Googled scholarly suggestions
If you ever need to google the website of Nordic Social Work Research, you will most likely first be shown the titles of articles and books related to the Nordic welfare state before the link to the journal website turns up. At least, this is what happens to me if I use Google for this purpose. This may indicate that Google recognises the Nordic welfare state as a more settled – and more searched for – key word than Nordic social work research but still somehow related to it. Although I am far from being an expert or a great believer in Google search logistics, I find this repeated search result quite intriguing. Should one indeed follow the suggestion made by Google and link Nordic social work research with the welfare state in the Nordic context?
What differentiates Nordic social work research from other ‘regionally’ entitled research traditions and related journals is actually a topical issue for the editorial work of Nordic Social Work Research. The intention to establish the journal was to create a forum for social work researchers in the Nordic countries to share their work in English and to establish a link to the international scientific community. The journal did not aim to restrict the authorship (and certainly, not its readership) only to researchers residing in the Nordic countries. Instead, we wished to invite any authors to contribute articles with relevance to Nordic social work research. This is, as you know, a very open definition.
It has been clear from the very beginning that there are some shared principles and policies of the welfare state which come under the notion of the Nordic welfare state and influence directly and indirectly social work and social work research. Their interrelations are not, however, self-evident or uncontested as the welfare model does not determine the very essence and practice of social work in the Nordic countries or vice versa. Further, the welfare state is not a static entity; it changes with time. In addition, there are many inter-Nordic and inter-country differences in how the Nordic welfare state model is implemented. Most interestingly, looking at the articles published in Nordic social work research, the topic of the welfare state and social work ‘in the Nordic light’ seems to be quite underrepresented as a distinctive focus of studies. The lack of explorations of those interrelations in this journal may suggest that the topic is taken for granted and therefore, does not inspire explorations; it may also suggest that relevant articles are published elsewhere, as the topic is interesting outside the publication forums which use the word ‘Nordic’ in their titles. In fact, looking at journals of more ‘European’ or ‘international’ emphasis, the latter explanation seems to hit the mark. As a result, in the context of Nordic social work research, the ‘Nordicness’ is approached differently from Google’s suggestions.
A simple answer to what makes Nordic social work research ‘Nordic’ would be that the majority of our authors are inevitably located in the Nordic countries and the majority of the articles present social work in one Nordic or more countries. Consequently, ‘Nordic’ connects them as a geographical notion. However, the most read article is written by a non-Nordic scholar (British) and it analyses non-Nordic (British) practice as is to be seen in the publisher’s chart of most read articles on the journal website. The chart does not say who the readers are. They may be located in the Nordic countries or elsewhere. The point is that the article itself interests our readers regardless of its seeming lack of connection to the Nordic region. A similar approach will be found in the forthcoming special issue of ‘Practice Research’ which includes articles from a variety of Nordic, European and non-European countries. Still, they share the same interest in practice research and make a relevant contribution to Nordic Social Work Research. Location or geography of the authors or articles is not thus the key to the Nordicness of Nordic Social Work Research.
More than welfare state, territory or geography, the Nordic element in Nordic Social Work Research is an arena for academic exchange and debate for research which acknowledges the variety of social work research communities and traditions. The precondition for this exchange is that social work research, some fields of its study more than the others, is context bound and therefore the context, whether geographical, political, thematic or scholarly, has to be explained to the reader from another country (or tradition). This precondition is, in fact, of fundamental nature as it questions whether the quality of research communication is based only on universally shared and understood vocabulary, theoretical and methodological approaches, and styles of writing.
Standardisation and scientific quality
The point taken above celebrates the variety of research traditions and scholarly ambitions and acknowledges the need to respect all of them. It rests on the assumption that social work is too complex to be standardised to meet only one form of research or research writings. It is, however, important to recognise that this point can easily take us to very lazy research as ‘everything goes’. The guest editorial by Bruce A. Thyer in the previous issue of Nordic Social Work Research is, an important reminder of the challenges related to standardisation of research or the lack of it. His editorial addresses the present issues in the US research context. However, in this part of the world, the requirements for reporting standards and clinical trial registries are not (yet?) the top themes for the social work research communities. Instead, the topical issue tends to be whether the quality of research publications can be judged based on the publication forum and how this reshapes research in social work and research for social work, as discussed in earlier editorials of Nordic Social Work Research. All in all, the notion of standardisation of research is an integral part of social work research at the moment although the communities may take a different approach to it. Consequently, Bruce Thyer’s call for journals to discuss, explore and safeguard the good standards of research in the complex area of social work research is to the point.
The following example of safeguarding the standard of research publications is quite common for Nordic Social Work Research, as the criteria for assessing the quality of research does not come only from data, research design or reference style but also from the context in focus and language used. The assessment of the quality of research is very much in the hands of reviewers. In the reviews, ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’, among other issues, are evaluated in detail which, as we all know, is not always a straightforward exercise. If the manuscript uses a lot of references and background material which is not published in the lingua franca of present academic publishing (English), how can you judge the quality of the paper? We have come across reviews which acknowledge only English language references for an academic paper. The reasoning is that, otherwise the argumentation of the paper cannot be judged. The implication of this standpoint would be that all articles submitted to Nordic Social Work Research should use only English language literature. This would exclude all research, professional books and policy documents in the original language of the country in question (unless the country uses English language as its main language). Consequently, one would miss a considerable amount of valuable research.
The line of standardisation we would like to follow in Nordic Social Work Research is that, English language references are not necessary to guarantee the proof and evidence of scholarly writing. Yet, we should not trust blindly. In order to assess the quality of evidence, a reviewer familiar with that particular social context and its language is needed. This is the only way not to exclude research highlighting topics unknown in the Anglophone countries, or research coming from the Sami or Faroese societies, for example, which has not built a repository of English language publications. Standardisation of scientific quality thus takes place through the recognition of particularities.
Within and beyond the Nordic borders
As it happens, the present volume of Nordic Social Work Research presents five articles all of which challenge the very idea of Nordicness being a straightforward denominator for the journal. They do it in different ways.
The article ‘When emotions count in construction of interview data’ by Amy Holtan, Astrid Strandby and Sissel H. Eriksen is a methodological analysis of emotions in a particular type of data, which is interview data. The data is Norwegian but the message is not country-specific: the authors suggest researchers to take emotions into consideration when analysing the data. This should be done for the sake of reflectivity and transparency in any interview study.
Two articles are based on extensive use of existing research. In ‘Constructing relations in social work: client, customer and service user? The application and relevance of the term user in social work discourse’, Lena Hübner analyses Swedish and British research publications in order to learn how the ‘non-social worker’ is addressed. She finds the terms ‘client’, ‘customer’ and ‘service user’ differently used in these two country contexts, and asks the hidden power positions which the terms bring with them to be uncoverd. Sari Rissanen and Satu Ylinen review English language literature addressing poverty among elderly people. The material is not restricted to any country and the messages of this review go beyond the Nordic borders, as is the case of the other article as well.
Niinive von Greiff and Lisa Skogens in ‘The mechanisms of treatment – client and treatment staff perspectives on change during treatment for alcohol problems’ and Sidsel Natland and Ira Malmberg-Heimonen in ‘A study of coordinator positionings in family group conferences’ examine their topics in the Swedish and Norwegian contexts, but demonstrate that the topics themselves are not labelled especially ‘Swedish’ or ‘Norwegian’. In social work, the questions of the mechanisms of treatment in alcohol abuse and the inclusion of social networks are topical in general. Both articles make suggestions for improving practice: the first one calls for a more extended system of support for more marginalised clients and the latter for more attention given to the role of the coordinators in the family group conference process.
In fact, Google’s custom to link Nordic social work research with the Nordic welfare state – as mentioned at the beginning of this editorial – is supported by Helena Hirvonen’s article ‘Doing gendered and (dis)embodied work. Care work in the context of medico-managerial welfare state’ as the welfare state offers a context for her study. The article provides a critical analysis of the medico-managerial reformulations of welfare ideology and policy which influence dramatically care work, among other issues.
The findings above may provide an impetus for Google searches: the currently important words for Nordic social work research may not include the terms ‘social’, ‘welfare’ or ‘state’ but terms coming from different regimes of research and policy. In case Google gets lost with all these variations, academic journals show their power: they do not only use the variety of terms but also critically analyse them and their implications.
Editor