Editorial

This first issue of 2022 sees a change in the way the journal is being managed. As with other journals we have found that being able to meet virtually, thanks to the ease of technological advance, has increased our scope for engaging with academics across the globe. We are thus no longer in need of having separate boards in different parts of the world, or indeed an international board with members representing widely distanced regions. We are now in the process of developing one international editorial board which will include representation from various parts of the world. The journal has been growing in strength year on year since its start in 2006 and we aim to continue that development whilst maintaining our focus on the discussion of ethical issues arising in the area of social intervention by professionals and policy makers. We continue to be interested in both empirical and theoretical discussion of these matters in the context of a smaller but fractious world where reflection, analysis and evidence need to be promoted within and across national borders. Our new board will enable us to do that across the time zones, with active virtual meetings helping to increase our co-operation and support for the further progress of the journal.

In this issue we have 5 substantial papers in the main section, plus a single sizable paper in the practice section. As in many previous issues the papers come from different countries, and we can learn from colleagues’ reflections on their varied research and experience. The first paper is a strong challenge to the ethics of social intervention in the UK in particular but will resonate with the difficult situation of family social workers everywhere. The paper by Carey and Bell – ‘Universal credit, lone mothers and poverty: some ethical challenges for social work with children and families’ is especially relevant in circumstances common across the globe where child poverty has been exacerbated by growing levels of inequality, aggravated by economic and health crises. Their argument consists of a critical evaluation of a UK example of conditionality-based welfare policies of the type adopted by neoliberal governments internationally, with a focus on the impact upon working-class lone mothers. They question the ethics and the stigma involved in the implementation of such a policy.

The second paper by Mia Tammelin and Maija Mänttäri-van der Kuip is a national report on ‘Policy alienation in frontline social work – A study of social workers’ responses to a major anticipated social and health care reform in Finland’. Like the previous paper, this one is also focused on policies associated internationally with neo-liberal reform. It reaches the conclusion that in Finland, as elsewhere, policy alienation is widespread among social workers who largely viewed the reforms as lacking socially relevant goals, and that experiences of powerlessness and meaninglessness are (sadly) common.

The idea of ‘tinkering’ with people’s lives at first sight seems to indicate a less than serious approach to very serious social problems. However the Dutch authors of Tinkering as collective practice: a qualitative study in community housing services – Marjolijn Heerings, Hester van de Bovenkamp, Mieke Cardol and Roland Bal – argue that the notion of ‘tinkering’ helps to express an important component of effective social intervention. Good care, they contend, should acknowledge the importance of relational complexity, requiring a collective handling of the tensions between the differing values of a multiplicity of involved people and organisations. They attempt to demonstrate this by developing the notion of collective tinkering in the context of an ethnographic study, conducted in two teams in community housing services for people with intellectual disabilities and severe mental illness. The result is an interesting paper about the design of care practices and ethical relationship.

The fourth paper in this issue represents an international effort to draw together a particular range of information in: Developing an Evidence-base to Guide Ethical Action in Global Challenges Research in Complex and Fragile Contexts: A Scoping Review of the Literature. The authors, Cristóbal Guerra, Clara Calia, Corinne Reid, Charles Marley, Paulina Barrera, Abdul-Gafar Oshodid, and Lisa Boden, all have expertise in different areas of the world and have usefully combined their knowledge to produce a paper to support anyone approaching research ethical issues in varied cultural and regional areas of the world, and also in relation to problems arising from interdisciplinary research. Their review of a large number of relevant papers helped to produce a four-part framework based on emergent key concepts. They conclude that ethical action in this kind of research context can be facilitated by a thorough analysis of ethical dilemmas using these concepts.

The final academic contribution in the issue, by Gulnaz Anjum, and Sania Bilwani, is a paper from Pakistan where the authors have conducted a small qualitative study to explore the notion of care in that society. They specifically wanted to study gender difference in the moral reasoning of men and women in Karachi, Pakistan, in the light of the ethics of care. The similarities and differences, both in their approach to the research, and to what they find in Karachi, are interesting to compare with care and gender in other parts of the world.

There is a practice section in this first issue of the year, but it unusually contains only one paper – a substantial piece of work reflecting on the author’s experience researching care in a prison environment. Warren Stewart’s Helping Not Hurting: Horizontal Care and Learning to Peer Care in Prison follows on from an earlier paper published in this journal on the research ethical issues arising in this same context: Stewart (2020). In this paper there is a focus on the practices involved in peer to peer caring in a prison setting, and the experiences of the researcher in teasing out both the complexity and the importance of it, especially in view of policies of incarceration that increasingly leave many older and frail men in vulnerable situations.

Our newly appointed practice editors, Tula Branelly and Antoine Rogers will be pleased to receive possible papers for inclusion in the Ethics in Practice section. Papers can be sent direct to the email address below, rather than through the Scholar One processing system. All practice papers are subject to approval by the editors but are not double-blind peer reviewed as academic papers. Please consult our website for further details: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/resw20.