Everyday ethics in professional life: social work as ethics work

ABSTRACT

This article outlines and develops the concept of ‘ethics work’ in social work practice. It takes as its starting point a situated account of ethics as embedded in everyday practice: ‘everyday ethics’. This is contrasted with ‘textbook ethics’, which focuses on outlining general ethical principles, presenting ethical dilemmas and offering normative ethical frameworks (including decision-making models). ‘Ethics work’ is a more descriptive account of ethics that refers to the effort people put into seeing ethically salient aspects of situations, developing themselves as good practitioners, working out the right course of action and justifying who they are and what they have done. After identifying seven features of ethics work, including work on framing, roles, emotion, identity, reason, relationships and performance, each element is illustrated with reference to two case examples from social work practice. It is argued that the concept of ethics work, with its focus on the practitioners as moral agents in context, is an important antidote to the rules-based managerialism of much contemporary practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional ethics
• social work
• ethics work

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the two social workers who contributed the cases and to Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan for giving permission to reproduce them in this article. I am also grateful to participants in several conferences where I presented the concept of ‘ethics work’ for their helpful feedback, particularly Frans Vosman, Harry Kunneman and Ed de Jonge. I am also very grateful to Merlinda Weinberg for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sarah Banks is Professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University, UK. She teaches and researches in the fields of social, community and youth work, with a particular interest in professional ethics and community-based participatory research.

Notes

¹Kahneman comments that he and Tversky used the term ‘framing’ both to refer to the formulation to which decision-makers are exposed and the interpretation they construct for themselves (Kahneman and Tversky 1981, p. xiv). So the term ‘frame’ blurs the distinction between the activities of editing and mental accounting and susceptibility to framing effects. However, I do not see this as a problem: we are given frames and we contribute to frames.