Welfare Words

Critical Social Work & Social Policy

Paul Michael Garrett, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473968974, 9781473968967
• eBook ISBN: 9781526418630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

'Systematically exposes the neoliberal myths in unequal societies' - Niels Rosendal Jensen
?A call to arms to challenge inequality and social exclusion.? - Lel Meleyal
'An impassioned dissection of the highly coded lexicon of so-called welfare reform…get reading, get angry, get ready'. - Gargi Bhattacharyya

Welfare Words analyses the keywords and phrases commonly used by policy-makers, news-outlets and wider society, when referring to social policy, welfare reform and social work in the present-day culture of neoliberal capitalism. Examining how power relations operate through language and culture, it encourages readers to question how welfare words fit within a wider economic and cultural context riven with gross social inequalities; to disrupt taken-for-granted meanings within mainstream social work and social policy, and to think more deeply, critically and politically about the incessant usage of specific words and phrases. Written by an authoritative voice in the field, Paul Michael Garrett makes sense of complex theories which codify everyday experience, giving readers vital tools to better understand and change their social worlds.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Introduction

In late 2016, the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE) issued a memo advising nursing staff to remove ‘trespassing’ patients who refused to surrender their beds from overcrowded and crisis-ridden hospitals (Cullen, 2016). The movement from ‘patient’ to ‘trespasser’ provided an example of not only a discursive shift, in that HSE legal advisors stated that nurses could deploy ‘minimum force’ in such instances to remove a ‘trespasser’ refusing to leave a bed once deemed clinically well enough to do so. The nursing unions refused to comply with this new protocol, there was public consternation and the senior managers were compelled to apologise for the controversial memo.

The incident highlights the significance of the use of words within social and health care and the differing practices that they often seek to trigger, promote and embed. This book will specifically examine what I am choosing to call ‘welfare words’. Stretching beyond issues simply relating to income maintenance, these are ‘welfare dependency’, ‘underclass’, ‘social exclusion’, ‘early intervention’, ‘resilience’, ‘care’ and ‘adoption’¹. This project is partly rooted in a course I have taught for a number of years and my perspective has been enhanced by having the opportunity to engage with students located in social work, sociology, social policy and politics. Some of the words to be explored are also commonplace on a range of other courses, including those concerned with criminal justice, urban policy, education, health and health promotion etc. As well as the general reader, I hope Welfare Words might also attract final year undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of other spheres and disciplines. In this context, I include a short ‘Further Reading’ section at the culmination of the first nine chapters. Influenced by my conversation-driven pedagogy, I also insert a series of ‘Reflection and Talk Boxes’ which, across nine chapters, have twenty questions. The aim of this device (which can be skipped if it is not to the taste of particular readers) is to stimulate critical conversations and debates on key facets of the preceding chapter in class and, for some readers, in fieldwork or workplace settings.

Welfare Words will articulate and discuss how the specific words and phrases analysed may fit within the wider economic and cultural patterning so riven with gross social inequalities and complex forms of social marginality. Thinking more deeply, critically and politically about the incessant deployment of particular words within prevailing discourses and daily social work encounters may also lead to questioning what such words ‘assume about a social totality or infrastructure, or the presumed characteristics of social actors’ (Barrett, 1992: 202). Far from being an exercise in ‘political correctness’, the aspiration will be to delve deeper into how power relations operate through the language and culture of neoliberal capitalism (Philpot, 1999; Fairclough, 2003).

Welfare Words, Critical Social Work and Social Policy

Words change meaning over time and are never encountered in isolation. Our engagement with words invariably occurs ‘within the flows of our socio-cultural practices’ with meaning ‘at least in part tied to the social world we inhabit’ (Grimwood, 2016: 15). Yet, as Noel Timms, a psychiatric social worker and author, observed in the late 1960s, it is ‘surprising’ that his profession, ‘largely dependent on language, should have paid so little attention to words and what it means to speak a language’ (in Gregory and Holloway, 2005: 38). The usage of words shapes the way the profession communicates to itself, how it coalesces, marks out and sustains a distinctive rationality. Through language, social work is able to construct and maintain the domain with words serving as the ‘glue’ helping it to stick into place. For example, keywords (such as ‘assessment’, ‘risk’ and ‘supervision’) are integral to the training of social workers who learn to think within the conceptual parameters of the profession and to talk the talk (see also Wilson, 2016). This mimetic dimension – learning the right language, perceptions and dispositions – contributes to producing a certain social work identity and style (Chiapello and Fairclough, 2002). This is part of the process Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) refers to as attaining the ‘feel for the game’. The game is acquired through experience and the ‘good player, who is so to speak the game incarnate, does at every moment what the game requires’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 63). This ‘feel’ is partly inculcated through prevailing names and descriptions helping to constitute the dominant forms of reasoning which become, in time, ‘turned into second nature’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 65).

This can also be connected to the ways in which people engaging with social workers are classified. Bowker and Star (1999: 10) maintain that a ‘classification system’ is a ‘set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work – bureaucratic or knowledge production’. Such systems have, of course, been central to social work since its inception (Woodroofe, 1962). In the past, this was reflected in the naming practices and types of descriptive language used in depicting and ‘fixing’ a person in a ‘case’ file (Foucault, 1991 [1977]). In more recent times, this form of activity is more likely to be undertaken using electronic templates (Garrett, 2005).

For social work to be operational, some forms of categorisation are inevitable if the day-to-day work is to be rendered doable. Yet the verbal categories that social workers use can promote ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 2000; see also Chapter 2). ‘Labels’, as Schram (1995: 23) avows, ‘operate as sources of power that serve to frame identities and interests. They predispose actors to treat the subjects in question in certain ways.’ For example, the words ‘client’ or ‘service user’ are apt to connote and convey vague, even suppressed, notions of inferior, tainted or spoiled personhood. Moreover, there may be instances when categories and classifications used by practitioners – often situated within a matrix of ideas associated with particular forms of ostensibly ‘scientific’ and neutral ‘expertise’ – can result in oppressive ramifications for those targeted for intervention (Mayes and Horwitz, 2005). An example of how this process can occur is reflected in historical responses to ‘unmarried mothers’ in Ireland and elsewhere (Garrett, 2015a, 2017). Experts, often straddling the boundaries between the applied social sciences and clerical or pastoral guidance, performed vital ‘definitional labour’ (Goffman, 1971 [1959]) and charted what was deemed to be the most appropriate forms of intervention. Felix Biestek (1957: 25), an American Jesuit and one of the primary definers of what constituted the philosophical foundation for social work, observed that caseworkers ‘have differed in their evaluation of the capacity of “unmarried mothers”, as a group, to make sound decisions. Some feel that unmarried mothers are so damaged emotionally that they are incapable of arriving at a good decision themselves’ (see also Shahid and Jha, 2014).

Language is not simply the means by which the social work task is ‘described and constructed in different ways at different historical junctures’, it is also the ‘cornerstone of intervention, the lifeline through which all communication between individuals engaged in the process takes place’ (Gregory and Holloway, 2005: 49). Given the increasing privatisation of social work services, practitioners’ communication skills and ability to use the appropriate language is also a commodity and source of potential profit for businesses (Garrett, 2010).

Gregory and Holloway (2005) chart the history of social work in England and identify how the profession has evolved discursively. For example, in the early 1950s the terminology used to describe the subjects of intervention included ‘poor’, ‘needy’,’ imbecile’, ‘problem family’ and ‘crippled family’ (Gregory and Holloway, 2005: 42). As the decade moved on, however, the emphasis on a more clinical orientation and the influence of psychodynamic approaches gave rise to shifting characterizations such as the ‘person’, the ‘client’ (Gregory and Holloway, 2005: 42). Somewhat surprisingly, military metaphors – such as officers and duty – have continued to symbolically represent aspects of social workers’ day-to-day engagement with the users of services (Beckett, 2003; see also Newberry-Koroluk, 2014). Chris Beckett (2003) proposes that the ‘spoken language’ of social work is a combination flowing from the dynamic interplay of three identifiable types: the ‘sacred language’ (reflected in the aspirational language embedded in the profession’s codes of ethics and so on); the ‘official language’ (revealed in the language of the bureaucracy); the ‘colloquial’ language (used by practitioners in the everyday, more informal interactions with one another).

Within mainstream professional exchanges, ‘social worker’ and ‘client’/‘service user’ are usually perceived as fixed and discrete categories despite the fact that during a singular lifetime an individual may find themselves passing from one to the other or simultaneously inhabiting both categories. More generally, how the users of services are identified has been a continuing source of debate (Tropp, 1974; Heffernan, 2006; McLaughlin, 2009). Indeed, within social work there is sometimes a ‘certain naiveté about the extent to which changing the names of things (using anti-oppressive language for example) can change the world itself’ (Beckett, 2003: 627). Nevertheless, critical thinking and engagement remains ‘incomplete without a significant element of language critique’ because ‘discourse, and in particular language’ appears to carry considerable ‘weight in the constitution and reproduction of the emergent form of global capitalism’ (Fairclough and Graham, 2002: 187). Moreover, given we ‘socially inherit linguistic use, our “unthinking” engagement in language can often appear to accept uncritically its ideological meanings’ (Holborow, 2015: 4).

Mindful as to how language is one of the key mediums through which ideology is generated and potentially transformed, Stuart Hall (1996: 27) stresses that it is important to analyse the ‘concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilise a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation’. For example, in terms of workplaces, there have been sustained cultural and discursive interventions aimed at cajoling and coercing workers into altering their values and remaking their identities in ways more conducive to the market. This development has been particularly apparent within public services, such as state social work. Central to the ideological project of neoliberalism, in fact, are strategies to inculcate ‘employees into new ways of working and new identities corresponding to them, partly through attempts to get them to not only use but “own” new discourses’ (Fairclough, 2003: 20). Such discourses are apt to focus on, and promote a certain idea as to how – to use one of Raymond Williams’ own keywords – a ‘modern’ service should be assembled and what core competencies and attributes compliant staff should possess and exhibit (see also Williams, 1983: 208; Garrett, 2008).

Welfare Words and Keywords

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams (1921–1988) is one of the main inspirations for this book. Initially published in 1976, Williams’ ‘slim, strangely addictive’ volume included 110 ‘micro essays’ on words that he perceived as significant in the mid-1970s and into the following decade (Beckett, 2014: 19). These included, for example, charity, communication, community, consumer, family, modern, society, technology, unemployment, welfare and work. These represented, for him, ‘binding’ words, ‘significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought’ (Williams, 1983: 15). Hence, they functioned, singularly and collectively, as the ‘linguistic-ideological hubs of his time’ (Holborow, 2015: 71; see also Fritsch et al., 2016a). The book was subsequently republished, during the period of the Thatcher governments (1979–1990), with an additional 21 words being added in 1983 (Williams, 1983). In 2014, a third edition was published coinciding with the Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

The underlying orientation in Williams’ Keywords is one maintaining that there is a need to analyse keywords in the social conditions in which they arise, circulate and are then apt to alter or have their meaning culturally and politically re-calibrated. Thus, Williams tended to place ‘special emphasis on adversarial uses, as in the repeated phrase “there is then both controversy and complexity in the term”’ (Durant, 2006: 12). In his perspective, words can be viewed as ‘artillery to be purposefully aimed’ (Durant, 2006: 12; see also McGuigan and Moran, 2014). Marie Moran (2015: 4), in her fascinating exploration of one particular keyword – identity – defines a keyword as ‘not merely an important or fashionable word, but a key element of a wider social transformation, capturing, embodying and expressing new, historically and socially specific ways of thinking and acting’. Hence, to understand their meaningfulness and social weight, keywords cannot be ‘separated from the cultural political economy of the capitalist societies in which they came to prominence’ (Moran, 2015: 4). For example, terms such as welfare and welfare state are ‘involved in drawing and redrawing the boundaries of state intervention’ (Béland and Petersen, 2014: 3). These, and other words and phrases we will examine, change over time ‘as newer terms replace or supplement older ones’ (Béland and Petersen, 2014: 3).

This focus on keywords is ‘traceable back to late nineteenth-century semantics’ (Durant, 2006: 5), but Williams injected a quizzical leftist approach into his own project (see also Williams, 1973; Eagleton, 1976; Ferrara, 1989; Hall, 1989). As a Marxist, he also voiced ‘reservations about semantic and lexicographical work as a force for change’ (Durant, 2006: 16–17). Whilst Williams’ work was foundational to the field of ‘cultural studies’, he remained a cultural materialist in that he believed meaningful social and economic change could never be prompted by words alone. This position anticipates, in some sense, later comments by Bourdieu (2000: 2), who chides those placing ‘excessive confidence in the power of language’. For the French sociologist, this was a ‘typical illusion’ of many contemporary academics who regarded an ‘academic commentary as a political act or the critique of texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 2).

Williams acknowledged, however, the power of ideas and culture in consolidating, or rendering more vulnerable to change, a given social order. Expressed somewhat differently, it would be wrong to reduce issues relating to social change to either materialist accounts laying emphasis on structures and the brute forces of history or to entirely idealist explanations stressing the determining importance of ideas, agency and intentions.

‘Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes’: Keywords Now

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

(Turn and face the strange)

Ch-ch-changes

(David Bowie, 1971)

David Bowie’s single ‘Changes’, along with the first edition of Williams’ book, appeared in the 1970s. Since then, the economic, political and cultural context has been radically transformed. In 1976, when Keywords was initially published, Abba enjoyed weeks at the ‘top of the charts’ with their shimmering pop classic ‘Dancing Queen’. However, a note of cultural discord was struck, in October of that year, when The Damned released what is often regarded as the first ‘punk rock’ single, ‘New Rose’. In December, The Sex Pistols infamously scattered swearwords on Bill Grundy’s live television programme and in doing so drew further attention to their new single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, released the previous week. In 1976 Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by James Callaghan. For the first half of the year a ‘Cod War’, involving British and Icelandic ships, took place. During the summer, the country experienced a heat wave which contributed to the worst drought since the early eighteenth century. Following an upsurge in violence, ‘direct rule’ was imposed on Northern Ireland in March. The year ended with the Chancellor, Denis Healey, announcing he had negotiated a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on condition that billions of pounds were cut from the public expenditure budget (Beckett, 2009).

In geopolitical terms, since the 1970s, the implosion of the USSR and the liquidation of degenerated workers’ states in other parts of the ‘Eastern Bloc’ have contributed to the global solidification of capitalism (Becker, 2016). In China, beginning in the late 1990s, sectors associated with safeguarding the ‘quality of life of the common people – housing, health, education – became increasingly marketized’ (Ngai, 2016: 14). In the West, and elsewhere, there have been substantial sociological transformations connected to changing ideas and practices relating to the family, gender roles, sexualities and ethnicities (Lawler, 2014; Moran, 2015). The Apple Corporation was only founded in 1976 with Microsoft having been established the previous year. Since this time there has been a rapid expansion in information and communication technology (ICT) with the internet and various forms of social media becoming pervasively influential (see also ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Conceptual Lens
• Chapter 3 Welfare Dependency
• Chapter 4 Underclass
• Chapter 5 Social Exclusion
• Chapter 6 Early Intervention
• Chapter 7 Resilience
• Chapter 8 Care
• Chapter 9 Adoption
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• References
• Index