Welcome to the start of a new volume of the European Journal of Social Work. The year 2018 will mark a transitional year for the journal as we start (and we hope complete) the process of recruiting a new Editor in Chief, and making further appointments to the editorial board. My role as Editor in Chief gives me great fulfilment; I have seen the journal grow, both in size and in terms of the contribution it makes to our understandings of social work across Europe and beyond. Equally I have seen the editorial board develop its role in steering and shaping both our content and our politics, welcoming new members and developing new roles to help manage the important editorial work that keeps our content strong and relevant. And we have forged strong partnerships with other organizations in the field, such as the European Social Work Research Association and the European Association of Schools of Social Work, demonstrating the value of collaboration and cooperation. This feels like an appropriate point at which to begin the process of handing over to a new pair of hands.
The process going forward is that early in 2018 we will advertise the role of Editor in Chief across a wide range of platforms, providing information about the role and inviting expressions of interest. At the same time we will undertake a new round of recruitment to the editorial board, seeking as always to broaden our representation and ensure that a wide range of perspectives from a wide range of locations are able to contribute to the journal’s editorial work. We thank three editorial board members who stepped down at the end of 2017 – Gurid Aga Askeland, Christine Labonté-Roset, and Bogdan Lesnik – for their long-standing contributions to the journal's work. Going forward, we invite you, our readers, to spread the word about all our new appointments across your networks and to encourage any interested colleagues to contact me in the first instance for further information.
We start this issue with a cluster of papers that are linked by a focus on the nature of social work, or what may be termed social work identity. Christian Ghanem and colleagues in Germany start us off by asking a deceptively simple question: how do social workers solve professional problems? What follows is a detailed analysis of the intricate reasoning processes used by practitioners with differing levels of experience when discussing case vignettes, through which the authors demonstrate key differences between novices’ and experts’ use of knowledge. We are delighted to congratulate the authors on becoming the winners of an Outstanding Publication award at the European Social Work Research Association’s annual conference in Aalborg in April 2017. The paper, which was has been published online for a year prior to making its way into this issue of the printed journal, was made free to access for a period following announcement of the award, and Christian Ghanem’s blog post on top tips for getting your thesis published is still available: http://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/3-tips-for-getting-your-dissertation-published/
Ian Hyslop, writing from New Zealand, explicitly picks up the theme of identity in his paper, exploring the relationship between the nature of social work and the neoliberal project, providing evidence to support recognition of a knowledge base that draws on relational engagement in an unequal society to challenge a neoliberal model of personal deficit in the lives of those constructed as clients. His paper provides a call to optimism, however cautious, about the profession’s future development. Denise Ryan and Paul Garrett then take us into the realms of a techno habitat, drawing on a small-scale study in the Republic of Ireland to explore the dilemmas associated with the use of Facebook, email and text messaging within social work.
Joe Duffy, Mary Collins and Sook Hyun Kim, from Northern Ireland and the United States, continue the theme of understanding social work by arguing that international comparisons make an important contribution to understanding the development of social work practice. Drawing on policy and literature, they identify how family-oriented and rights-based frameworks are manifest in four countries – United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, and South Korea – and discuss the contribution such comparison can make to theory-building in childcare practice.
There then follows a cluster of papers from Sweden that expand our understanding of a number of specialist fields of practice. Veronica Ekström looks at social services support for women experiencing domestic abuse, drawing on interviews with social work practitioners to identify some of the organizational features of services that are associated with specialization. Per Carlson investigates the association between young people’s drinking habits and their social networks, including both family and peer influences. Anna Arvidsson and colleagues explore the little researched area of transnational surrogacy, drawing on social workers’ experiences of work in this field to discuss the legal uncertainties and ethical dilemmas that arise, resulting in a call for stronger regulation.
The final group of papers broadens the geographical scope to bring a range of international perspectives on diverse topics. Ida Juhasz and Marit Skivenes, writing from Norway, report on a cross-national study in four countries – England, Finland, Norway and the United States – reporting the obstacles social workers face when making the decision to remove a child. These are of a predominantly organisational nature, lending strength to a call for time and resources to enable practitioners to devote the time necessary for care proceedings. Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Karen Lyons, collaborating from Russia and England, explore the development of social work since 1991 across the 15 countries of the Former Soviet Union. Their study identifies the state as the main actor in shaping the welfare structures within which social work is located, and that politics and economics are major influences on the profession. Next Marina Milic Babic, Zdravka Leutar and Monica Dowling, in another cross-country collaboration between Croatia and England, draw on a qualitative study to investigate the lived experiences of women with disabilities in Croatia, providing evidence on which to base their calls for social work to engage with a broad spectrum of individual, group and collective support initiatives. Finally, Rogelio Gómez García and colleagues from Spain evaluate the job satisfaction of Spanish social workers, matching this to both personal features and job characteristics. Their findings – that the intrinsic satisfaction derived from the nature of the job is counterbalanced by the extrinsic factors of pay, fringe benefits and operating conditions – will resonate with those practising in other countries, and raise implications for employers seeking to improve recruitment and retention in the sector.