A Concluding Reflection

Linda Davies and Peter Leonard

As we described in the Introduction, the McGill Social Theory Group at the School
of Social Work existed prior to the production of this book and continues to meet.
Participation in this group has become a source of both intellectual exchange and
emotional support for its members as educators, students or practitioners. We see
the McGill group as an opportunity for resistance in an academic context of
increasing managerial and corporate control within Western universities.
Various and long-standing inter-connections amongst and between all the
contributors to this book also proved to be important. Although we each came to
the table with individual preoccupations, we seized the opportunity to spend time
together as a whole group to reflect on some of the key challenges and debates
facing social work educators and practitioners today. These face-to-face meetings
were also valuable in sustaining the intellectual comraderie and perseverance
necessary to realize this book. One of the outcomes of this collective process is that
it allowed us a deeper appreciation of each other's perspectives and experience.
Our discussions enabled us to explore the historical antecedents of the
problems social work is facing today. We see a growing theoretical and practice
literature in social work, which is positioned primarily in one of the two major
traditions of the profession. The most influential and powerful one is perhaps that
which is heir to the modernist tradition of valuing, above all, prescriptions for
practice within a paradigm of science, reason and moral discipline in its pursuit of
professional legitimacy. But there are also indications of renewed demands for
social reform and for structural transformations as a precondition for human
welfare. This emancipatory strand in social work practice and politics tries to
maintain its optimism while at the same time facing the paradox of drawing upon a
radical but often pessimistic deconstruction of the Western emancipatory tradition
itself. This is the wider context within which we see our book situated: a
contribution to continuing efforts at reconstructing critical social work as a
Copyright © 2004. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

reflexive and resistant practice. But to face an uncertain future with some optimism
demands more than the intellectual capacities needed to engage in the reflections
and skeptical questionings that we hope this book raises for the reader as it has
done for the authors. What is needed, we would argue, are exercises of the
imagination.
We have explored in this book the various tensions and oppositions that are
characteristic of social work at this particular historical juncture. This exploration
was pursued not only in an attempt to contribute to social work praxis a process -

Davies, Linda. Social Work in a Corporate Era : Practices of Power and Resistance, edited by Peter Leonard, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ryerson/detail.action?docID=5064767.
Created from ryerson on 2022-11-15 06:04:16.
 A Concluding Reflection 161

o f both reflection and action - but also to argue, in the end, for the greater use of
our imaginations . We cannot expect to sustain any contribution to the positive side
of the modem project of emancipation unless we are able to imagine alternatives to
the existing order of things. We need to imagine the relationships, institutions and
practices of a society that does not yet exist. Such a projection is difficult in a
context in which rapid transformative change is already taking place. It is a change
committed to a planet-wide global capitalist system in the interests of 'human
progress ' . In previous historical periods of revolution and anti-colonial struggle, it
was possible to see the future as a positive state of being already on the horizon.
The old order was dying and the new was yet to be born, Antonio Grarnsci
maintained, optimistically.
For us, such optimism may be more difficult to sustain without leaps of the
imagination. We need to use our imaginations when we attempt to develop new
forms of relationships with others - democratic and dialogical - in our daily
practices as social workers and educators. Such practices pre-figure, in our
imaginations, a society that does not yet exist. This utopian thinking allows us to
see emancipation as a process as well as a goal. Pre-figurative social work and
educational practice might be seen as a growing form of resistance to an
oppressive, scientistic and cynical world. Imagining alternatives becomes a means
by which we can challenge the existing dominant institutions and practices in the
name of an, as yet unnamed, more just, more equal and more inclusive society. As
a contribution to the building of alternative social institutions and relationships, a
revitalized critical social work has its part to play.
Copyright © 2004. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Davies, Linda. Social Work in a Corporate Era : Practices of Power and Resistance, edited by Peter Leonard, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ryerson/detail.action?docID=5064767.
Created from ryerson on 2022-11-15 06:04:16.
Copyright © 2004. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Davies, Linda. Social Work in a Corporate Era : Practices of Power and Resistance, edited by Peter Leonard, Taylor & Francis
Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ryerson/detail.action?docID=5064767.
Created from ryerson on 2022-11-15 06:04:16.