Situating social workers’ political responsibility

Although professional history and ethical codes clearly assign social workers to a political responsibility, putting it into effective practice appears all but obvious in contemporary contexts for at least two connected reasons.

First, the orientation towards so-called ‘policy practice’ (Gal & Weiss-Gal, 2013) may clash with micro-level routine professional activities. Although the fight for social justice can be significantly embedded in daily work with single users (Dominelli, 2002), social and political change in contemporary complex societies is not realistically achievable through the sum of individual, episodic actions alone; rather it requires some form of upscaling and coordination. To be effective political actors, social workers seem called to develop a multifaceted collective agency linking the professional and the political.

Second, the contexts of professional social work in Europe have changed so much in the last 25 years that social workers’ political acting faces an unprecedented challenge today. Social services organisations have been called to tackle growing, changing and more complex social demands (Taylor-Gooby, 2004) under the pressure of new managerialism (Clarke et al, 2000) and ‘permanent austerity’ (Pierson, 2001). This institutional context has been proven to have a ‘corrosive’ (Healy, 2009) and ‘deforming’ (Rogowski, 2011) effect on professional social work (Kessl, 2009; Stark, 2010; Branco & Amaro, 2011) and has reduced social workers’ possibility to empower users and act on social structures (Rogowski, 2011; Jordan, 2012). Critics have also observed that in this scenario social professions seem to have sought an institutional legitimation by developing ‘both a distancing from “politics” and an emphasis on clinical approaches’ (Ferguson & Lavalette, 2013: 106). Nevertheless, neoliberalism is supposed to have ‘opened up such disillusionment and discontent within the profession that it has created the space for the rebirth of radicalism in social work’ (Lavalette, 2011: 7), mainly possible through a new collective agency of practitioners (Ferguson & Lavalette, 2013: 107).

While literature has robustly focused on how crucial aspects of professional social work have been hit by neoliberal and austerity politics (for example, Jordan & Drakeford, 2012), recently increasing attention has been to paid to the agency side of the coin, namely social workers’ collective action facing this adverse context and affecting the political processes of austerity (so far on this issue: Harlow et al, 2012; Pentaraki, 2013, 2015; Ioakimidis et al, 2014; Martínez-Román & Mateo-Pérez, 2015).