Abstract
The distinguished, and rightly respected, scholar Ian Shaw has been thinking hard about the role that science plays in social work. At first glance I struggled to fathom what was going on with this book. This was partly because the various chapters do not really hang together. Indeed, there is no obvious underlying thread apart from some loose notion of ‘science’.
Some readers might think that Shaw’s book amounts to an insurgent scientism. That is, an attempt to place social work on a strong scientific basis. Not quite. Actually, it is best perceived as an exercise in consilience. It appears that Shaw is trying to do for social work what E. O. Wilson in his 1998 book on the unity of knowledge tried to do for biology. As Fodor (1998) explains:
Consilience is an epistemological thesis: roughly, it says that all knowledge reduces to basic science. Reviving the unity of science programme is most of what consilience amounts to … Though Wilson is aware that it’s now pretty much a dead issue among philosophers of science, he thinks ‘its failure’ … was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. (p. 4)
Philosophical objections against science are often objections about the role of reductionism. Shaw’s expansive, but reductive, consilience is summed up by Ray Pawson in the blurb on the jacket cover: “Shaw’s coverage in Social Work Science includes just about every philosophical basis ever proposed for science”. That in my opinion is the whole story.
Evidence is a leading actant in the book. A key issue is this: if science fixes all the evidence there is for social work, does it follow that all the evidence that there is are scientific explanations? Would there be an evidential foundation around something called ‘scientific knowledge’? Shaw clearly thinks so. Saying that social work is a science, or scientific, is a bit like saying that thanks to the invention of the electric toaster we can forget about Foucault. A second key question is not whether social work is a science, but whether social work can be modelled on science. In order to understand this, we need to understand ‘science in action’ (Latour, 1987). Science is what scientists do. Given Shaw is chasing after action there is a significant omission here – a failure to address the huge contribution Actor Network Theory has made to science studies, controversy analysis and the principle of ‘following the actor’ in scientific laboratories and experimental settings. Perhaps, it is actually worse with Shaw’s book than I have been suggesting. He has ambitions that the positivists did not dream about. The summons to consilience runs not just to the relation between evidence and interpretation, but also to justice, art and ethics. I am still not quite sure how the discussion on Christianity and faith-based practice in Chapter 2, ‘Doing Social Work Science’, fits. Finding a thesis was hard because I do not understand how it is supposed to work. It is, after all, entirely possible to doubt that art, ethics and justice are primarily in the business of explaining things: not, anyhow, in anything like the way that biology and physics aim to do. More troubling, there’s no discussion of vertical as opposed to horizontal consilience. As Fodor (1998) remarks, “[i]f this is what consilience is like, I recommend the assorted antipasti”. Shaw himself appears vaguely aware that there may be trouble here, and he is not entirely clear about what prescriptions for a scientific social work might look like. Unfortunately, the appendix did not help. Criticising a text because of omissions can be unfair, but there is a second, more revealing, lacuna. Over the past decade there has been an upsurge in revisions, alternatives and modifications to evidence-based thinking. Here is the rub: most of the material used in the second half of Chapter 6 – ‘Social Work Science and Evidence’ – appears to be lifted from a paper the author presented in 2004 to the 7th Inter-Centre Network for the Evaluation of Social Work Practice conference in Solothurn, Switzerland. It is thirteen years old. More recent highly acclaimed articles such as Engebretsen et al. (2015) and Wieringa et al. (2017) are not even mentioned.
At the coalface, social work is largely an exercise in building interpretations. It is a practice of valuation. Social work is not the ‘expression’ of science, nor is science the ‘expression’ of social work. Social work, rather, is a certain trade transaction. An often dramatic transaction nonetheless. Social work’s valuations transform situations into irreducible entities or events. Into, in short, something that never looks like science. It is messy and social. In contrast, the main intention of Ian Shaw, like his evidence-based forefathers, is to ‘produce’ scientific credibility for social work. No doubt a labour of love, he is manifestly seeking out something strong and stable.