Metaphors as a Tool for Understanding of Lived Experience of Social Work Practitioners in the Contemporary Czech Society

Abstract

The paper aims to understand lived experience of social work practitioners in contemporary Czech society through the use of the potential of metaphors. Metaphors are seen as a tool for bringing implicit knowledge and experience to the surface (especially where they are encountered certain barriers to verbalisation); as an area of connecting lived experience and its essential meaning. Using the phenomenological hermeneutical method of thematic narrative analysis and structural thematic analysis of metaphorical narratives, new ways of structuring reality by participants and new coherences are revealed, thus re-describing reality that shows the tension, if not conflict, between the concept of social work based on technically conceived rationality as officially carried out and required institutional policy in social services and social work as a value-oriented profession The implication for social work: the social workers should reflect the impacts of the revealed conflict on the practice and reconsider the further role and development of social work.