Introduction

When we think and talk about ‘social work’, we mostly focus on the first word. We read, discuss and write about the social problems and social issues addressed by social work or the social processes that are the focus of social work's intervention in people's lives and the vehicle through which that intervention takes place. In mainstream accounts of the development of social work after the Second World War, it was depicted as a demonstration of social responsibility: ‘As the accepted areas of social obligation widened, as injustice became less tolerable, new services were separately organised around individual need’ (Titmuss 1963: 21). In such accounts, social work, as part of the wider social services, was also extolled as the material expression of the social rights of citizenship:

However, despite its embeddedness in many and various aspects of ‘the social’, social work is also a job. As a job it involves work and the focus of this chapter is on how the work of social work has been and can be understood from a critical perspective.

The conceptualisation of social work as work was developed in response to its organisational location in Social Services Departments (SSDs) and this is, therefore, the starting point in what follows. The radical social work movement that emerged in the context of SSDs is then considered, followed by its articulation of an industrial labour process perspective in relation to social work, taken from the work of Braverman. Shortcomings in this perspective's ability to account for the nature of the social work labour process in this period, as revealed by empirical studies, are explored and Derber's analysis of professional labour processes is used to address the shortcomings. Having established an analytical framework, key developments in the social work labour process following the advent of neoliberalism are reviewed.