Welcome to the first issue of volume 23 of the European Journal of Social Work, one in which we welcome the year 2020. One year ago, we took over this journal as Editors in Chief. This last year has been an extremely exciting, challenging and instructive year. We quickly learned that being Editor in Chief for a journal such as ours is much more than assembling several issues a year. It is about managing the journal in every possible way, supporting authors, finding reviewers, carrying out the journal at national and international gatherings, discussing the way forward with board members and maintaining the quality threshold of those papers which are accepted.
In doing so, we can count on a tremendous team and we would like to take the opportunity to thank them. A journal as ours cannot succeed without the enthusiasm and the hard work of the editorial board, its publisher, its administrator, its peer reviewers, its book reviewers and its authors. We are very grateful to all of them for their support, their hard work and their continuous thoughtful and sometimes thought-provoking insights. We would like to give a special thanks to Jacob Kornbeck, our Associate Editor for Book Reviews, who is doing an amazing job. We also would like to thank our former Editor in Chief Suzy Braye once more. Not only for the hard work she has done for the European Journal of Social Work in the past, but also for her continued support over the last year. She was – and still is – always available when we need her advice or assistance.
As for our new year resolutions, we will continue to consolidate the journal’s current quality threshold and look for ways to improve it over the coming year. We hereby aim to strengthen our position as a forum for social work in all parts of Europe and beyond by analysing and promoting European and international developments in social work, social policy and social service institutions. We aim to strengthen our journal as a forum for strategies for social change by publishing refereed papers on contemporary key issues.
In doing so, we will continue to support authors who struggle to publish their research and we stay committed to the idea that social work must respond to the decline of existing welfare regimes in a critical, informed, and independent manner. This ambition is already reflected in this issue where you will find research across a wide spectrum of disciplinary and professional engagement with relevance to social work.
The first group of articles addresses different aspects of social work as a profession and the challenges social work and social work practice is faced with. In their paper, Allen Allday, Jason Newell and Yevheniv Sukovskyy from the United States and Ukraine address the issue of burnout, compassion fatigue and professional resilience in the context of caregivers of children with disabilities in Ukraine. Their study reveals that despite the difficult working conditions, caregivers experience moderate levels of compassion fatigue, and above average levels of compassion satisfaction, hereby suggesting that the positive aspects of caring for children with severe disabilities may be moderating the deleterious effects of the work. In the second paper, Jung-Sook Lee and Thomas Besch from China and Australia critical reflect on the concept of toleration in social work. They argue that toleration in social work is inseparable from power relations and that social workers should therefore critically reflect on how power affects the meaning and effects of toleration in social work in general.
In our third paper, Anja Dall from Denmark writes about social work professionals’ management of institutional and professional responsibilities at the micro-Level of welfare-to-work. Her findings suggest that team members enact a dual orientation to professional and institutional responsibilities, characterised by shifting between professional and institutional discourses. Furthermore, she points out that when a dual orientation cannot be managed, the institutional obligations overrule the professional ones. José Juan Carrión-Martínez, María del Mar Fernández-Martínez, María del Carmen Pérez-Fuentes and José Jesús Gázquez-Linares from Spain then again, studied the perception of future professionals in Spain on social work higher education. Their findings indicate that undergraduate students express a high valuation of the specific competencies of the degree and that the students’ sociodemographic variables have little effect on their valuation of specific competencies.
The next paper by Ian Dore from England is a conceptual paper. The paper’s intent is to stimulate debate on an alternate future that enables and emboldens us to reach beyond organisational and self-imposed limitations that serve to reproduce disadvantage and social injustice. In doing so, it takes a reflective, psycho-social approach that offers a space for critical and transformative thought. Our sixth paper by Laura Tiitinen from Finland discusses silencing as an obstacle to whistleblowing in the field of social work. The paper describes forms of silencing and uses content analysis to analyse these from the perspective of power. The results characterise silencing as the hidden exercise of power, using institutional mechanisms, communication hierarchies and informal rules to control channels of communication and information flows. According to the author, these silencing mechanisms must be understood if they are to be challenged and properly addressed. The last paper of this first group is written by Maria-Jose Aguilar-Idañez, Neus Capparrós-Civera and Sagrario Anaut-Bravo from Spain. In their paper on e-social work, they perform an empirical analysis of the professional blogosfere in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. Their results reveal that although virtual networks are not yet widespread, an increasing number of social work practitioners have begun to collaborate in creating a shared professional culture.
Our second group of papers addresses issues related to mental health. Lluís Ballester, María Valero, Carmen Orte and Joan Amer from Spain analysed family dynamics in a selective substance abuse prevention programme for adolescents. They conclude that the observed differences in family dynamics are not dependent on the families’ level of vulnerability or structure, but rather on their acquired skills. From Australia, George Karpetis explored how statutory mental health social workers implement recovery policies in Australia. His study contributes new knowledge to the literature by means of translating the main aspects of recovery policies into identifiable practice behaviours and demonstrates that the terminology the practitioners adopt considerably aligns with the critical and humanistic theoretical perspectives that similarly underpin the majority of the current recovery-oriented policy documents.
Our third group of papers addresses issues related to child welfare and protection services. In the first paper, David Pålsson from Sweden writes about how the Swedish inspectorate operationalises care quality within the residential care services for children. Pernille Stornæss Skotte from Norway continues the topic of child welfare by describing the fragmentary and sometimes incoherent way caseworkers record cases in child welfare work. The article is based on a contextual analysis of 13 case records from two Norwegian child welfare frontline offices and suggest that purposeful vagueness allows for future re-interpretations of cases, giving leeway to act in unanticipated future situations. The last paper of this group is written by us and shows that although the idea that social work should be based upon a more rational framework continues to capture the imagination, many critical remarks are to be made from a variety of perspectives.
Our fourth and last group of papers addresses issues of migration and ethnic minorities. To begin, Youssef Azghari, Fons van de Vijver and Erna Hooghiemstra from the Netherlands investigated the views of Dutch social professionals and young Moroccan-Dutch on success and failure factors in the social participation of the latter group in the Netherlands. They uncovered that participation is hampered by stigmatisation, victim-blaming attitude, poor parenting, weak skills, limited ties and access to social work. The purpose of last of article of this group and of this issue by Anita Røysum from Norway is to examine how resourceful, job-seeking immigrant women in Norway perceive that the competences and education they acquired from their home country are received in Norway and how their job-seeking experiences influence their work-related self-efficacy and identity. They conclude that their competences from their home countries are not perceived as valuable in terms of Norwegian expertise and employee qualities.
It is our understanding that there is much here to enjoy and learn from. We wish you all the best in the upcoming year and we look forward to any future collaborations.