Editorial

The previous issue of Nordic Social Work Research offered in depth knowledge of how social work practice is conducted in everyday situations within various institutional settings, and in particular, how relations are shaped, transformed and may be improved. This issue approaches such core aspects of social work practice from a slightly different angle by offering important knowledge about the institutional, administrative and organisational contexts of social work, as well as the consequences they may have for vulnerable groups in society and social work practice.

Social work has historically been embedded in processes of ‘modernisation’, an increasing awareness of ‘social issues’, and attempts to ensure social stability and order. Through political advocacy and amelioration of problematic conditions and forms of social suffering, social work was from the beginning deeply intertwined in processes of social transformation (Philp 1979). It gradually became associated with ideals of professionalisation through the generation and use of scientific knowledge, and the rational organisation of forms of investigation and intervention (Kirk and Reid 2002). In that way, the shaping of forms of social work has from early on been related to questions concerning solidarity and responses to social conflicts and problems as well as processes of differentiation, organisation, rationalisation and specialisation by division of work. This embeddedness in society, combined with the idea of improving living conditions and possibilities for individuals, constituted what Lorenz has described as a ‘tension between the profession’s necessity to engage with a given historical, social and political reality and its desire, necessary also for its survival as a recognisable profession, to distance itself from these structural contexts and to establish fields and methods of relatively autonomous action...’ (Lorenz 2004, 146). Historically and up until today this tension has been a recurrent underlying theme in professional debates and critical reflections concerning the political, institutional, administrative and organisational conditions for conducting social work – reflections that can be viewed as ways of engaging in the tension between policy and profession regarding the definition of social problems.

Despite social, political, institutional, administrative and organisational differences, the development of social work in the Nordic societies provides a significant example of the tensions outlined above. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the Nordic welfare states were, with some temporal differences, consolidated through changes in the regulation of the labour market and the expansion and institutionalisation of universal and special services (Kananen 2014). The differentiation and decentralisation of social policy, public administration, service organisations and the demand for professional competences increased. In Denmark, for example, this made it possible for social workers to ‘enter’ into jobs in the municipalities at a larger scale, but concurrently this development also gave rise to critical reflection among social workers concerning the negative consequences of administrative regulations said to hinder social workers providing the kind of social work, in particular family counselling, which was originally intended. There was a demand for time, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the individual family’s needs, and for services for improving the basic living conditions of the family (Nissen 2016). Social work as a profession and practice became embedded in, but also insisted on critical reflection on, the institutional, administrative and organisational structures. During the 1980s, this critical reflection was construed as, if not ‘biting the hand that feeds you’, then as a loyalty to the profession which was assumed to be in opposition to a focus on the interest and needs of the client. The Danish Social Democratic minister of social affairs Ritt Bjerregaard expressed this clearly in her speech to OECD in 1980 by suggesting that a social policy for the future should not be about expanding the number of institutions and experts, but about making it possible for civil society, including the family, to become active and self-determined: ‘The greatest hinder (for a modern social policy) will be the professionals, who earn their bread from and define their life by being the ones who know best and by taking care of the poor, the ill, the old and the week etc. It is the importance of them that should be down toned, and their desire to grow that should be cut down, their advice and expertise that should be questioned’, it was said (Bjerregaard 1980 quoted in Bømler 2012, 9). This speech exemplifies both a general restructuring of welfare – and social policies in the 1980s and 1990s (Kautto et al. 2002), and also a change in the relation between social policy and social work (Villadsen 2007). What was suggested was not a tension to engage in, but a fundamental conflict between the definition of the needs of the citizens and the assumed self-contained logic of the profession.

This basic assumption about welfare professions is also suggested to lay behind later New Public Management reforms seeking to change the organisational environment of welfare services (Hagen 2006). However, the decentralising elements of those reforms and the promotion of quasi-market mechanisms within the public sector have neither let to a de-specialisation nor to a decrease in administrative tasks and the regulatory role of professionals. On the contrary, regulation runs along ideas of activation, responsibilization and mobilisation of the resources of the individual client – often embedded in forms of governance by performance. It is an open question how these conditions will affect the institutional, administrative and organisational contexts of social work and vulnerable groups in society in the longer run. We know that especially governance by performance can have ‘creaming’ effects, and thus consequences for the processing, filtering of and services for the most vulnerable clients (Møller, Iversen, and Andersen 2016). In one of the articles in this issue, Adjusting to standards: reflections from ‘auditees’ at residential homes for children in Sweden, David Pålsson points to other possible effects. Swedish residential care of young people is a highly privatised and weakly professionalised welfare service area and inspections have an important role to play in securing some minimum standards of practice, according to Pålsson. However, his study also suggests that the inspections mainly have had an impact on the administrative parts of the provision of care. Furthermore, that the increased focus on compliance with regulatory standards may restrict the space for professional judgement. He argues that the logic of public administration, shaped by general principles and where equality is equated with ‘sameness’ and equal treatment (cf. Pringle, Balkmar, and Iovanni 2010; Pringle 2011), may not always be ideal in serving the needs of individual service users. In addition, complying with regulatory standards may be prioritiesed over determining which elements leads to the best possible effects of care.

What seems to be clear is that currently there is a strong emphasis on increasing the productivity of the public sector (Nissen et al. 2015). It has been suggested that this ideal is embedded in a wider transformation of welfare states into the (Schumpeterian) ‘competition state’; the kind of state where reforms are increasingly initiated as much for the purpose of increasing national productivity and competitiveness on a global market, as for the purpose of welfare. This involves the promotion of individual and collective capacities to engage in entrepreneurial innovations regarding organisation, technologies and the use of knowledge. The purpose is to create a competitive environment based on dynamic efficiency (Jessop 2002; Pedersen 2011). In managerial terms this entrepreneurial, innovative and flexible approach may be interpreted as what has been termed management of welfare organisations through the ‘orchestration of potentiality’ (Andersen and Pors 2016). This is the kind of management which seeks to hold the future open for alternatives without renouncing other potential possibilities, and thus tends to produce decisions which are flexible and open to change – no longer only for the purpose of calculating ‘risks’ but for the purpose of using uncertainty as a resource for promoting innovation and capability to change. Indeed an important motivation for this kind of management is the projection of a potential future uncertainty related to scarcity of economic resources for welfare and the need to deliver ‘more quality for less money’. A suggested consequence of this is the emergence of ‘partnerships’ as an organisational form, which explores potentials for alternative ways of providing welfare services in an open, indefinite sense based on negotiations of what are core responsibilities of the state/public sector, and what could be distributed to e.g. third sector agents. That such a development is associated with many different layers of challenges to social work is illustrated by Päivi Pöyhönen and Marjaana Seppänen in Responsibilities Between the Church and the State in the Field of Elderly Care in Finland. Their study of how public sector social workers define the role of church diaconal work of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in the field of elderly services shows, among other things, that the division of labour between public sector social work and church is not only motivated by the core knowledge of each actor or the needs of the elderly populations, but simply by the time and funding available to the social work sector at any given time. Some notions expressed by the social workers also indicate that the division of labour was defined by the fact that social services had no special understanding of spiritual needs or answers to the spiritual questions that the elderly may have. The question then becomes what consequences such a lack of focus on spiritual matters will have, for example when it comes to service provision to elderly from minority populations in a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. As the authors point out, spiritual matters form a significant part of social work education and training in many parts of the Anglophone world, while a neutrality to religious matters is more visible and guide education in Finland (as in the other Nordic countries). Such a quest for neutrality may have not so neutral effects when the church is in high demand as a co-operator due to restricted resources for public sector social work.

A core responsibility of the Nordic welfare states has traditionally been the promotion of equality e.g. by providing a ‘safety net’, by reducing poverty and by improving living conditions in a broad sense. This obligation is very much dependent on the capacity to sustain solidarity with vulnerable groups in society. Recent research on economic inequality and social coherence suggests that the moral perception of poor people on social benefits is still more positive in the Nordic countries Sweden and Denmark, than in the UK or USA (Larsen 2013). However, it is also well know that, at least in Denmark, poverty and the ‘moral constitution’ of people on social benefits has been much debated. Research shows how policies of unemployment focusing on performance (getting the client to work), financial incentives and sanctions, and the rationality/irrationality of the client in relation to compliance, might have severe consequences in terms of poverty, marginalisation and stigmatisation (Caswell, Larsen, and Sieling-Mona 2015). What has previously been regarded as ‘traditional’ obligations of the welfare state are nowadays debatable and open to negotiation, as indicated by the scholarly interest in the moral perception of poor people. In relation to this, research providing knowledge of client’s perception of their life situation and basic living conditions is valuable. Looking back on the early formation of social work as a professional practice those debates expressed a strive to broaden the view on human beings and human life conditions, to include contextual as well as individual complexities and thus prevent reductionist standardised or stereotyped views of clients. What tended to be perceived as ‘moral deficiencies’, ‘deviant behaviour’, or ‘unwillingness’ to take responsibility, was at that time translated into social problems with complex causes (Nissen 2016). A contribution to this issue that touch upon both of these points is the article by Alain Topor, Ingemar Ljungqvist and Eva Lena Strandberg on Living in poverty with severe mental illness. Coping with double trouble. Drawing on interviews with persons diagnosed with severe mental illness about how they manage poverty in their everyday life, the study both gives insights into the realities of poverty in contemporary Sweden and problematises medicalised interpretations of some of the seemingly irrational behaviours the interviewees sometimes engage in. To manage living in relative poverty within the strict framework of a structured budget plan for the rest of one’s life could be more of a question of surviving, than of living a life, according to the authors. In this study, to overstep a strategy for survival, even at the price of an even more strained financial situation, was described as a strategy for living. What in a de-contextualised perspective may be described as psychiatric symptoms – and lack of ability to economically responsible – can thus be interpreted as a personal way of adapting to the conditions of life at the economic margins, according to the authors.

The issue of complex social problems and associated challenges to the institutional, administrative and organisational contexts of social work, runs through several of the articles in the current issue. In People Processing in Swedish Personal Social Services. On the Individuals, Their Predicaments and the Outcomes of Organisational Screening Hugo Stranz, Stefan Wiklund and Patrik Karlsson describe and analyse the individuals processed in personal social services and also the outcome of the filtering process. Their conclusion is that although the social problems experienced by the individuals are complex, the investigative process is associated with a low degree of external and in particular internal referring which indicates a ‘silo mentality’ within the Swedish personal social services. For example, in child protection, a substantial proportion of clients are defined as suffering from financial distress or parental drug use but are not referred to the relevant social services domain. This marginal collaboration with actors within and outside a social services domain is not only at odds with the legislation, but also with the fundamental ideas behind specialised personal social services, the authors argue. The point of departure for specialisation is that expertise in any given area is combined with a further referral to parts of the organisation with different expertise, but these ideas do not seem to be implemented in practice, according to this study. The negative effects of this ‘silo mentality’ from a service user perspective is demonstrated by Pär Grell, Nader Ahmadi and Björn Blom in ‘Sometimes it’s really complicated!’ – Clients with complex needs on their encounter with specialised personal social service organisations in Sweden. Clients with complex needs are likely to encounter service fragmentation, illustrated by narratives of difficulties in grasping and navigating the organisation, time- and energy-consuming contacts, and experiences of confusion as well as gaps in service provision, all of which echoing previous research. The authors argue that the rationality and expediency of specialisation can to some extent be considered rationalised myths that disregards aspects of complexity that are in fact involved in a considerable proportion of cases in personal social services and which represent a key characteristic of social work. Furthermore, that clients seem to be obliged to define themselves and their life situation in service system terms and adapt to system conditions, rather than vice versa.

Other facets to the picture of complexity are added through the study of Conditions for recovery from alcohol and drug abuse – Comparisons between male and female clients of different social positions by Lisa Skogens and Ninive von Greiff. Their study of internal and social factors promoting change among men and women recovering from alcohol and drug abuse point to the importance of problematizing both gender and time in the sense of change as a process. The results from this study relates to the distinction between two ideal types as base for treatment – universalism versus particularism – and Skogens and von Greiff show that an universalistic approach that presume ‘equality as sameness’ and that all clients ought to be treated in the same way may have unintended and negative effects in a context where consideration of the particular situation of the individual client, including gender, needs to be considered. The authors outline how gendered notions and expectations and notions from both family and friends and the persons in treatment themselves play a part in the different stages of the change process.

Trends in the development of the welfare state as well as the institutional, administrative and organisational consequences still call for critical reflection on the purposes, goals and means of social work and perhaps even new ways of perceiving the tension between being embedded in a structural and political context while striving for professional autonomy? It is an open question how, but seen from a historical perspective, critical reflection has often, if not always, been based in debates on the forms of knowledge underpinning professional development e.g. through education and in social work practice. The last article in this issue seeks to contribute to the development of social work education through new pedagogic measures. In Learning to Reason: The Factorial Survey as a Teaching Tool in Social Work Education Lisa Wallander and Anders Molander outline a conceptual model for professional reasoning and propose a tool enhancing social work students’ ability to account for the reasons underlying one’s judgements and decisions, which they highlight as one of the most essential skills of a social worker. This is due to the fact that general social work knowledge and legal and organisational rules do not generate unambiguous conclusions about particular cases. Thus social workers’ judgements and decisions involve a quite extensive use of discretion, which, on the one hand, is generally considered to be an essential feature of social work as professional practice, on the other hand, it may also constitute a potential source of arbitrariness, malpractice, cognitive errors and biases, the authors argue. Systematic training in critical thinking in general and in reasoning in particular are thus necessary ingredients of social work education.

This issue of Nordic Social Work Research offers important knowledge of how the tension between a structural and political context and strives for professional autonomy is shaped by changes in the institutional, administrative and organisational environment. It also offers important knowledge of how clients perceive their life situation, living conditions and needs. Finally it offers important knowledge of forms of reflection in social work practice, education and scholarly literature.

Maria Appel Nissen
[email protected]
Maria Eriksson
[email protected]