Practice Research Collaboration in Social Work

Why Metaphors Matter for Practice Research

The Third International Conference on Practice Research, held in New York in June 2014, was titled “Building bridges not digging pipelines: promoting two-way traffic between practice and research”. The metaphor of bridges with two-way traffic is an evocative one for practice research. Tellingly, it suits the New York topography and is nicely visible. Being visible is important, since we use physical metaphors to help communicate abstract ideas. Practice is an abstract idea and so is research. When combining the two, it becomes understandable that metaphors are called upon to assist and have been invoked with some regularity in social work over the years.

In debates on the place of knowledge in social work, the foundational metaphors of science and art resurface in various guises (England, 1986; Fook, Ryan, & Hawkins, 1997; Gray & Webb, 2008; Reid, 2001). Perhaps this is because they afford easy shorthand through which participants can identify with contrasting depictions of the profession. It is, or should be, like a science; or like an art. Or perhaps it is because they resonate with ongoing epistemological controversies. Some may dismiss the debates as an irrelevance: You just do what you have to do. Others may assert that the two—science and art—are not as separate as they may first appear. There may well be merit in this, but the dichotomy does not readily go away. And it is certainly one that continues to be appropriated in defining the kind of professional—whether located in the field or the university—which one seeks to be.

When talk turned to the swampy lowlands of practice, a rather different kind of metaphor emerged (Schon, 1983). This promised to depict intrinsic qualities of professional work and was imbued with a meaning that gained immediate popularity. It clearly captured the imagination and introduced new rationalities for the epistemology of practice. Previous dilemmas dissolved in the wake of the practice movement. Knowledge could now be tacit, inscribed in the practice. Reflecting in and on action was the promising resolution to mind and body, head and hand dualisms.

The reflective turn (Schon, 1991) did harness fresh ways of dealing with troublesome and tiresome discussions on how to apply theory to practice or how to integrate knowledge in practice. Though this too is part of the practice research heritage and does have an important place. To note one particular and older study in the theory–practice conundrum (Waterhouse, 1987), the question was posed to social work students on placement, how do you see the relation between knowledge and practice? And adeptly, the researcher identified two salient metaphors: the Tool Box metaphor (you rummage around and find the right tool for the job) and the Osmosis metaphor (what you need will have been absorbed along the way). It would be instructive to test out in class today whether the assumptions at work in these and like attributions are actually that different.

So apparently in social work, we are apt to rely on metaphors to navigate this terrain of knowledge, research, and practice (Epstein, 2014). Evidence based could be taken as a further example. Here is a metaphor starkly different to the reflective mirror. The depiction is of something altogether harder, more solid: evidence, tried and tested, there to provide a base, or at least to inform. The metaphor does indeed cut through. Its communicative effect is undoubted—and appreciated by varied audiences, including those with political and economic accountability (McDonald, 2003). Yet the same question has to be asked: What assumptions are at work here in the presumed or desired relation between knowledge and practice?

The significance of metaphors, however, lies beyond the simple communication of ideas. They are a powerful rhetorical or literary device. Metaphors may not exactly rule, to borrow from Ricoeur (1978), but they do craft consciousness. They capture meaning and perception and symbolically advance a particular way of seeing the world. They can both close down and open up new understandings. There is creativity in metaphor making and a susceptibility to political ambition (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003). They can be deployed to suit a multiplicity of agendas.

How are these observations of relevance to practice research collaboration? The argument being advanced is that the development of practice research has to lean heavily on metaphors to chart its course but in so doing must remain vigilant as to their effect. Practice research is an emergent endeavor. To flourish, it must meet a host of conceptual, cultural, and institutional challenges. Practice research contests our understandings of practice, of research and of how they stand in relation to one another. Neither is any of this simply reducible to a set of technical puzzles. Purposes, impacts, and beneficiaries are invoked. There is a lot at stake. Metaphors may seem ephemeral, but they are worth noting and taking seriously. Misplaced metaphors could be costly. Generative metaphors, fit for time, place, and purpose, can guide action and enable innovation.

Practice Research in the Intermediate Zones

For those who would like to see practice research blossom, one of the biggest challenges is manifest at the interface between universities and field agencies. It is at this mezzo level that collaboration is forged and where challenges arise of institutional regimes and their particular relations of dominance. The question thus becomes how metaphors depict, sustain, or disrupt those institutional relations.

There are clearly other levels at which energy for collaboration is focused. Much attention is necessarily given to impacts of practice research at the micro level—at the level of innovation through research-minded practice, engaging with individuals or teams of workers, reconstructing their practices with them (Dodd & Epstein, 2012; Fook & Gardner, 2013). This is vital and desirable but not necessarily sustainable in unfavorable environments. And at the broader level, there are the political economies with which institutions interact—crudely, the funding arrangements and big P policies of research and practice (Hewitt-Dundas, 2012; Jordan & Drakeford, 2013; Robins & Webster, 2002). Metaphors abound here too (Lakoff, 2004) and a recent offering in terms of university engagement with industry and government, the triple helix, has received considerable attention (Etzkowitz, 2008). Arguably, complementary action is required in all these dimensions of engagement for practice research to flourish (Orme & Powell, 2008; Walter, Nutley, Percy-Smith, McNeish, & Frost, 2004). But the contention is that a midrange focus is crucial and holds scope for influence; that significant change can be achieved, with considerable ripple effect, within the intermediate zone. It is those aspects that are to be explored—how we work within and across universities and field agencies to create conducive conditions for the advancement of practice research.

This is not an inconsiderable challenge, given those economies and policy dictates within which organizations of interest exist (Gould, 2000; Peake & Epstein, 2005). Much contemporary social theorizing concerns itself, for example, with assessing possibilities for resisting the excesses of market societies (Garrett, 2013; Sandel, 2012; Sennett, 2006). And there is no clear consensus about this. Different theories offer different visions, some bleak, some less so. In that respect, debates on the interplay of structure and agency are still very much alive and highly relevant to the prospects of practice research collaboration.

Reflexive Knowledge Exchange

The metaphor of reflexive knowledge exchange is one that has been adopted at a university in Australia to guide its collaborative work. Maybe it is stretching a point to call this a metaphor as it is hardly a commonplace term. Yet this is not unintentional. Too much reliance on sensate points of equivalence, such as bridges and pipelines, can become limiting in their own way when communicating about social practices. And that is an underlying assumption of the approach: practice research is viewed within this metaphor as a social practice that takes shape in the intersections of specific histories and contexts (Schatzki, Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001). The assumption is important. It suggests that successful practice research collaboration involves social, cultural, and political change processes, which in turn underlines that capabilities at research alone, while vital, will not be sufficient to embed this within a practice environment (Jones, 2012).

Exchange as a term offers some poise in straddling the abstract and the concrete. One can visualize exchange, perhaps admittedly not least because of its close association with economic dealing. It does evoke well that sense of transaction between participants. It is of course both a verb and a noun and speaks of process and place. In the heady world of knowledge production and utilization, exchange is largely superseding translation and transfer as the currently preferred term—or, some might say, slogan. As studies in the implementation of research-informed practice have shown, it is easier to speak these words than make them real (Mitten, Adair, McKenzie, Patten, & Perry, 2007; Shea & Dill, 2012). Setting out to realize a knowledge exchange metaphor is highly ambitious, perhaps even a touch naive.

Two-way traffic is not dissimilar: movement in both directions, bringing the parties together across whatever divide. Exchange of course implies mutual giving and receiving—in this instance, of knowledge. And therein lays one point of potential redundancy for this metaphor. It works for as long as practice research prefigures knowledge in fusing the two. Ultimately, this presumes an expansive view of knowledge, one in which knowledge admits action and emotion and being; one in which ways of knowing have passed beyond technical mastery; and one where the positions of knowledge giver and knowledge receiver are not presumed but open and fluid (Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001; Taylor & White, 2001).

How might one begin to signal this expansive view of knowledge? By grafting reflexive on to the more frequently encountered term knowledge exchange, there lies an alert to a certain orientation to knowledge and to exchange. Reflexive pulls the metaphor away from any connotation of commodified transactions. There are many typologies of reflexivity, with their associated debates and critiques (Ashmore, 1989; D’Cruz, Gillingham, & Melendez, 2007; Finlay & Gough, 2003; Lees & Freshwater, 2008; Lynch, 2000). Reflexive knowledge exchange speaks of transactions in knowledge and ways of knowing between the participants, where there is openness to mutual giving and receiving—and in the process, a readiness to transform practices as assumptions inscribed in existing ways of thinking, acting, and being are remade (May & Perry, 2011; Phillips, Kristiansen, Vehvilainen, & Gunnarsson, 2013; Taylor & White, 2000). Such transactions through this metaphor become relational, built on shared discovery and the design of fresh possibilities. There is a strong sense of social constructivism conveyed here, channeling knowledge activity into the formation of new practices—but not exclusively so. The ambiguity of reflexivity allows for a creeping structuralism, an acknowledgment that knowledge exchange occurs within preexisting conditions that structure knowledge relations and mediate knowledge claims (McDonald, 2006; Miller & Rose, 2008). These too require analysis and should prompt humility in lofty aspirations to forge stronger connections between research and practice.

Adopting this metaphoric view has pragmatic consequences for the alignment of research and practice through university and field connectivity. This will now be considered by way of illustration, with just one reiteration. Exchange can be reduced to an episodic, instrumental activity—little more than a trade. Alternatively, however, when thought of as a noun as well as a verb, exchange is an ongoing place of transactional relations. It is the latter that is of interest here. Reflexive knowledge exchange speaks of creating places and processes in which practice and research can fruitfully meet.

Preexisting Conditions

The preexisting conditions for practice research in social work and human services—at least in Australia—are such that, when it comes to research, universities and field agencies continue to eye one another cautiously. There are, of course, many examples of excellent collaboration. There are also examples of universities seeking sign off and funding commitments from agencies for projects they themselves have designed without any meaningful consultation. Universities are under pressure to perform and produce—produce measurable research outputs and growing research income (Hicks, 2012). At the same time, official research policies advanced by government funding bodies encourage relevance, impact, and benefit; and industry partnerships are frequently perceived as the vehicle to achieve this. The notion of collaboration can quickly become tainted in these circumstances, adopting a potentially exploitative character, and field agencies are understandably wary.

Before seeking collaborative practice research relations with field agencies, universities need to examine their readiness to do so. Knowledge and learning is the province of universities, and there is an understandable deference to the university as the site of research production and robust insights into professional practice. Holding a privileged place in regard to the formation and dissemination of knowledge, the university has a responsibility to examine assumptions at work within its own world if it will be requiring this of field agencies when seeking to build research collaborations. The discussion will illustrate what it may mean to exercise reflexivity within the university as fundamental to a process that can lead to innovative forms of knowledge exchange.

The University Human Services Group

Within the Australian university, a Human Services academic group was created with the objective of it becoming a tertiary entity, strongly engaged with the sector. Tertiary in this context means combining vocational and higher education, spanning the breadth of qualifications from more elementary education through to doctoral awards. The Human Services Group included education programs in community services, social work, psychology, youth work, and public policy. A Research Centre was also part of the group, comprising a team of applied social researchers. Sector engagement here was predicated on forming multipurpose relationships of learning and research with organizations in the health and welfare field. Collaborative relations were central to this goal.

Beginnings: Internal Reform

Enacting: Exchanges in Action

The first example of reflexive knowledge exchange in action concerns a project undertaken with a nongovernment community services organization on provision of residential care for older people with complex needs. The project was a combination of research and workforce development. From the university side, the team comprised staff from vocational education and staff from the applied research center. The project was government funded and required the development of learning materials and processes to be based on research of core competencies in residential care practice, for dissemination beyond the participating sites. Outcomes will include a vastly different educational program for staff working in aged care facilities. The working principles have emerged from social philosophies regarding human capability, care ethics, and human rights. Research and educational development has sought to engage all key players (residents, carers, care staff, managers, and advocates) from the earliest stages. Such inclusive engagement can present a challenge for service agencies. Unexpected for the care facility was increased realization of their own assumptive worlds regarding the legitimate contribution of their constituencies to the research and development process.

As a second example, the crisis service organization described earlier, where the working relationship was triggered through collaborative development of a student placement program, now has a growing research budget. It supports practice research with the originating as well as other university departments. This organization’s beginning point for practice research projects are the practitioners themselves. Any supported project has to be nominated by at least one practitioner and the project itself has to be conducted conjointly by field- and university-based members. In establishing this approach, staff from the Human Services Group were invited to take workshops with practitioner staff on practice research; for example, on ways of developing research topics and questions out of practice experience. Knowledgeable staff from the organization can now run those workshops by themselves. Such staff are also on the organization’s committee that determines which larger, government-funded projects the organization will pursue in partnership with university researchers. They are now as likely to seek out universities for thoughtfully designed projects as they are to be approached by them.

One project supported by this organization in which the Human Services Group is involved concerns the evaluation of practice outcomes, notoriously complex territory. The implementation of this outcome evaluation tool is being examined across a suite of crisis service delivery programs (housing, sexual assault, drug and alcohol, etc.), particularly in terms of case management functions. An interesting dynamic here concerns the dual purpose of the tool. Initially devised to get some hold on evaluating effectiveness in achieving outcomes, the close working relationship between the researchers and practitioners has surfaced another, incipient purpose. For the practitioners and their supervisors and line managers, attention has turned to the role of the tool in designing outcome-based practice methodologies. A timely intervention in managerial driven practice environments, practitioners and their supervisors are leveraging the potential of the tool to place more control with service users in determining the goals of practice. Whether this can now be tied back to using the tool for outcome evaluation is the next, demanding phase of the project.

In the final example, at the level of partnership agreements, the Human Services Group has been able to represent its combined span of educational and research programs to the region’s umbrella organization for nongovernment community service organizations. The resulting partnership agreement illustrates the range of institutional provisions that can result from a reflexive knowledge exchange orientation. It includes the more standard provisions, such as commissioning the university to provide systematic reviews for policy responses, but it extends beyond these. There is the provision of fellowships to second practitioners and frontline managers onto conjointly defined and delivered research initiatives, the coordination of agency-nominated student research projects, the systematic engagement of agency staff in educational design and delivery, and conjoint research into emerging workforce development requirements. This is a bold initiative, occurring after several years of purposeful and persistent change processes that most intriguingly involve what has been referred to as assumptive displacement. How well and fully the promise of the partnership agreement can be met has yet to be discovered.

Reflexive Knowledge Exchange and Practice Research Rationalities

It is important to address two possible rejoinders at this juncture. First, it may seem as though the term reflexive knowledge exchange is being used to do no more than dress up in a somewhat fancy way what may seem commonplace to many. If that were to be the case, it would be heartening—encouraging to know that this way of thinking and these kinds of institutional issues, arrangements, and change processes are widespread. However, in social work and human services, one can reasonably question whether that is the case. In clinical social work, and perhaps especially in hospital settings, one may well find student units, joint appointments, practitioner seminars, and so on. The challenge though is to construct these models in such a way that they can translate outside of clinical settings into the diversity that is the hallmark of social work. The meta-thinking of reflexivity enables one to do just that—but reflexivity (as distinct from reflective learning) has not been a common discourse in clinical social work.

As to be hoped is apparent from the examples chosen, the practice rationality that pertains in reflexive knowledge exchange is captured to some degree in another metaphor, the street-level craft worker. This is admittedly a variation on the famous, or infamous, street-level bureaucrat, which when coined (Lipsky, 1980) was not necessarily quite such a pejorative term as now. However, in the way of casting professional practice as a social practice, the street-level craft worker signals a practice that occurs at the interface of the professional and the organization; a practice that is the partial embodiment of policy; a practice that aspires to be the human face of harsh or caring social responses to suffering and resilience. This, as our social theorists remind us, renders practice and craftsmanship a complex and weighty matter (Sennett, 2008). As such, it demands a concurrent folding inward (dissembling the social determinants of practice, and reconstructing new forms) and reaching outward (engaging with alternative perspectives and modalities). In other words, it merits continuous reflexive exchange.

In presenting reflexive knowledge exchange as a worthwhile metaphor, the risk is that it will be received with complacency, dismissed as holding nothing new or even as already outdated—perhaps so. But this critique may well be missing the point. The point is that reflexive knowledge exchange is not the end game. The illustrations given are meant to show how at one particular place, at one particular time, the process was to disrupt assumptions about learning, practice, and research and to shift relations of knowledge and power. And that is an open-ended objective. The challenge is ongoing, since the realization of practice research within such a metaphor requires analysis and action in changing and different places and times. It is a metaphor of rule making rather than rule following (Fook, Ryan, & Hawkins, 2000).

The second rejoinder returns to focusing on the intermediate zone of institutional relations, where the discussion may appear neglectful of other levels of engagement in practice research. In particular, it is evident that there is a high-level activity in those initiatives that aim to assemble and disseminate research findings through to practitioners and frontline managers. Often, these initiatives in supporting research-informed practice are making inventive use of new technologies to do so. These are very compelling initiatives and complementary to the kind of work that has been the subject of discussion. But they are no substitute for it. The argument is that shifting relations of dominance and their associated assumptive worlds will increase receptivity to research information. One cannot take for granted that receptivity. It has to be nurtured, and the discussion is intended to explain and illustrate ways that can be done.

Prospects for Reflexive Knowledge Exchange

What are the prospects for reflexive exchange in social work? Precarious is the word that comes to mind. There is an elasticity about institutional relations that pulls in contrary directions; and with this a pervasive instability. Changes to policies and political economies will quickly alter the rules and resources at play. Furthermore, while the kind of knowledge exchange presented may be made more sustainable through formal governance arrangements, ultimately, these arrangements are mediated through working relationships. It takes time and considerable investment to foster the necessary understandings and trust. Rapidity of staff turnover in today’s organizations, and a backdrop of disengagement and suspicion, is a constant issue in forging reflexive social practices (Fook, 2004). It is hardly surprising that, in light of this, organizational investment is turned instead to producing more immediately tangible and supposedly more lasting—but certainly more countable—templates, manuals, and behavior audits. Short termism is no doubt a threat to cultivating rich working relationships (Sennett, 2006). Clients and service users can bear testament.

The precarious nature of these initiatives is a consequence of the broader context within which they occur. As new senior executive managers arrive at a university, one can expect they will assert their command and set up new projects of alleged strategic value but certainly increased compliance. The higher education drive for research productivity (i.e., income generation and publication numbers) and institutional leanness are squarely on the agenda (Hicks, 2012). Meanwhile, a change of Federal Government in Australia, one seemingly mindful of austerity measures introduced elsewhere, heralds a series of policy reviews that will stretch across higher education and social welfare. Community service organizations are watchful. University management is performance minded. There is confidence that the reflexive knowledge exchange ventures can speak to the anticipated sterner demands for relevance, excellence, innovation, and value for money. But as the intensification of work increases for both university and agency staff, it is of course a possibility that what is being achieved may come to be classified as lesser priority, too time intensive, and perhaps dispensable.

Concluding Comments

There is reason to be hopeful that a reflexive knowledge exchange metaphor can serve social work—and its clients and communities—successfully into the future. The constructs it affords for guiding collaborative relations for practice research have proved generative to date. More formal evaluation is now required to investigate key concepts and processes, with a view to evolving the approach to ensure sustainability and maximum benefit to end users. What is clear is that such a metaphor, sensitive to the social structuring of knowledge and professional action, is suited to conditions of uncertainty and complexity. One can expect that the ideas and orientations it offers will assume varying forms in realization as conditions change. It is acknowledged that the way the metaphor has been portrayed may imply a somewhat benign view of university social work departments, human service organizations, and knowledge-making relations between them. But a good part of the appeal of a reflexive metaphor is that it speaks to a critical as well as an innovative disposition. And therein lays a special strength. When practice research is construed as a social practice, then the search for its moral and political meaning and contribution becomes integral. In times of economic dominance, it is just that kind of practice research that can assist social work pursue its historic mission.