Editorial

Early 2019, the European Journal of Social Work published a thought-provoking special issue on Social Work and Neoliberalism with Edgar Marthinsen, Anne Juberg, Nina Skjefstad and Paul Michael Garrett as guest editors. Throughout this special issue it became clear how social work is increasingly confronted with standardisation and uniformisation because of neoliberal inspired logics that have also reached and impacted social work practice.

This is no different today. Social work is still influenced by the demand for a rational approach to social work, but especially by a tendency towards overrationalisation. Perhaps, the demand is even stronger today than it was two years ago. Today, social work practice seems to be a minefield. From the outsider's perspective, everything looks calm. Social work is committed to acting rationally, to using evidence-based methods where their effectiveness has been proven by research, to accounting for what happens with public funds and to communicating transparently with service users, social workers and the government about what happens in practice. Social work even commits, despite its historical reluctance, to invest in new digital developments, such as electronic information systems, and recognises the benefits of doing so.

But those who move in the social work landscape, either by listening to social workers or through research, notice that this story deserves a lot more nuance. With this issue, we exactly offer a glimpse into that nuance. We do this through three different, but intertwined clusters of papers.

The first cluster of papers refers to systemic interventions that aim at improving social work practice in terms of rationalisation. We begin with a contribution of Marina Sletten and Catharina Bjørkquist. They talk about how child welfare professionals adopt standardised tools into practice. They argue that there is a dynamic process between professionals on the one hand and the tools on the other hand, in which they both impinge on one another. The second paper by Philip Gillingham elaborates on this theme. In his contribution, he presents findings from a small qualitative study which aimed to evaluate the reaction of social workers to a new form of electronic information system. Going beyond the problems expected with the introduction of this new tool, he outlines that the reasons why this form of electronic information system may be particularly problematic for frontline social workers are explored.

The third paper, written by Alessandro Sicora and colleagues, addresses the issue of decision-making, which is inextricably linked to the development of a more rational social work practice. In their paper, the authors state that although social work must continue to develop its ability to use the best knowledge to inform practice, a psycho-social rationality model may be required to conceptualise internalised ‘intuitive’ judgement processes in practice. The following paper by Line Moseggaard Søbjerg and colleagues addresses the same issue but from a different angle. It explores and considers the potential use of statistical methods in understanding risk factors. According to the authors, it is imperative that social work engages with the development of adequate statistical methods to improve the knowledge and skill base for social work in the best interest of services users. The last paper of this cluster was composed by Morten Ejrnæs and Cecilie Moesby-Jensen. They investigated 57 Danish social workers’ risk assessments by means of a vignette study. They uncovered that social workers’ risk assessments were very divergent, that social workers lacked words to communicate the magnitude of risk adequately and that there were no significant differences in approach to the assessment of children’s risk between social workers who rated the risk as high, medium or low.

The second cluster of papers deals with how both research and social work can engage service users in what they do. In the first paper of this cluster, Merete Tunestveit explores how participation of children and adolescents in child welfare services can be improved. She provides a unique analysis of how the research circle model provides structure and strategies for combining critical reflection on practice with theoretical insight, promoting knowledge production and serving as basis for improving practice. The second paper, written by Anita Strøm and Tor Slettebø, draws on the same topic by performing a critical interpretive review of the factors affecting user participation for residents with dementia living in nursing homes. Their main finding is that user participation for this group and this context is multifactorial. The third paper, by Rosi Enroos and colleagues, examines the nature of consent in the context of Finnish care. Based on qualitative data, they highlight the messy and blurred nature of consent that is found in other fields of practice as well. According to the authors, critical awareness of the nature of consent is important for an understanding of service-user participation and self-determination. The last paper of this cluster explores how stakeholders perceive quality of social services. In this contribution, Jan Siska designed a questionnaire that was completed by 217 service providers, 249 public administration representatives and 205 service users of residential care and in-home support. In the end, the subjective quality of life of service users was rated as the most important indicator of service quality by all stakeholders.

The third and last cluster of papers refers to service users who left care. Ingri-Hanne Braenne Bennwik and Inger Oterholm open the debate on care leavers by exploring values that underpin Norwegian policies aimed at supporting care leavers with disabilities in their transition to adulthood. They found that care leavers are not identified as a target group in either child welfare policy or disability policy. We continue this topic with a paper from Gemma Crous and colleagues on how interaction between the care system and youth can promote resilience from a long-term perspective. They found that the main factors promoting resilience among young people formerly in out-of-home care are attributed to the personal sphere and to relational and environmental factors; their education and the social support received. The last paper of this cluster, and thus of this issue, written by Elli-Maria Tahkola and colleagues focused on coping strategies identified in interviews with 18 young adults with foster care backgrounds in Finland. By means of an interpretive phenomenological analysis three main themes of coping strategies were identified: inward orientation, outward orientation, and influencing one's life circumstances.