Beyond Ethics: Professionalism and Social Belonging in Social Workers’ Moral Deliberations

ABSTRACT

In professional therapeutic settings, care-providers are required to work through dilemmas in light of a professional ethics that demands the suppression of other aspects that may inform their moral experiences. Drawing upon in-depth conversations with Jewish-Israeli female social workers who talked about dilemmas at work, we analyse how they carry out such deliberations. When recounting their dilemmas, social workers relied on shared professional principles for justifying their decisions, but upon closer examination, differences were apparent in their decisions. Whereas religious (observant) social workers tended to follow professional regulations, seculars (non-observant) favoured clients’ interests and took some liberty in bending rules. Accordingly, we argue that while care-providers follow shared professional ethics, they still implicitly adhere to the local moral worlds that inform their moral experiences. We analyse this discrepancy in relation to the interface between a modernist professional ethos and acknowledged and unacknowledged motives that pragmatically participate in professionals’ deliberations.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral experience
• professional ethics
• social work
• secular and religious Jews
• Israel

Acknowledgements

We thank Sherry B. Ortner, Farzad Amoozegar, and the reviewers for their thoughtful comments on this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All names of persons and places are pseudonyms. The research received its ethical clearance from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem IRB.

2 Like ‘emotional discourses’ (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990), ‘ethical discourses’ concern both the pragmatics of communication and how discourses partake in constituting ‘the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972: 49). We ask still, how the objects of which professionals speak are constituted when the relevant discourses are multiple and even contradictory.

3  How social workers choose to recall, think and speak about their experiences is an inherent part of their moral experience (Ochs 2012). This moment has a life of its own and should not be conflated with the events in the social field itself (Ewing 2006; Stromberg 1993).

4 The link between adherence to authority and the Zionist nation-building project is widespread across Jewish-Israeli society. Most notably, it is manifested in the obligatory military service, which relies on an ethos of abiding military authority in order to safeguard the Israeli state (e.g. Levy 2007). This link is often invoked to make moral claims for or against certain members or groups in Israeli society, like arguing that one’s refusal to enlist to the army and to abide military orders is morally illegitimate as it undermines the nation-building project (Weiss 2017).

5 Similar to the EU and the US, in Israel, basic social work training includes a four-year Bachelor of Social Work programme that incorporates theoretical studies and practicum.

6 Individuals’ gendered identity may inform moral experiences (e.g. Gammeltoft 2014; Han 2012). Considering female dominance among Israeli social workers, we focused on female social workers alone. Future research could examine how their moral experiences compare with male social workers.

7 Three other interlocutors used these labels (one described herself as ‘Datiya’ and two as ‘Hilonit’), but expressed explicit reluctance about this dichotomous categorisation.

8 One interlocutor, Gila, did not share any dilemmas. In response to questions on this topic, she shared a story about feeling uncomfortable with a patient’s behaviour but did not elaborate on her deliberations about what to do with this. When explicitly asked about it, she responded, ‘It was very clear what I had to do. There were no deliberations.’ Other than Gila, three interlocutors shared one dilemma, and all other interlocutors shared 2-4 dilemmas.

9 In five cases, interlocutors justified their actions based on a political-ideological viewpoint. In some of these cases, the justification was based on personal prejudice, including being ambivalent toward a certain person.

10 Whether or not Yahel actually avoided her personal bias or just over-corrected it is beyond the scope of our argument, which centres on the way she chose to justify her decision.

11 These findings correspond with studies that indicate a tendency among religious social workers to follow given sets of ethical principles more consistently than secular social workers (Landau 1999; Osmo and Landau 2003: 264–265).

12 Three secular social workers shared moral dilemmas in which reaching similar decisions (and bending of rules) did not mean overt disobedience of regulations. For instance, Ravit, a coordinator for a programme that integrated people coping with psychiatric difficulties in their communities, decided to release one of her clients from a mandatory monthly meeting when noticing it became an unbearable obstacle for her. She argued that while this was against programme guidelines, her superior knew that she did not meet all her clients monthly, and therefore it was not a harsh case of disobedience.

13 While this article focuses on dilemmas concerning relationships between social workers and clients ‘in the field,’ we have noted a similar dynamic in dilemmas recounted concerning instruction roles many of our interviewees fulfilled. These latter dilemmas are beyond the scope of this paper, as they concern a different kind of relationship and raise additional questions about the ethics of teaching.

14 It may very well be that social workers also left this unacknowledged to themselves.

15 Whereas previous anthropological studies of moral experience discussed the notion of purpose as regaining a sense of comfortably dwelling in the world (Zigon 2011a) or in relation to existential commitments one makes as part of a fundamental sense of self (Mattingly 2014), we discuss purpose as concrete (acknowledged and non-acknowledged) pragmatic guidelines orienting subjects’ experience through ethical moments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Shaine Institute, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an award by the Max and Bela Guggenheim Fund.