Reclaiming Social Work

Challenging Neo-liberalism and Promoting Social Justice

Iain Ferguson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412906937, 9781412906920
• eBook ISBN: 9781446235188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Reclaiming Social Work is a thought-provoking and innovative book which examines how social work?s commitment to social justice has been deepened and enriched by its contact with wider social movements. It explores the tensions between social work values and a market-driven agenda, and locates new resources of hope for the social work profession in the developing resistance to managerialism.

The book:

" discusses pertinent social work issues such as inequality and risk, the voluntary sector, and service-user involvement

" examines values such as democracy, solidarity, accountability, participation, justice, equality, liberty and diversity

" is written in an accessible style, drawing on diverse examples to illustrate theoretical concepts.

Reclaiming Social Work is an accessible yet challenging book and will be essential reading for all social work students and practitioners wanting to think outside the boundaries of their profession. The book will be particularly helpful to students taking courses in anti-oppressive practice, social work values, social work theories and concepts, and international social work.

Iain Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Stirling. Previous publications include Rethinking Welfare: A Critical Perspective (SAGE, 2002, co-authored with Michael Lavalette and Gerry Mooney); Globalisation, Global Justice and Social Work (Routledge, 2004, co-edited with Michael Lavalette and Elizabeth Whitmore); and International Social Work and the Radical Tradition (Venture Press, 2007, co-edited with Michael Lavalette).

1

A Profession Worth Fighting For?

Introduction: After Social Work?

Throughout much of the world, the 1980s were tough years for those involved in fighting for social justice and social change. The 1960s and early 1970s had seen the emergence in many countries of powerful new social movements, against war in Vietnam and for the liberation of women, gays and black people, coupled with a resurgent trade union movement in Britain, France and elsewhere. The rise of these movements had led many to believe that real social and political change was on the global agenda (Harman, 1988; Kurlansky, 2004). In contrast, the 1980s saw the old ruling order re-establish itself in Britain, the USA and elsewhere, through the vehicle of a new, aggressive neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2005). There was, of course, still resistance, both internationally and in Britain. Whether it was workers in Poland fighting to establish Solidarnosc – the biggest trade union in the world – in the early 1980s, the campaign against Margaret Thatcher’s hated poll tax at the end of the decade, or the magnificent, and ultimately successful, struggle of trade unionists and activists in South Africa to overthrow the brutal apartheid regime, people continued to fight for change. Yet in the main, the social and political struggles of these years were often bitter and defensive attempts to hang on to some of the gains made during earlier periods, whether in the form of trade union rights or a woman’s right to control her own body.

More than any other health or welfare profession, social work suffered from the shift in the political climate during these years. In the 1970s, social workers in Britain and elsewhere had begun to break from the narrow, individualised and often pathologising focus which had characterised much social work practice till then. The 1980s, in contrast, was a period of retreat. As the decade progressed, a combination of factors which included the rise of mass unemployment, a financial squeeze on social work spending and a hostile government and media intent on portraying social work as a ‘failing profession’ combined to reduce the scope for progressive practice (Clarke, 1993). Again there was resistance, and even some progress in social work education in the areas of anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice (albeit of an increasingly ‘top-down’ nature and within a narrow context of regulation and control – Penketh, 2000; Langan, 2002). The growth of managerialism (or New Public Management), however, from the late 1980s onwards, underpinning the extension of market forces into social work, further squeezed the potential of social work to act as a force for social change and added to a sense of alienation amongst many front-line workers (Clarke and Newman, 1997; McDonald, 2006).

Given this climate, it is hardly surprising that a mood of despondency and pessimism should occasionally have affected some of those who earlier had been in the forefront of the development of more radical social work approaches. Jones and Novak, for example, writing in the British Journal of Social Work in 1993, suggested that

It would appear that until the political climate changes and there is a widespread revulsion against current trends and inequalities, social work might continue as an occupation but perish as a caring and liberal profession. (Jones and Novak, 1993: 211)

Further into the 1990s, Clarke, in a paper entitled ‘After Social Work?’ reflected on the ways in which managerialism and marketisation were fragmenting both social work organisations and the social work task, and posed the questions:

How can one struggle over what a ‘client-centered’ social work would look like when the client has been abolished and replaced by ‘a customer’? How can commitments to ‘anti-discriminatory practice’ be articulated within a managerial agenda which is dominated by the quest for efficiency? The old points of leverage have been marginalised, to be replaced by corporate visions, competition and confusion. That multi-faceted dislocation matters both for those who practise social work and those who receive it. For both, the future looks bleaker after social work. (Clarke, 1996: 60)

Clarke’s paper was extremely prescient. The intensification of managerialism under New Labour governments since 1997 has indeed meant that many social workers in the UK do now work in organisations with managers who have no background or training in social work. In the interests of ‘joint working’ and ‘integrated services’, social work departments have often been merged with other local authority departments, such as housing, and in some cases have been closed down altogether, with staff relocated into departments of education or health. The growth of the social care sector and the increasing individualisation of services is contributing to the process of de-professionalisation, both within the voluntary sector (or Third Sector, as it is now usually referred to) and within local authorities. Others, meantime, are relocated into call centres owned by private multinational companies like BT.

Yet despite these changes, and despite a profound ambivalence and distrust towards social workers on the part of New Labour which has led to their exclusion from key welfare programmes (Jordan with Jordan, 2000), the profession has not disappeared, either in Britain or elsewhere. On the contrary, on a global scale, as Lorenz has noted:

Social work is very much in demand, enjoys a boom, represents a growth industry even in countries that ideologically would rather do without it. (Lorenz, 2005a: 97)

In part, this expansion is itself a reflection of these same political and economic processes discussed above – national, European and global – which are aimed at creating greater integration of markets and increased government regulation of professional education and practice (Penna, 2004). In the UK, for example, an expansion of social work education has resulted in part from the Bologna process of harmonising European social work education, which means that social work in the UK is now a graduate profession (Lorenz, 2005b). In addition, the development of new forms of governance under New Labour has given rise to a raft of new social work bodies, including the Social Care Councils, the Commissions on Social Care, the Social Care Institute for Excellence and its Scottish equivalent. In Scotland, Changing Lives, the Report of a major enquiry into social work commissioned by the Scottish Executive, is likely to give rise to major legislative changes, creating a new framework for the profession for the coming period (Scottish Executive, 2006a). Meanwhile, as noted by Lorenz, on a global scale it does appear that social work in one form or other is seen by governments as having a role to play within advanced market societies. The fact that social work schools are springing up rapidly in the newly marketised societies of Eastern Europe, and also China, suggests that the governments of these countries see a use for professional social work in situations of growing social and economic inequality and dislocation (Yip, 2007). It seems likely, then, that social work will survive, though the fact that it will often do so in a truncated and sometimes punitive form means that in itself, this is hardly a cause for celebration.

More importantly, however, in terms of the form in which social work survives, there has been a second development in the years since these articles were written which gives grounds for genuine hope, since in important respects it represents the beginnings of the ‘widespread revulsion against current trends and inequalities’ which Jones and Novak saw as the basis for social work’s re-emergence as a liberal, humane profession. The late 1990s saw the emergence of a powerful reaction against the neo-liberal version of globalisation which had become the common sense of most governments, both conservative and social-democratic, during that decade. For much of the past two decades, as the radical journalist George Monbiot observed, the great advantage of the neo-liberals had been that they had only one idea: that society should subordinate all other concerns to the interests of big business (Monbiot, 2001: 5). It was that idea above all, however, that came under attack at the end of the decade. The turning-point in the development of opposition to neo-liberalism, the ‘fork in the road’ as the American anti-corporate campaigner Ralph Nader described it, came in the city of Seattle in November, 1999. There, 40,000 demonstrators, drawn from a very wide variety of constituencies, brought the proceedings of the World Trade Organisation to a halt and, in doing so, initiated a global movement which has since challenged neo-liberal governments and neo-liberal policies on every continent (Charlton, 2000; Danaher, 2001). Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winner and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and a critic of the dominant version of globalisation, has explained the significance of this new movement:

Until the protestors came along, there was little hope for change and no outlet for complaints. Some of the protestors went to excesses; some of the protestors were arguing for higher protectionist barriers against the developing countries which would have made their plight even worse. But despite these problems, it is the trade unionists, students, environmentalists – ordinary citizens – who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world. (Stiglitz, 2002: 9)

In the years which followed Seattle, this anti-capitalist movement (or global justice movement, as it is sometimes called) has grown and developed in four different, though connected, ways. First, there have been the demonstrations. Since 1999, each time the world’s business and government elites, notably the World Trade Organisation and the G8 group of world leaders, have met to discuss ways in which the liberalisation agenda can be taken a stage further, their deliberations have taken place against the background of large mobilisations by angry protestors, drawn overwhelmingly from the country in which they are meeting (Callinicos, 2003). More than 300,000 protestors, for example, gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland in July 2005 to demand that the G8 leaders meeting in nearby Gleneagles ‘make poverty history’ (Hubbard and Miller, 2005).

Second, the movement has developed its own structures and discussion points in the form of the World Social Forum and Regional Social Forums, where the experiences of opposition to the free-market policies of the G8 and WTO can be shared and alternative policies proposed and debated. Since 2001 such gatherings, typically involving tens of thousands of participants, have regularly taken place in cities across the globe including Porto Alegre, Cairo, Mumbai, Florence, Paris and London (George, 2004).

Third, the influence of this movement, coupled with people’s direct experience of neo-liberal policies, has fuelled mass movements against privatisation in many different countries and contributed directly and indirectly to political change. This is most obviously the case in Latin America, where struggles against the privatisation of basic utilities such as water and electricity have given rise to huge popular movements in countries like Colombia and Ecuador and elsewhere, as in Venezuela and Bolivia, that have led to the election of new radical governments (Ali, 2006). Meanwhile in Europe, opposition to the neo-liberal agenda has led to the creation of new political parties which, in several countries including Italy, Portugal, Britain and Germany, have gained parliamentary representation.

Finally, since 2003, the movement has been central to the development of an even bigger global social movement in opposition to the devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as the ongoing occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state). Following the events of 9/11 in New York in 2001, there was a widespread assumption, voiced by the New York Times, that the global justice movement would wither away, unable to withstand the patriotic fervour engendered by George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’. Instead, the movement rapidly developed in an anti-war direction, with many people easily making the connection between the economic policies of the world’s most powerful states and corporations and their military policies, summed up in the popular slogan ‘No blood for oil’. The result has been the biggest anti-war movement the world has ever seen, with 10 million people marching globally on 15 February 2003, including 2 million people on the streets of London (Murray and German, 2005). One indication of the extent to which this movement has shaped popular consciousness is the fact that the term ‘imperialism’, long associated with some of the more esoteric sects on the far left, has once again become a term of common use in describing the behaviour of the major powers. As one prominent critic of the wars of recent years has noted:

I used not to use the word imperialism. I thought young people wouldn’t even know what it meant. Then Robert Cooper [formerly foreign policy adviser to Blair] writes a pamphlet in which he openly calls for what he describes as a new imperialism. Suddenly I find that everyone is using the words imperialism and anti-imperialism and I think that is a jolly good thing. If something looks like a duck and walks like a duck, the chances are it is a duck. That’s exactly what we’ve got going now – a new imperialism. All sides are using its real name. (Galloway, 2003: 117)

Challenging Neo-liberal Social Work

What might be the significance of this global movement, and this shift in popular consciousness, for those seeking to recreate a social work profession rooted in notions of social justice? First, without understating the extent to which neo-liberal ideas and policies continue to dominate the political landscape in Britain and in many other countries, the movement has been successful in challenging the notion that neo-liberal globalisation is the only show in town. One indication of the shift in ideas that has taken place is that some of those who, less than a decade ago, were arguing that social democratic governments need not concern themselves overmuch with issues of inequality are now to be found arguing for a ‘new egalitarianism’ (Giddens and Diamond, 2005).

Second, as Thompson has argued (Thompson, 2002), social work in the past has been profoundly affected by its contact with social movements and the shifts in popular thinking which such movements bring about. This is most obviously true of Britain, Canada and Australia in the 1970s. In important respects, radical social work was a product of the great social movements of these years, notably the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement and the struggles of trade unionists. On a smaller scale, in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘new social welfare movements’ such as the disability movement and the mental health users’ movement have similarly exerted an influence on professional social work, reflected in the widespread acceptance of social models of disability and health. However, as I shall argue in Chapter 6, the links between social work and social movements go back much earlier than the 1970s and are not confined to the countries mentioned above. The ways in which the social movements of the twenty-first century – notably the anti-capitalist or global justice movement on the one hand and the anti-war movement on the other – can inform the development of a new, radical practice will be considered in Chapter 8.

Third, this wider dissatisfaction with neo-liberalism finds a strong echo from within a social work profession whose knowledge base, skills and values have been distorted and undermined by the imposition since the early 1990s of a pro-business ideology, sometimes referred to as New Public Management (NPM). McDonald identifies some of the key elements of NPM as being:

a shift of focus by public sector leaders from policy to management; an emphasis on quantifiable performance measurements and appraisal, the break-up of traditional bureaucratic structures into quasi-autonomous units dealing with one another on a user-pays basis, market testing and competitive tendering instead of in-house provision, strong emphasis on cost-cutting, output targets rather than input controls, limited-term contracts for state employees instead of career tenure, monetized incentives rather than fixed salaries ‘freedom to manage’ instead of personnel control, more use of public relations and advertising and encouragement of self regulation instead of legislation. (McDonald, 2006: 69)

One of the main effects of these changes has been to hugely reduce the possibilities for social workers to undertake direct work with service users. The desire to ‘work with people’, alongside the aspiration to ‘make a difference’ have historically been amongst the main reasons for people coming into social work. Yet as Changing Lives, the Report of the 21st Century Social Work Review in Scotland published in 2006, makes clear it is precisely these aspects of the job that have been undermined by the changes described above:

Working to achieve change is at the heart of what social workers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A profession worth fighting for?
• 2 Neo-liberal Britain
• 3 New Labour, new social work
• 4 The market and social care
• 5 Consumerism, personalisation and social welfare movements
• 6 The radical tradition
• 7 Critical social work: issues and debates
• 8 Challenging the consensus
• References
• Index