Social Work's Changing Identities

SOCIAL WORK’S CHANGING IDENTITIES Malcolm Payne Professor 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]

Social work’s identities are changing, because all identities are changing, because our ideas about what identity is are changing. These social changes may be a problem because traditionally we have thought that identity gives us security and certainty. However, the world is changing very fast, and old certainties not longer protect and offer security. My approach, therefore, is that we should welcome and try to understand changing identities because they offer an opportunity to deal with the changing world in a new and different way. Changes in the meaning of identity offer us the challenge to redesign our own identities and help our clients redesign theirs. This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, I discuss how changes in society have created changes in the way in which people understand and deal with identities, calling on some of the current sociological debate. The argument is that globalisation in postindustrial societies is changing the way we understand ourselves and other people both as individuals and collectively. The second section applies some of these ideas to understanding the changing identities of social work. Social work is a shared collective identity, and there are features of it mean that it has been particularly affected by social changes in identity. The third section identifies some developments in thinking about social work. My argument here is that, for reasons that I shall explain, we have to go out actively and develop a new representation of social work’s identity: a ‘redesign’ for social work. I will outline something of what I think the redesign might look would like. However, I’m not going to say too much about that, because you are bringing to your conference during these two days your own experiences of social work and developments in it. In a very real sense, therefore, you are beginning the redesign with the innovations you are making in your work. What I seek to persuade you of is the need to use your creativity in social work to set out explicitly to change social work’s identities, how you see it and how others outside social work see it.

1

Changing identities

What is identity and is it important? There are broadly two different kinds of identity: personal identity and social, collective or group identity. They are connected, because identity is relational, that is, people can only understand an individual or group identity by referring to its relationships with other identities. A collective or group such as the social work profession may have an identity, but it will depend on how other groups construct their identities and whether it is accepted by outsiders as well as insiders. Personal identity There are two aspects of personal identity: one aspect is inside us, a personal consciousness of ourselves as a human being, our ‘self’. The second aspect is how we build this up through relationships with others. Babies start with biological needs and capacities,

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including a capacity to learn. Learning requires continuity, so that people may keep the same picture of the world and of themselves in relationship to it (Archer, 1995). This continuous self is the beginnings of an identity, which develops through more reflexive relationships with the world. Reflexive relationships are a cycle in which we are affected by our perceptions of the world and it changes as we have an impact on things outside ourselves. An important origin of these ideas is George Herbert Mead, who described personal identity as a continuous conversation between our internal conception of ourselves, which he called ‘I’, and our perception of others views of us, which he called ‘me’. Our ‘self’ emerged and continuously adapted itself from this interaction between in the internal and external (Craib, 1992: 84). Social, collective or group identity The second aspect of our personal identity, then, is social, and it is also reflexive (Archer, 1995). It is also, like the self, continuous because networks of relationships form into patterns, and become groups and collectivities; that is, collections of people that have some kind of continuing relationship with each other. These collectivities might include families, local communities, schools, employment, profession or nation. We have a stake in these collectivities and they partly form our view of ourselves by giving opportunities for social activity and by constraining how we take up our social roles. Sometimes, we call on resources from them in dealing with the world. Personal identity represents the collectivity or group and affects the collectivity (Archer, 1995). For example, in one hospital social work team that I was involved with, one social worker left and was replaced by another. The first social worker was efficient at making arrangements for the quick discharge of patients back to their homes and sorting out practical problems. The new social worker was more concerned with helping patients work out their family relationships and personal responses to their illness. She did the practical things as well, but the doctors and nurses gained a rather different view of social work. The new social worker’s professional identity was slightly different, and the identity of social work in that hospital team changed as a result. However, her supervisor did not agree with the approach that she took, because it took up too much time, and the objective of getting patients discharged quickly was not achieved so well. As a result, the collectivity that she represented and that gave her the social role of social worker and resources, in the form of the job, official position and professional support forced her to change to some extent the way she did her social work and give a higher priority to discharge work. Summary – personal and social identity To summarise, personal identity comprising a continuous sense of self interacting with responses to others’ perceptions, leads to two different sorts of social interactions. People become part of collective interests, and also carry out social roles. The roles are moulded by both the personal identity and collective interests (Parker, 2000: 84). People have a stake in their collectivities and their collectivities have a stake in both the personal identity and the social roles that their stakeholders carry out. Castells (1997: 22) summarises it, neatly: ‘…identity is the process by which a social actor recognizes itself and constructs meaning primarily on the basis of a given cultural attribute or set of attributes, to the exclusion of a broader reference to other social structures.’ This quotation emphasises two further points. The first is that identity is about the meanings that people accord to themselves and their social relations. The second emphasises that in selecting some cultural or social interests for the most important groups that they identify with, they will, of course, exclude other alternative reference points and interests. For example, social workers who focus strongly on professional identity may exclude other professions’ views or client perspectives

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on their professional actions. They may say, or act as though, that doctors or lawyers do not understand what social work is all about, or that clients should accept the value of their professional knowledge and skill, and not question too much. Problems with the idea of identity There are at least three problems with this account of personal identity. First, there is a dispute about whether this single, continuous self exists (Hollinger, 1994). Some psychologists and postmodern thinkers propose that the self is variable, unfixed and has many different characteristics and possibilities within it. These possibilities interact with each other, and come out in different ways, depending on what happens to the person. In that way, our identity is changeable. The problem is how to regard this. Modernist thinkers tend to argue that without the security of a clear identity our character becomes fragmented, confused and disordered. Postmodernist writers dwell on the possibilities for change, both for individuals and groups, deriving from multiple elements in personal identity. We can see this at work by looking at the second difficulty. Legitimising identity The second problem is that because of changes in society, the process by which identities, particularly social identities, are created has been changing in recent years. In the past, dominant organisations and interests in society had the most influence in establishing identities; Castells (1997: 8) calls this legitimising identity. They did this as part of the process of maintaining authority and control in an organised society. The structure of society, traditionally, had a strong influence on our social roles and our identity. Identities were given or, the sociological term, ascribed, because of the social roles occupied. A woman who married became a wife and later usually a mother, and there were common assumptions about how they should behave. In recent years, social relations have changed and identities are no longer so strongly controlled and ascribed, but they are patterned by how we understand the whole set of relationships in which people participate. So, to continue with the same example, a woman has a much wider range of choices of gender behaviours than the traditional wife and mother models. Even if she takes these on, she has opportunities to live through a range of different kinds of wife and mother roles. She works these out for herself, participating in debates within society about these roles and social interactions with people around her. These debates and interactions form a discourse, in which she continuously modifies her identity as she experiences her life, other people’s reactions to her way of living, and the debates and discussion that she hears about. This freedom is constrained by the requirement to have identities in the first place, because this helps people to deal with a complex world (Hovland, 1996). Resistance identity However, in recent years, important identities have been established as part of a process of resistance to legitimising identities: to Castells (1997: 8), resistance identities. So women have struggled against patriarchy, ethnic groups have tried to establish their cultures in countries where there has been immigration, especially where they are in a minority, disabled people have tried to establish their own culture and power, gay and lesbian people come out; there are many examples. In all these cases, creating a distinctive identity is part of the process of resisting control and domination by powerful groups.

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Project identity and identity politics Creating a strong identity as part of a resistance can only take a group so far. It can become exclusionary. Therefore, the next step is to try to incorporate these new resistance identities into projects for social change. These are project identities: created to achieve social purposes (Castells, 1997: 8; Turner, 1996: 7). In doing this, groups are trying to exercise power through these new identities to interrogate and criticise uses of power by dominant groups. Because these activities involve the use of power, they have a political content, and these debates have become known as ‘identity politics’, through which groups excluded from mainstream political action try to have an impact on society by constructing an identity around which their political activism is established. One of the important things about identity politics is that the personal identity of the people involved is closely associated with their political actions; as feminist writers would say ‘the personal is political’. Moreover, these identities are ‘natural’, in the sense that they draw on personal characteristics of the people involved, their female gender, their ethnic state, the disabled body. In this, they contrast with the rather artificial character of many of the legitimising identities, which are constructed, ideas such as identities that come from nationhood, from language and from culture, or identity associated with social groups (Wagner, 1996). Identity and globalisation The third problem with the account of identity that I have been describing is that social changes arising from globalisation in the past twenty years has changed our view of the world; it makes the world seem smaller. It puts us all in touch with a myriad of different cultures and lifestyles and it makes some cultures seem dominant, with everything else less important. Through the internet, we can find all sorts of information, but much of it comes from the USA and is provided in (American) English. Local or national economies seem to be buffeted by worldwide changes, so our countries join ‘regional’ economic groupings like the European Union or worldwide groupings like the World Trade Organisation. Being involved in bodies such as these, we seem to lose the freedom to make decisions on our own, based on our own information and on our own culture. Many people cannot identify with these organisations, or with their decisions, or, perhaps, with their aims or methods. A useful definition of globalisation refers to ‘…the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.’ (Robertson, 1992: 8). Globalisation changes the relationships between time and space. Through television and the internet, events on the other side of the world are as close to people as what happens in the next street. This is very important because place-identity is a crucial part of sustaining personal identity. Place gives ‘secure moorings in a shifting world’ (Harvey, 1990: 302). A distinctive organisation of space creates a framework within which identities gain security. A map or aerial view of a town will show railway lines, major roads or waterways, which divide up the town and create different experiences in different communities for people who live in different parts of the town. However, people who have quicker and more frequent contacts with people on the other side of the world than in their own town have an identity that is less clear, both to others and to themselves. In a globalised world, people and social experiences lose their personalised characteristics because people have ‘contacts’ rather than relationships with each other and share some personal experiences, but generally not the kind of personal experiences that form identities. Many internet contacts, for example, are work contacts with people who are rarely, if at all, met, and so may not form our central identity. How, then, can people build and maintain an identity in these kinds of relationships. To understand this, we can compare many relationships with manufactured products. Farmers

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grow the plants or care for the animals that provide their food. They can see the connection between the plant and the food or the animal and the joint. However, city-dwellers buy most of their food in packaged or manufactured form. They cannot transform its identity by putting something of themselves into it. In markets, relationships are not personal and are not reflexive. Therefore, products have to be given something to make it special. This may be the sense that it is traditional, or trendy or good value. However, this is not necessarily an identifiable characteristic, it is rather a surface image that has been created. In markets, image establishes identity (Harvey, 1990: 288). As personal relationships become more generalised and more distant, people have come to rely on image rather than on personal identity. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, wears informal clothes, speaks informally and carries his guitar in part to give us an image that is different from his predecessor who wore formal suits and seemed rather pompous and boring. Images, however, can be very ephemeral, they change quickly, they are inconstant, unlike identities. In recent years, people have got used to dealing in images, rather than identities. All these changes mean that identities are less clear and continuous, more flickering images on the screen. They no longer offer the certainty and security of the traditional, socially developed forms of personal identity interacting with group and social identities, ascribed by established social roles and dominant, controlling social structures in societies. Social identities have become less substantial and clear as a cultural basis for personal identity, groups have resisted traditional ascription of identity as a form of social control and have they have begun projects to create alternative forms of identity. Identities have become attenuated, fragmented and less at the centre of people’s lives.

2 Changing identities in social work What, then, does this mean for social work? The first question is whether these issues are relevant to social work at all. Insecurity and fragmentation of identity has always been an issue for social work and similar occupations. In many countries, social work has not become established strongly as an accepted profession, there have been many debates about its nature, and many waves of change in its character. Moreover, social work’s clients have always been marginalised, battered by events and insecure in the hold on mental health and social competence. However, the social changes affecting the creation of identity are still important and indeed have particular implications for social work. Social work as insecure and ineffectual The insecure history of social work as a profession places it in a special position, and so does the position of its clients. The need for personal identity is a crucial matter in people’s social surroundings. However, this is heightened by the increasing social need in a fragmented society to establish a strong personal identity. So pressure is applied to complete a personal sense of oneself. Giddens (1990) argues that where people cannot create a strong, shared social identity in postmodern society they become seriously isolated; so they search for identity. There is such a wide range of social experience from many different cultures to choose from that people strive for greater individuality, greater intimacy and understanding in relationships. For example, previously, people accepted the official message that adoption was the creation of a complete, separate new identity. Now, many adoptees see this as a dislocation in her identity and needs to repair it. Social work is often presented in this way makes a point about social work itself. It is presented as pursuing its own official aims, without responding to the client, who invites engagement, but does not achieve it. Why is social work seen in this ineffectual, disengaged way, when it is supposed to be a personal service profession?

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Resistance, oppression and reservation The answer to this question lies in the shift way from and resistance to the ascription of identities by dominant groups in society. We sometimes think that social work is not a very powerful profession, but it is, at least in most European countries an established part of the welfare state, with most social workers being employed as part of the state apparatus. Moreover, social work is expressly about social control on behalf of the powerful. Therefore, the more marginalised people are, the more likely they are to be distanced from social work and resistant to participation. In the film, not only the social worker, but also the applicant creates the distance. The applicant is from an ethnic minority, applying to the state for a favour that may not be granted. Both of them recognise this, and the distance arises from it. The changes in society mean that now traditional roles and prescriptions for behaviour are less powerful, and people have to make their own choices. The young woman must decide whether she seeks to complete her identity; previously the law would have denied her this choice. However, at the same time expert knowledge from someone in a position of authority is less acceptable as a form of guidance. If the social worker tried to persuade her that she would be unwise to go on, both know that this would be unacceptable, and so the interaction between them is uneasy; both the identity of the social worker and the engagement of both is reserved. Engaging with resistance and project identities It seems, then, that we need a changed social work that responds to some of these trends of resistance and fragmentation in society. We have to work out how to engage with resistance and project identities in a new way. An identity as a profession, as a part of the state, as part of an organised agency no longer makes contact with people in isolated and fragmented social relations and marginalized and excluded groups. Resistance to dominant definitions of identity is an important feature of how people react to present cultural experiences, but it is difficult to participate in such resistance as part of the official provision of the welfare state. This was, of course, always so, as enthusiasts for community work and the radical social work of the 1970s discovered. We have become the enemy, not the ally. What within social work’s identity, therefore, offers an alternative approach? Is the answer to move towards the therapeutic social work of some of the elite American agencies, or the more authoritarian social and family structures of eastern cultures? How would we make such moves, in any case, since in Europe, we are an integral part of the welfare state, and this brings many benefits, both for social workers and for their clients? A social construction view of social work To answer these questions, we can apply some social construction ideas to understanding how social work creates its identity and might change it. There are three major points, which need to be examined in greater detail:
Social work is not a given and unchanging construction, it constantly shifts its nature in response to social changes and changes in related professions.
Social work is not one thing, but a discourse, that is, a collection of practices and ideas that is constantly in debate.
The debates about social work do not just take place in one social institution, but in many, and they interact. Social work’s construction in networks Rather than see social work as having an essence, an identity that defines its basic core and creates a filed of activity, it is helpful to see social work as part of a range of networks. Six networks have an impact on how we see social work (Payne, 2002):

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Demographic factors affecting its clientele. Social work changes, as its clientele alters. Clearly, we focus more on children when the number of children rise, on elders when the proportion of elderly people in the population rises, on disability when medicine preserves life better, but in impaired bodies or when new conditions such as HIV-AIDS emerge.
Policy and law. In countries such as ours, where government is an important player in social provision, service development and social work’s roles change and progress, as policy and legal changes are made.
Education, training, knowledge and research. Social work’s character changes as education and training for it develop and as views of the organisation of knowledge and research change. For example, more competence-based qualifications using evidence-based practice imply a more technical and less discretionary form of practice.
Professional organisation. How the occupational group is organised affects its identity. For example, the character of a group with organised trade unionism would be different from that of a group where trade union and professional functions are divided.
Values and political aims. The values represented in a profession have important consequences for its. For example, individualistic values would produce a different form of practice from social justice values.
Organisational structure and strategy. The structure of agencies, large and comprehensive or small and specialised for example, have consequences for the service. Obviously, all these different factors interact with each other, but an analysis of these factors in relation to a particular situation helpfully identifies the major factors affecting a profession at present. In Britain, for example, almost no changes have taken place in the structure of education or of agencies for many years, but recently shifts towards alliances between social care for adults and health care and between child care and education services are constructing different forms and specialisms of social work. These factors also interact therefore with the impact of similar factors in related professions. For example, social values may come to see an issue as a nursing or legal issue, rather than as a social problem, and this will shift the relative involvement and influence of the occupational groups involved. Social work’s discourse Rather than try to see social work as one thing, it is more reasonably represented as constantly reconstructing itself by rebalancing three elements within its purposes:
Maintaining social order and providing services within the welfare state;
Helping people attain personal fulfilment and power over their lives; and
Stimulating social change (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 or the other: local government social services give priority to providing and improving services, while offering a certain amount of empowerment and personal growth to clients, and with an eye to supporting changes in provision in the long-term. A women’s counselling service, might mainly aim for empowering developments in clients’ control of their lives. A community work organisation might mainly aim to change housing policy. However, in carrying out their function, they inevitably include elements of the others. A classic case in Britain is the child Poverty Action Group, whose main purpose is campaigning for changes in social security policy which will relieve child poverty, but it also provides welfare rights advice drawing on its legal expertise and using the experience of its service in its campaigning.

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These different balances of aim operate at different levels. For example, at the national or regional level, services may focus on one rather than another objective; particular agencies within a national system may have a particular priority, and within an agency, every social work act, while containing elements of all three, will lean towards a particular priority. For example, if a hospital social worker works with a mentally ill woman to help her reestablish her life in the community, her main professional purpose may be empowering and strengthening the woman’s capacities for independent living. In different arenas, her agency may primarily see this as delivering a service and government policy may be that, delivered widely, this service may 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 social worker, even though they are not at the forefront of her mind. By thinking about social work in this way, we are recognising the complexity of what it contains, trying to use its alternatives, but also creating a clear conception and analysis by which we can control and explain what we are doing. This account of a constantly changing social work, rather than a defined and single social work, proposes an identity that is complex. However, represents what goes on as we act and think in practice more accurately than trying to designate an identity for social work. Instead of saying: ‘we have defined social work as…’ we are saying: ‘by our actions, social work is becoming like this…’. Arenas for discourse Social work is, thus, formed in complex networks of interaction, balancing different perspectives on its purposes. Although this analysis represents the complexity and fragmentation of identity in our globalised world, it does not help us to see how people take action to have an impact in the formation of identity. To examine this, the analysis needs to pick up, from the preceding discussion the third aspect of social work’s identity: that it is formed by reflexive cycles of discourse in different arenas, which interact with one another:
A political-social-ideological cycle;
An agency-professional cycle; and
A client-worker-agency cycle. These are reflexive cycles, because they involve stakeholders in a constant interaction influencing each other, they are discourses because they involve both debate and actions, which also affect each other, and they are arenas, because they represent centres of action and debate, rather than mutually exclusive cycles. They overlap: for example, the agency provides the context for and directs clients’ and workers’ interactions, but agencies are also crucial in professional and academic debate. The form a larger cycle of mutual influence, which may work in different directions. Services may change because clients make demands and respond in new ways, because professionals or agencies decide on new forms of practice or organisation, or because public opinion or political impetus creates changes. For example, developments in project identity may affect how politicians and public view the role of social services. The disability movement has campaigned successfully in Britain for a legal change giving disabled people control of the individual budgets for their personal help. This forces a change on agencies and professionals. The disability movement has also influenced how professionals think about disability, giving greater importance to a social model, and resistance identity stimulated by the disability movement have caused disabled people to demand to be treated differently by social workers. The impact of each of these participations in the discourse has influenced the others. The legal change works better where professionals are committed and where clients demand the service to be delivered in this particular way.

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Summary – the impact of changing identity in social work In summary, recent changes in how identities are formed have had an impact on the lives of social workers’ clients, and consequently on social work. Moreover, it has become necessary to recognise the complexity of the discourse that forms social work: the networks within which it is formed, the shifting balance between different objectives and the mutual influence of the arenas in which our daily actions and wider debates have an impact on the identity of social work.

3

Redesigning Social Work

That is not all. Section 2 discussed an analysis of the complex formation of identity and how people participate as stakeholders in that formation. However, in the present-day world, identity is no longer a given, but needs to be taken. Unless social work accepts the legitimising identity constructed by dominant forces in society, it must develop its own resistance identity and project identity. There is considerable evidence (Hindmarsh, 1992) that social workers come into this work as part of resistance, to seek change in the status quo. Unlike some other professions, social work practice is inherently about change, at both individual and collective levels. To find social work’s project identity, we need to construct a new practice to meet this change objective. The analysis so far suggests that we are doing this all the time, as we practice, think and debate about our work. However, much of our talk, inevitably, is concerned with description; we say: ‘this is what we do…this is what works.’ My purpose in Part 3 is to place much of the work that seems to be going on into a structure of analysis which reflects social work’s own identities and begins to build upon these. Constructing a redesigned social work Examining table 1, therefore, the left-hand column starts with the three purposes that, in Part 2, I suggested are balanced within all social work, all social work agencies and all acts of social work. In the second column, I have set out five perspectives on practice that inform all social work. These move from activities that emphasise service delivery, through those that emphasise empowerment and personal fulfilment to those that emphasise transformation; none of these activities exclude any those purposes - it is a question of emphasis. The third column indicates something of the social work approach, which would follow from taking up this perspective. The fourth column indicates some examples of the kind of service that social work would seek 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 social workers do. The welfare rights perspective emphasises that social work sees welfare benefits and services as a right, as an essential part of a civilised society, and sees it as a professional responsibility to pursue those rights on behalf of clients. Making provision for this is integral to social work services, rather than a desirable extra, and services are planned to include this element of seeking people’s rights. Most other personal services, such as counselling, medicine, nursing or psychology focus on the practitioner’s own treatment or related services. If they want to 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 welfare rights 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 practical provision that concentrates on rights rather than an indistinct form of personal help, it encourages people to make contact with social work, when they might otherwise be cautious about doing so. It means that, in a fragmented and isolating society, people can keep their distance if they want to, but still engage in valid social work. National systems that integrate social security

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payments into social welfare provision and provide social work alongside it implement this perpsective directly. Once people gain confidence in the social worker, they may be prepared to call for more complex personal services. Second, the rights perspective that social work takes is crucial. At a time when political movements favour liberal individualism, and suggest that people should look after themselves, insure themselves for risks, take responsibility for their families and communities, social work emphasises that this does not work for many. People with inherited medical conditions or experiencing serious social deprivation cannot insure themselves, and do not have the resources to care for themselves. Social work’s emphasis on welfare rights is an integral aspect of our approach to social issues. People’s rights to a reasonable standard of welfare are not an option, as many right-wing politicians would like to suggest they are an essential to any civilised society. Third, therefore, meeting welfare rights needs efficiently is a fundamental service in any civilised country and it is part of the social work contribution to society. An example that demonstrates this is disaster aid, or in very poor underdeveloped countries, the acknowledgement that dealing with basic poverty, starvation and helplessness is an essential first step in social development. This is easy to forget in European countries with a wellestablished infrastructure, where social security and relief of poverty or homelessness is very much a residual part of the state’s services, since most people are provided for by employment in an active economy. It may be residual most of the time, but it is nevertheless basic and remains so. For example, Britain experienced a great deal of flooding last winter, and from time to time some disaster occurs such as an aeroplane crash. People in Western societies expect that the services can turn out and manage the personal consequences of these events for their citizens. Such times make clear that this role is basic to civilisation, even though it is fortunately rare to have to bring it into play in advanced economies. The user participation perspective forms part of the identity of social work because its actions are holistic, when we compare them with other professions. Other professions still primarily focus on their expert role, providing information or expert interventions. As people have become less deferential to professionals over the last few decades, they have become more open and democratic. This perspective speaks directly to the sort of identity issues discussed in this paper. People in societies where they are isolated, excluded and part of fragmented social relations need to be integrated as stakeholders within the practice of help that is offered to them. Identity processes in present-day society do not allow social workers to prescribe their clients’ actions and objectives. However, this is a participation approach because social worker 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 to the failure of social work. The social model of explanation distinctively signifies social work. Even if they 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’, therapeutic or educational model of what they are doing. Social work typically goes out of its way to invest in social networks and listen to explanations of the problems that we deal with which go beyond the scientific into the interpersonal and social realms of explanation. This is a crucial contribution that social work makes to reintegrating fragmented social relations. A definition of the client’s problem that says: ‘You are an offender,’ 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 ‘We are overcoming social factors that prevent you from leading a satisfactory life…’ is a response to excluding and fragmenting social relations. The family and community involvement perspective is integral to social work in a way that is not true of related professions. Most professions, such as medicine, nursing or

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psychology, focus on a selected patient or client and see their primary work as being for and about that patient. They take into account the impact of family or community limitations on their work and they may keep relatives informed, but they do not see it as their primary purpose to integrate individuals with their family and community networks. Other professions have a particular function, such as education or accountancy. In every case, other professionals would turn to social work to have an assessment done to inform their work about family and community matters relevant to their focus. They would also turn to social workers to intervene in family and community situations that affected their patients or pupils. The nearest similar role is priests and other religion and spiritual professionals. To go further, social work calls on links with other professionals as an essential part of its work. Again, by taking this perspective, social work seeks to extend and build links within social networks against the fragmenting tendencies of present-day societies. Finally, social justice is integral to social work. One outcome of this focus is the strong leadership that social work has provided for focusing on anti-discriminatory practice. This links back to the concern with social models of explanation, family and community as well as individual outcomes, and the welfare rights perspective. Social work, with these perspectives integral to its work, inevitably responds to marked injustices of this kind with general social responses as well as individualised help and service provision. To be concerned about justice is to be concerned with the impact of clients and services on others, and not to focus on the needs of our clients and our service alone. Thus, a social work service for people with severe behaviour disorders deals with the consequences for the victims of their violence, or for their families of their destructive behaviour. Other services focus mainly on the patient or their own skills and responsibilities.

Conclusion Much of what is discussed here is what social work would already aspire to, at its best. It is a resistance to many of the aspects of present-day society that are most damaging to the people we work with. If that is so, why is our identity so much under attack? Why are we so uncertain about what we offer to the societies in which we work? The answer to this issue derives from the nature of identity in present-day societies: it does not just describe social work, it gives meaning to it. Legitimising identity, from dominant groups and social institutions, no longer gives social work a clear identity, because their legitimation is often contested. It is particularly contested by the powerless groups that are the focus of social work, as they construct new identities around resisting oppressive identities that the powerful want to ascribe to them. Powerless groups have begun to incorporate resistance identities into new forms of identity, which develop social structures to recognise and incorporate their participation within them. Excluded groups no longer accept the oppression of identities created by the powerful; they seek the construction and acceptance of their own identities. Social work is complex and incorporates many social groups and collectivities that are part of it and that have stakes in it. A social construction approach to understanding social work emphasises analysing the many factors in its discourse. Discourse always includes both action and debate. In present-day society, change comes from action, but debate is required as part of the action to define and identify what the importance and social meaning to us and to others. To change the discourse of social work, social workers must act, and they must give meaning to their actions. This means working together on their project identity. It is not enough to understand how society is complex and changing. The changes that social workers are making must be grasped. Their project must be to put them into a new design for social work. Social work must be actively redesigned, rather than be carried along with social change. Social work

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conferences offer the opportunity to review and develop identity from action, as participants discuss, discover and renew their work with colleagues. That is why it is not enough to resist the pressures towards fragmentation and uncertainty in present-day societies, and to help our clients resist them. It is not enough to understand the complexity of our lives, of their lives and the many factors that construct our identities and theirs. Our identity must include a project. A project requires us not just to understand how identities are changing, not just to act, not just to practice well and improve practice, but to give new meaning to social work. Social work as we know it can be, should be and will be, if we seize the opportunity for thought, for action and for a redesigned identity.

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Table 1 Redesigning social work Aim Service provision

Social work perspective Welfare rights

User participation

Social model Empowerment Family and community involvement

Social justice

Transformation

The social work approach

Service consequences

Benefits and services are a right for clients, which should be actively pursued on their behalf Clients to participate and if possible direct the services they receive and the way they receive them Medical, behavioural or criminal ‘problems’ may produce problems in people’s lives, or may be influenced by social experiences People live in families and communities, whose interests in and concerns for particular individuals and need to be taken into account Many people have ‘problems’ or are ‘difficult’ because of the social divisions and social structures that have constructed their life experience

Welfare rights provision Effective planning for services Choices offered, where possible Wishes and values respected Concern for social influences Respond to social impact of ‘problems’

Concern for impact on family and community Concern for family and community influences Avoid labelling Equality in service provision Anti-oppressive practice Empowerment compensation for lack of life opportunities

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