localities where social work actually occurs. This destabilizing work can help social workers to extend and diversify what counts as social change and hence what qualifies as critical social work practices.
A poststructural turn in critical social work
In analysing the relevance of contemporary âpostâ theory to social work I refer to critical poststructural theories, particularly the work of Foucault and the radical poststructural feminists, rather than other aspects of postmodernism. The reason for this orientation is that the work of these poststructural authors provides useful tools for destabilizing and reworking the social work theories, whilst retaining an orientation towards progressive political practices. Although the terms âpostmodernismâ and âpoststructuralismâ are often used interchangeably, there are differences between them. Here I will overview these similarities and the differences as a way of alerting the reader to the orientation taken in this book.
One of the difficulties in differentiating between postmodernism and poststructuralism is that many of the authors associated with these bodies of thought contest their inclusion in them. The diversity of ideas amongst thinkers so named leads Foucault (1988b) to remark: âI do not understand what kind of problem is common to people we call postmodern and poststructuralâ (p. 34). Nonetheless, there are some common themes that delineate postmodern ideas from those associated with poststructuralism.
Both schools contest the grand narratives of modernity, particularly the attempts to explain and transform the social whole. However, the basis of the critique differs between the schools. On the one hand, postmodernists are disillusioned with modernity. Lyotard (1984) contrasts the Enlightenment claims to human betterment with the violence and oppressions that have occurred in the name of progress. Moreover, postmodern authors contend that the contemporary conditions of constant change and upheaval exceed the capacity of the grand theories of modernity to understand or direct action (Bauman, 1992). Postmodern theories are founded on the claim that the contemporary conditions of transformation are so fundamental that the new conditions must be named and new cultural forms developed in order to understand and engage with these uncertain times (Kenway, 1992, p. 121).
By contrast, poststructural theory challenges the failure of contemporary social and political discourses to come to terms with the constitutive power of language. Poststructuralists are particularly critical of the humanist aspects of Enlightenment thought, which are based on assumptions about the coherence of individual identity and which place humans centre stage in determining the course of hi...
