René Sand (1877-1953) and His Contribution to International Social Work, IASSW-President 1946 – 1953

The extraordinary significance of the life and work of René Sand lies in his central position as a mediator, promoter and coordinator of social work on an increasingly international level during the interwar-period and it can hardly be overestimated. To approach the achievements of Sand’s life and work you have to work archaeologically as he does not seem to have left any traces in the literature on social history. In Germany, even within the field of social work his name is hardly known. His biographical sketch and his importance for the development of the profession of social work have fallen into oblivion. The situation is a little different in the French-speaking countries where a biography has been published (compare Anciaux 1988a, b, c) which contains a detailed record of Sand’s writings. Altogether this lack of interest is regrettable because it doesn’t consider that René Sand is exemplary and in some parts fundamental to the emergence of professional social work in the 1920s in Belgium and Europe. Professional social work was established by a consequent international orientation and an emancipation from neighbouring fields such as social medicine and hygiene. Therefore it is a rewarding task to draw attention to this pioneer of social work and make the public appreciate his work. I want to emphasize explicitly that in this portrait Sand’s achievements concerning social work will be the main focus, even if this is an inevitable reduction of his accomplishments in the field of medicine and social medicine.

Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

René Sand (Belgium), President 1946 – 1953

The extraordinary significance of the life and work of René Sand lies in his central position as a mediator, promoter and coordinator of social work on an increasingly international level during the interwar-period and it can hardly be overestimated.