Everyday Ethics of Dignity Work: What Social Workers Do to Promote the Dignity of Service-users in Times of Austerity Measures and Welfare Stigma

ABSTRACT The social work profession is committed to recognising the inherent dignity of humanity, as reflected in global and national ethical codes. The article shows what this commitment implies as a part of everyday ethics by developing the concept ‘dignity work’. Dignity work is an ongoing effortful moral activity social workers perform to promote the dignity of service-users. Social workers’ narratives, collected with professionals in the Netherlands, revealed that they do this mainly to counter welfare stigma. Welfare stigma currently forms the biggest threat to dignity as it defines people dependent on welfare arrangements and professional help as ‘undeserving’, questioning their worth as a person. Social workers perform three strategies of dignity work: affirming, equalising and including. With these practices they negotiate the self-sufficiency norm, dominant in the Dutch context, and try to counter ideas and feelings of undeservingness and worthlessness of clients. Their practices lay bare the working of ‘stigma power’ as social workers have no choice but to relate to welfare stigma daily. The analysis shows that the ethical is intertwined with the political. Studying dignity work in the context of austerity and welfare stigma reveals that otherwise seemingly ordinary everyday acts are morally and politically significant.