Social Work in Context

Theory and Concepts

Lester Parrott, Noreen Maguinness, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473969131, 9781473969124
• eBook ISBN: 9781526414878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines key sociological theories that have contributed to the understanding of the nature of social work, its organisation and delivery. It provides key sociological concepts and theories to help student social workers better understand the nature of their work and the social and political context within which they will be working. Taking a practical approach to social work, and focusing on the application of theory, the book also provides insightful discussions to important thinkers such as Douglas, Beck and Furedi, and how their ideas have direct relevance for understanding the risk averse nature of social work.

Chapter 1 Theory, Ideology and Discourse in Social Work

Whenever I pick up a newspaper and read about what is happening in the world and read about a particular event or story the question which comes into my head is ‘Why is this so?’ As soon as this thought comes to the front of my consciousness I would argue I am beginning to theorise. I am trying to understand why a particular event has happened, what might have caused this to happen and how might I make sense of it. When I talk to students about their experiences on their practice placements it is not uncommon for them to relate conversations they have had with some social workers who tell them to forget all that theory they have learnt at university now that they are in the real world. Of course that in itself is a theoretical statement albeit in an attenuated form about the nature of the real world as those social workers perceive it to be. It is not possible to go through life without trying to make sense of the social world that we live in. We need to do this in order to be able to function on a daily basis through understanding the challenges that a constantly changing world presents to us and our fellow human beings.

Social workers who hold to this idea of theoryless practice nonetheless have to construct some kind of conceptual framework whereby they can make sense of the world they inhabit in order to practise social work. The theories that they hold may not be explicit and they may not be formally thought through but they are theories nonetheless albeit constructed on an informal basis. Such informal theory develops from practical experience on a day-to-day basis. Informal theory is an important source of knowledge in social work but it is theory. The problem with social workers telling students to forget theory is that they do not make explicit the use of their own theories. More importantly they do not recognise the importance of making their thinking explicit so that their ideas can be open to challenge and therefore open to be investigated for their coherence and clarity. In so doing we are opening up our ideas about the world to critical scrutiny so that alternative explanations can be explored to see if we can construct more coherent explanations that will help us practise in a more effective manner.

It is not enough for student social workers to be assailed by demands to forget theory from their colleagues but depressingly for me successive government ministers and their functionaries (see Nairey 2014) have also criticised social work education for its apparent commitment to teaching too much theory. As long ago as the 1980s, the criticism by the head of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) Jeffrey Greenwood was that social work education was focused excessively upon teaching anti-racism and anti-oppressive practice (AOP), by the time New Labour assumed power Health Minister Jacqui Smith (2002) was showing her concern:

Social work, like teaching, is a practical job. It is about protecting people and changing lives, not about being able to give a fluent and theoretical explanation of why they got into difficulties in the first place.

More recently former Minister of Education Michael Gove (2013) had this to say about social work training:

Theories of society predominate over an effective understanding of child development, the cognitive damage that accrues through neglect and appropriate thresholds for taking children into care.

In too many cases, social work training involves idealistic students being told that the individuals with whom they will work have been disempowered by society. They will be encouraged to see these individuals as victims of social injustice whose fate is overwhelmingly decreed by the economic forces and inherent inequalities which scar our society.

This analysis is, sadly, as widespread as it is pernicious. It robs individuals of the power of agency and breaks the link between an individual’s actions and the consequences. It risks explaining away substance abuse, domestic violence and personal irresponsibility, rather than doing away with them.

As McLaughlin (2008) argues this criticism of theory that was taught in universities led to governments responding by introducing competence based education in social work which has focused more on assessing social work students through what they do at the expense of integrating this with what they understand. This process of distancing students from what is taught in terms of theory has developed through a number of iterations culminating in the further removal of some elements of social work education from universities and moving it into the workplace (Frontline, 2016). This book is therefore committed to enabling social workers to see the importance of what critics call a focus upon theories of society and to show how these theories are intimately related to practice. Thus the theories presented here have a central role to play in social work practice and it is argued that a practical focus without theory leads to ineffective and dangerous social work. The explicit use of theory enables social workers to think more about the context of the situation they are working with and enables them to plan and structure their work and therefore develop practical solutions with a far greater chance of success. Thinking and doing are inextricably linked, whilst thinking about theory we are practising social work, we are constantly evaluating and reflecting upon our actions. A useful term for this is praxis, a process whereby there is a continual interplay between thought and action which Gadamer encapsulates below.

As we think about what we want to achieve, we alter the way we might achieve that. As we think about the way we might go about something, we change what we might aim at. There is a continual interplay between ends and means. In just the same way there is a continual interplay between thought and action. This process involves interpretation, understanding and application in one unified process. (Gadamer, 1979: 275)

As professional social workers we have to justify our actions on a daily basis. This may be in a court room when presenting evidence in regard to a child protection case, in a multiagency team when we are working with other professionals or in the front room of a service user’s house in justifying a decision we have made in relation to an aspect of their care. In making our decisions and justifying them then we should have good reasons for following a particular course of action. The more we can open up our reasoning to challenge and debate then the more we can justify our actions to others and develop effective practice. Using theory, both informal and formal, which is open to challenge is therefore at the heart of practising social work. When I first qualified as a social worker I made many mistakes, sometimes by being too driven to care before actually thinking about what I should be doing. I would take on too much work to show my more experienced colleagues how well I was coping. This of course led to some poor outcomes for the people I was trying to help. One comment by an experienced worker in my team who had no formal training made me stop and re-evaluate what I was doing she said:

Lester, you must care with your head as well as your heart.

Taking theory seriously, both formally and informally, speaks to the sense of what my colleague said to me and encapsulates all that is valuable in embracing theory in social work.

A theory can therefore be useful for helping us:

• predict what might happen in the future
• understand what caused a specific event
• it might help us decide on which action to take.

Theory helps us to reflect and think critically about social work and the specific practice situations that we face. In doing so it helps us to formulate the right kinds of questions to ask and to not make assumptions about what is being presented to us. One of the many inquiries conducted into child deaths in the UK concerned the death of Victoria Climbie (Laming, 2003). This is what Lord Laming had to say about some aspects of the practice that involved the agencies who came into contact with Victoria:

1.17 In his opening statement to the Inquiry, Neil Garnham QC listed no fewer than 12 key occasions when the relevant services had the opportunity to successfully intervene in the life of Victoria. As evidence to the Inquiry unfolded, several other opportunities emerged. Not one of these required great skill or would have made heavy demands on time to take some form of action. Sometimes it needed nothing more than a manager doing their job by asking pertinent questions or taking the trouble to look in a case file. There can be no excuse for such sloppy and unprofessional performance. (Lamming, 2003: 3)

In a later section of his report he also reflected on issues of race:

16.3 I do not for one moment suggest that the ill-treatment of Victoria by Kouao and Manning was either condoned or deliberately ignored by those responsible for Victoria’s case. However, it may be that assumptions made about Victoria and her situation diverted caring people from noting and acting upon signs of neglect or ill-treatment.

16.4 Examples of such assumptions at work may include the following:

• the social worker [my insertion] said that when she heard of Victoria ‘standing to attention’ before Kouao and Manning she ‘concluded that this type of relationship was one that can be seen in many Afro-Caribbean families’ because respect and obedience are very important features of the Afro-Caribbean family script. Victoria’s parents, however, made it clear that she was not required to stand in this formal way when she was at home with them. Therefore it seems that [my insertion] assumption was unfounded, in Victoria’s case at least.
• Pastor Pascal Orome told me that he attributed Victoria’s potentially concerning behaviour to the fact that she had come ‘freshly’ from Africa. This of course was not the case – Victoria had been in Europe for almost a year by the time she came to his attention.
• On more than one occasion, medical practitioners who noticed marks on Victoria’s body considered the possibility that children who have grown up in Africa may be expected to have more marks on their bodies than those who have been raised in Europe. This assumption, regardless of whether it is valid or not, may prevent a full assessment of those marks being made (Laming, 2003: 346).

A firmer grounding in theory about different cultures would have led to the possibility of asking pertinent questions and not acting upon assumptions without verification. A more considered study of and reflection upon Victoria’s social background would have meant a better outcome for Victoria was possible.

Building Theory

In order to develop explanations about the world that we encounter we build up our theory using concepts. A concept is a symbolic representation of an actual thing such as a house, a blanket,. etc. A concept may not necessarily have a link with an actual object but can relate to an idea such as oppression or freedom. When we think of concepts in this way we can use the term ‘construct’, i.e. a concept that has no physical presence.

Although we may not be able to touch or see oppression as an actual physical object we can certainly measure its consequences. Many people with black skin regularly experience oppression in the form of racism with the consequence that they may, for example, not be able to get the kind of employment they want. A Department for Work and Pensions sponsored study (Wood et al., 2009) sent similar Curricula Vitae (CVs) to the same employer advertising job vacancies. The only difference was in the name of the candidate. A candidate with a recognisable name from an ethnic minority was found to be less likely to be called interview than a candidate with a more anglicised name. The study observed that:

High levels of name-based net discrimination were found in favour of white applicants. This is consistent with the high levels of discrimination found in studies in other countries in recent years. This relates only to the early stage of the recruitment process, and there are limitations with the approach in terms of the occupations and vacancies that it was possible to cover. Nevertheless, candidates were denied access to a range of jobs in a range of sectors across British cities as a result of having a name associated with an ethnic minority background. (Wood et al., 2009: 5)

Theory is therefore developed through the building of concepts or constructs and observing how these concepts relate to one another. So theories of oppression derive from black people’s experiences linking the concept of race with prejudice and discrimination which leads to, for example, lack of access to valued opportunities in society. So here we can see how the development of constructs such as race and discrimination are then linked to the construct of opportunity to develop an explanation for how black people are oppressed in the labour market. When two constructs are linked together like this we can define these as expressing a principle which can lead us to ask questions about the relationship between such constructs to see if there are connections between them which might lead us to investigate any causal links in order to help us to understand the effects of racism. As we investigate these links we begin to develop explanations which can lead us into creating theory. Theory is therefore the way we organise related concepts and principles to enable us to explain, in this case, how racism occurs in our example above, but it also helps us to predict what might happen to black people in general who experience racism.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Theory, Ideology and Discourse in Social Work
• Chapter 2 Hayek, Markets and Social Work
• Chapter 3 Management and Managerialism
• Chapter 4 Risk and Social Work
• Chapter 5 Bourdieu and Social Work
• Chapter 6 New Approaches to Stigma
• Chapter 7 A New Culture of Poverty?
• Chapter 8 Globalisation and Social Work
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index