Abstract
The return of ‘austerity’ has coincided with some remarkable variations on social work’s infamous ‘rule of optimism’. Programmatically, this has included a pre-occupation with neuroscience, the ill-fated ‘Social Work Practice’ pilots and the vaunted ‘Troubled Families’ initiative. The latest incarnation of these neoliberal inspired transformation projects is A Blueprint for Children’s Social Care: Unlocking the Potential for Social Work (MacAlister et al., 2019). This suggests that, if social workers were reoriented to follow the Buurtzorg model, this would result in a 60 percent increase in the face-to-face time social workers spend with children.
In contrast, What is the Future of Social Work? is devoid of the ‘magical thinking’ that has dogged social work in the last few years, offering instead a more sober assessment about what lies ahead. The book is assembled in nine chapters. It opens with Michael Lavalette’s contextual overview of the 2008 debt crisis and the government ‘austerity’ policies that opportunistically followed. In the next three chapters, contributors in the field of Child Protection (Brid Featherstone), adult social work (Mark Lymbery) and in mental health (Iain Ferguson) are invited to respond to questions such as: ‘how did we get here?’; ‘what are the contemporary problems facing social work’? In addition, and vitally, ‘what is to be done’? The next set of chapters switch the focus onto those ‘lessons from the past’ needing to inform the next generation of social workers in the field of learning disabilities (Jan Warmsley), service user engagement (Peter Beresford) and anti-oppressive social work (Gurnam Singh). In the final two contrasting chapters, John Harris discusses the degradation of social work through the lens of labour process theory and Chris Jones raises the need for a humanitarian based social work response to the global refugee crisis-taking place on the outer fringes of Fortress Europe.
Central to the book’s argument is the premise that ‘austerity’ has been a clear ‘political choice’. Whilst some social work services have enjoyed a modicum of insulation from the cuts, a raft of new and over-optimistic ‘practice frameworks’ have been central in council officers’ strategies to find budget ‘savings’. In Chapter 3, Lymbery refers to these as ‘fantasy objectives’ (p. 47). ‘Strength-based practice’, he remarks, is a case in point, where projected savings and the rhetoric of the benefits - when compared to the ‘old’ system of care management - do not match the reality. This theme re-appears in Chapter 7 in Gurnam Singh’s fascinating and lengthy unwrapping as to how, seemingly, progressive social work concepts are frequently appropriated in ways that enable the reconstruction of social work as a more punitive activity (p.113).
Reacting to the hegemony of ‘austerity’, several of the authors explore and extend the late Mike Oliver’s ‘social model’ in disability activism. In mental health, the biomedical model remains dominant yet, as Iain Ferguson claims, it sits alongside a promising new critique of psychology and psychiatry that argues there is, in fact, little or no evidence for a determining organic basis for ‘mental disorders’ (p. 60). Similarly, Brid Featherstone calls for a renewed focus on humanistic social work - a theme repeated in other parts of the book - whilst also making the case for a social model in child protection. This is a response to the alarming ‘investigative turn’ of families being subject to child abuse inquires. Students of Loic Wacquant’s concept of the ‘centaur state’ will find some useful empirical evidence here where state regulation and surveillance has expanded rather than retreated - at least for the urban poor. New research highlights the fact that an 80 percent increase in local state child protection ‘section 47’ Children Act investigations prompted a 40 percent increase in children subject to child protection plan in the period 2009/2010 to 2014/2015 (Bilson and Martin, 2016).
There are one or two omissions, some more serious than others. I would have liked to have seen more emphasis on what Cooper and Wyatt (2017) call the ‘violence of austerity’ that draws on the archive of testimonies relating to benefit sanctions and Work Capability Assessment suicides (see DPAC for example). Crucially, this dimension needs to be embedded in social work and social policy thinking. Moreover, the book may have benefited from a much-needed discussion on the ethics of predictive algorithms and ‘machine learning’. Such approaches have already gained a foothold in some children’s services and, in echoing Singh’s discussion in Chapter 7, we are all in danger of being ‘blinded by science’ as Wastell and White (2017) warned us elsewhere. I was also surprised of the absence of discussion on the implications of the so-called ‘fast-track’ post-graduate social work courses being part-funded by corporate sponsorship and private equity philanthropy (see Murphy, 2016). ‘Frontline’ trained social workers now make up over 10 percent of newly qualified social workers in England.
These comments aside, What Is the Future of Social Work? offers an invaluable and timely overview of contemporary issues taxing social work and a wider CSP readership.