the role of social work

IFSW (EUROPE)

DISCUSSION PAPER PREPARED BY THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION

OF SOCIAL WORKERS

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL WORK

Malcolm PayneProfessor of Applied Community Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University,

799, Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester, UK, M20 2RR.Telephone: 0161-247 2098; fax 0161-247 6844; Email: [email protected]

Making claims about social workWhat is the role of social work? Do we want to ask:

§ what it is?§ what we might imagine it could be? or§ what we might realistically hope it might be?

Sticking with ‘what is’ may seem complacent and lacking in ambition,although over the last century and a half social work has achieved a lot in establishingits position in many societies. Seeking a realistic and foreseeable role might fail tomeet our ideals for future progress. Promoting the extent of the possibilities mightseem conceited and pretentious.

Identifying these alternatives suggests that talking about the role of socialwork involves what sociologists call ‘claims-making’; that is, saying what somethingis, so that our view of it gains acceptance, in preference to someone else’s claim. Ithas the image of homesteaders in the American West or gold-diggers putting upfences round their property. Staking a claim is not final: whether people accept itdepends on the claims that others might make about the same field. That this is soemphasises that trying to define the role of social work sets out on a political processin which we engage with other stakeholders in the hope of coming to an acceptedagreement. Therefore, I propose in this paper that simply trying to define one role ofone social work is unlikely to be effective; what will be needed is a constantlyredefined strategy for making and pursuing claims about it that represent the bestunderstanding of social workers. However, within that complexity, a relatively smallnumber of principles can describe important aspects of social work’s approach, in itscontribution to the network of professions working in welfare systems.

The reason why we want to make claims, or assert a clear role, is to gainlegitimacy. There is a problem with doing so in the twenty-first century. Castells(1997) discusses this in relation to social identities. In the past, dominantorganisations and interests in society had the most influence in establishing and‘legitimising’ identities and roles. They did this as part of the process of maintainingauthority and control in an organised society. The structure of society, traditionally,had a strong influence on our social roles and our identity. Identities were givenbecause of the social roles occupied. For example, a woman who married became awife and later usually a mother, and there were common assumptions about how theyshould behave.

The Role of Social Work - 2

In recent years, social relations have changed and identities are no longer sostrongly controlled, but they are patterned by how we understand the whole set ofrelationships in which people participate. So, to continue with the same example, awoman has a much wider range of choices of gender behaviours than the traditionalwife and mother models. Even if she takes these on, she has opportunities to livethrough a range of different kinds of wife and mother roles. She works these out forherself, participating in debates within society about these roles and social interactionswith people around her. She continuously modifies her identity as she experiences herlife, other people’s reactions to her way of living, and the debates and discussion thatshe hears about. This freedom is constrained by the social and personal need to haveidentities in the first place, because this helps people to deal with a complex world.

Applying this to social work, in the past social work only had to persuadepowerful decision-makers to ascribe roles to it, perhaps through legislation or byestablishing respected and powerful agencies to work in. This helped to establish andmaintain through professional organisation a clear and certain role in society. Now, arange of possible roles exists in a complex mixture of related professions andorganisations, all of which have less status, all of whose positions is less secure andopen to question.

In recent years, important identities have been established as part of a processof resistance to legitimisation through powerful groups. So women have struggledagainst patriarchy, ethnic groups have tried to establish their cultures in countrieswhere they have migrated, especially where they are in a minority, disabled peoplehave tried to establish their own culture and power, gay and lesbian people come out;there are many examples. Creating a strong identity as part of a resistance can onlytake a group so far. It can become exclusionary, make a ghetto of the ‘different’ or‘difficult’. Therefore, many excluded groups try to create new identities to interrogateand criticise uses of power by dominant groups.

Applying this to social work, the groups that social workers helped in rolesdefined by the powerful are being redefined as consumers and service users withinterests, rights and their own identity to establish. Therefore, social work finds itsrole squeezed between the interests of the powerful, whose role definitions are treatedwith less deference than in the past but may still be strongly asserted by politicians orthe media, and the powerless seeking greater influence over their own identity. Thereis a limit to its capacity to define its own role. Social workers can only establish theirrole in interaction with the interests of service users, groups with political and socialinfluence in the definition of professional roles and other related professional groups.This becomes clear when we examine the idea of ‘role’.

What is a ‘role’?When we talk about a ‘role’, many people think about acting; that is, a person

assuming a character or position and presenting it convincingly as part of a fiction. Itcarries implications of performing, following a script and being directed. Somephenomenological sociological theories, such as Goffman’s (1968a) ‘dramaturgical’role theory, start from the assumption that people vary how they behave according tothe situation they are in and their purposes. Goffman writes, for example, about howstigmatised people try to pass as normal (1968b), or how controlling institutions suchas mental hospitals create particular forms of behaviour (1961). Roles mightsometimes be false impressions, given to achieve a social purpose. However, anotherway of looking at it is that we vary the way we behave, depending on our socialsituation. Psychological theories like transactional analysis use similar analogies:


behaviour is analysed according to ‘scripts’ and common reactions to situations thatare played out in ‘games’ (Berne, 1961).

One implication of the dramatic analogy for considering ‘the role of socialwork’ is the risk that people may see defining a role as merely presentational, a coverfor some reality that we want to disguise. For example, we might claim altruisticmotives for social work, while others commonly say that this is a disguise foroppressive and controlling elements of it. It may be important, therefore, not to makepartial or self-interested claims, but to acknowledge all the implications of what wesay. Otherwise, it will be hard to get people to accept our claims. Another implicationof the dramatic analogy is the importance of the situation we are in: the script, theother actors, the director, the scenery. This emphasises that a role cannot be created byactors alone, they are part of a social environment that controls, constrains and directswhat role they must play. We have to examine the role of social work, therefore,within the pattern of services, professions, knowledge and social behaviour that exists,We cannot define social work with a free hand.

In other forms of sociology, ‘role’ is an outgrowth of structural-functionaltheory, and it carries some hidden assumptions. Talking about the ‘role’ of a socialinstitution or of an individual implies a ‘social order’ perspective, that

§ there is a structure of institutions that we can identifyand be clear about;

§ the structure is relatively stable and ordered;§ the position of institutions or individuals within the

structure can be understood and agreed upon;§ the kind of acts and behaviour associated with those

positions can be described and agreed upon.So, talking about the role of social work implies that we can describe what

social work is and how it fits with other institutions, that its position is clear,continuous and understandable and that we can say what the social work professionand social workers should do.

There are two problems with this approach to considering social work:practical and theoretical. The practical problem is that there are many uncertainties,and things change and develop all the time, so we can never be sure about maintaininga continuous definition of social institutions and activities and we end up havingapparently irreconcilable disagreements. The theoretical problem points to theseuncertainties and says that assuming stability and order is clearly an inaccuraterepresentation of our world. There are two kinds of answer to this theoretical problem.Critical theories propose that we should focus on change and conflict; that socialbehaviour and social institutions emerge from conflict, debate and exchange, ratherthan from stability and order. Phenomenological and post-modern theories try toinclude uncertainties and changes into explanations of how social institutions work.They look at historical and social factors that create uncertainty and change. Criticaland post-modern theories are, at least potentially, more creative than social orderperspectives, because they include change, development and the opportunities forcreativity that come out of uncertainty and change. However, social order theoriespropose that the world is actually more or less ordered, that people would like it to bemore rather than less ordered and that disorder leads to social problems such asoppression and poverty. They complain that focusing on change and uncertainty leadsto instability and to taking a relativistic view of social values and behaviour, whichmakes it impossible for people to organise their way of life.


Talking about the role of social work, therefore, can be rather conservative.We are saying that we want to stop change, stop uncertainty and try to create someclarity and stability. Is this desirable? It might be desirable if it could help people gainconfidence and security in knowing what they are doing or aiming for. It might beundesirable, because change and uncertainty provide opportunities for developmentand sticking with one view of the social work role would miss chances to develop it.

Is it realistic? It might be realistic because clearer definitions of social workwould help create stability and certainty. It might be unrealistic because there areuncertainties and changes that we cannot avoid, and so we are seeking a false security,which in the end may make us uncomfortable with our position and unable to defendour view.

Defining a social work roleThe changes and uncertainties are obvious because different countries and

cultures have different ways of organising social work services and differentinterpretations of what social work is. Over time, the main ideas about social workhave changed. This suggests that there is not one thing called social work, because itchanges depending on social, cultural and historical context. Therefore, defining arole for social work needs to include social, cultural and historical differences.

Since international organisations developed in social work during the 1920s,there has been an ‘internationalist view’ of it, which argues that there are differentforms of social work, but they are all related and can be seen as fundamentally thesame thing (Payne, 2003). During the 1980s, a critique developed that this was acolonialist position, that it imposed one cultural interpretation of social work on otherequally relevant and justifiable ones (Nagpaul, 1972; Midgley, 1981). Particularly, itimposed a view from Western, rich country perspectives on Eastern, poor countries.During the 1990s, this critique has developed to identify a range of alternativeperspectives on social work, and to claim that there are justifiable differences, whichcan and should be accepted. One example is the claim that there is an ‘Eastern’ modelof social work, which emphasises social interdependence on families andcommunities throughout life, rather than the Western convention of individualism,and a greater acceptance of responsibility for directive practice, rather than Westernpolicies of self-determination.

The internationalist view is modernist, that is, it proposes that social workmainly develops and progresses and can be understood by rational argument andscientific research. The critique of modernism suggests that there have been countrieswhere social work has not progressed, that at times, for example in 1930s Germany(Lorenz, 1974) or in colonialist countries, it has been oppressive, discriminatory andsocially regressive. The critique also proposes that since New Right or economicrationalist attacks on public services and welfare states in the 1980s, social work hasbeen in retreat and is being redefined in a restricted way (Jordan, 2000). The 1990shave seen a debate between social construction or post-modern views of knowledge(which emphasise experiential forms of understanding) and more rationalist andpositivist views of understanding (which emphasise the accumulation of evidencethrough structured and rational forms of investigation).

If we accept such variation, it becomes much harder to accept that we shouldtry to identify just one role for just one form of social work. However, the argumentfor having a clear mission and set of values is that it might help to defeat regressionand oppression. In a famous early paper on social work, Lee (1929) argued that associal work became a more established part of the society, it moved from being a


‘cause’, with ideals for change and a focus on wide social objectives, to being a moreroutinised social ‘function’. It loses its mission for change, but may perhaps be able toachieve results through its steady action within societies. This view argues thatdifferent aspects of social work might reinforce each other: the mission providesideals to give inspiration and direction to effective social provision, while performingthe function interprets the mission in ways that are appropriate to the times andcircumstances.

Taking these points together, social work seems to have a range of possibleroles, which gain influence according to current social expectations andcircumstances. The roles are expressed in wide social objectives and values, which areinterpreted through different practices relevant to social, cultural and politicalenvironments. The roles interact with the roles associated with cognate professions.Social workers face a paradox. On one hand, taking all this into account makes itdifficult to establish a clearly-defined role. On the other hand, ignoring thesecomplexities makes any role that social work claims seem over-simplified, excessiveand hard to justify to other stakeholders.

However, fortunately it is possible to recognise the complexities whileestablishing some clear goals for action that start from some basic aims andprinciples. I also argue in the remainder of the paper that many of the complexities areresolvable to a connected series of analyses.

A starting point: the welfare regime and systemSocial work, as with any other social profession, operates within the welfare

regimes in different countries. How social work is implemented within any particularcountry is affected by its welfare regime, that is the approach taken to the state’sresponsibility for the welfare of its citizens. The last years of the twentieth centuryhave seen considerable debate about the character of different forms of welfareregime. Titmuss (1968) distinguished between residual and institutional welfarestates. Residual welfare states gave priority to the family and the market, acceptingresponsibility only when these failed. Institutional welfare states embody a‘commitment to welfare’, which involves providing more or less universal socialprovision. Esping-Anderson (1990) makes this analysis more complex. He identifiesthree clusters of welfare regimes. Liberal states, focusing on individual responsibilitythrough a work ethic and freedom, have modest universal transfers and socialinsurance. Corporatist states, partly influenced by churches, focus on using welfare tomaintain social stability through reinforcing status differentials and the role of familyand work. Social democratic states seek social equality through pursuing highstandards of universal welfare. Leibfried (1993) distinguishes in Europe between fourgroups of states. Scandinavian-style universal welfare states make the state the mainprovider and guarantor of welfare. The Bismarck countries (Germany and Austria)rely on substantial social insurance provision for workers. Anglo-Saxon countries usewelfare to reinforce the work-ethic, but social insurance is available as a last resort.‘Latin rim’ states have rudimentary welfare systems, relying on family and church,but are moving towards more universal provision.

Social work itself occupies a marginal position in all of these systems, sincethe political focus is on the major social welfare systems of social security or socialprotection, health, education and to some extent housing and employment. Socialdevelopment and regeneration and criminal justice are also important social welfareprovisions in many countries. The attitude to social work may arise from indirectly


from general attitudes to welfare within these regimes, rather than from views ofsocial work itself.

Moreover, a distinction must be made between social work and social care,social protection or social services. Social work is often allied to significant serviceprovision, which is often not defined specifically as social work. This includes insome countries social security or social protection services, or health and social careprovision such as domiciliary, day and residential care. In such instances, social workitself may be a relatively small part of a major service effort, which then colours theimpression of social work. On the other hand, social work may be the dominantprofessional group in such services, and its ideology and the regard in which it is heldaffects the pattern of provision. Social work may be a secondary profession in asetting dominated by another profession. Social workers in courts, schools, hospitalsand health care services, or housing services are likely to be defined at least in part bythe purposes and political position of the major service, and their model of practice islikely to be coloured by medical, educational or criminal justice models.

Discussing the role of social work, therefore, involves:§ identifying its role within general welfare provision;§ identifying its connection with related service provision;§ distinguishing its role in multiprofessional settings.

This is difficult to do on an international basis. Many different systems ofwelfare provision exist, each of which has developed an organisation for welfareprofessions and these are often associated with different interpretations of the natureand role of social work. A useful approach is to see social welfare as a field, in whichdifferent welfare systems select and develop different elements of the possibilities ofsocial work. The field thus becomes a set of networks, which cover a similar area ofhuman welfare activity, with a different pattern of provision and professionalorganisation in each case.

Patterns of social work provisionRather than see social work as defined by an essence, therefore, it is helpful to

see social work range of networks forming different patterns in different nationalsystems. Six networks have an impact on how we pattern social work in any welfareregime (Payne, 2003):

§ Demographic factors affecting its clientele. Social workchanges, as its clientele alters. Clearly, we focus more on childrenwhen the number of children rise, on elders when the proportion ofelderly people in the population rises, on disability when medicinepreserves life better, but in impaired bodies or when newconditions such as HIV-AIDS emerge.

§ Policy and law. In many countries where government isan important player in social provision, service development andsocial work’s roles change and progress, as policy and legalchanges are made.

§ Education, training, knowledge and research. Socialwork’s character changes as education and training for it developand as views of the organisation of knowledge and researchchange. For example, more competence-based qualifications usingevidence-based practice imply a more technical and lessdiscretionary form of practice.


§ Professional organisation. How the occupational groupis organised affects its identity. For example, the character of agroup with organised trade unionism would be different from thatof a group where trade union and professional functions aredivided.

§ Values and political aims. The values represented in aprofession have important consequences for its. For example,individualistic values would produce a different form of practicefrom social justice values.

§ Organisational structure and strategy. The structure ofagencies, large and comprehensive or small and specialised forexample, have consequences for the service.

Obviously, all these different networks interact with each other, but ananalysis of these factors in relation to a particular situation helpfully identifies themajor factors affecting a profession at present.

Interpretations of social workWithin patterns of welfare provision, social work is interpreted differently as

part of a network of professions interacting with each other. Each of these professionsoverlaps and connects with the others. Health care professionals, for example, areoften involved in health education of patients, have a planning and strategic role inpublic health and a social order role in mental health and with problems such as drugmisuse. The police, to give another example, have many welfare roles, are involved incrime prevention and education, and work using interpersonal skills in rape interviewcentres. Different systems place the divisions between professional welfare roles indifferent places. Interpretations of social work often have connections with otherprofessions. The professions within the welfare networks usually contain elements of:

§ a therapeutic model, based on medical assumptions thatpeople have illnesses (which, in social work, we often call problems)that may be understood and cured (problems are resolved or at least‘worked on’);

§ an educational model, perhaps most evident in socialpedagogy, and, in Britain, youth and community work, which focuseson enhancing people’s capacities to deal with the world;

§ a spiritual model, related to priestly roles, which isconcerned with enhancing people’s personal psychological and socialgrowth, their relationships and understanding and appreciation ofthemselves and their worlds;

§ a social order model, related to policing, which seeswelfare as being concerned with helping people to regulate andorganise their lives and playing a part in dealing with problems thatdisrupt society, such as elders, mentally ill or physically and learningdisabled people who cannot care for themselves, or parents who abusechildren, people who abuse drugs;

§ a social change model, related to planning anddevelopment, concerned with achieving social progress anddevelopment;

§ a social provision model, related to public service roles,where social work often has what Pietroni (1994) has called the


‘quartermaster’ role, in which the task is to provide services andorganise the provision of resources in situations of social difficulty.

Social work at times incorporates all of these interpretations. Every act ofsocial work contains some of these interpretations; every system of social workprefers some rather than others of these interpretations; every agency picks up somebut not others of these interpretations. What particular systems pick up depends on thediscourse that goes on within the welfare system and more widely in society about therole of social work, and that discourse interacts with internal discourses within socialwork about its nature and role.

Social work’s discourseA discourse is a set of interactions, activities and debates that form views of

something, in this case social work. Rather than try to see social work as one thing, itis more reasonably represented, as in Figure 1, as constantly reconstructing itself byrebalancing three aims that are contained within all social work:

§ An social order element - maintaining social order andproviding services within the welfare state;

§ A therapeutic empowering element - helping peopleattain personal fulfilment and power over their lives; and

§ A transformational or emancipatory element -stimulating social change to promote service users’ freedom fromoppression (Payne, 1996; 2000).

Focusing on each of these objectives brings a different form of social work.All social work contains these purposes to some extent. Services lean towards one orthe other: local government social services give priority to providing and improvingservices, while offering a certain amount of empowerment and personal growth toclients, and with an eye to supporting changes in provision in the long-term. Awomen’s counselling service, might mainly aim for empowering developments inclients’ control of their lives. A community work organisation might mainly aim tochange housing policy. However, in carrying out their function, they inevitablyinclude elements of the others.

These different balances of aim operate at different levels. For example, at thenational or regional level, services may focus on one rather than another objective;particular agencies within a national system may have a particular priority, and withinan agency, every social work act, while containing elements of all three, will leantowards a particular priority. For example, if a hospital social worker works with amentally ill woman to help her re-establish her life in the community, her mainprofessional purpose may be empowering and strengthening the woman’s capacitiesfor independent living. In different arenas, her agency may primarily see this asdelivering a service and government policy may be that, delivered widely, this servicemay change social perceptions about people who are recovering from mental illness.Elements of these other purposes will be present in how the worker acts as a socialworker, even though they are not at the forefront of her mind.

Arenas for discourseSocial work is, thus, formed in discourses within professional and social

networks, balancing different perspectives on its purposes. Discourses take place indifferent arenas. The arenas interact with one another, so that what goes on in onearena influences what goes on elsewhere. Figure 2 describes three arenas:

§ A political-social-ideological arena;


§ An agency-professional arena; and§ A client-worker-agency arena.

However, the arenas in which discourse takes place are potentially infinite andcomplex. These three propose cycles of debate where stakeholders are likely to be in aconstant interaction influencing each other and are likely to be concerned with socialwork or at least welfare issues, so they may be arenas that are particularly relevant tosocial work roles. They are arenas, because they represent centres of action anddebate, rather than mutually exclusive cycles. They overlap: for example, the agencyprovides the context for and directs clients’ and workers’ interactions, but agenciesare also crucial in professional and academic debate. The form a larger cycle ofmutual influence, which may work in different directions. Services may changebecause clients make demands and respond in new ways, because professionals oragencies decide on new forms of practice or organisation, or because public opinionor political impetus creates changes. For example, the disability movement hascampaigned successfully in Britain for a legal change giving disabled people controlof the individual budgets for their personal help (political-social arena). This forces achange on agencies and professionals. The disability movement has also influencedhow professionals think about disability, giving greater importance to a social model(professional–agency arena). It has also caused disabled people to demand to betreated differently by social workers (client-worker arena). The impact of each ofthese participations in the discourse has influenced the others. The legal change worksbetter where professionals are committed and where clients demand the service to bedelivered in this particular way.

Aims and principlesWe can bring all these issues together to examine the role of social work by

identifying particular perspectives of social work that implement the main purposes ofsocial work but suggest how we may interpret the special roles of social work incontrast to the networks of other professions involved in the welfare system. In Table1 the left-hand column starts with the three aims that I suggested above are balancedwithin all social work, all social work agencies and all acts of social work. In thesecond column, I have set out five perspectives on practice that inform all socialwork. These move from activities that emphasise maintaining social order througheffective service delivery, through those that emphasise empowerment and personalfulfilment to those that emphasise transformation; none of these activities exclude anythose purposes - it is a question of emphasis. The third column indicates something ofthe social work approach, which would follow from taking up this perspective. Thefourth column indicates some examples of the kind of service that social work wouldseek to provide as a result.

How can we see these perspectives as forming the identity of social work?They constitute claims about the fundamental and distinctive nature of what socialworkers do.

The social protection or social assistance perspective emphasises that socialwork sees welfare benefits and services as a right, as an essential part of a civilisedsociety, and sees it as a professional responsibility to pursue those rights on behalf ofclients. Making provision for this is integral to social work services, rather than adesirable extra, and services are planned to include this element of seeking people’srights. Most other personal services, such as counselling, medicine, nursing orpsychology focus on the practitioner’s own treatment or related services. If they wantto have a general check on whether someone is receiving all the benefits that they


should be getting, they will usually refer them to a social worker. Thus, the welfarerights role is a recognised and valued service. It is also important for social work,because it is the basis of much else that social work does. For one thing, as a practicalprovision that concentrates on rights rather than an indistinct form of personal help, itencourages people to make contact with social work, when they might otherwise becautious about doing so. It means that, in a fragmented and isolating society, peoplecan keep their distance if they want to, but still engage in valid social work. Nationalsystems that integrate social security payments into social welfare provision andprovide social work alongside it implement this perspective directly. Once peoplegain confidence in the social worker, they may be prepared to call for more complexpersonal services.

Second, the social assistance perspective that social work takes is crucial. At atime when political movements favour liberal individualism, and suggest that peopleshould look after themselves, insure themselves for risks, take responsibility for theirfamilies and communities, social work emphasises that this does not work for many.People with inherited medical conditions or experiencing serious social deprivationcannot insure themselves, and do not have the resources to care for themselves. Socialwork’s emphasis on welfare rights is an integral aspect of our approach to socialissues. People’s rights to a reasonable standard of welfare are not an option, as manyright-wing politicians would like to suggest they are an essential to any civilisedsociety.

Third, therefore, providing social assistance and protection efficiently is afundamental service in any civilised country and it is part of the social workcontribution to society. An example that demonstrates this is disaster aid, or in verypoor underdeveloped countries, the acknowledgement that dealing with basic poverty,starvation and helplessness is an essential first step in social development. This is easyto forget in European countries with a well-established infrastructure, where socialsecurity and relief of poverty or homelessness is very much a residual part of thestate’s services, since most people are provided for by employment in an activeeconomy. It may be residual most of the time, but it is nevertheless basic and remainsso. For example, Britain experienced a great deal of flooding last winter, and fromtime to time some disaster occurs such as an aeroplane crash. People in Westernsocieties expect that the services can turn out and manage the personal consequencesof these events for their citizens. Such times make clear that this role is basic tocivilisation, even though it is fortunately rare to have to bring it into play in advancedeconomies.

The user participation perspective forms part of the identity of social workbecause its actions are holistic, when we compare them with other professions. Otherprofessions still primarily focus on their expert role, providing information or expertinterventions. As people have become less deferential to professionals over the lastfew decades, they have become more open and democratic. This perspective speaksdirectly to the sort of identity issues discussed in this paper. People in societies wherethey are isolated, excluded and part of fragmented social relations need to beintegrated as stakeholders within the practice of help that is offered to them. Identityprocesses in present-day society do not allow social workers to prescribe their clients’actions and objectives. However, this is a participation approach because socialworker must also be drawn into action with their clients if they are to be effective.Distancing themselves from clients, being neutral about their objectives will lead tothe failure of social work.


The social model of explanation distinctively signifies social work. Even ifthey know about and respond to the social origins of the problems that they deal with,other professions focus on individual explanations and operate on a ‘cure’, therapeuticor educational model of what they are doing. Social work typically goes out of its wayto invest in social networks and listen to explanations of the problems that we dealwith which go beyond the scientific into the interpersonal and social realms ofexplanation. This is a crucial contribution that social work makes to reintegratingfragmented social relations. A definition of the client’s problem that says: ‘You are anoffender,’ or ‘You are impaired,’ takes the person as a damaged individual. To say:‘We are dealing with offending behaviour to help your social integration…’ and ‘Weare overcoming social factors that prevent you from leading a satisfactory life…’ is aresponse to excluding and fragmenting social relations.

The family and community involvement perspective is integral to social workin a way that is not true of related professions. Most professions, such as medicine,nursing or psychology, focus on a selected patient or client and see their primary workas being for and about that patient. They take into account the impact of family orcommunity limitations on their work and they may keep relatives informed, but theydo not see it as their primary purpose to integrate individuals with their family andcommunity networks. Other professions have a particular function, such as educationor accountancy. In every case, other professionals would turn to social work to havean assessment done to inform their work about family and community mattersrelevant to their focus. They would also turn to social workers to intervene in familyand community situations that affected their patients or pupils. The nearest similarrole is priests and other religion and spiritual professionals. To go further, social workcalls on links with other professionals as an essential part of its work. Again, bytaking this perspective, social work seeks to extend and build links within socialnetworks against the fragmenting tendencies of present-day societies.

Finally, social justice is integral to social work. One outcome of this focus isthe strong leadership that social work has provided for focusing on anti-discriminatorypractice. This links back to the concern with social models of explanation, family andcommunity as well as individual outcomes, and the welfare rights perspective. Socialwork, with these perspectives integral to its work, inevitably responds to markedinjustices of this kind with general social responses as well as individualised help andservice provision. To be concerned about justice is to be concerned with the impact ofclients and services on others, and not to focus on the needs of our clients and ourservice alone. Thus, a social work service for people with severe behaviour disordersdeals with the consequences for the victims of their violence, or for their families oftheir destructive behaviour. Other services focus mainly on the patient or their ownskills and responsibilities.

ConclusionThe analysis in Table 1 shows how our discourse about the aims of social

work can lead us to concrete principles that establish social work’s role within thenetwork of professions. It does not deny the complexity of social work, but proposesthat the complexity lies, as this paper suggests, in the complex ways in which role andidentity must now be understood in present-day society. While social work must haveits ideals and mission, defining its everyday activities, what Lee (1929) called its‘function’, in the welfare system, is complex. However, by relating social work’smission or aims to the everyday role through a small number of principles, we can


accept the complexity of its formation while expressing clearly in a relatively smallnumber of connected principles what its contribution to welfare systems is.

AcknowledgementsSubstantial parts of this paper are excerpted from ‘Social work’s changing

identities’, a paper first given at a conference of the Danish Association of SocialWorkers, Nyborg, September 2001, and first published as ‘Det sociale arbejdesidentiteter under forandring’ in Tidsskrift for social forskning 2(3): 4-18 (2001). Thispaper was also presented as a Research Seminar, Department of Applied CommunityStudies, Manchester Metropolitan University, February 2002. I am grateful forcomments from both audiences.

Excerpts from the paper were included in an article published in English as‘Balancing the equation’ in Professional Social Work, January 2002, 12-13.

Some of the analysis relies on the author’s What is Professional Social Work?(Birmingham, Venture, 1996).


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