Social Work Emerging from Crisis

[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.

Social Work Mitigates Between the Life-World and Institutional Spheres

By Mohol Nagy

 

Methods and procedures

Methods and procedures are the shapes of actual social work being done. Social work should be empowering, based in people’s reality and allowing them access to resources – (public) goods, however, the crisis pushed it to retreat into counselling, bureaucracy and ‘workshops’ – i.e. psychological, administrative and pedagogical mouldering of people’s subjectivities Flaker, 2016a). And, along with their users social workers are scapegoated for the failures of the society.

Renewal of social work ethics on the stratum of methods and procedure should be built on imperative of assuring access to resources or possibilities of generating them. This should be considered as one of human rights, which is ever so important in changing, precarious society.

Social work should be always considered as action, as doing, work – not merely listening, talking, assessing, testing. It should embody the spirit of social work in action. It should avoid various fundamentalisms (religious, therapeutic, political, and others) since they disable social work. It should in practise appreciate differences and become a signposts for a new way of appreciative transcultural citizenship (Napan, 2011).

Social work is always participatory, partisan in its method and approach, however, needs to be objective (not neutral) provide not only evidence but also demonstrate of what really works.

Procedures should be about securing people’s rights and not about legitimating their denial. There are many procedures where social work is closely involved that are dealing with denial of rights to certain groups of people (children, mental disabilities and distress, criminal justice, more and more old people). In the procedures curtailing children’s freedom of expression or contrary – stealing away their childhood when treating them as criminally responsible adults, as well as in the procedures of restraining, taking away or diminishing ‘mental’ or ‘legal’ capacity’, instituting guardianship and in the issues of criminal responsibility and insanity, there should be strong maxims of ‘no closure’ and no restraint, strife for freedom and inventing how to deconstruct the this thorough de-humanisation and construct or even intent of how the free will can be reassumed, expressed and supported by and for the community. Instead of retributive, punitive justice – restorative, transformative social justice should be championed by social work (Case & Yates, 2016; Flaker, 2016a).

For this participatory, engaging approaches are needed, which will assert the central role of users in decisions regarding their futures (involving care, rehabilitation, etc.). Social work cannot be done without the person, nor without the community – it has to be personalised – personal care planning, assistance, personal projects, recovery etc. – and it has to become a common ground for action. Person is a starting point and end of the work, so is the community. It is matter of pragmatic convenience where to start, but the end is a ethical imperative in itself (Flaker, 2015b).

This should be true also for ‘involuntary’ users (court orders) and those whose difficulties are the toughest. Social work should be transforming life-world by engaging people in changes, connecting to local and deterritorialised social movements. And above all, even when social work is partly embedded in the virtual realities of institutional world it should be in its action connecting its methods with everyday life (Flaker, 2015a).

Power of the life-world

Crisis by invention of new mechanisms of control, by pushing social workers in the role of defending the state and not championing the users, by lack of users’ involvement and participation, as well as by the persistence of alienating, poisonous ideologies, people in need are transformed into institutional objects to be managed – thus taking away their self-determination and even their own life world (Flaker, 2015a) (refuges are a clear example of such a metamorphosis).

Life world is being by post-fordist production transformed in to a commodity – life is not something that we create with other people, it is now a commodity to consume (if not to buy) (Jordan, 2012) – if we do not do this the fate is of becoming the object of technological control; excluded from everyday life and not with even this kind of control over life.  (Neo)Robinson rules again. Now on the island of himself. The way old people are being abused and stigmatised is our common destiny. The life world is being increasingly characterised by loss of social guarantees, ‘stable instability’ (the individual‘s experience of social and cultural uncertainty), marginalisation¸ exclusion and disaffiliation of social groups, ‘social vulnerability’.

In the power relationships, social work is always taking side of the weak. Although risking its own disempowerment, the power invested in social work must be used to assure the access to resources, to create alliances of solidarity – connect various groups and modalities of work and not to reduce them to only one dimension (Flaker, 2016a). Empowerment, justice, and autonomy should become community resources and common ownership of them a guarantee to be able to influence over future. Power can be generated only collectively – even when it is expressed in personal contractual capacity. People with little such power experience both need for participation and protection. Both can be achieved through common effort – one has to have right to be mad, deviant, old, but also right to be supported in one’s recovery journey, in creativity when old in loyalty conflicts (e.g. children and parents). Recovery is both individual and collective responsibility (Flaker, 2016b).

One of social works main goals is producing a better life, many times it simply means reappropriation of one’s own. It supposed taking risks, but also fulfilling need and safeguarding rights.

Social work must replenish its power to act in actual world and change it to a better with others with the mandate (alliance) with the movements and communities. Part of the past, but also the future of social work, is an activist one, and lively communities need activism of their own (e.g. old age activism), securing participation of the people concerned. Participation and empowerment are the strategies to foster social cohesion and sustainability, common welfare – reclaiming community as source of identity, of resilience, also common enterprise, and a way of getting out of the clinches of economism – with a modest goal to live the life of our own!

Life-world is what counts and where sovereignty matters – and is only possible for everybody – in a praxis of dialogue common can be constructed.

References

Case, S. & Yates, J. (2016) ‘Examining social work with children in conflict with the law: Trajectories and possibilities’, Dialogue in Praxis (Ethics of Inclusion – special issue), vol. 5, no. 1­­. (forthcoming).

Flaker, V. (2015) 'Impact of social movements on deinstitutionalisation: case of Slovenia and a case for social cooperatives', in 1914–2014 from the Europe of World War 1 to Social Europe: report, Social Firms Europe, . Gorizia; Nova Gorica, pp. 10–22.

Flaker, V. (2016a) ' Social work is the art of remaining human in the inhuman conditions’, Dialogue in Praxis (Ethics of Inclusion – special issue), vol. 5, no. 1­­. (forthcoming).

Flaker, V. (2016b) ‘Social matrix of the recovery and empowerment’, in Aufbruch / Ausbruch: Baustellen der Gleichstellung: Fachsymposium von DAS BAND – gemeinsam vielfältig, (Sozialpädagogik, 28), J. Erkinger, Richter, V. & T. Schmid eds, LIT Verlag, Vienna, pp. 66—80.

Jordan B. (2012) Individualisation, liberal freedom, and social work in Europe, Dialogue in Praxis: A Social Work International Journal, Volume 1 (14) Issue 1–2 (22–23), 2012, pp. 7–25, [On line] Available at: http://dialogueinpraxis.fsd.uni-lj.si/index.php?id=5&a=article&aid=10

Napan, K.  (2011) 'An inquiry into scarcity, mutuality, social justice and what can social work offer to the changing world', Dialogue in Praxis, vol. 0 (13), no. 0 (21), pp. 23–34. [Online] Available at: http://dialogueinpraxis.fsd.uni-lj.si/index.php?id=5&a=article&aid=3

Political Stratum of Matrix of Social Work (Crisis, Ethics, Movements and Innovation)

On the political (and economical) level we are experiencing a prolonged crisis. Neo-liberal regime has come to impasse, and it does not seem to see the way out. The crisis even more pronounced since it is coinciding with, if not causing, environmental degradation, disasters, armed conflicts and massive migration. The social impacts of austerity and the concurrent crisis are devastating – increasing number of people poor, vulnerable people (children, old) exposed – in need of basic safety and care. The crisis has undermined the social reproduction, ‘generations are lost’ (young people without education and future prospects) and old people are marginalised. People have been tried, often beyond their resilience. 

International and national policies are slow[1], cumbersome and inefficient to deal with the crisis (e.g. refugees), with no imagination how to change or to adapt to new situation. Resources for engagement in crisis are limited, often misspent. Cost of social expenditure is both cut down and misused on running not very efficient programmes in terms of helping people.[2] Sometimes quite contrary, people are being punished for their needs, and social work practitioners criminalised for their work. Trust in government and in social covenant is lost.

Ethics in crisis is essential, it is a response to it. Social work is more than ever under an ethical stress of contradiction between security, solidarity and freedom – between caring and liberating. This dilemma is practically resolvable in social work dance in actual work (Flaker, 2006). However, it is politically translated in organisational reality into the basic contradiction of control and liberation of the actual provision of services. On the political level, the new ideas of community and solidarity seem to inspire resolution – new solidarity in the fight for social justice across time and space (Stubbs, 2016), a new community based, appreciative transcultural planetary citizenship. Ecology and feminism point to oppression of women, indigenous nations, wildlife, to erosion of resources as result of neoliberal regimes and provide directions of action (Napan & Oak, 2016). Safeguarding children’s rights, championing inclusion and fighting exclusion seem to be ethical imperatives of today, thus and by creating social sustainability and social consciousness, which becomes a societal task and ethical duty. Ownership of common goods in order to gain influence over the future is an integral part of new ethics (Stubbs, 2016; Maple & Kurnik, 2012).

Appropriation of the common good is one of postulates of new social movements of today. Tools political tools of new movements are protests, plenums and claiming social justice (Stubbs, 2015, 2016). There are transnational movements against austerity and gaining representation in the institutional politics. Institutions are challenged also on the grounds of various human rights declarations and demanded is the implementation, e.g. UN Convention of Children’s Rights, in national legislation and in protection, care and education of children in war and other crises.

While the movements on the streets have moved from particular issues to universal questions of the future society, classic social work movements for particular minority groups or issues need to find the way into this broader picture. Direct social work (Slovenia) has produced, for example Programme of bailing out the people (instead of banks) (Flaker, 2012).

Involvement of social work in the new political arena (however unclear its organisation and agenda might be) if social work is to be re-owned once again by its actors, is essential and it has to base the mandate within the movements and communities. The particularistic movements have its potential on the molecular level of ideas and images, formulating the non-exclusion imperative and practices of inclusion. By its professional power, if social work is involved, they can instigate policy and practice transfer between different jurisdictions and internationally in order to promote more human practices, and by participation and empowerment strategies they can foster social cohesion and sustainability.

References

Flaker, V. (2006) 'Social work as a science of doing: in the praise of a minor profession' in Von der Idee zur Forschungsarbeit: Forschen in Sozialarbeit und Sozialwissenschaft, V. Flaker & T. Schmid, T. eds Böhlau Verlag, Wien.

Flaker, V.@Boj za (2012) Direktno socialno delo (Direct social work), Ljubljana: Založba /*cf.

Flaker, V. (2016) ' Social work is the art of remaining human in the inhuman conditions’, Dialogue in Praxis (Ethics of Inclusion – special issue), vol. 5, no. 1­­. (forthcoming).

Maple, R. & Kurnik, A. (2012) 'The Occupy Movement in Žižek’s hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming', American Ethnologist, vol. 29, no. 2, May 2012, pp. 238–258.

Napan, K. & Oak, E. (2016) ‘Inquiring into the Spirit of Social Work’, Dialogue in Praxis (Ethics of Inclusion – special issue), vol. 5, no. 1­­. (forthcoming).

Stubbs, P. (2016) ‘Resistance in Austerity Times: Social policy, social work and social movements in crisis conditions’, Dialogue in Praxis (Ethics of Inclusion – special issue), vol. 5, no. 1­­. (forthcoming).

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[1] Deinstitutionalisation is internationally accepted policy, but still millions of people interned.

[2] Criminal justice for children provides not fully legitimate, ineffective, stigmatising, and often even in the short run costly interventions instead of child-friendly, diversionary, positive approaches, which have more positive effects and are more cost-efficient, especially in the long run.