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 S
OCIAL
W
ORK
’
S
C
HANGING
I
DENTITIES
 
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:m.payne@mmu.ac.uk  
Social work’s identities are changing, because all identities are changing, because ourideas about what identity is are changing. These social changes may be a problem becausetraditionally we have thought that identity gives us security and certainty. However, theworld is changing very fast, and old certainties not longer protect and offer security. Myapproach, therefore, is that we should welcome and try to understand changing identitiesbecause 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 andhelp our clients redesign theirs.This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, I discuss how changes insociety 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 post-industrial societies is changing the way we understand ourselves and other people both asindividuals and collectively.The second section applies some of these ideas to understanding the changingidentities 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. Myargument here is that, for reasons that I shall explain, we have to go out actively and developa new representation of social work’s identity: a ‘redesign’ for social work. I will outlinesomething of what I think the redesign might look would like. However, I’m not going to saytoo much about that, because you are bringing to your conference during these two days yourown experiences of social work and developments in it. In a very real sense, therefore, youare beginning the redesign with the innovations you are making in your work. What I seek topersuade you of is the need to use your creativity in social work to set out explicitly to changesocial 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, becauseidentity is relational, that is, people can only understand an individual or group identity byreferring to its relationships with other identities. A collective or group such as the socialwork profession may have an identity, but it will depend on how other groups construct theiridentities 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 personalconsciousness of ourselves as a human being, our ‘self’. The second aspect is how we buildthis up through relationships with others. Babies start with biological needs and capacities,
 
Social Work’s Changing Identities - 2
including a capacity to learn. Learning requires continuity, so that people may keep the samepicture of the world and of themselves in relationship to it (Archer, 1995).This continuous self is the beginnings of an identity, which develops through morereflexive relationships with the world. Reflexive relationships are a cycle in which we areaffected by our perceptions of the world and it changes as we have an impact on thingsoutside ourselves. An important origin of these ideas is George Herbert Mead, who describedpersonal 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 andexternal (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 forminto patterns, and become groups and collectivities; that is, collections of people that havesome kind of continuing relationship with each other. These collectivities might includefamilies, local communities, schools, employment, profession or nation. We have a stake inthese collectivities and they partly form our view of ourselves by giving opportunities forsocial activity and by constraining how we take up our social roles. Sometimes, we call onresources from them in dealing with the world. Personal identity represents the collectivity orgroup and affects the collectivity (Archer, 1995).For example, in one hospital social work team that I was involved with, one socialworker left and was replaced by another. The first social worker was efficient at makingarrangements for the quick discharge of patients back to their homes and sorting out practicalproblems. The new social worker was more concerned with helping patients work out theirfamily relationships and personal responses to their illness. She did the practical things aswell, but the doctors and nurses gained a rather different view of social work. The new socialworker’s professional identity was slightly different, and the identity of social work in thathospital team changed as a result. However, her supervisor did not agree with the approachthat she took, because it took up too much time, and the objective of getting patientsdischarged quickly was not achieved so well. As a result, the collectivity that she representedand that gave her the social role of social worker and resources, in the form of the job, officialposition and professional support forced her to change to some extent the way she did hersocial work and give a higher priority to discharge work.
Summary – personal and social identity
To summarise, personal identity comprising a continuous sense of self interactingwith 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 aremoulded by both the personal identity and collective interests (Parker, 2000: 84). People havea stake in their collectivities and their collectivities have a stake in both the personal identityand 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 constructsmeaning primarily on the basis of a given cultural attribute or set of attributes, to theexclusion of a broader reference to other social structures.’ This quotation emphasises twofurther points. The first is that identity is about the meanings that people accord to themselvesand their social relations. The second emphasises that in selecting some cultural or socialinterests for the most important groups that they identify with, they will, of course, excludeother alternative reference points and interests. For example, social workers who focusstrongly on professional identity may exclude other professions’ views or client perspectives
 
Social Work’s Changing Identities - 3
on their professional actions. They may say, or act as though, that doctors or lawyers do notunderstand what social work is all about, or that clients should accept the value of theirprofessional 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 isa dispute about whether this single, continuous self exists (Hollinger, 1994). Somepsychologists and postmodern thinkers propose that the self is variable, unfixed and has manydifferent 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, ouridentity is changeable. The problem is how to regard this. Modernist thinkers tend to arguethat without the security of a clear identity our character becomes fragmented, confused anddisordered. Postmodernist writers dwell on the possibilities for change, both for individualsand groups, deriving from multiple elements in personal identity. We can see this at work bylooking at the second difficulty.
 Legitimising identity
The second problem is that because of changes in society, the process by whichidentities, particularly social identities, are created has been changing in recent years. In thepast, dominant organisations and interests in society had the most influence in establishingidentities; Castells (1997: 8) calls this
legitimising identity
. They did this as part of theprocess 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 givenor, the sociological term, ascribed, because of the social roles occupied. A woman whomarried became a wife and later usually a mother, and there were common assumptions abouthow they should behave.In recent years, social relations have changed and identities are no longer so stronglycontrolled 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 womanhas a much wider range of choices of gender behaviours than the traditional wife and mothermodels. Even if she takes these on, she has opportunities to live through a range of differentkinds of wife and mother roles. She works these out for herself, participating in debateswithin society about these roles and social interactions with people around her. These debatesand interactions form a discourse, in which she continuously modifies her identity as sheexperiences her life, other people’s reactions to her way of living, and the debates anddiscussion that she hears about. This freedom is constrained by the requirement to haveidentities 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 aprocess of resistance to legitimising identities: to Castells (1997: 8),
resistance identities
. Sowomen have struggled against patriarchy, ethnic groups have tried to establish their culturesin 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 peoplecome 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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