Human rights as an opportunity and challenge for social work in a changing Norwegian welfare state

ABSTRACT

This article discusses human rights as an opportunity and a challenge for social work in a Norwegian welfare state characterised by transformation and rising inequality. The relationship between social work and human rights is explored theoretically through the discussion of two different imperatives of distribution: sufficiency and equality. To develop an understanding of human rights for social work in a Norwegian and Nordic context, the article creates an illustrative framework that build on a basic continuum between sufficiency and equality (Dean, H. [2015]. Social rights and human welfare. Routledge; Moyn, S. [2018]. Not enough: Human Rights in an unequal world. Harvard University Press). The continuum is adapted by Bonnycastles (2011. Social justice along a continuum: A relational illustrative model. Social Service Review, 85(2), 267–295) Continuum of Relational Social Justice. The aim of the article is to articulate theoretically what it means to say that social work is a human rights profession in a Nordic and Norwegian welfare state in transformation and to consider the implication of such a perspective for the practice and research of social work. The article suggests that human rights must be seen in relation to the possibility of moving society closer to social equality.

ABSTRAKT

Artikkelen diskuterer menneskerettigheter som mulighet og utfordring for sosialt arbeid i en norsk velferdsstat preget av reorganisering og økende ulikhet. Forholdet mellom sosialt arbeid og menneskerettigheter utforskes teoretisk gjennom diskusjon av to ulike idealer: tilstrekkelighet og likhet. For å utvide forståelse av menneskerettigheter for sosialt arbeid i en norsk og nordisk sammenheng, utvikler artikkelen et illustrerende rammeverk som bygger på et grunnleggende kontinuum mellom nettopp tilstrekkelighet og likhet (Dean, H. [2015]. Social rights and human welfare. Routledge; Moyn, S. [2018]. Not enough: Human Rights in an unequal world. Harvard University Press). Kontinuumet er tilpasset fra Bonnycastles (2011. Social justice along a continuum: A relational illustrative model. Social Service Review, 85(2), 267–295) Continuum of Relational Social Justice. Målet med artikkelen er å artikulere teoretisk hva det vil si å si at sosialt arbeid er en menneskerettighetsprofesjon i en nordisk og norsk velferdsstat i transformasjon og legge til rette for å diskutere implikasjonen av et slikt perspektiv for praksis og forskning i sosialt arbeid. Artikkelen antyder at menneskerettighetene må sees i forhold til mulighet for å bevege samfunnet nærmere sosial likhet.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• equality
• social justice
• citizenship
• ethical practice
• welfare state

NØKKELORD:

• Menneskerettigheter
• ulikhet
• statsborgerskap
• sosialt arbeid
• etisk praksis
• velferdsstat
• sosial rettferdighet

Introduction

This article discusses human rights as an opportunity and challenge for social work in a Norwegian welfare state characterised by change and rising inequality (Dølvik et al., 2015; Kamali & Jönsson, 2018, pp. 1–22; OECD, 2011). As defined by the International Federation of Social Workers and stated in professional codes of ethics in many nations, including Norway; social work is a human rights profession (Fellesorganisasjonen, 2019; IASSW, 2018; IFSW, 2014). The concept of human rights is a powerful and contested ideal. In addition, the ways in which human rights contribute to social work are frequently unclear (Ife, 2012). In Norway, knowledge of human rights is considered especially useful when social workers advocate on behalf of marginalised groups in society. Less attention has been paid to how the welfare system fulfils its obligations towards the social rights of marginalised people since social rights are often taken for granted as a part of the welfare state's general provisions for the wellbeing of its citizens.

This conceptual article aims to integrate extant theory, literature and research to create a conceptual framework of the relationship between human rights and social work in the Scandinavian welfare states. It also seeks to explore the implications of this conceptual framework for the practices of social work and social work research. The conceptual framework is defined as a systematically organised collection of concepts and constructs related to a single phenomenon that can be used to generate new perspectives (McGregor, 2018, p. 5). This paper's methodological approach is discursive and integrates the following (2018): (I) extant literature, theories and empirical indicators that are concerned with the transformation of welfare states that have been shaped by the discourse of neoclassical economic theories and New Public Management; and (II), modern critical social work theories that aim to understand the ideas that underpin the institutional context and formal theory base for social work so that the profession's values and goals can be achieved (Healy, 2014).

The proposed illustrative framework highlights the differences between the human rights positions and concepts of Scandinavian welfare states that lie somewhere on a human rights continuum between two unique imperatives of distribution: sufficiency and equality (Bonnycastle, 2011; Dean, 2015; Moyn, 2018). The continuum was adapted from Colin R. Bonnycastle’s (2011, p. 273) ‘Social Justice along a Continuum: A Relational Illustrative Model’. According to Samuel Moyn (2018), drawing on the distinction between sufficiency and equality allows us to see how the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and rising inequality. In social work practice and research, it is essential to explore how human rights relate to the distinction between sufficiency and equality so that structural issues can be addressed, and the local and global distribution of power and wealth can be challenged.

In the sections that follow, this article addresses concerns that have increased focus on human rights in social work at the expense of social justice (Webb, 2009). Using arguments by Hartley Dean (2015) and Moyn (2018), the article suggests that now is the time to approach economic, social and cultural rights in Norwegian social work with the seriousness that is afforded to civil and political rights. It also recommends that human rights should be viewed from the perspective of moving society closer to social equality (Bonnycastle, 2011).

Human rights in relation to sufficiency and equality

Social justice requires that all citizens enjoy social, economic and political rights and it has both a micro-dimension and a more commonly articulated macro-dimension (Cummins, 2018). Since the inequality between and within nations is growing, the benefits of globalisation are unevenly shared and its costs are unequally distributed (Dølvik et al., 2015; OECD, 2011, 2015; SSB, 2019; UN, 2013). Inequality creates problems for contemporary welfare and those exposed to poverty, and it threatens the very nature of democracy. This is because high levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power, with those at the top using their economic weight to shape politics and political institutions in ways that give them increased economic control (Stiglitz, 2012).

Göran Therborn (2013) described inequality as a violation of human dignity and a denial of the possibility for all humans to have the same capabilities to develop. As a consequence, inequality involves a socio-cultural order that reduces the ability for people to function as human beings, damages their health, weakens their self-respect, diminishes their sense of self and restricts their resources to act and participate in the world (Therborn, 2013). The primary aim of contemporary social work is to deal with the harmful impacts of economic and political policies that promote and uphold inequality as the building block of sociocultural order. Learning how to provide adequate help to people and to promote social change that eliminates or reduces structural inequality is vital to social work education, research and practice.

In Moyn’s (2018) book, Not Enough. Human Rights in an Unequal World, he identified the shift from the egalitarian politics of the past to the neoliberal globalisation of the present as the period when human rights and the human rights movement emerged. According to Ioannis Kampourakis (2019), the major contribution of Moyn's work was the connection it made between human rights, inequality and market fundamentalism and its exploration into why the emergence of human rights occurred alongside enduring and rising inequality (Moyn, 2018). Moyn's answer to this question was that human rights alone are not enough if egalitarian ideals and politics is the goal. Although human rights might not actively support neoliberalism, Moyn (2018, p. 7) found that it has conformed to the political economy of the age.

Through the discussion of two different imperatives of distribution; sufficiency and equality, Moyn (2018, p. 5) claimed that the distinction between these imperatives clarifies how the age of human rights has been good for some of the worst off and a golden age for the rich. Sufficiency is to have enough in relation to some minimum degree of provision (i.e. how far a person is from having nothing) (Moyn, 2018, pp. 3–4). This imperative of distribution focuses on saving those with the least amount of resources from destitution. Equality is a relative term that describes how far apart individuals are from one another regarding their possession of items of value. According to Moyn (2018, p. 4), although human rights have catered to distributing sufficiency by providing a ‘floor of protection’ against insufficiency, they have been unable to guarantee a ‘ceiling’ for equality to ensure that those in the upper echelon of income distribution do not pull away from everyone else (2018, p. 4). Whereas policies aimed at sufficiency include any effort to alleviate poverty, such as food stamps, unemployment benefits, direct cash transfers and humanitarian aid, politics that seek to ensure equality are more difficult to identify (Jackson, 2018).

Contrary to today's minimalist sufficiency, the system wherein inequality was most restrained was the interventionist welfare state that was created in the aftermath of the Second World War (Moyn, 2018, p. 49). At the time, the essence of social citizenship was not rights but a principle of equality that was built in addition to mere sufficiency. Like the Nordic social-democratic welfare states, which have been inclined to view welfare as a system that ensures the universal rights of all citizens, social rights in the interventionist welfare states were not written down in constitutions but instead concretised by class compromise and state regulatory guidelines to provide top-down welfare to citizens (2018, p. 49). According to Gösta Esping-Andersen’s (1990, p. 27) typology of welfare capitalism, rather than tolerate a dualism between state and market and working class and middleclass, the traditional social-democratic model pursued welfare that would promote equality of the highest standards over the bare minimum that was pursued elsewhere. Policies that promoted the nationalisation of industries, antitrust laws, tax revenues, high employment and generous unionisation and bargaining rules were important to the push for social equality. As such, Moyn (2018) concluded that rather than list entitlements or aim for judicial enforcement which can create conditions of equality, the design of welfare was institutional, and human rights made sense as one partner in a new politics of fair distribution (Kampourakis, 2019).

In Dean’s (2015, p. 31) Human Rights and Social Welfare, he claimed that the emergence of international human rights agenda has made it possible to achieve a set of potentially realisable social rights goals that may secure the provision for human needs and from which some definitions of human needs may be indirectly inferred. Where Moyn (2018) understood human rights from the perspective of the conceptually clear distinction between sufficiency and equality, Dean (2015) perceived human rights as the idea that human needs exist along a continuum of sufficiency and equality. The latter meaning that an understanding of human needs and the essence of wellbeing may be thought of as existing along a continuum, ranging from thin to thick and the imperatives of individual survival to the causes of social fulfilment (2015). Viewing human rights as the idea that human needs exist along this continuum is expedient when discussing the development of social work in Scandinavian welfare states. Dean (2015, p. 156) and Moyn (2018) both proposed that the full realisation of social rights requires more than a defence of human dignity; it also necessitates an expansion of solidarity and some form of global and national governance that concerns human rights and equality.

To summarise, Moyn (2018) and Dean (2015) concluded that while human rights are indivisible, over the last decade, social rights have been overshadowed by political and civil rights and egalitarian ideas and politics aimed at a socially just distribution of life opportunities have been severely challenged by the neoliberal consensus. The recipe for tackling poverty today is a hostile stance towards big government and scepticism of welfare rights and it favour a neoliberal consensus that insists on the liberalisation of markets, privatisation, deregulation, flexible labour markets, low public spending and taxation and minimum social safety nets (Dean, 2015). To the extent that the principles of human rights and associated laws decree economic and social protection, sufficient provision is guaranteed, rather than restrictions to inequality (Moyn, 2018, p. 9).

The relational illustrative model

To develop an understanding of human rights in the context of Norwegian and Nordic social work, this article created a conceptual framework (see Table 1) that built on a basic continuum between sufficiency and equality as discussed above (McGregor, 2018). The continuum highlights dissimilar human rights positions that exist somewhere on the continuum between sufficiency and equality (Bonnycastle, 2011). The matrix in the relational illustrative model (see Table 1) describes that there are subcategories closest to describing sufficiency as a thin version of human rights and equality as a thick version of human rights. The differentiation of the subcategories in Table 1 is not between straightforward categories but overlapping concepts. Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) observed that the essential criteria for defining welfare states are related to the quality of social rights, social stratification and the relationship between state, markets and citizenship. Accordingly, three relational aspects of human rights – social welfare, citizenship and social work – are shown in the left column of Table 1 and act as separate lenses through which the concept of human rights relates to the Scandinavian welfare state.

Table 1. The Relational Illustrative Model (Bonnycastle, 2011).

Human rights continuum
Sufficiency				Equality
	Neoliberal Scandinavian Welfare state	Traditional Scandinavian Welfare state	Human Rights Scandinavian Welfare state
Relation to social welfare	Equality of opportunity	Equality of outcome	Equality of conditions
	Conditional rights and obligations	Redistribution and reciprocal rights and obligations	Structural- transformation regime
Relation to citizenship	Citizenship rights and obligations	Redistribution and cultural recognition	Redistribution, recognition and representation
	Conditional economic and social rights	Economic and social rights	Solidarity rights
Relation to social work	Individualistic framework of human rights	Collective individualism framework of human rights	Intersubjective and interdependent framework of human rights
	Valuefree	Values inherent with paternalistic welfare state	Valuebased
	Welfare-nationalism	National	International and global

Source: Adopted from Bonnycastle’s (2011) The Relational Illustrative Model. Social Justice Continuum.

The model divides each relational aspect into three subcategories: (1) the Neoliberal Scandinavian Welfare State (which is associated with ‘The Third Way’ (Giddens, 1998) and ‘Social Investment State’ (Morel et al., 2012)); (2) the Traditional Scandinavian Welfare State (which is associated with the Social-democratic model [Esping-Andersen, 1990]); and (3), the Human Rights Scandinavian Welfare State (a potentially transformed Norwegian welfare state with prominent human rights and a partnership with redistribution and equality). These three categories are ideals rather than empirically grounded categories of the Scandinavian welfare state. According to Swedberg (2014), the most important function of an ideal type is to be heuristic and thus be used to discover new aspects of a phenomenon that can be tested empirically.

The conceptual framework in Table 1 characterises human rights as a process of striving for social equality instead of sufficiency, and the assigned locations of the continuum's subcategories illustrate the outcome of the three different versions of the Scandinavian welfare state. It is important to note that while all three subcategories are concerned with varying degrees of human rights, the third subcategory – which is known as the Human Rights Scandinavian Welfare State – explicitly addresses human rights.

Human rights in relation to social welfare

Human rights instruments, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent international agreements, assert the indivisibility of all human rights. Nevertheless, as Dean (2015, p. 2) stated, these instruments incorporate the same distinction that T. H. Marshall drew between a ‘first generation’ of civil and political rights and a ‘second generation’ of the social, economic and cultural rights that were identified in the twentieth century. As illustrated by the column for the traditional Scandinavian welfare state in Table 1, positive rights, or the social rights of citizenship, were not written down in constitutions but extended by expanding public services to foster equal outcomes. Social policy interventions resulted in decommodification, meaning that citizens’ rights to existence were independent of the market (Dean, 2015).

Until the neoliberal turn at the end of the 1980s, Norway was broadly perceived to be pushing egalitarian policies to reduce inequalities, prevent future inequalities and achieve the greatest degree of equality between men and women and the rich and the poor (Kvist et al., 2012). As illustrated in Table 1, the key to social policy in the traditional Scandinavian welfare state was universalism and egalitarian institutions. With the aim to reduce the impact of social class backgrounds on people's opportunities in life, at least in the form of enduring cross-generational poverty, the traditional Scandinavian welfare state established a set of welfare state institutions to promote social security and equality (Wiborg & Hansen, 2009).

In the neoliberal Scandinavian welfare state, which represents the thinnest version of human rights (see the leftmost column in Table 1), the meaning of equality has shifted from equal outcomes to equal opportunities, and the ideas behind equal justice match contributions to rewards (i.e. obligations and rights or the principle of reciprocity) (Halvorsen & Stjernø, 2008, p. 160). Managerialism and individualisation through economic incentives and cost-efficiency measures are widespread in all areas of social policy and services, and these measures have increased the socio-economic, political and cultural gaps amongst the population. In addition, equalisation processes have either been reversed or ceased altogether (Kamali & Jönsson, 2018, pp. 1-22; Stamsø, 2009; Wiborg & Hansen, 2009). By using laws and bureaucratic and political measures of power, the neoliberal state enables market mechanisms to become prevalent in all areas of society.

Although Norway is among the most generous welfare states in the world, inequality in earnings and wealth has steadily increased in recent decades, showing that the traditionally egalitarian Scandinavian societies are no exception to the rising trends of inequality (Arntzen et al., 2019; Bakken, 2019; Dølvik et al., 2015; Halvorsen & Stjernø, 2008; Kamali & Jönsson, 2018; SSB, 2019). Low incomes are strongly correlated with immigration and marginalisation in the labour market (Dølvik et al., 2015). Neoliberal politics in Norway have involved tax cuts, followed by reductions to public spending. In sum, taxes have been reduced by 25.5 billion kroner since 2013, and income tax has decreased from 28% to 22% (SSB, 2019). According to the Statistics Norway (SSB) analysis (SSB, 2019), these changes have had the biggest impact on overall income inequality. Unless low income levels and inequality are kept under control, the Nordic model's objective to promote egalitarian policies and institutions will fail and potentially destabilise the function of the entire model (Dølvik et al., 2015, p. 101).

The Norwegian welfare state is built on ideas about redistribution that combat poverty and create greater material equality, and there is no consensus about whether the welfare state has been robust and adaptable or retreating and declining (Hutchinson, 2014; Kamali & Jönsson, 2018, pp. 1–22; Kvist et al., 2012). Nonetheless, the neoliberal reorganisation of the welfare state has made it so that social policy has become less focused on redistributing life opportunities and social welfare measures have become less capable of redistributing resources or providing directly to meet the needs of the people. Rather, these changes to the welfare state have enabled individuals to more readily manage risk by emphasising the objective of equal opportunity (Dean, 2015; Halvorsen & Stjernø, 2008).

Solas (2008) argued that a theory of social justice that responds to inequality as though it were inevitable is necessary and that such a theory must offer a stronger response to inequality by recognising that it is an unwarranted injustice. The human rights Scandinavian welfare state, the third thickest of the human rights welfare states found in Table 1, falls in line with Solas (2008) observation and does not accept the inevitability of inequality that the two former versions admit to varying degrees. According to Bonnycastle (2011, p. 277), the key here is to recognise that inequality is rooted in changing and changeable structures of domination and oppression. Institutions and welfare policies express political choices and structural transformation, and it is possible to change institutional structures that systematically produce worse life prospects for the members of certain groups than for the members of others (2011). The third version of a welfare state stresses the need to reform structures that build community responsibility, cooperation and mutual benefit for and by all members by making the prospect of a good life available to everyone and by enabling them to make real choices among alternatives of similar worth (2011).

Human rights in relation to citizenship

In practice, citizenship rights have provided the foundations upon which modern global conceptions of human rights have been constructed (Dean, 2008). As shown in the centre row on human rights in Table 1, reciprocity about rights and duties between the state and its citizens is a core principle in the traditional Scandinavian welfare state and is based on the state's responsibility to ensure its citizens’ wellbeing. People are expected to participate in many areas of economic and social life in accordance with their capabilities and the notion of collective individualism – the idea that people share values and are mutually dependent on one another (Hutchinson, 2014, p. 19).

According to the left column of Table 1, a liberal understanding of human rights imposes obligations on the state to protect and realise human rights, but it also imposes obligations on the citizens who claim and benefit from those claims (Ife, 2012, p. 153). In the neoliberal Scandinavian welfare state's language of citizenship, rights and duties are prominent, with particular weight being given to the latter. These ideals have been used to justify punitive attitudes towards those who receive state assistance. In other words, people should work for their benefits, repay their benefits, show gratitude for the assistance and prove themselves ‘deserving’ (Ife, 2012, p. 154). Although Norwegian experts have argued about the extent to which neoliberal policies have contributed to the decline of social welfare (Dølvik et al., 2015; Hutchinson, 2014), very few have disagreed that the neoliberal imprint has existed in growing conditional forms of social assistance, means-testing and underfunded programmes, which have not enjoyed middleclass support (Langford, 2017). According to Jim Ife (2012, p. 154), conditional rights and obligations are equal to construct citizenship in a framework of conservative judgement and social control. Others have described this framework as a criminalisation of social policy (Rodger, 2008). McKendrick and Finch (2017) identified another variation of the social control framework by introducing the idea that welfare protection is being superseded by malign, securitised forms of safeguarding. Although it is not directly equal to the concepts of criminalisation and securitisation, the concept of welfare nationalism also divides people into those who are entitled to social benefits and resources and those who are not without first considering equal human rights. The liberal idea of welfare nationalism – that a shared national identity is an essential prerequisite to the shared solidarity underpinning systems of state welfare – is reducing immigrants to how much they cost society and reinforcing the polarisation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Alseth, 2018). While the neoliberal state endorses human rights, it does so conditionally. In other words, individuals may lose their rights if they do not meet certain obligations (van Ewijk, 2009, p. 173).

Although the realisation of rights in Norway may be high, the states have also engaged in domestic policies and practices that can only be described as systematic, large-scale abuses of civil and social rights in retrospect. Some examples of these abuses have included their treatment of indigenous peoples, the Roma, orphans and German-Norwegian war children (Langford, 2017; Pettersen & Simonsen, 2010). This was the dark side of the efficient, powerful and sometimes paternalistic traditional Scandinavian welfare state (see Table 1) (Pettersen & Simonsen, 2010). New social movements in Norway and elsewhere have drawn attention to social divisions that exist outside of class and have raised questions about the ways in which individual identities are constructed through social differences. This has led to the subsequent demand for the right to participation, empowerment and recognition over redistribution (Búrca, 2018; Dean, 2015; Fraser, 1997). Modern critics have claimed that while this change has generated new insight into the social relations of power and advanced a sense of global responsibility and equal status, it has also diminished any analyses of class-based inequalities, social justice and welfare rights (Dean, 2015; Fraser, 1997; Moyn, 2018; Webb, 2009). Fraser (2008, p. 283) asked how we can integrate struggles against maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation within a post-Westphalian frame. This question is vital to exploring the relationship between citizenship and the human rights Scandinavian welfare state (see the right column of Table 1). How we define and understand social inequality in how it relates to recognition, distribution and representation is connected to how we perceive the way in which the experiences and consequences of inequality are handled (Pettersen & Simonsen, 2010). As the discussion above has demonstrated, the answers depend largely on whether the aim of the welfare state is sufficiency or equality.

The third type of welfare state, the human rights Scandinavian welfare state, aims to unanimously protect and realise human rights and infers a type of citizenship that embraces redistribution, recognition and representation – all of which are essential for people to participate as equals in life (Bonnycastle, 2011, p. 279; Fraser, 2008). Alternative theories of citizenship focus on the participatory dimension of citizenship and are in line with postcolonial theorists that used the concept of transnationalism to challenge the definition of nation states as separate and bounded entities (Moosa-Mitha, 2014). These theories focus on citizenship as a realisation that involves ‘being’, ‘doing’ and the relationships that people have with one another over the individual citizens of nation states. The perception of citizenship and human rights that exists in the third type of welfare state acknowledges dependency and celebrates human interdependence. It seeks to enable people to engage with one another in mutually protective solidarity (Dean, 2015). As illustrated in the right column of Table 1, the version of human rights with the broadest relationship with citizenship recognises that rights of solidarity can be exercised by collectives or groups. These rights are typically understood in the forms of self-determination, global issues that involve environmental protection and sustainable development and the protection of different minority groups and indigenous peoples. In realising collective rights and equal conditions, social transformation at an institutional, national and global level may be achieved. Therefore, human rights in the human rights Scandinavian welfare state are necessary to make both the individual and the society that they live in completely human (Dean, 2015).

The history of the relationship between the welfare state and citizenship may be viewed as a history of the development of state power and increasingly sophisticated methods of control rather than as a history of progress towards the development of universal social rights (Dean, 2015, p. 59). Recent policies of welfare retrenchment have often involved subtle refinements to disciplinary mechanisms that underpin Foucault's description of social rights as ‘governmentality’ (Dean, 2015, p. 59). The different versions of social welfare and citizenship and their relationships to human rights have had significant implications for social work. These implications will be discussed in the section below.

Human rights in relation to social work

Social work in Nordic countries has historically been organised by the nation state as an inseparable part of the welfare state. Social workers have been involved in both the identification of human needs and in the formation of egalitarian policies and practices responding to them (Hugman, 2012, p. 2). As illustrated in the traditional Scandinavian welfare state column in Table 1, the aim was to produce good, well-adjusted citizens with methods that ranged from individual case work to community work and advocacy (Hutchinson, 2015; Lorenz, 2005). The Nordic welfare states both benefited from and provided the institutional basis for the development of social work. According to Walter Lorenz (2005), social work at that time was applied social policy.

The neoliberal reorganisation of the Norwegian welfare state introduced management principles in social work practices that left less room for professional judgment and limited the autonomy of social workers (Skjefstad et al., 2018; Stamsø, 2009). As shown in the left column of Table 1, the neoliberal Scandinavian welfare state represents the professionalism that Vishanthie Sewpaul (2006, p. 112) labelled as the dominant logical-positivist conception that reflects modernism's technical rationality. This dominant professionalism favours a linear reductionist approach in assessment and management and views the practitioner as an expert who prescribes solutions. The practitioner is thereby expected to be uninvolved, detached, value-free and neutral (2006). They are also predicted to divert attention away from the needs of human beings and towards the needs of the system. In this environment, social workers must demonstrate their effectiveness and clarify to whom they owe their primary allegiance (Lorenz, 2006).

In the human rights Scandinavian welfare state (see Table 1), social workers are committed to human rights and can relate to a competing loyalty and ethical standard of remaining obedient to the system or the state (Kamali, 2015; Stang & Sveaas, 2016). By linking the values of human rights more closely to the social workers’ professional identities and by allowing human rights to influence the relationship between society and the profession, the social work profession becomes politicised and is held accountable to human rights. At the same time, the interpretation of the mandate to promote human rights becomes a collectivist ethical matter of the profession (Pettersen & Simonsen, 2010).

Historically, social workers in the Norwegian welfare state have participated in extensive segregation and exclusion processes that have violated basic human rights. As described previously, some examples of these abuses have included their treatment of indigenous peoples, the Roma, orphans and German-Norwegian war children (Pettersen & Simonsen, 2010). In retrospect, it may appear that their interpretation of these mandates was more strongly influenced by obedience than by an independent ethical reflection of their own professional practices and that the lack of courage to protest against what they viewed as unjust may have been rooted in the cultural foundation of the top-down paternalistic welfare state (Pettersen & Simonsen, 2010).

Because social workers are products of their socio-political, economic and cultural worlds, they must be mindful of their complicity as arms of the state in the reproduction of various forms of oppression that are linked to prejudice and discrimination on the basis of class, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, physical ability or sexual orientation (Sewpaul, 2016). This does not mean that social workers are merely objects of neoliberalism and translate policies as a one-way process. Social workers are also agents in relation to citizens and clients and potentially reinforce, oppose and resist policies through their practices (Nordberg, 2018, p. 128). Studies on the identities and roles of social workers in neoliberal Nordic welfare states show that social workers are not passive actors in the transformative process but are capable of taking actively different stances and choosing their own identities (Jönsson, 2019; Skjefstad et al., 2018).

Social work in the human rights Scandinavian welfare state is focused on structural transformation (see Table 1). From the perspective of human rights, the first step in structural transformation could involve learning from the history of the social work profession and its relationship to the development of the Nordic welfare state. This history could then be re-examined to avoid the reproduction of discriminatory, Western-centric and colonial discourse in the future (Ife, 2012; Jönsson, 2014, p. 101; Sewpaul, 2007). This process would include recognising and reflecting on how both the traditional and neoliberal histories of social work in the Nordic welfare states make a distinction between ‘social work for us’ and ‘social work for the others’ (Jönsson, 2014, p. 101). It would also involve addressing the following questions from the perspective of human rights: what comprises citizenship in relation to human rights; and what are the primary responsibilities of social work?

Sewpaul (2016, p. 707) emphasised that as professionals, social workers are in a strategic position to contribute to the promotion of the micro and macro levels of social justice and human rights, and more specifically, at the intersection between them. Bringing micro levels of analyses and intervention to broader public issues can transport social work to the realm politics so that it can engage in political negotiations about needs and rights (Sewpaul, 2016, p. 707). According to Martínez Herrero and Nicholls (2017), much of the current theoretical emphasis on international social work focuses on the development of a broader, relationship-based understanding of the human rights involved in the social problems that people face. The relationship between the human rights Scandinavian welfare state (see Table 1) and social work is reflected in this tradition, and this development is illustrated in the new principles of the Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles (IASSW, 2018). Rather than locating the concept of human rights within an individualistic and nationalist framework, the new principles emphasise the intersubjective and interdependent nature of human rights (Sewpaul & Henrickson, 2019). A key message in these principles is that by pursuing and strengthening the connection between ethics and human rights in social work, a human rights perspective can provide a more robust framing for ethical practices that are founded on a relationship-based approach and citizen obligations that coincide with human rights (Banks, 2016; Ife, 2012, p. 182). In this approach, practitioners are moral agents in context and ethical issues are embedded in the constructs of social work so that social workers must operate from within the political context (Banks, 2016).

This new understanding of ethics can be interpreted as a discourse about the behaviour of the powerful. It may also be viewed as an attempt to circumscribe such behaviour in the interest of the less powerful and as an essential reformation of social work as a profession so that it is more concerned with issues of social justice, power and empowerment (Ife, 2012). Thus, because people who experience the greatest disadvantages in Norway and elsewhere are the most likely population to be unable to exercise their rights, failure to raise issues of privilege and oppression is not an option (Witken, 2017, p. 53).

As discussed in the continuum, Colleen Lundy (2011) reasserted a view that had been central to social work theory – that social structures and social relationships are the primary barriers to the unmet needs of people – by building a partnership between the issue of human rights and the creation of equality. Thus, the idea of rights can clarify this concept and imbue social work with a form of moral force as shown in the human rights Scandinavian welfare state (2011). In the traditional Scandinavian welfare state (see Table 1), while the macro-level and structure-oriented perspectives on social work and social problems have been included in the ideology and functions of the welfare state and its egalitarian institutions and policies, these factors are less visible within interactions between people (Jönsson, 2014). Although there has been increased awareness of poverty in Norway, studies show that in relation to child welfare, social-economic inequality has become obscured in the understanding of social problems (Kojan, 2011, 2016). Social inequality can be explained by a lack of cultural recognition, and it is often rooted in the economic redistribution of political structures within society (Fraser, 1997).

The Nordic welfare states are committed to active citizenship and to increasing the participation of its citizens – factors that have long been the goal of social work (Hutchinson, 2014; Ife, 2012, p. 161). In the illustrative model in Table 1, there are overlapping ideas of participation. The traditional Scandinavian welfare state encourages citizen participation that is based on the idea of individual collectivism and reciprocated rights and duties. In the human rights Scandinavian welfare state, social work is based on the broader side of participation and the ideal that Fraser (2008) called participatory parity: wherein all three conditions of redistribution, recognition and representation are necessary for people to participate equally in life. From the perspective of human rights, social work is committed to an approach that incorporates advocacy, community development, social action and individual case work. This can lead to the development of a more participatory society where people are encouraged to meet their obligations as citizens, which in turn support their rights (Ife, 2012, p. 159).

Conclusion

Karen Healy (2014, p. 1) argued that an understanding of the context of practice is integral to social work and that the context of practice can be understood through a competing set of discourses. The current paper proposed a conceptual framework that built on a basic continuum between sufficiency and equality to reflected on how human rights in the social work of the Norwegian welfare state was sensible in its relationship to the redistribution and goal of achieving social equality (Bonnycastle, 2011; Dean, 2015; Moyn, 2018). The conceptual model's aim is to unearth new perspectives on the relationship between human rights and social work practices. It also seeks to build a research agenda that uses a conceptual lens to determine how human rights as a normative value of social work relate to the Norwegian welfare state. The goal is to facilitate discussions about an empirical approach on how human rights can further be developed in research about Nordic social work and the ways in which human rights are linked to the potential development of an egalitarian society (Bonnycastle, 2011).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions for improvements of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Ann Kristin Alseth is an Assistant Professor in public policy and administration at the Department of Social Work, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. Her research and teaching areas concern public policy developments in the welfare state, immigration and integration policy, human rights and social work practice, critical pedagogy and social work education.