Why social work and sociology need psychosocial theory

Abstract

Sociology and social work as disciplines have, over the last decades, had an, at best, ambivalent relationship. Whereas branches of sociology, such as symbolic interactionism, have produce theory of immense use to social work, for example the concept of ‘stigma’ and work in the field of identity, others are harder to utilise and indeed can seem to be antithetical to building social work theory for practice. Both structuralist and post-structuralist paradigms have been criticised for this latter difficulty. This paper argues that the current cross-disciplinary developments integrating scholars concerned with theory, research and practices, from within sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, social policy and social work, with the academic and practice discipline of psychosocial studies, offers a way forward. The theory, the paper suggests, from psychosocial studies, allows a re-analysis of some of the impasses in applying post-structural sociological theory to essentially modernist projects such as social work. It also bridges traditional academic/practice divides such as the role of the ‘knower’ in relation to the ‘known’ and elucidates an agenda for research practices and methodologies which harness sociological and social work ontologies.

Keywords:

• sociology
• psychosocial
• structure
• theory
• psychoanalysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.