Operation D: Creating a work relationship, an alliance – dialogue and meeting point (operations 11, relationship 1)

Social work is about relationships. And, social work is a relationship. A special relationship – a work relationship and alliance. Social work is about people coming together in order to perform meaningful changes in their lives. Hence, it is a working relationship, alliance of doing.

However, before the work starts, there needs to be an idea about what to do. This idea needs to reflect one’s inner and outer reality and needs to be reflexive to the events and contingencies of one’s Life-World. It also has to be utopian – bringing about something that there is not, but at the same time pragmatic enough to be workable. In deed, it has to be operative, conceived how it is to be done. It has to form an arch from the insight based on reflexion to doing thing, to work and change.

Dialogue

The most important tool in doing that, and probably in social work generally, is the dialogue. The dialogue does not mean the conversation of two people, the prefix “dia—“does not stand for “two” but for “through”. Dialogue literally means talking (and thinking) through (the matter). Enunciating what is to become.

In Freirean terms, the dialogue is a way to see through the material forces, it is a way of including people, being in cahoots with them in this gaze, seeing what there is going to be. Dialogue is a way of rendering the social arrangements into a material (reducing substance to matter) in order to transform them. Just like love was, for that man, a reason to dress better.

Dialogue means to establish a safe space where it is possible to say things, to name the world in order to change it (Freire, 1972).  It means establishing a “theoretical” (thinking) contexts”, in which concrete context of the lived world can be represented and decoded; and where new codes can be produced which can lead the action in the real context.

The necessary prerequisite for working together is to meet, establish the contact. Social work users are usually being referred to social work practitioners by other services or fellow users, who detect that there might be a social work issue, they often come on their own initiative “to sort something out” be it a simple social benefit or the complexity of life. Not seldom, however, it is also social work task to “seek” the user, as it is the case when it is due to perceived danger a statutory or a moral obligation.

In any case, they have to meet and this usually means, since the social work is not repairing or making “things” but dealing with human, personal and existential matters, that it is an encounter of the two human beings. This may not be important when the common task is a simple one, but is of virtual importance when dealing with rearranging the “whole life”. There a mere professional trust is not sufficient; the authentic human trust must be developed. Actors need to get to know each other, and this should be a two-way, mutual process (with more or less symmetry). A social worker also needs to learn about the person in the situation, acquire “user’s perspective”, realise the strengths of the person. A user needs to know the social worker not only in terms of what he or she has to offer, to get a sketchy idea of how the social work operates, what are the resources on disposal, but also how he or she experiences a kind of distress the user presents, what are his or her attitudes and values. Employing the strength perspective is important since it is about sharing the values. For common work, common value base is needed.

Meeting place

The meeting point should, in principle, be half-way between the two Life-Worlds. It may be handy of a social worker to meet in his or her office, but, however, might not be the user’s perspective. Although social work office should be in principle a safe space, a space where one can express his anxieties, worries, desires and … this may not be seen so by the user; he or she may experience it as an alien territory, somebody else’s turf, feel constrained by assumed or actual rules (e.g. no smoking) and by expectations how to behave.

Meeting in user’s home environment turns this perspective around, not only the user feels at home and is the host, and the power differential is slimmer, but also social worker meets and gets to know the user in the situation, not only his abstract persona but also its material and immaterial extensions.

Meeting on the neutral territory, often a public space (a café, park, town square) is also a good option, especially in the beginning. Not only it is free of burden of institutional expectations or domestic stipulation but it also enables an encounter that can be primae facie an exchange of equals.

Often institutional space other than social worker’s is used by necessity (a hospital, prison, old age home). In these cases a niche should be sought that would allow a personal encounter, a proxy for home, office or a public space – allowing privacy, equity and sovereignty.

Reference:

Freire, P. (1972), Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books.

Operation C: Psychologisation and individualisation of power (operations 10, power 3)

Although the term of empowerment was invented in the struggle against the apartheid and it is a political concept par excellence, it has been diluted, watered down to psychological abilities and capacities such as assertiveness, courage, social skills etc. Or a little better but still misguiding merely to the strength perspective approach.

Strength perspective is an approach to users and human beings in general that focuses on people’s strengths, virtues rather than on their weaknesses, deficits and faults. For social work, for working with people it is important to learn what they can do, how they can be seen in good shade of light, rather than concentrating on what they cannot do, what is wrong with them, what they lack. In this, it is an important paradigmatic shift in getting to know the people and their Life-worlds. It is a giant step towards seeing the users as heroes of survival rather than victims of adverse consequences (poverty, violence, stress) or even as their perpetrators (as with drug users, people in mental distress …).

Strength perspective is an important part of empowerment, but the empowerment cannot be reduced just to it. 

Such a demeaning use of the term empowerment is a consequence of “ideological revision” of the concept, probably not intended, and of the neglect of the structural properties of the situations where it is taking place.

Placing the issue of power in an individual and his or her psychological makeup as well as targeting a person as an “object of empowerment” – “to empower somebody” subverts the gist of the operation making him or her as its object – is in fact the inversion of the cause and effect; making him or her a source of disempowerment or inversely the source of power and not a vehicle of it. Such an operation reiterates the fault, the guilt – making people wonder “What did I do wrong?!”. On other hand, it also reflect powerlessness and lack of resources with the professionals. For example, “empowering” the victim of family violence by counselling and engaging in family therapy may reflect inability to provide material resources, namely housing, a flat where the victim could move to (which would enhance also the counselling or negotiating capacities and possibilities.

On the structural side there is also the notion and the idea of the society being constituted by equal individuals that makes an individual as register of well-being – which in turn keeps turning the attention to the individual. A good and powerful example of this being the deinstitutionalisation – which is in fact a defence of the individual over the oppressive collective. It is a good starting point, and most probably a good point of destination, however, as a process and operation it must be seen a collective issue – be it as individual empowerment resulting in collective action or in term of regaining, recovering the common ground. Investment in an individual is also investment in the community and vice versa.