Abstract
The relationship between the local and the global is a complex and contested one, with little consensus on either its meaning or interpretation in a practice context. Social work research has addressed the linkages between them since the late 1980s, early 1990s and covered issues such as migration, intercountry adoptions and poverty. However, such research has not hit the headlines like Thomas Piketty’s (2014) book, even though similar points were made much earlier. Now, much of the research addresses the local–global nexus, that is, the impact of the local on the global and the interaction in the reverse direction. Recently, social work research has also focused on climate change and environmental degradation as problems of industrialisation that have been intensified under neoliberal globalising regimes that promote the interests of capital at the expense of those of ordinary people and the physical environment. The neglect of social work research in the public arena is linked to the profession’s lack of voice and questioned status as a profession since its inception, although the Global Agenda is attempting to redress this problem. Yet it remains the case that few economists refer to the social work literature, but many social work researchers refer to studies undertaken in economic and other disciplines. The articles in ISW 60(2) continue social work’s history of exploring the challenges of globalisation through the local–global nexus as articulated in social work education and practice.
The challenges of globalisation for education, including the danger of imposing Western knowledge and views on entire world, are explored at length in the first article, in which Michele Sogren and Karene-Anne Nathaniel go on to argue for a locality specific, culturally relevant approach to social work by considering the Global Agenda from a Caribbean perspective. The authors highlight the importance of ‘country-specific mandates and jurisdictions’ ‘as the primary determinants of social work practice, education and policy development’. Interestingly, the research they conducted, namely considering the Global Agenda through a focus group, revealed the complicated links between local perceptions of social work as a profession and the desire to respond to macro-level issues raised by the Global Agenda, especially that of social justice.
Travel to study abroad is an important part of the globalisation process within the profession, and is covered by the next article. Travel for educational purposes carries the danger of imposing imperialist ontologies on other countries, while also heightening people’s understandings of themselves and others in the world. Human rights are an important element within these interactions, and require handling with sensitivity and awareness. Orit Nuttman Shwartz and Rebecca Ranz in their article consider the implications of students from Israel and India spending time in each other’s country during a short-term field placement abroad. They discuss both relativism and universalism in upholding human rights within the terminological constraints inherent in terms like ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. Some social work academics have highlighted the failure of such phraseology to address the presumption of superiority attached in wider discourses around countries considered ‘developed’, and have proposed the use of ‘industrialising’ and ‘industrialised’ countries, the global South and global North, or the one-third and two-thirds world, instead. The student narratives about their experiences indicate differences in priorities, perceptions and interactions between Indian and Israeli social work students alongside the care they take to respect and value each other. The authors conclude that social work placements abroad need greater engagement and cultural competency to create a more equal playing field.
The theme of preparing students for encounters through overseas study is also considered in the following article by Roni Berger and Marilyn S Paul. Here, they are preoccupied with the teaching of the ‘cultural aspects of trauma practice in a study abroad immersion course’. Their research reveals that individual and collective forms of trauma are poorly understood, but need to be considered within the wider context of multiculturalism and diversity in both the social work curriculum and practice. Skin colour, language, culture, religion, social exclusion and unemployment are all factors that can contribute to stress and complicate interactions between those from different ethnic groups, even within an educational context.
In their article, Eunjung Lee and Marjorie Johnstone use the term ‘education migration’ to encompass the complex issues raised when students cross borders to engage in the internationalisation of education. Using South Korea and Canada in their case study, they expose the role that social policy plays in the gradual process of limiting the citizenship claims of education migrants who become workers by remaining. Those who stay behind to become labour migrants assume a significant role in the nation-building endeavours of the receiving country. At the same time, their importance to the sending country is played out in the overseas income they send to their family (including extended family) that stays behind in their country of origin. As Small (2007) indicates, such remittances play a significant role in the family life of what have become known as transnational families. Cross-border splits in family structure can, nonetheless, risk social integration because exclusionary dynamics impinge on the lives of these labour migrants. Moreover, the authors argue, such exclusionary processes distinguish deserving migrants from the undeserving ones, and establish an oppositional binary between the established nationals of the nation-state in question and the other residents.
Addressing poverty, an internationalised social problem perpetrated by neoliberal economics lies at the heart of the article written by Alice K Butterfield, James L Scherrer and Katarzyna Olcon. Here, the authors discuss the Integrated Community Development and Child Welfare Model (CD-CW) to enable community-based workers to engage families and communities in poverty alleviation strategies and improve children’s well-being. Strengths-based approaches are used to facilitate skill building and an asset-based development that promotes family enterprises. The trauma experienced by children is addressed through the application of a three-stage applied training model, the aforementioned CD-CW. This model was piloted, tested and implemented by 100 livelihood and child welfare workers in Ethiopia. It involved data collection through learning portfolios, team consultations, and a 2-day evaluation retreat. The analysis of these revealed that poverty impinges on child maltreatment and that this can be reduced through integrated training that tackles issues of poverty through asset-based assessments and practical assignments.
Blaming the poor is a refrain that echoes throughout the corridors of neoliberal power holders and opinion-makers. Linda Harms Smith examines this issue through a critical interrogation of social work texts. The author focuses on the South African context in which inequalities continue, despite majority rule after the 1994 democratic election which sought the creation of a ‘rainbow nation’ in which equality flourished. This article examines one of the thematic ideological trends found in post-1994 social work texts on poverty and social development. It focuses on how the conservative, individualistic neo-liberal ideologies that underpin social work knowledge and discourses act performatively to ‘blame’ low-income people and hold them personally culpable for poverty. She selects three texts that illustrate the processes and approaches whereby these ideologies operate to make her case. Consequently, she argues that the transition to a better society has been blocked by neo-liberal ideologies that have structured and constrained social work knowledge that could have promoted practices that might have facilitated social change. Instead, neoliberal ideologies have fostered hegemonic ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge that allows oppressive power relations to be maintained and reproduced by shaping practice and social realities.
Migration is a significant phenomenon produced by globalisation and is currently challenging social workers in countries throughout the world. Its ramifications are many, and the negative responses triggered in Western Europe and the United States, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump as the American President and the vote of the UK to pull out of the European Union (Brexit), are amongst those encountered by social workers addressing the local–global nexus. Phillip F Blaauw, Catherina J Schenck, Anna M Pretorius, and Christiaan H Schoeman consider migration, particularly that emanating from economic or political hardship. They argue that migration has significant psychological and socio-economic consequences for the individuals and families involved. Additionally, they highlight that there has been little social work research on migration in Africa, which accommodates more migrants, including displaced persons and refugees, than the numbers reaching North America and Europe - both of which have an extensive literature produced by social work researchers. Indeed, they reveal that there is not one article on migration within the African continent that has been published by social work practitioners or academics. Their article seeks to tackle this research gap by surveying Zimbabwean day-labourers in South Africa. Their results are bleak. These migrants endure intense economic uncertainty, fierce competition for scarce jobs, and victimisation as foreign labourers. The authors argue that the profession must expose the vulnerable conditions in which day-labourers work and live. Moreover, practitioners have to mobilise coordinated responses from communities, government and non-profit organisations to promote greater social justice and harmony.
The globalisation literature is replete with articles on the economic costs of migration. But it gives little consideration to either the gender differentiated experiences of men and women migrants or the psychosocial and emotional dimensions of the migration experience, especially of those left behind. Admire Chereni pays attention to this point by exploring the psychosocial conditions and emotional needs of women non-migrant family members in Southern Africa. Chereni does so by exploring the narratives of suffering articulated by Zimbabwean women whose husbands are migrants. It shows how non-migrant women have to deal with the consequences of the absence of men from their homes. Chereni argues that this creates a multidimensional deficit whereby the non-migrant Zimbabwean women have to double their labour to cover all responsibilities in the family and make up for the missing ‘caring hands’ offered by the menfolk. The factors that undermine these women’s well-being include their overwhelming responsibilities at home, the emotional insecurity created by their prolonged separation from their partners, and the potential disintegration of their familial bonds. The article also contains recommendations for social work research in this topic.
Kristina Lovato-Hermann also focuses on the implication of migration on families. This time, her article focuses on family separation among Latino immigrants. She examines the situation of children who are separated from parents, but are reunified in the United States. Her starting point is that there is limited research that examines how these young people adjust to life in this receiving country. She conducts in-depth interviews to investigate how 10 young Mexican immigrants who were reunited with their parents adjusted to living in the USA. Interestingly, gender featured as a significant factor in that her findings. These indicated that young men participating in the research experienced low levels of familial and social support and had low educational achievements. In contrast, young women in the study received greater familial and social support and secured high academic achievement. Lovato-Hermann considers her findings provide profound recommendations for research and social work practice.
Marriage migration is another expression of a global trend that has a local impact. Winky FK Wong, Isabella FS Ng and Kee-Lee Chou explore this issue in a study that considers the determinants of social support for Chinese women marriage migrants. They utilise a random sample of 211 Chinese women marriage migrants in a 2-year longitudinal study of a secondary data set. They employed bivariate and multivariate multiple regressions to examine the associations between social support and acculturation stress, persistent acculturation stress, psychological wellbeing, perceived neighbourhood disorder, and optimism. Acculturation stress and psychological wellbeing proved to be significant variables that impacted upon social support. The results showed that these Chinese women marriage migrants had difficulties in forming social networks beyond their own communities. The authors suggest that social workers should focus their interventions on reducing acculturation stress, expanding social networking opportunities, and enhancing psychological wellbeing for Chinese women marriage migrants.
Migration can pose concerns about representation and how the newcomers and settled populations visualise and experience each other. This becomes the starting point for the article by Natalia Khvorostianov and Nelly Elias. Their contribution examines the representation of social workers in the Russian-language immigrant press in Israel. They contend that social work as a public service did not exist in the former USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and it forms the background of many Russians who emigrated to Israel. Consequently, many Russian immigrants were unfamiliar with the social work profession prior to their immigration experience. For these authors, the lack of basic knowledge about social work underscored the importance of reliable representation of the public services that social workers could provide in the immigrant media. Moreover, their findings revealed a distortion in the role that social work services played in society, and a tendency for the Russian immigrant press to support the views of its immigrant readers in virtually all circumstances. This, the authors conclude, results in the Russian immigrant press failing to fulfil its socialisation role and thereby impeding the integration of Russian immigrants into Israeli society.
Beverly Scarvelis, Beth R Crisp, and Sophie Goldingay examine intercountry adoption in their article. The transfer of children from one country to another has been a hotly contested concern in the anti-racist social work literature, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when black professionals argued that black children had the right to ethnic matching so that their identity and cultural needs were addressed throughout their childhood (Small, 1987). These authors considered intercountry adoption programmes that took 30 Thai children from Rangsit Children’s Home to Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite their racially and culturally diverse backgrounds, these children were expected to live and behave like Australians. The article indicates that intercountry adoptees undergo four key stages during the adoption process. These are: leaving the orphanage; arriving in Australia; becoming a member of a family; and reconnecting with Thai culture. Each stage poses challenges for both adoptees and the families who adopt them. Additionally, these writers demonstrate that to enhance their well-being, support remains necessary long after these adoptees become adults.
That the family provides the better environment for the development of children is often taken as a nostrum in social work theory and practice. The benefits and disadvantages between institutional and foster care for children exercise the thinking of Wen-Chi Wang, Robert B McCall, Junlei Li, Christina J Groark, Fanlin Zeng and Xiaolin Hu in their evaluation of foster care in China. The authors reveal that although diverse forms of foster care exist in China, none have been empirically evaluated in terms of the outcomes for children. One of these forms is ‘collective fostering’. In this, many foster families live in a single apartment building on the grounds of a particular institution. The authors evaluated the effectiveness of one of these projects by tracking changes in children’s height and weight before and after they entered foster care. They chose to study a children’s institution in a large city in China to evaluate the outcomes for 102 children. Their research revealed a significant positive quadratic relationship between time and height (p = .002), with height z-scores declining during institutional residency and then increasing after entering foster care. Moreover, a more detailed analysis of 23 children who remained in the fostering project for longer than 65 months revealed that their height and weight z-scores improved significantly while living in foster families compared to the last assessment undertaken before they left institutional care. The authors concluded that ‘collective fostering’, like community foster care which is more popular, has potential for enhancing children’s development.
Child soldiers and their involvement in adult-initiated armed conflict is a difficult issue to be addressed in explorations of the challenges resulting from the interactions that occur within the local–global nexus. Researchers estimate that there are around 300,000 children acting as child soldiers worldwide. In their article, Gracie Brownell and Regina T Praetorius consider the life-long effects of children abducted and forced into combat. They argue the importance of understanding child soldiers’ experiences and developing culturally appropriate interventions because as victim-survivors, their experience can have enduring traumatic outcomes. The authors use qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis (QIMS) to explore the lived experiences of ex-child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Northern Uganda and Liberia. Their findings highlight the four phases that these former child soldiers undergo. These are nuanced and complex and are defined as: abduction; militarisation; demilitarisation and reintegration; and civilian life. These add to current knowledge about these children’s experiences, which is helpful in informing policy and practice that is designed to enhance the capacities of former child soldiers in adapting to civilian life in the aftermath of war.
The role of the state in promoting socio-economic development within a globalising world is another challenge social workers have to confront in articulating the local–global nexus. Edwell Kaseke considers this issue in his article, which examines South Africa’s intention to build a developmental state by repositioning the role of social work away from individual concerns with the psychosocial aspects of life to focus on developing the country. Kaseke argues that by becoming a developmental state, South Africa can promote both social development and economic development. In this context, the article promotes the idea that social workers have to reposition themselves as advocates who can pressurise the state to ensure that as a developmental state, South African politicians prioritise social development. This goal should be facilitated by the White Paper on Social Development that the South African government is already promoting.
The role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in development processes, especially those occurring in industrialising countries, is another contested concern in globalisation debates. In the article by M Rezaul Islam, the role of NGOs in the community development process is explored. It focuses on socioeconomic development in Bangladesh to argue that evidence of the NGO role in community development there is scarce. Islam uses a qualitative case study and multi-method data collection research approach to focus on two NGOs working with two indigenous communities in that country. The findings highlight the four roles in the community development process that these two NGOs played: improving participation; social networking; partnership building; and development ownership. These also enabled Islam to created guidelines for social workers, NGO workers and development practitioners to follow.
The role of NGOs in the development process is also considered by Gershon Osei in the next article. Osei argues that in Ghana, successive governments have worked with NGOs to solve rural problems for more than four decades. However, the article questions the extent to which the NGOs have achieved this goal. This study’s findings reveal the dominance of the view that NGOs have operated more as ‘patriarchs’ than as partners, and have thus distorted rural development work. By critiquing the roles played by NGOs and the rural development strategies that they have adopted in Ghana, the article exposes longstanding limitations whereby NGOs may have contributed to ‘rural underdevelopment’ rather than the development of rural areas. It concludes that for NGOs to contribute meaningfully to rural development in Ghana, they must change their development strategies.
Admire Chereni’s contribution considers the role that advocacy plays in facilitating the social work task of realising social justice. The implementation of social justice in countless situations is another of the challenges faced by practitioners working within the local–global nexus. This article attempts to fill a gap in social work research, namely, its limited consideration of advocacy in South Africa. Here, Chereni uses a qualitative systematic review of published research on advocacy in the country’s social welfare sector to evaluate what social work research says about social welfare advocacy there. It concludes that further social work research on this topic is necessary.
The challenges of globalisation on the local–global nexus have called for interdisciplinary approaches between social workers and other disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted by Nurullah Osmanli, Emra Sert and Mevlut Uyan in their article on creating a social texture map covering social services in Konya, Turkey. Their study involves the creation of a social texture map that draws upon information collected through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the work of establishing a Social Information Centre (SIC) in the city of Konya. As metropolitan municipalities in Turkey are responsible for delivering local government services to the public, the SIC Project is significant. This is because the Project develops a scalar concept of development whereby the findings based on the city-based scale of Konya can assist in developing a model that encompasses the entire country of Turkey.
In conclusion, social work academics and practitioners have much to say about the local–global nexus. Their research and scholarship has contributed substantially to improving policy and practice. However, much more remains to be achieved and this issue is another step on the journey to social justice in a globalising world that has left many people behind by excluding them from opportunities, wealth and the full realisation of their skills, talents and strengths.