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IFSW (E
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ISCUSSION
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APER PREPARED BY THE
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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 
Making claims about social work
What is the role of social work? Do we want to ask:
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what it is?
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what we might imagine it could be? or
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what we might realistically hope it might be?Sticking with ‘what is’ may seem complacent and lacking in ambition,although over the last century and a half social work has achieved a lot in establishingits position in many societies. Seeking a realistic and foreseeable role might fail tomeet our ideals for future progress. Promoting the extent of the possibilities mightseem conceited and pretentious.Identifying these alternatives suggests that talking about the role of socialwork involves what sociologists call ‘claims-making’; that is, saying what somethingis, so that our view of it gains acceptance, in preference to someone else’s claim. Ithas the image of homesteaders in the American West or gold-diggers putting upfences round their property. Staking a claim is not final: whether people accept itdepends on the claims that others might make about the same field. That this is soemphasises that trying to define the role of social work sets out on a political processin which we engage with other stakeholders in the hope of coming to an acceptedagreement. Therefore, I propose in this paper that simply trying to define
one
role of 
one
social work is unlikely to be effective; what will be needed is a constantlyredefined strategy for making and pursuing claims about it that represent the bestunderstanding of social workers. However, within that complexity, a relatively smallnumber of principles can describe important aspects of social work’s approach, in itscontribution to the network of professions working in welfare systems.The reason why we want to make claims, or assert a clear role, is to gainlegitimacy. There is a problem with doing so in the twenty-first century. Castells(1997) discusses this in relation to social identities. In the past, dominantorganisations and interests in society had the most influence in establishing and‘legitimising’ identities and roles. They did this as part of the process of maintainingauthority and control in an organised society. The structure of society, traditionally,had a strong influence on our social roles and our identity. Identities were givenbecause of the social roles occupied. For example, a woman who married became awife and later usually a mother, and there were common assumptions about how theyshould behave.
 
The Role of Social Work - 2
In recent years, social relations have changed and identities are no longer sostrongly controlled, but they are patterned by how we understand the whole set of relationships in which people participate. So, to continue with the same example, awoman has a much wider range of choices of gender behaviours than the traditionalwife and mother models. Even if she takes these on, she has opportunities to livethrough a range of different kinds of wife and mother roles. She works these out forherself, participating in debates within society about these roles and social interactionswith people around her. She continuously modifies her identity as she experiences herlife, other people’s reactions to her way of living, and the debates and discussion thatshe hears about. This freedom is constrained by the social and personal need to haveidentities in the first place, because this helps people to deal with a complex world.Applying this to social work, in the past social work only had to persuadepowerful decision-makers to ascribe roles to it, perhaps through legislation or byestablishing respected and powerful agencies to work in. This helped to establish andmaintain through professional organisation a clear and certain role in society. Now, arange of possible roles exists in a complex mixture of related professions andorganisations, all of which have less status, all of whose positions is less secure andopen to question.In recent years, important identities have been established as part of a processof resistance to legitimisation through powerful groups. So women have struggledagainst patriarchy, ethnic groups have tried to establish their cultures in countrieswhere they have migrated, especially where they are in a minority, disabled peoplehave tried to establish their own culture and power, gay and lesbian people come out;there are many examples. Creating a strong identity as part of a resistance can onlytake a group so far. It can become exclusionary, make a ghetto of the ‘different’ or‘difficult’. Therefore, many excluded groups try to create new identities to interrogateand criticise uses of power by dominant groups.Applying this to social work, the groups that social workers helped in rolesdefined by the powerful are being redefined as consumers and service users withinterests, rights and their own identity to establish. Therefore, social work finds itsrole squeezed between the interests of the powerful, whose role definitions are treatedwith less deference than in the past but may still be strongly asserted by politicians orthe media, and the powerless seeking greater influence over their own identity. Thereis a limit to its capacity to define its own role. Social workers can only establish theirrole in interaction with the interests of service users, groups with political and socialinfluence in the definition of professional roles and other related professional groups.This becomes clear when we examine the idea of ‘role’.
What is a ‘role’?
When we talk about a ‘role’, many people think about acting; that is, a personassuming a character or position and presenting it convincingly as part of a fiction. Itcarries implications of performing, following a script and being directed. Somephenomenological sociological theories, such as Goffman’s (1968a) ‘dramaturgical’role theory, start from the assumption that people vary how they behave according tothe situation they are in and their purposes. Goffman writes, for example, about howstigmatised people try to pass as normal (1968b), or how controlling institutions suchas mental hospitals create particular forms of behaviour (1961). Roles mightsometimes be false impressions, given to achieve a social purpose. However, anotherway of looking at it is that we vary the way we behave, depending on our social 
 
The Role of Social Work - 3
behaviour is analysed according to ‘scripts’ and common reactions to situations thatare played out in ‘games’ (Berne, 1961).One implication of the dramatic analogy for considering ‘the role of socialwork’ is the risk that people may see defining a role as merely presentational, a coverfor some reality that we want to disguise. For example, we might claim altruisticmotives for social work, while others commonly say that this is a disguise foroppressive and controlling elements of it. It may be important, therefore, not to makepartial or self-interested claims, but to acknowledge all the implications of what wesay. Otherwise, it will be hard to get people to accept our claims. Another implicationof the dramatic analogy is the importance of the situation we are in: the script, theother actors, the director, the scenery. This emphasises that a role cannot be created byactors alone, they are part of a social environment that controls, constrains and directswhat role they must play. We have to examine the role of social work, therefore,within the pattern of services, professions, knowledge and social behaviour that exists,We cannot define social work with a free hand.In other forms of sociology, ‘role’ is an outgrowth of structural-functionaltheory, and it carries some hidden assumptions. Talking about the ‘role’ of a socialinstitution or of an individual implies a ‘social order’ perspective, that
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there is a structure of institutions that we can identifyand be clear about;
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the structure is relatively stable and ordered;
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the position of institutions or individuals within thestructure can be understood and agreed upon;
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the kind of acts and behaviour associated with thosepositions can be described and agreed upon.So, talking about the role of social work implies that we can describe whatsocial work is and how it fits with other institutions, that its position is clear,continuous and understandable and that we can say what the social work professionand social workers should do.There are two problems with this approach to considering social work:practical and theoretical. The practical problem is that there are many uncertainties,and things change and develop all the time, so we can never be sure about maintaininga continuous definition of social institutions and activities and we end up havingapparently irreconcilable disagreements. The theoretical problem points to theseuncertainties and says that assuming stability and order is clearly an inaccuraterepresentation of our world. There are two kinds of answer to this theoretical problem.Critical theories propose that we should focus on change and conflict; that socialbehaviour and social institutions emerge from conflict, debate and exchange, ratherthan from stability and order. Phenomenological and post-modern theories try toinclude uncertainties and changes into explanations of how social institutions work.They look at historical and social factors that create uncertainty and change. Criticaland post-modern theories are, at least potentially, more creative than social orderperspectives, because they include change, development and the opportunities forcreativity that come out of uncertainty and change. However, social order theoriespropose that the world is actually more or less ordered, that people would like it to bemore rather than less ordered and that disorder leads to social problems such asoppression and poverty. They complain that focusing on change and uncertainty leadsto instability and to taking a relativistic view of social values and behaviour, whichmakes it impossible for people to organise their way of life.
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