Social work practice: struggling to be a wise person - 1

SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE: STRUGGLING TO BE A WISE PERSON

Malcolm Payne

Director, Psycho-social and Spiritual Care, St Christopher’s Hospice, London;

Honorary Professor, Kingston University/St George’s University of London

How do you feel about social work in Malta? Is it at one of those great turning points
that you can see now will herald a new situation for your practice, with new
opportunities to contribute to your country and to meet the needs of its people? Or
does it feel like an evolution from the creation that you and your colleagues have been
putting together for some time? Whatever your current feelings I want to argue in this
paper that, first, social work is always a struggle and, second, that part of the struggle
is the struggle to be wise. It is wisdom of a special kind, that social workers
implement a special way, and it is the nature of that wisdom and its use that I want to
explore.

Social work as struggle

The idea of social work as a struggle has important connections.

First, social work clients, the users of social workers’ services, are often from the
most deprived and oppressed parts of our communities. Marxist theories of social
change propose that people from such communities establish a sense of solidarity
within their communities by struggle against economic and social oppression that
comes from the capitalist societies of which they are a part.

These ideas tell us something important and practical about the people that we work
with. First, oppression and struggle against it is inherent in our societies. Some people
are expected to lose out in our economic system. The ways in which they lose vary,
but over the world, the poorest people suffer from the most ill-health and the most
injury and disability and their children have the most difficulties achieving success in
education. The people we work with experience life as a struggle and our task in
working with the social difficulties in their lives means that we join them in and
experience that feeling of struggle with them. We know from daily practice
experience the frustration, the anxiety and the misery of the struggle for the poorest
people in our societies. Second, these ideas tell us that if people can work together,
create solidarity within their communities, then they will be able to achieve more, to
go places that they do not expect. Third, this concept of struggle emphasises the
importance of the place and the people that our clients live among; this is not a
background, it is essential to whom they are – their identity - and to the resources that
they can bring to dealing with the issues that they face in their lives.

This leads me to the next important idea about struggle. Because, as social workers,
we have this daily experience, social work, from its earliest days has aimed to work
on two different aspects of social life:

 It seeks to achieve social improvement, that is, positive social change,

through interpersonal work
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 It seeks to work with the personal consequences of social change

(Payne, 2006).

This particular combination of objectives is unique among professions. Many

professions that work with individuals through interpersonal work aim to benefit that
person, their client, their patient, their pupil, their student. Certainly doctors, teachers,
nurses and psychologists all hope for a better society, and through their professional
organisations and personal commitments, they often work to achieve it. But social
work is unique in making it part of their professional role to achieve positive social
change as part of their interpersonal work. That is why groupwork and community
work is an integral part of social work, and it is also why social workers focus upon
the families and communities with which personal problems are entwined. Again,
many occupations and professions aim to achieve positive social change, including
journalists, policy analysts, civil servants, politicians. But they do not seek to deal
interpersonally with the people affected by the changes they create. Only social
workers try to limit negative personal impacts of social change with the people who
are actually affected by it.

Many people would say that the task social work has always set itself is impossible.
Achieving social change, to them, is something you do at the highest levels of society;
individuals must be left to work out their own responses to change. Interpersonal help,
on the other hand, can only apply to individual change and cannot contribute to wider
social change.

Social work practice, then, always consists of a struggle between these two elements
in our practice: how do we combine achieving social change with interpersonal
change?

Our practice identity in social work’s territory

The struggle between interpersonal and social change perspectives on social work is
not an either-or issue. All social work, every bit of practice, all practice ideas, all
social work agency organisation and all welfare policy includes both interpersonal and
social change. This comes out in the heated debate about what the aims of social work
are. So people say that in all humanity, we have to work with individuals’ needs and
problems first, while other say that if we focus on that, we accept the inequalities and
oppression in society. Instead of feeling that we have to resolve this debate, we need
to accept that all social work contains both in various combinations.

Figure 1 may be found at the end of the bibliography

How can we understand the various combinations of ideas that go to make up social
work? It is useful to see social work as a social territory, in which we operate. Figure
1 sets out this territory as a triangle. Go beyond this territory, and it is increasingly
another profession’s role. But within this territory, social work seeks to do various
combinations of three things. I call these ‘perspectives’ on social work; all social
 Social work practice: struggling to be a wise person - 3

work practice and policy is a rubbing up of three views of social work against each
other. They are:

 Therapeutic views. These see social work as seeking the best possible
well-being for individuals, groups and communities in society, by
promoting and facilitating growth and self-fulfilment (e.g. Goldstein,
1995). A constant spiral of interaction between workers and clients
modifies clients’ ideas and allows workers to influence them; in the
same way, clients affect workers’ understandings of their world as
they gain experience of it. This view of social work says that workers
and clients change society as they influence each other, and as they
take their personal changes into wider society and the organisations
that they are involved with.

This view is basic to many ideas of the nature of social work, but two other views
modify and dispute it

 Transformational views. These views (e.g. Pease and Fook, 1999)

argue that we must transform societies for the benefit of the
poorest and most oppressed. Social work aims to develop
cooperation and mutual support in society so that the most
oppressed and disadvantaged people can gain power over their own
lives. It facilitates this by empowering people to take part in a
process of learning and cooperation, which creates institutions that
all can own and participate in. This view of social work says that
by empowering people to achieve mutual support and cooperation,
we are strengthening society and people at the same time.

 Social order views. These see social work as an aspect of welfare

services to individuals in societies (e.g. Davies, 1994). It meets
individuals’ needs and improves services of which it is a part, so
that social work and the services can operate more effectively.
Social work maintains the social order and social fabric of society,
and maintaining people during any period of difficulties that they
may be experiencing, so that they can recover stability again. This
view sees social work as keeping things going, so that both society
and clients can improve themselves.

While each of these views emphasises one of the three aspects of social work, each of
these aspects of a different way of handling the basic struggle between interpersonal
and social change work.

In our everyday practice, we position ourselves on the territory of social work by

giving ourselves a practice identity. Looking at Figure 1 again, you can see that we
might position ourselves by being entirely therapeutic in our approach, or entirely
transformational or oriented entirely towards social order. Alternatively, the welfare
system we are part of, our agency, or our government policy may emphasise one or
the other. But usually, we incorporate some elements of both.

We can work these out by setting ourselves a test. Figure 2 enables us to rate
ourselves along three scales. Each scale offers the extreme of two of the views; if we
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complete all three scales, we cover all the possibilities. Now, you can transfer your
rating to the territory diagram. You see on the left side of the triangle in Figure 1 a ‘3’
at the therapeutic extreme and at the social order extreme. There is a zero at the
middle point. If you rated yourself at the midpoint between these two extremes, the
zero, make a mark at the zero point in this diagram. Now transfer your other two
ratings in the same way. Then, connect up your marks on each of the three sides. You
will find that you have drawn a triangle within the social work territory. The mid-
point of this triangle is your own centre in the territory of social work.

Figure 2 may be found at the end of the bibliography

You can evaluate where you are, where your agency is, where Malta’s government
policy is in this way, and compare them. You can also rate where you would like to
be: would you like to be doing more therapeutic work? Or more transformational
work? You can compare where you want to be with where you are.

Making a difference – becoming wise

Being clear about your professional identity, your agency’s identity your
government’s policy identity can help you incorporate into practice a range of
understanding about the context and aims of what you are doing. However, there is
also an extensive range of understanding from different kinds of knowledge that have
to be included in any practice situations. A recent analysis (Pawson et al, 2003) refers
to:

 Organisational knowledge, about government and agency organisation and

regulation;

 Practitioner knowledge, drawn from experience of practice, which tends to be

tacit, personal and context-specific;

 User knowledge, drawn from users’ knowledge of their lives, situation and use
of services;

 Research knowledge, drawn from systematic investigation disseminated in

reports; and

 Policy community knowledge, drawn from administrators, official

documentation and analysis of policy research.

All these are mediated through the worker’s situational knowledge, another form of
tacit knowledge, which comes from knowing the agency, the local procedures for
doing things and the kind of situation that the agency commonly deals with. For
example, a woman recently asked me on the day after her husband’s death in our
Hospice about arrangements for the funeral. I was able to reply, knowing that the
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registrar of births, marriages and deaths would be prepared to be flexible about some
of the arrangements. Also, since I knew him, I knew that I would be able to ring up
and make arrangements. I also understood why this was necessary, because I knew
without asking the particular requirements that a Muslim family would have about
burial. Much unspoken knowledge comes from experience of the setting we work in;
it is nevertheless important knowledge, even though it is flexible and unwritten. I
know what the public information is about the Registrar’s opening hours, but I also
know what the flexibilities are.

This sort of knowledge allows me to appear more able than many people would be to
deal with practical and emotional difficulties that arise. Of course, I am not personally
and in general particularly wise. However, in these work situations where I have both
formal academic and professional knowledge, and can interpret it from experience of
similar situations, I appear wise to people who are less involved.

It is important to understand that the social worker becomes a wise person by reason
of the way in which their situational knowledge allows them to incorporate within
themselves, almost to embody, their profession and its knowledge together with their
agency and its knowledge. In turn, this helps in dealing with the struggle between the
interpersonal and the social in our everyday experience. Because all this is
incorporated into us, adapted to deal with our situation, we can also respond to the
complexity and struggle that our clients experience.

Complexity thinking in the social work process

One of the striking features of social work is this complexity of the situations we have
to deal with. Most social workers are familiar with the experience of sitting down with
a client, talking through a myriad of issues in their lives and thinking to themselves:
‘Where on earth do we start?’ Of course that is why social work is important as part of
welfare services because people do not come for help with the matters that they can
easily sort out for themselves; it is the complexity that makes them, or the people who
refer them, feel they need help.

However, from this account of social work, we can separate out the elements of the
complexity. First, we started with the family and community, not as a background but
as integral to what is going on. Second, we have people’s life experience, that has led
them on the pathway to this point (Payne, 1992). Third, they are experiencing a
particular issue that they need to work on. Fourth there is the politically and socially
constructed role of our service, and of the multiprofessional area of provision in
which we sit. Behind this, fifth, there is a bank of policy and practice wisdom on
which we can draw, and is which is part of us as ‘wise people' in this situation.

How do we put all this together? There is an important tradition in social work of
using reflection to make the connections. Reflection has three elements (Payne, 2002):

 Thinking the situation through carefully, drawing in all these elements.

 Thinking how the client’s present behaviour reflects family,

community, life experience and the trajectory of the issue they are
facing. In their present problem and their behaviour, we see their
background and their life reflected.
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 Using a structured way of thinking. Drawing on the work of Argyris

and Schön (1974), we use a cycle of exploring our experience of the
situation, reflecting on it (in the first sense), taking action as a practical
experiment to see what works, evaluating our success and then
changing our practice conventions based on that experience. The
model is ERA – experience – reflection – action (Jaspers, 2003).

More recently, in social work, this model of reflection has been developed to include
critical reflection. There are two meanings of ‘critical’ combined in this concept:

 Critical in the sense of questioning the evidence for the judgements

that we make about a situation and making sure that what people tell us
is consistent with our observation, with what we see. This is a
traditional social work role, in examining the social history and
situation of our clients on behalf of welfare services, courts and
medical and teaching colleagues. Observation is an essential aspect of
social work; it is not just a ‘talking’ practice, but a talking, hearing,
observing practice

 Critical in the sense of using critical social theory, which, based on the
work of the Frankfurt school of social science, which questions how
science and knowledge is organised to support existing power
structures in society (Fook et al, 2006).

In these two meanings of ‘critical’, we can again see the basic struggle of social work
between the interpersonal and the social, since this analysis refers to being critical in
an interpersonal sense and critical of the social order. One of the ways in which social
work deals with the struggle is by a socially critical element together with
interpersonal work, and interpersonal understanding in its critical reflection on policy
and social change.

A further development of critical reflection is complexity thinking, which does not

seek to oversimplify the complexity of the situations that our clients face. One of the
failings of the current trend towards evidence-based practice is the assumption that
forms of research that can manage a limited number of variables can be used to
provide prescriptions for practice. The complexity of clients’ social situations and the
range of possible interpersonal and social responses make this impossible.

An example, drawn from Payne (2006), is of values complexities. Social work codes
of conduct and of ethics tend to offer fairly simple prescriptions for professional
action based on distillations of practice experience. However, these never seem to be
helpful in practice because the situations that we have to resolve and too complex to
be dealt with by simple rules. Instead, it is more appropriate to see that the rules that
our codes of practice offer enable use to identify the areas where there are likely to be
difficulties. Then, we are able to go straight to the issue, which requires consideration
of a number of alternatives, rather than the application of a role.

For example, encouraging self-determination for clients in decision-making that

affects their affairs is an important underlying practice principle for social workers.
However, if we think about this, it is often the case that clients are rule-following,
including following the law and following the complex systems of social
 Social work practice: struggling to be a wise person - 7

understanding and social negotiation that we all follow in society. Alternatively,

again, clients are often interdependent in their social relations, which means that they
have to take into account the views of other people.

A man in the in-patient unit in the Hospice where I work recently wanted to go home
to die, rather than die in the Hospice; this is a common occurrence. However, his wife
was extremely anxious about how she would cope caring for him if there was a
medical emergency at home. The way the social worker dealt with this was to sit with
the man and ask him to list the kinds of things that would go wrong, and how he and
his wife would deal with them at home. Through this process, he came to accept that
he could not go home. Then, in a discussion with both of them, the social worker
talked over various arrangements that would be possible. Hidden behind this
discussion is an understanding of the social rules in the UK about the circumstances in
which people should accept caring responsibilities for a family member. This has been
researched by Finch and Mason (1993), and shows that a number of socially accepted
factors are relevant, such as what the carer would have to cope with (the issue in this
case) and past relationships between them, which affect whether there is a feeling of
duty to the other person.

Conclusion
As social work in Malta takes an important step in its progress, therefore, you can
build on your achievements thus far. It has felt like a struggle to achieve the role in
society that you think social work should occupy. There will be more struggle. But I
have argued that understanding social work’s identity, and being the kind of ‘wise
person’ that people expect in the situations that we deal with every day is an
incorporation of the basic struggle of social work to try to achieve the very difficult
outcome of bringing together the social and the interpersonal. We do it through
critical reflection and complexity thinking. Our struggle in social work is not easy, it
should not be oversimplified, but we can understand and work with it.
 Social work practice: struggling to be a wise person - 8

Bibliography
Argyris, C. and Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: increasing professional
effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Davies, M. (1994). The essential social worker: a guide to positive practice. (3rd
edn)Aldershot: Arena.
Finch, J. and Mason, J. (1993). Negotiating family responsibilities. London:
Routledge.
Fook, J. and Askeland, G.A. (2006). The ‘critical’ in critical reflection. In White, S.,
Fook, J. and Gardener, F. (eds.) (2006). Critical reflection in health and
welfare. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 26-38.
Fook, J., White, S. and Gardner, F. (2006). Critical Reflection: A Review of
Contemporary Literature and Understandings. In White, S., Fook, J. and
Gardner, F. (eds.) (2006). Critical reflection in health and welfare.
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Goldstein, E. (1995). Ego psychology and social work practice. (2nd edn) New York:
Free Press.
Jaspers, M. (2003). Beginning reflective practice. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.
Pawson, R., Boaz, A., Grayson, L., Long, A. and Barnes, C. (2003). Types and
quality of knowledge in social care. London: SCIE.
Payne, M. (1992). Routes to and through clienthood and their implications for
practice. Practice 6(3), 169-80
Payne, M. (2002). Social work theories and reflective practice. In Adams, R.,
Dominelli, L and Payne, M. (eds) Social Work: themes, issues and critical
debates. (2nd edn) Basingstoke: Palgrave, 123-38.
Payne, M. (2006). What is professional social work? (2nd edn) Bristol: Policy Press.
Payne, M., Adams, R. and Dominelli, L. (2002). On being critical in social work. In
Adams, R, Dominelli, L., and Payne, M. (eds). Critical Practice in Social
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Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge.
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Figure 1. Views of social work

Therapeutic
3

3
Social order Transformational

Source: Payne (2006)

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Figure 2 Your social work identity scales

Social order Transformational

3 2 1 0 1 2 3

Social order Therapeutic

3 2 1 0 1 2 3

Therapeutic Transformational

3 2 1 0 1 2 3

Source: Payne, 2006