The editorial board of the European Journal of Social Work has membership from a wide range of countries across Europe. Members do not ‘represent’ their country in any way, but they bring valuable perspectives about social work in their region, and its relationship with broader European and wider international trends. In addition, of course, all members are experienced in social work research and publication, and bring an informed, reflective and critical edge to discussions about the journal’s strategic development. While much work is conducted through online communications, we also make the most of our face-to-face meetings, which happen every two years, each time in a different location.
One such editorial board meeting took place earlier this summer in Paris, prior to the EASSW/UNAFORISFootnote1 2017 European Conference. One of the many items on our agenda was to consider future recruitment to the editorial board, and this editorial gives me the opportunity to alert you – our community of authors, reviewers and readers – to our plans. During the autumn we will issue a call for applications to join the board, together with details of the procedure. We will then consider applications before making decisions on how to fill the vacancies that will arise at the end of 2017. So, if you want to be sure of receiving the details when they’re available, send me your name, organisational affiliation and email address to register your interest in hearing more (that’s all I need at this stage – no applications will be taken yet). We will also place the information on the journal’s website in October: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cesw20/current.
In the meantime, it’s business as usual, and in our case that means another issue packed with great research. We start with a cluster of papers that focus on participation in its various guises. Hans Grymonprez, Rudi Roose and Griet Roets, writing from Belgium, consider how outreach work with those who are often beyond the reach of regular services has become a practice of accessibility, caught in a tension between the twin imperatives of managing access to services (a residual approach) and contributing to the realisation of human dignity (a structural approach). Two papers from Italy then follow. Lavinia Bifulco and Carla Facchini draw on research into Local Area Plans to consider the competences deemed important for promoting social participation, while Nico Bortoletto considers how participatory action research provides a framework for the development of symbolic and material resources in communities, again within the context of local development.
Such work often hinges upon the degree to which successful partnerships can be established. Sidsel Natland and Ragnhild Hansen, writing from Norway, investigate one local partnership project, exploring how conflicts influenced processes and outcomes, and finding these to be interwoven with empowering processes. The theme of micro-practices and power dynamics is picked up again by Lill Hultman, Pernilla Pergert and Ulla Forinder, in an article that explores how young people in Sweden participate in interviews that affect their entitlement to social assistance. Their finding that participation is tokenistic issues a challenge to develop a more child-focused perspective. And remaining with the theme of empowerment, Jan Depauw and Kristel Driessens address the challenge of evaluating the effectiveness of social work’s empowerment aims, reporting on the development of a tool to measure psychological empowerment in the clients of public centres of social welfare in Flanders.
That paper forms the bridge to a second cluster of papers that focus on social assistance. Ida Solvgang, writing from Norway, reports on a study of social workers’ decision-making when personalising activation measures for clients of an activation service, and shows how institutional and political frameworks may lead to social workers setting requirements that are inconsistent with clients’ needs and capabilities. Åke Bergmark, Olof Bäckman and Renate Minas follow with a paper that examines the strategies employed by Swedish municipalities to prevent long-term receipt of social assistance, identifying the activation approaches that are associated with shorter spells of assistance. Also writing from Sweden, Rickard Ulmestig and Marie Eriksson demonstrate how survivors of domestic violence experience financial vulnerability and the implications of these experiences for social work within the social assistance system. The fact that women struggle to achieve a reasonably economic standard long after separation from their violent partner demonstrates the extent to which quality of life is affected. Social assistance also figures in the paper by Ivan Harsløf, Ulla Søbjerg Neilsen, Marte Feiring, who compare the impact on hospital social workers of an accelerated return-to-work focus in health-related social benefit programmes in Denmark and Norway, finding that social work can use its symbolic capital to transform the work-and-welfare experience of patients. Transformation is a theme picked up also by Christos Panayiotopoulos and Agamemnonas Zachariades, in their account of how marginalisation and discrimination impact upon the quality of life of the Roma community in Cyprus. They conclude that social work can foster a more empowering and coordinating role to enhance Roma’s distinctive identity and to improve standards of living.
We know that some of the excellent research profiled in this journal originates in doctoral study. In the final paper in this issue Vesna Leskošek and Aila-Leena Matthies, writing from Slovenia and Finland respectively, explore the internationalisation of doctoral education in Europe. They argue that international cooperation between programmes, while often beset with challenges, significantly contributes to the quality of doctoral studies, and call for a policy framework for higher education in the EU that can more actively promote and facilitate such cooperation.
We wish you happy reading on these powerful and pertinent themes.
Notes
1 EASSW is the European Association of Schools of Social Work; UNAFORIS is the Union Nationale de Formation et de Recherche en Intervention Sociale.