Science and social work: a sketch

Abstract

While recognizing that understanding of ‘science’ varies across time and countries, there are strands of a shared albeit diverse inheritance. Failures to see where we are located within this inheritance make the social work community vulnerable to simplistic claims regarding what, for example, ‘doing science’ is like. This in turn makes it difficult to deal adequately with questions such as in what ways can or should we distinguish social work science from other kinds of knowledge? Is science in some recognizable way a unified form of knowledge? How ought we to deal with disputes and disagreements in social work science? What kinds of consequences might we envisage from social work science? I deal in turn with each of these questions.

Forståelsen af ‘videnskab’ varierer mellem forskellige historiske perioder og fra land til land. Imidlertid er der elementer i opfattelsen som hidrører fra en række forskellige fælles kilder. En manglende erkendelse af, hvordan vi positionerer os indenfor denne fælles arv, gør vores sociale arbejde sårbart overfor simplificerende betragtninger, fx vedrørende forståelsen af ‘videnskab’. Dette gør det efterfølgende vanskeligt at beskæftige sig med spørgsmål som fx hvordan vi skelner videnskabelig indsigt i socialt arbejde fra andre typer af viden. Kan videnskab overhovedet identificeres entydigt som en bestemt form for viden? Hvordan skal vi forholde os til diskussioner og uenigheder indenfor forskning i socialt arbejde? Hvilke konsekvenser kan vi forudse at denne forskning vil have? Jeg vil i det efterfølgende beskæftige mig med en række af disse spørgsmål.

Keywords:

• Social work science
• tacit knowledge
• science language
• science practice
• history of social work
• kinds of knowledge

Søgeord:

• Forskning i socialt arbejde
• tavs viden
• videnskabelig sprogbrug
• videnskabelig praksis
• det sociale arbejdes historie
• vidensformer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ian Shaw is Professor of Social Work, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, and Emeritus Professor, University of York. He steered the foundation of the European Social Work Research Association and was first Chair until 2015. For a period in 2016 he is S. R. Nathan Professor in Social Work at the National University of Singapore. His next publications include Social Work Science (Columbia University Press) and a four volume ‘Major Work’ on Social Work Research (Sage Publications). He is researching the history of the British Journal of Social Work and research networks in social work.

ORCID

Ian Shaw http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6917-7574

Notes

1. The line is from Paul Simon, ‘You Can Call Me Al.’

2. I have deal with the issues in this article at length in book form (Shaw, 2014e), but I drafted the article before writing the book.

3. She never came to accept either for herself. ‘All that happened was my detachment from Christianity’ (p. 107). For her and for many it was the Great War that undermined these confidences ‘now that we have learned, by bitter experience of the Great War, to what vile uses the methods and results of science may be put’ (p. 146).

4. In adopting the expression ‘social work science’ I do not wish to imply that social work is a science, but only that in some sense and to some degree aspects of social work scholarship can plausibly be regarded as possessing scientific characteristics. I have discussed this in a conversation with John Brekke (cf. Brekke, 2012, 2014; Shaw, 2014c).

5. E.g. Timms work on art and science in his Language of Social Casework (1968).

6. This is from a passage in Padgett (2008). Each word retains the first and final letters in the same position but randomizes the sequence of the other letters.

7. Though the majority of social work uses of evolution are loose references to, e.g. ‘the evolution of social work knowledge'.

8. Personal communication, 21 August 2014.

9. Quoted by Lewis Wolpert in Wolpert and Richards (1997, p. 14).