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