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.