The future of social work

Despite having practised in many different roles over the 47 years since I took on my first job in social work, I have read very few social work texts thoroughly, finding the theory often lacking a conceptual framework, with unacknowledged biases and implicit perspectives, and over-elaboration obscuring common understanding and everyday concepts. As a social work student in the late 1970s, I was drawn primarily to works in the fields of sociology and social policy which offered plausible frameworks that I could use creatively in my work, whilst Pauline Hardiker’s work on practice theory was for me the most meaningful approach to understanding practice. However, Bill Jordan’s work stood out from most other texts about social work. His direct and clear communicative style, looking at what makes helping work without resorting to jargon, taking account of the relationships between worker and organisation and the person being helped, all made great sense to me. His focus on the importance of material conditions fitted with my own political sensibility. Unlike many writers on social work, he paid attention to the personal and the political, the individual and wider society and the relationship between them. This most recent book is no exception, looking both historically and internationally at social issues and related private troubles and the relationship between this social context and the role of social work. In this book social work emerges as relationship-based in several ways. Firstly, its form is highly dependent on the context in which it takes place. Secondly, it is an activity concerned with relationships. Thirdly, Jordan sees social work as a kind of Socratic endeavour (see p. 77, ‘Social work practice consists in reasoning with fellow citizens about how to deal with stressful situations in dialogues towards negotiated solutions (Jordan, 1990)’. The book is set out in chapters which describe overarching social themes and relate them to social work. In the following overview I focus on the first two chapters in most detail as these set the grounds for the rest of the book.