[This blog is a concluding part of previous blogs published in April (sorry for this omission). It is also conclusion of the summarising article on the last
year conference at IUC in Dubrovnik Ethics of Inclusion: The Role
of Social Work in Social Transformation and Innovation, now published in the
Dialogue
in Praxis special issue.]
We have explored the presupposed triangle of crisis – ethics, movements and
innovation - on various strata of existence. How they combine is parallel but
different and autonomous in its content and dynamics diverse planes. The patterns
on diverse planes may be in dissonance or resonate with each other. Empowerment
in one to one social work, can be, for example, annulled by organisational
control, or by disempowering policies. Or, it may confirm and strengthen the
policies that give power to the people. Events on more abstract strata have a
vector effect on more concrete ones, but also vice versa – and especially the
latter route must be explored for social work programme for the future.
A common
pattern resonating across the strata is that the answers to the questions posed
by crisis can be sought in ethics and by responses through people coming
together and acting in common interest. Rights and community are
the keywords and have to be understood as a double entity. While the state was
seen in the past as the provider and guarantor of rights, the community is now seen
as the site where these should be enacted, but also as autonomous places of
constituting rights and providing responses to people’s needs. These are the
communities to be created by movements among the people. In other words, crisis
can be resolved on different levels by different means, but a strong ethical
stance and collaboration between the people is needed. Ethics should be based
on the imperative of non-exclusion, and through collaboration on the ethics of
inclusion.
What
happens in the life-world should be the benchmark and the basis of social work
and how successful it is. It is also a measure of our existence and the final
end of the use of power we have, the essence of our sovereignty. Yet, how we
live, and also how we do social work, is the subject to forces extraneous to
it. No matter how virtual they are, they have an impact on our lives.
Social work
can be seen as a profession embedded in the life-world but also a mediator between
the life-world and other strata of existence. The life-world is both its starting
point but also its destination: the journey through other strata must be useful
in the actual world we live.
Social work
has the potential to generate power by recombining forces imminent in the life-world.
It can be done by getting people together in order to surmount common difficulties,
distress and obstacles, but also by enabling to express their desires, what
they like and what they dislike and what they enjoy and fear, to do what they
need and want and decline what they do not want to do. Social work is, however,
also a vehicle of power generated extraneously to the life-world and should be
able not only to provide its useful function in the life-world but also let the
expression of the people influence the events on more abstract levels.
Methods and
procedures are usually seen as a way of moulding and adapting to abstract
realities (Kafka). Such use of them must be avoided by social work. Instead
they must be used to enable people to be inscribed in the registers of
distribution of resources, to receive means they are entitled to (in social
policy, social security), to secure their rights and promote their desires.
Instead of ceremonies of degradation (Garfinkel), social work procedures must
be celebrations of promotion and conveyers of empowerment in order to
influence general decisions and provide power to enable action in the
life-world.
The organisation
of social work should be there to serve the people, their needs and enable them
to live better and have more power (and not the other way around where people serve
organisations). The intention of such organisation should be to bring people together
and enable them to communicate, interact, deal with and liaise with other such organisations,
communities and groups. Thus, the organisation should be transparent,
participatory, self-managed and open. It should not be exclusive nor excluding.
Social
policy and service provision must similarly be in the hands of service users, not
merely through representation but through common projects, direct action and
community organisation. It must be rights-based, grounded in the universal
rights that would not allow exclusion and poverty. Modern technology and social
work methods allow that this universalistic right can be transformed into
singularised achievements, so that a person’s desires become the measure of
social policy. It requires the double action of people coming together to achieve
what they want and of negotiating changes in institutions. The latter must be
in the direction of conserving and promoting the right to social security and social
safety (universal income, long-term care), of defending people from exploitation
and of creating autonomy through community-based self-sustainable initiatives.
Social work
should polemically challenge poisonous knowledge and cultures of exclusion. It
must foster dialogue about the past, the present and the future, across diverse
cultures and groups. It must truly embrace the ideal of expertise by experience
and combine theory, research and active participation of everybody involved. It
must include those hitherto excluded, hidden knowledge and replace elitist axioms
with experience-based and pragmatic solutions.
Social work
should actively resist any politics that lead to exclusion, even if it is only
by effect. Its politico-ethical stance should be against any kind of oppression
and degradation. It should endow any developments towards community-based
planetary citizenship. It has to connect to new popular movements, be a companion
in the struggle and a witness of suffering. It must use the power invested in
social work to the ends of the people. As stated, it should bring social work
to level of people’s lived experience and raise it up to all sorts of occasions.
The pyramid
of power is upside-down: with a lot of power in the top layers of abstract
schemes of society and almost none in the concrete world of social work service
users. Social work should seek out and challenge the inconsistencies of the
structure and its dissonances, in order to overturn it. It should seek ways to
deliver power to the people, using its methods to give voice to service users and
not to keep them quiet; using its procedures to inscribe their will into the
fabric of the organisation, and organise people to take care of themselves, producing
knowledge useful in everyday life, establishing universal rights to enable
change and restore humanity – to the people and to the society.
