Modernising Social Work and the Ethics of Care

Recent attempts to 'modernise' social work have emphasised the importance of collaboration, partnership, and participation with individual users of services and the wider community. However, technical-rational aspects of managerialism have proved dominant. Managerialist approaches to social service administration and delivery threaten important dimensions of social work; specifically its caring and democratic-transformative dimensions. However, social work theorists have only recently begun to re-engage with ideas of care. We argue that closer attention to feminist debates about the ethics of care can make a significant contribution to not only rehabilitating the ideal of care for social work but also to moving forward the modernisation agenda itself. We develop a feminist critique of managerialism, and argue that the discourse of the ethics of care offers useful ways of framing arguments to counter some damaging impacts of managerial reforms.

The Impact of Western Social Workers in Romania - a Fine Line between Empowerment and Disempowerment

Ideally the social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance their well-being (IFSW 2004). The social work practice, however, often proves to be different. Social workers are always in the danger to make decisions for their clients or define problems according to their own interpretation and world view. In quite a number of cases, the consequence of such a social work practice is that the clients feel disempowered rather than empowered. This dilemma is multiplying when western social workers get involved in developing countries. The potential that intervention, with the intention to empower and liberate the people, turns into disempowerment is tremendously higher because of the differences in tradition, culture and society, on the one side and the power imbalance between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’ on the other side. Especially in developing countries, where the vast majority of people live in poverty, many Western social workers come with a lot of sympathy and the idea to help the poor and to change the world. An example is Romania. After the collapse of communism in 1989, Romania was an economically, politically and socially devastated country. The pictures of the orphanages shocked the western world. As a result many Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), churches and individuals were bringing humanitarian goods to Romania in order to alleviate the misery of the Romanian people and especially the children. Since then, important changes in all areas of life have occurred, mostly with foreign financial aid and support. At the political level, democratic institutions were established, a liberal market economy was launched and laws were adapted to western standards regarding the accession into the European Union and the NATO. The western world has left its marks also at the grassroots level in form of NGOs or social service agencies established through western grants and individuals. Above and beyond, the presence of western goods and investment in Romania is omnipresent. This reflects a newly-gained freedom and prosperity - Romania profits certainly from these changes. But this is only one side of the medal, as the effect of westernisation contradicts with the Romanian reality and overruns many deep-rooted traditions, thus the majority of people. Moreover, only a small percentage of the population has access to this western world. Western concepts, procedures or interpretations are often highly differing from the Romanian tradition, history and culture. Nevertheless, western ideas seem to dominate the transition in many areas of daily life in Romania. A closer look reveals that many changes take place due to pressure of western governments and are conditioned to financial support. The dialectic relationship between the need for foreign aid and the implementation becomes very obvious in Romania and often leads, despite the substantial benefits, to unpredictable and rather negative side-effects, at a political, social, cultural, ecological and/or economic level. This reality is a huge dilemma for all those involved, as there is a fine line between empowering and disempowering action. It is beyond the scope of this journal to discuss the dilemma posed by Western involvement at all levels; therefore this article focuses on the impact of Western social workers in Romania. The first part consists of a short introduction to social work in Romania, followed by the discussion about the dilemma posed by the structure of project of international social work and the organisation of private social service agencies. Thirdly the experiences of Romanian staff with Western social workers are presented and then discussed with regard to turning disempowering tendencies of Western social workers into empowerment.

Social Work, Social Politics and Justice

"The disaster does not primarily lie in people and in the way that they perceive the circumstances, rather in the circumstances that doom people to powerlessness and apathy - circumstances which they could, however, change" (Adorno, 1966, p. 189). When Karl Marx writes to Friedrich Sorge in his letter of the 19.10.1877, regarding his critique of the opinion of his opponents Dühring & Co., that one must deal with "a whole crowd of immature students and pompous doctors who claim to give socialism a 'higher, ideal' turn, that is to say, to replace the materialistic basis (that demands serious, objective study if one wants to operate on it)… with modern mythology by means of their goddesses of justice, freedom, equality and fraternité" (Marx, 1973, p. 303; cf. Schiller, 1993, p. 199 onwards), this thus refers to fundamental problems with the concept of "justice" up until today. As the debate shows, it concerns the contextualization of the term "justice", its meaning in historically concrete as well as socio-political circumstances, and therefore a social analysis that is both representation and critique. Essentially it also concerns the question of the relationship between ideas and reality and the development of standards of historical systematic 'nature' out of social frameworks (see Frey, 1978; Theunissen, 1989).

Equality and Diversity in the Dutch Welfare State

Under the Constitution, the equality principle is very important in the Netherlands. This article argues that there is little evidence for equal citizenship in the Netherlands. There is anti-discrimination legislation in the Netherlands, but it is not very robust. The core argument in this article is that the equality principle must be supplemented by the diversity principle. Diversity is multi-dimensional and can refer to religion, philosophy of life, political persuasion, race (ethnicity), gender, nationality, sexual orientation, age, disability and chronic illness. In this paper multi-culturalism and disability are taken into account and we make a comparison of the social position of disabled people and people from ethnic minorities. Policies on diversity are needed to arrive at diverse citizenship in a varied society. This implies that a distinction has to be made between political citizenship and cultural citizenship. The former has to do with equality, and the latter with diversity.

Marginalized Youth, the ‘Modern’ Professional and the ‘Modern’ Workplace: A note on the Need for a Critical Approach to ‘Modernizing’ Strategies

This paper briefly examines plans to ‘transform’ social work services for socially marginalized children and young people in England. More specifically, it will focus on moves to privatize social work services for children and young people who are in public care, or ‘looked after’. In what follows, the focus will be on how the promotion of ‘social work practices’ (SWPs) – the name of these envisaged new structures – is discursively embedded in the idea the idea that ‘liberation’ and worker fulfillment can only be delivered within a privatized sphere. In this context, it will be maintained, the work of Boltanski and Chiapello may help to illuminate how the government and other primary definers are seeking to ‘win hearts and minds’ for further neoliberal ‘transformations’ within Children’s Services in England.