Critical social work and the promotion of citizenship in Chile

Chilean social work in context

Since its emergence as a profession in 1925, addressing the diverse expressions of social exclusion has represented the central purpose of social work in Latin American countries (Carballeda, 2012; Palma, 1988). As an institutional welfare state with universal coverage of social rights has never existed in the region (Delamaza, 2015), state policy has always targeted the poorest sectors. Latin American social workers have traditionally had the task of identifying those potential service users and providing social services – if available – to them (Illanes, 2007).

In the mid-1960s, with political changes across the world, a debate about the purpose and aims of social work was initiated in Chile as in many other Latin American countries. This process, which was called ‘the reconceptualisation movement’, denounced the role of social workers as supporters of the established order and became concerned with the search for ‘a new social work to the service of the oppressed and dominated Latin American people’ (Aylwin, 1999: 2). The coup d’etat and the establishment of the right-wing military dictatorship in 1973 abruptly changed the Chilean social workers’ situation. Schools of social work were closed during the first years of the dictatorship, and many social work academics and students were expelled, exiled, and some of them are still registered as ‘arrested-disappeared’ according to the reports of the Chilean Association of Social Workers (Colegio de Trabajadores Sociales de Chile [CTS], 2013). Social work lost its university status, and as a consequence curricula were re-designed in order to remove the theoretical and political nature of the profession (Saracostti et al., 2012).

After the return of democratic regimes in Latin America in the late 1980s, a re-appraisal of the critical tradition of social work started to find a place within Latin America, Chile included. In particular, the idea of citizenship – which was a taboo concept during the period of dictatorship – emerged in the 1990s as an ethical-political horizon for the reconstruction of the purpose of social work (Carballeda, 2012; Montaño, 2004; Saracostti et al., 2012). This emphasis on citizenship has also been reflected in the statements of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Enseñanza e Investigación en Trabajo Social (ALAEITS) (2012) – Latin American Association for Teaching and Research in Social Work – relating to the definition of social work. The promotion of citizenship is also a core value in the Code of Ethics elaborated by the CTS (2014). In the context of a weak welfare state, monopolisation of the channels of influence and increasing inequality gaps which question the legitimacy of democracy, the denial of citizenship was identified as the ultimate cause of poverty and social exclusion in Latin America (Fleury, 2004) and in Chile (Delamaza, 2015; Ministerio de Planificación [MIDEPLAN], 2009; Palma and Urzúa, 2005). In a similar vein, the Social Protection System launched in Chile in 2000, characterised by a high participation of social workers in its design and implementation (Saracostti, 2008), was seen as an opportunity to expand the rights of citizens within the poorest sectors in Chile (MIDEPLAN, 2004).

The study

Despite the current relevance given to the promotion of citizenship by Latin American and Chilean social work academics and professional bodies, empirical research has yet to look at the way in which ideas on citizenship are included in the understanding and practices of social workers. In this context, and drawing upon some findings of my doctoral research, this article examines social workers’ understanding and interventions related to the promotion of citizenship in Chile. The study involved documentary analysis and 26 semi-structured interviews with senior social workers who, employed by NGOs, implemented state policy for addressing poverty and social exclusion in Chile. By complementing interviews and documentary analysis, data were triangulated. Thematic analysis of the gathered data was carried out to seek not only semantic content, but also the latent meaning of such content (e.g. underlying ideas, assumptions, conceptualisations, ideologies) (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

The social workers who participated in this study worked within two Chilean NGOs: the Home of Christ (HOC) and the Foundation for Overcoming Poverty (FOP). These two organisations were selected because they both state addressing poverty and social exclusion as their main goal; at the same time, they identify the promotion of citizenship as a strategy to achieve such a goal (FOP, 2013; HOC, 2008). In addition, both organisations are sufficiently large to facilitate access to the sample of social workers required for interview. Of the participants, 19 were female and 7 were male social workers; most of them graduated between 1990 and 2000. Three of them implemented interventions in the north zone of Chile, 11 in the centre and 12 in the south. The aim was not to make wider inferences or generalisations from the data produced, but to provide initial insights for understanding the nature of social workers’ practices in Chile in order to generate new questions for further inquiries.

Ethical considerations were adopted following the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, 2015) guidelines and the requests for ethical research established by the Ethics Committee of the School for Policy Studies of the University of Bristol. The research project was approved by the committee before undertaking fieldwork.

Discussing citizenship

Social exclusion is manifested in many Latin American countries, Chile included, not only as the lack of access to goods and services but also as a lack of voice and power in society (Buvinic and Mazza, 2004; Delamaza, 2015). In such a context, which is still characterised by inequality and the dominance of political elites and authoritarian enclaves (Garretón, 2012), the promotion of citizenship has been understood as a way of challenging oppression and redistributing power (Clarke et al., 2014; Cruz, 2010; Field, 2007; Jelin, 2012).

Citizenship is a polysemic concept because it can be approached from diverse perspectives. It can be understood as ‘a privilege of the civilised’ (Mamdani, 1996: 19) as well as an expansive and egalitarian imaginary around which political mobilisation of those who are excluded is possible (Clarke et al., 2014). Since the 20th century, three main approaches to examining the idea of citizenship have been dominant, with competing traditions: liberal, communitarian and republicanist. The liberal perspective can be traced back to Marshall’s (1950) ideas on citizenship, in which citizenship was conceptualised as the successive entitlement of individual rights and duties, while from a communitarian approach, citizenship is understood as an immaterial category, a cultural practice based on the sense of belonging to a particular community regardless of legal status (Balibar, 1988; Faulks, 2000; Tonon, 2009). The republicanist approach emerges as a reaction to liberal and communitarian approaches on citizenship, where citizenship entails both individual rights as well as community bonds with a special focus on the collective exercise of such rights in the public sphere, that is to say, the place where the interaction between citizens and institutional mechanisms can be produced (Arendt, 1958; Cortina, 2004; Habermas, 1991).

Emphasising the exercise of collective rights in the public sphere, critical republicanist approaches go further than general republicanist views by highlighting the dimension of power that influences the exercise of citizenship by excluded populations. Although an internal debate between deliberative and agonistic proposals on citizenship and democracy can be found in the literature (see e.g. Mouffe, 2009), this research agrees with Khan’s (2013) analysis on the commonalities of both of these versions of republicanism: the constructive role of conflict in democratic politics and the focus on self-government as well as the search for civic solidarity.

The idea of the citizen as client and consumer has proliferated under the neoliberal rhetoric since the 1980s (Clarke et al., 2014; García Canclini, 1995; Jelin, 2012; Mouffe, 2005). The hegemonic nature of neoliberalism derives from its capacity to penetrate not only the economic but also the cultural and social domains of life by colonising the common-sense way people interpret, live in and understand the world. It operates as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action towards market values (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Deepak, 2011; Strier et al., 2008). Particularly in the field of citizenship, a neoliberal reworking of such a notion through responsibilisation of civil society has been identified over the last decade (Clarke et al., 2014; Levitas, 2012). The Big Society initiative launched by the Conservative government in the United Kingdom in 2010 is a clear example of the emergence of a co-optation of republicanist ideas related to citizens’ rights and participation. Such co-optation lies in its reduction to a set of individual rights, as Clarke et al. (2014) point out, ‘centered on the right to spend one’s own money [and on] a shallow conception of participation’ (p. 175). Citizenship, when colonised by neoliberal rationality, is characterised by passivity and, above all, its discipline and alienation in the market. It is a socially and politically fragmented citizenship.

The impossibility of reconciling neoliberalism and democracy is denounced in the critical republicanist approach, and the need for radicalising democracy is instead claimed (Field, 2007; Mouffe, 2009; Santos, 2003). This radicalisation, as Santos (2003) points out, requires re-politicising the idea of citizenship. In his words, such repoliticisation means ‘to identify power relations and imagine practical ways to transform them in shared authority relationships’ (Santos, 1998: 332). Citizenship, hence, is a central point for launching projects of political contestation or developing redistributive projects, in which those who are excluded can challenge situations of oppression or push for change.

From the critical republicanist perspective, citizenship is understood as an anti-essentialist (Mouffe, 2009; Tambakaki, 2010) and counter-hegemonic (Arshad-Ayaz and Ayaz, 2015; Buck, 2012; Field, 2007) notion. The anti-essentialist nature of the concept lies in the acknowledgement of the three hegemonic meanings of citizenship (citizenship as the exercise of individual rights for liberals, as the sense of community belonging for communitarians and as participation in the public sphere for republicanists) as competing views which are intertwined and interdependent. From this approach, a citizen is recognised as an individual, but he or she is also an individual inserted within a political community, and therefore has the necessity and democratic right to participate in ways that are in a permanent state of negotiation and contestation. Here, citizenship has been recognised as a means of resistance to oppressive powers, that is to say, a counter-hegemonic idea of citizenship (Cruz, 2010; Field, 2007; Harvey, 1998; Mouffe, 2009).

The concept of citizenship adopted in this research follows the critical republicanist approach with its anti-essentialist and counter-hegemonic orientation. Citizenship, therefore, is conceived as a notion informed by three intertwined dimensions: (1) exercising rights, including not only civil and political rights but also social, economic and cultural rights, and not only individual but also collective rights; (2) community bonds, which enable a flexible and plural community identity and the existence of a collective political project; and (3) community power, which means enlarging the capacities of excluded communities to exert control over traditional powers. Consequently, the findings have been organised according to these three dimensions of citizenship.

The promotion of rights and the impact of neoliberal rhetoric

Promoting the exercise of citizenship by excluded populations was identified by all the social workers who participated in this study as a pendant task of state policies for poverty alleviation. From the three dimensions informing the concept of citizenship adopted in the study, that is rights, community bonds and power, most of the interviewees identified the promotion of rights (particularly social rights) as a way of contributing to the exercise of citizenship. The possibility of demanding rights, as seen by some social workers, is a way to counteract the paternalist and clientelistic styles of policy and politics that have reinforced the exclusion of these targeted communities. The idea of rights operates, from their perspective, as the opposite of favour, and certainly this view contributes to the construction of citizenship in the Chilean context where patronage and asymmetric power relationships have characterised the very formation of the Chilean republic since its early stages. Some social workers (SW) asserted,

The municipalities reproduce exclusion since they are based on the patronage system, and that’s why there are many people who still believe that access to housing, access to culture, to health care remain a gift and not a right […] so people don’t know what having rights means. (Male SW, 6)

It is incredible how people think that all that they can have depends on the Mayor’s willingness or the favours of other public servants. Here you can see how they see themselves as powerless individuals, because the authority is who decides what is best for them, if they deserve something and so on […] It is difficult to promote a culture of rights in a context like that. (Female SW, 19)

The majority of the interviewees understood rights as individual rights only. The focus on individual rights, as discussed previously, is generally related to a liberal perspective on citizenship. Critical perspectives on citizenship produced in developed countries are often concerned with clarifying that citizenship is much more than the exercise of individual rights (Field, 2007; Mouffe, 2009). However, in Latin America, as in many other countries from the Global South, the existence of such individual rights, if at all, has been the result of historical social struggles and therefore cannot be taken for granted (Jelin, 2012). The acquisition of individual rights in Latin America did not follow the sequential steps identified by T.H. Marshall (1950) in the British context. Although political rights are practically universal in Latin American countries, civil rights are not guaranteed yet and social rights are restricted as a consequence of recessive economic adjustment programmes (Fleury, 2004).

But the divorce between individual and collective rights – a problem, as detected by Mouffe (2009), that lies in the incompatibility between neoliberalism and democracy – entails the exacerbation of individual rights and the reduction of citizens to consumers (Clarke et al., 2014; García Canclini, 1995; Habermas, 1991; Jelin, 2012; Mouffe, 2005). Neoliberal reworkings of democracy, as Clarke et al. (2014) assert, result in the reduction of rights of citizenship to the rights of being a consumer. This approach can be clearly observed among social workers who highlighted the necessity of enabling the freedom to choose among their users as a way of promoting citizenship. A hegemonic idea of citizenship, or an idea of citizenship which favours the neoliberal nature of social policy, was underlying some of the social workers’ approaches:

Exclusion is when someone cannot decide regarding the life he/she wants. Those who have money can choose a private clinic or the best located neighbourhood to live […] Having rights means having the freedom to choose where and how to live. (Male SW, 6)

When we bring the structure of opportunities closer to the communities, the individuals can make links with several institutions that provide services. This provides more freedom to these individuals to choose the services that they need and want. That is also an exercise of citizenship. (Male SW, 13)

In a similar vein, collective rights were not discussed by any social worker. As already mentioned, if rights are developed on an individual basis, the ideal of the ‘responsible citizen’ may be replaced by the ‘client-citizen’. This means that the exclusive promotion of individual rights may discourage citizenship. In that case, the individuals (service users) remain enclosed in their individuality and experience a reduced capacity to exert influence on public decisions or form part of a wider community (Clarke et al., 2014; Habermas, 1991; Jelin, 2012; Mouffe, 2005).

Community bonds and solidarity: Pendant tasks for Chilean social work

The strengthening of community bonds, which is the second dimension informing the concept of citizenship adopted in the study, was not discussed by any of the social workers. Some of them referred to the idea of solidarity instead, stating that its promotion constituted the main goal of interventions aiming at overcoming poverty and social exclusion. However, their idea of solidarity, which could be interpreted as a counter-hegemonic response to the neoliberal rationality, reveals precisely a neoliberal solution to poverty and social exclusion, where the individuals are considered responsible or are directly blamed for their own exclusion (Levitas, 2012):

Solidarity is when the community is interested in the others who are even more excluded. I would aspire not to be waiting for the government or other institutions to come and solve problems but that people and community organisations realise we have the power to do it. (Female SW, 14)

Our users cannot be depending on the welfare services all the time, because we know that these services are poor and bad quality, and difficult to access, and so on. So the community needs to create its own alternatives for more disadvantaged members. It has to do with breaking individualism and passivity, for example creating community allotments, spiritual support groups, community micro-business and so on. (Male SW, 2)

Some of our users are individualistic, they live in a very poor condition but they do not want to join a neighbourhood board, nor participate in a community group or help a neighbour who is in the poorest condition. There is no solidarity among our users. (Female SW, 9)

In this approach, solidarity (understood as the creation of collective projects around common problems) does not lead to citizen control of the state’s role. On the contrary, it encourages a view in which the state’s role is irrelevant and leads to the privatisation of solidarity. Hence, it can be asserted that not all the versions of solidarity contribute to the construction of an anti-hegemonic citizenship. A genuine exercise of citizenship, as understood in this research, implies creating solidarity bonds able to challenge the dynamics of power underlying the exclusionary process.

Although all the social workers recognised the worth of promoting community bonds as a strategy for overcoming social exclusion, they stated that there were several factors hindering the implementation of such an idea in practice. For example, most of the interviewees commented that promoting community organising and the construction of projects relating to collective interests was a difficult task, due to limitations such as practices of clientelism exerted by ‘local authorities’ and the paternalistic approach underlying national social policies. Most of them also claimed that the individualised nature of policy involving targeting reinforces apathy and reluctance of communities to take part in collective processes. In addition, some social workers highlighted that more skilled frontline professionals are needed to conduct intervention processes oriented to the strengthening of citizenship:

Sometimes we see communities that are totally depressed. Nobody wants to participate in anything. If there is a fund, ok, they may organise themselves and apply for the fund. When they are awarded the fund, they dissolve the organisation and come back to their individual lives. There is no pleasure of organising itself. This is because our social policy has always encouraged individualism. (Female SW, 21)

There are communities where there is hardly any interest in building a collective project, there is distrust and for obvious reasons given that members of the same community organisation compete individually to earn a project or receive a benefit; that is how social policy has been designed. (Female SW, 25)

We need more skilled front-line professionals. They need to understand the dynamics of politics within the targeted neighbourhoods and City Councils, they need to be prepared to support processes of disputing power in local areas. I feel that our front-line professionals are not trained to understand this context. (Female SW, 14)

Certainly there are structural factors underlying these limitations to the promotion of citizenship identified by these social workers. Fear, distrust in collective action and low participation in collective initiatives can be understood as global trends related to the neoliberal order. Particularly in Chile, these trends have been exacerbated by repression, censorship and violence imposed during 17 years of dictatorship, and subsequently reinforced by social policies focusing on individual users and their rights, as recognised by some social workers.

The incompatibility of neoliberalism and democracy denounced by Mouffe (2009) can be observed in the coexistence of two opposite perspectives underlying the Chilean social policy implemented by social workers. On the one hand, the promotion of citizenship has been recognised as a key aspect of the consolidation of democracy in Chile; on the other, neoliberal ideology has colonised the Chilean state’s and NGOs’ responses to such challenges. This is a crossroads that, as this study identified, social workers experience in their daily practices. Two social workers explained this issue clearly:

If social policy is targeted at individuals and not groups, people find no sense in organising and constructing collective projects. (Male SW, 13)

We are expected to be effective in meeting the goals established by the NGOs and the Chilean state, which do not address dimensions of citizenship other than individual rights, do not focus on processes but measurable outcomes and do not target communities but individual users only. (Male SW, 16)

A marginal approach: Citizenship through the promotion of community power

As already mentioned, community power – the third dimension of citizenship as defined in the study – was generally not addressed by the participants. Only a few social workers alluded to the idea of increasing community power as a strategy to address social exclusion and promote citizenship through their interventions. These social workers understood social exclusion as the marginalisation of the poor from the decision-making process which affected the development of their communities:

We cannot change the world; we are social workers and work in a context full of limitations. But I think, I am sure, that we can make great changes from our positions. These changes can be small, but can make a difference in how policy is delivered in each borough. We can contribute to creating a more democratic culture in areas where authoritarianism is the rule. (Female SW, 22)

These social workers understood power as an attribute to be disputed. They did not exhibit a romantic idea of power; on the contrary, they acknowledged that power is exercised in the interplay of non-egalitarian and changeable relationships (Foucault, 1981). Power, in this vein, is counteracted by resistance. And resistance may adopt diverse forms from subtle to radical actions aiming at re-balancing power relationships in a specific place.

Some initiatives aimed at increasing community power have succeeded. The interviewees referred to them as ‘small social changes’ that they have been able to achieve through the encouragement of the political dimension of social intervention, that is, politicising interventions (Ferguson and Lavalette, 2007; Ioakimidis, 2013; Montaño, 2004). The interviewees highlighted that these experiences were not frequent and that they were not formally part of the guidelines provided by their organisations. These experiences occurred, in their view, because different factors were present at the same time: skilled frontline professionals, public servants receptive to citizen participation and community organisations interested in participating in decision-making processes:

A few communities have increased their power of dialoguing or confronting the ‘local authorities’. We had one experience. Thanks to the participation of several community organisations, we were able to present four candidates to the councillors’ election. They were community leaders that represented different sectors of the community. Most of the success we achieved that time was produced because of the strong tradition of community organising that such a community has. (Female SW, 25)

We have had just one experience, but it was very significant for us. We worked with women’s groups that wanted to create a proposal to the candidates of the Mayor’s election. They wanted to engage these candidates in a proposal based on women’s rights. In order to support them, we provided training on legal and political issues, so they would be able to elaborate a realistic and appropriate proposal. After that, we organised a conference, and these women presented their proposal to the candidates, and the candidates discussed the proposal and committed to including it in their government programme. Today these women are still organised, and are looking forward to meeting the elected Mayor, in order to monitor whether the commitments are being fulfilled. And in this case, the Mayor is available to meet with them for discussion. (Male SW, 6)

We have been able to mediate between the City Council and communities, advocating for the relevance of opening more spaces to participation. But this is sensitive work; we have succeeded just when we have more experienced or better trained front-line professionals. If not, the political nature of this work overwhelms them. (Female SW, 24)

Despite being a marginal approach among social workers, it illustrates how the critical republicanist approach of citizenship can be implemented in practice. These experiences demonstrate how power can be re-balanced through practices of citizen control and how this can lead to reduced social exclusion among the targeted communities. Their experience also reinforces the existence of professional discretion as the academic literature has alluded to (Evans, 2011; Harris, 2014), demonstrating that professional discretion can be guided in an emancipatory manner.

The experiences reported by these social workers contribute to rethinking the scope of the critical tradition of social work considering the particularities of the Chilean context. Citizenship, in the view of these social workers, means to be part of the decision-making processes, which is implemented through practices of citizen control. And citizen control is understood in this context as a long-term goal which contributes, as the post-colonial theorist Santos (1998) proposes, to the construction of autoridad compartida (shared power). This is an issue of vital importance in post-dictatorial Chile. Citizen control can help re-balance power within local spaces because citizens compel local authorities, particularly Mayors, ‘to rule in obedience’ as the Liberation Theologian Enrique Dussel (2013: 499) claims.

Here, it is relevant to make clear that such an idea of citizenship is understood by these social workers as a way of increasing the citizens’ control over the Chilean state’s policy, which is the opposite of claiming the reduction of the state’s role as the neoliberal perspective suggests (Levitas, 2012). And this is a particularly valuable way of exerting citizenship in the Chilean context due to the dominance of neoliberal ideology.

Discussion

The coexistence of diverse and even opposite approaches to citizenship exhibited by the social workers participating in the study can be interpreted as the result of a number of overlapped historical and political factors which inform the current professional identity. The legacy of the radical debates during the reconceptualisation process in the 1970s and the intellectual and political repression experienced by social workers during the dictatorship in the 1980s have been understood in the study as the two social work pillars of fluid identity and professional culture. Neoliberal reworkings of citizenship along with a return to critical ideas on power and its disputes are examples of that.

In addition, the promises of returning to democracy and the relevance given by the state to the promotion of citizenship since the 1990s have set a scenario of expectation and frustration related to the incompatibility of democracy and neoliberalism. The implementation of the Social Protection System since 2000, which emphasises the promotion of individual rights of the poor, has also contributed to the theoretical diversity and endemic contradictions that characterise Chilean social work. On the one hand, social workers are expected to re-construct social fabric and collective projects within the targeted communities, but on the other, they should follow the orientations provided by state policy which tend to target individuals and families. That is a professional crossroads that has been identified by some of the interviewees in an explicit way, reinforced by distrust in collective action, individualism and consumerism set on a global scale. In this context, although some social workers adopted a critical view towards the promotion of rights, an individual idea of rights appeared to be the dominant trend. This neoliberal approach of rights reinforces subordinating relationships, a trend which has also been detected in social workers’ practices in the Global North (Lorenz, 2014; Moosa-Mitha, 2014).

A minority group of social workers, however, provided examples of how the critical republicanist approach of citizenship can be exercised by excluded communities. Initiatives of citizen control, which were not advised by the state policy or NGO guidelines, were undertaken by these social workers in some cases. This illustrated how power can be disputed in local areas and how social workers may adopt a political role by using professional discretion or wriggle room. The implementation of such a counter-hegemonic idea of citizenship in practice is more a subtle than a radical resistance against the neoliberal order (Baines, 2008). First of all, the idea of disputing power is on a local scale only and the generation of links between the targeted communities with other communities or with regional, national or global social movements was not reported by the interviewees. Second, the strategies and activities undertaken by these social workers did not attempt to radicalise democracy or question the neoliberal background of democracy currently in force as Santos (2003), Mouffe (2009), Cruz (2010) and other radical thinkers suggest. This means that the challenging of hegemonic powers encouraged by these social workers through practices of citizen control occurred within the boundaries of deliberative democracy. Third, the approach held by these social workers focuses on negotiation and consensus rather than on highlighting conflict, as critical perspectives suggest (Field, 2007; Khan, 2013; Mouffe, 2009).

Certainly, the interviewees’ experiences of disputing power could be labelled as subtle or progressive practices of resistance as they did not attempt to radically transform the hegemonic state. However, within the Chilean context, these experiences are significant contributions in terms of redistribution of power. Although nearly 25 years have passed since the end of the dictatorship, issues related to the redistribution of power in society remain almost untouched (Delamaza, 2015; Garretón, 2012).

The search for a critical social work, committed to the promotion of citizenship as the ALAEITS (2012) and the CTS (2014) suggest, demands an examination of past Chilean social work and a dialogue with the professional history of social work which allows the search for contradictions to better understand contemporary challenges of the profession. The reconceptualisation movement in the Latin American region during the 1970s and the 1980s is a source of experience which needs to be revitalised in the current context. That is not to say that the same reconceptualisation process should be replicated nowadays, but that such experience may illuminate a renovation of current social work. In addition, the discussion of a critical ethical-political project for social work, a proposal mainly developed by Brazilian and Argentinian social workers (see e.g. Montaño, 2004 and Rozas, 2007), constitutes a relevant contribution to revising Chilean social work. The idea of resistance developed by social workers around the world also provides a crucial approach to understanding, from a critical perspective, the role that social workers can perform in the Chilean context. Chilean social work can learn not only from its history, but also from the current struggles of other social workers around the world (see, e.g., Calhoun et al., 2014; Cuskelly, 2013; Ioakimidis et al., 2013; Sewpaul, 2013, among others). A counter-hegemonic idea of citizenship can be exercised by social workers through the interpretation, revision and adaptation of social policies in practice, challenging the orientation of such policies through methodological innovations, including the knowledge of service users, expressing dissent or keeping silent, among many other subtle yet radical forms of resistance.

This research has shown that the idea of citizenship has been colonised by neoliberal rhetoric, as most of the social workers identified the protection of individual rights as the way in which citizenship may be exercised by poor communities; some of them also identified factors that hinder the promotion of community bonds and community power. Resistance against such an apparent hegemonic rationality and its possible manifestations in practice were not recognised by most of the interviewees. If we, as social workers, do not act as citizens, it is unlikely that we will be able to promote citizenship with communities that experience poverty and deep exclusion. Therefore, if Latin American and particularly Chilean social workers adopt a definition of social work which includes the promotion of citizenship as a core value of professional practice, schools of social work need to implement a social work curriculum oriented towards such a purpose. It should consist of, among other things, educating social work students as citizens. This has been considered a relevant issue, as one of the barriers to promoting citizenship identified by some interviewees lay in the lack of skilled frontline professionals.

Being a citizen, as understood in this study, means being able to govern ourselves and to deliberate about what is fair or unfair within our communities. This idea of a citizen, as applied to social workers, demands the capacity to act as a collective. The critical point here lies in the capacity of social workers to make their views and their voices known and heard in the public space, in order to feed back the way in which poverty and social exclusion policies are being implemented in practice. In this regard, social workers’ participation in professional organisations and trade unions is also a matter of concern which needs to be urgently addressed by schools of social work and the Chilean Association of Social Workers among other entities.

Concluding remarks

The findings suggest that social workers implementing policies aimed at addressing poverty and social exclusion in Chile face crossroads. It is expected that they promote collective projects and empower poor and excluded communities; however, state policy does not address dimensions of citizenship other than individual rights and does not target communities but individual users only. This crossroads takes place within global neoliberal trends in which individualism, consumerism and distrust in collective action are founding values.

Given these findings, the question is how social workers can challenge such hegemonic approaches of social policy from their workplaces. Professional bodies and schools of social work have a critical role in promoting expectations related to the possibilities of social workers contributing to social transformation. Counter-hegemonic practices to promote citizenship, such as those reported by a few social workers in this study, need to be listened to by social work academia. In other words, social work academia needs to be open to the knowledge that social workers create from their professional experiences in the field. Relevant initiatives, as well as the limitations to the promotion of citizenship, must be studied and disseminated in order to promote critical reflection and re-construct horizons of transformation for contemporary social work.