To Empower a Profession

Creating, developing, and transferring social work special knowledge is significant for the quality of professional standard (see Rutter & Fisher, 2013). In our age of knowledge, it may be argued that integrating research and practice indeed is not only a question of efficacy but even professional survival (Juliusdottir, 1999, 2011). Thus, social work as a helping profession and a discipline has been developing from its historical heritage of charity or bare empathy with people in need, and from Cartesian corrective interventions, into welfare-based ideologies and policies, user involvement, and progressive, sophisticated methods of best knowledge (see Chambon, Irving, & Epstein, 1999). In North European social work, we sometimes talk about a paradigm shift (Juliusdottir, 2006) in that we have increasingly been integrating research and practice in social work education (Juliusdottir & Peterson, 2004) not least evident in field practice placements where the professional self evolves (see Hrafnsdottir, Kristjansdóttir, & Juliusdóttir, 2002), thus inducing a new mode of thinking and changing attitudes.

The linking of practice and research serves multiple purposes. Firstly, reinforcing the institutional status of the profession through enforced legitimacy and gained authenticity; secondly, enabling the individual in his professional role to persevere through seeing and meeting problems as research subjects, understanding social phenomena in theoretical perspectives and contextually, which also serves as a protection against disillusion, exhaustion, or burnout; and thirdly, empowering clients through using their actual problem questions as a challenge, source, and embryo to social work research questions.

The core of this vision is acknowledgment of the significance of fluidity between levels (Juliusdottir, 1999; Juliusdottir & Karlsson, 2007). That means not only a congruous flow in curriculum between academic education, field training, and research alignment but also connecting clinical work to research as a source of ideas for research topics, and vice versa, in a reciprocal and consistent process. Thus, we get relevant, significant research questions from the clinical setting and we get meaningful answers from our practice-related research. By this, we are transferring client experience to professional knowledge production usable as a beacon in single cases, foundation for teaching material in academic courses, and guidelines for clinical training as well as for methodological development and influencing policy.

Let us link this view to the ideological vision of social work. The American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey (1859–1952) developed the philosophy of pragmatism and progressive education, highlighting the ideology of necessary linkage of education, knowledge, and power—in a similar vein as contemporary pioneers in social work also did. According to that view, we have a professional-ethical (even political if we like) obligation to create scientific knowledge generated from field and clinical experience and communicate it to clients, students, colleagues, and to policy makers. This connection fits in with contemporary professional social work and the recognized view of knowledge as a tool for informing and building on in psychosocial family life education, as means to empower people. People need help to be enlightened and reinforced in their various situations of life—such as recovering from different life crises, that is, of loss by death or divorce, and also to handle various choices and differentiate between endless offers of the market. This may sound almost as a common sense, but I think we have not been there for so long, that is, applying social work research issues and knowledge transfer critically for consciousness raising, counseling, and therapeutic work.

A special challenge in current social work therefore consists in meeting individuals and families, where they are in the turbulence, threats, and possibilities of postmodern times. It may be seen as a professional encounter and in line with social work’s original ideology to both bring insight and support and educate and empower families, young people, and children within the framework of their actual social conditions. Here, premarital counseling and preparation for the parental role, the transition from two into three persons relationship, make up the precondition for cultivating personal, intimate, close relationships for secure attachment for newborn, young children, and adults—as a question of “emotional survival” and a prerequisite for health and personal integrity. It is a question of meeting the primal need for belonging and guarding the deep, inner core of the young individual. This serves the goal of making him strong and persistent in his later choice of lifestyles, that is, helping him in creating his own individual biography (see Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). Social workers as clinicians, family workers, and counselors, in the broad area of school-, justice-, health-, and social services, are in a position of guiding people “in time of anxiety” to find their way in their travel through the liquid pathways of the contemporary labyrinth of the (Scandinavian) welfare society, through the professional/therapeutic dialogue (see Bauman, 2006). For functioning significantly in that role, social workers need status which only solid knowledge and a research basis can bring.

In order to meet this ethical claim of professional responsibility, the social worker has likewise to be farsighted and to build on insight into the social/political development, linking it to the individual/family level—seeing the individual in the family and the family in the individual in a global perspective (see Sennett, 1998). This of course also relates to the influence of increased individualization; increased social/emotional isolation; fragmented lifestyle, mobility, strain; and subjective feeling of lack of time in postmodern time. Through knowledge, insight and understanding of his situation—mediated through the therapeutic and educative process—the individual gets power, becomes empowered, to make difficult decisions on basis of own consciousness and responsibility for themselves, their (old) parents, (ex)mate, and children. When listening to clients in different circumstances, you hear what is needed in question of knowledge and it is from there you get the most actual, burning questions to be researched for applicable client-beneficial solutions.

To conclude, from social work research, built on clinically raised questions, we are in a better shape to use our findings in cocreating answers with clients, present various kinds of solutions, and even recommend what seems suitable for individuals in this family in this situation—also taking into account personal conditions, wishes, and realistic goals in accordance with the landscape—just as a skilled travel guide. As a final remark, I maintain that the following institutional activities are now benchmarking social work as a discipline and high standard profession: (i) fortified emphasis in social work education on research orientation and scientific activity; (ii) reinforced practice–research linking in field service institutions; (iii) the growth and welcoming of reviewed and respected social work journals, increasingly accessible and read in working places. I am grateful to the editor of Research on Social Work Practice, Professor Bruce Thyer, for inviting one from a Scandinavian country to write this guest editorial, giving me the opportunity to present my views and visions for social work, and hopefully contributing to the ongoing professional dialogue about its standards, scientific challenges, and future social influence.