A conversation between Noel Timms and a US social work practitioner,nascent sociologist

Sociological approach to social problems for social work

I am an experienced social work practitioner, but only recently took my first class in sociology as a part of a joint PhD program in social work and sociology at the University of Michigan in the United States. So, my reading of Timms (1967) is through the lens of a new sociologist but experienced social worker. My interest in sociology comes from my criticism of social work’s lack of a structural analysis to social problems, which results in too many of our interventions offering band-aid—or temporary—solutions that do not address the root causes of oppression. However, I am committed to taking action in order to create a more just world. This commitment is fundamental to social work but is not usually the domain of sociology.

In pursuing a joint degree in both disciplines, I hope to combine critical, structural analyses of social problems with the ability to effectively co-create solutions to those social problems with the communities which are most affected by them. As Nissen (2013) says in, “In search for a sociology of social problems for social work,” I want to, “explicitly address the relation between problem identification and problem solution as well as the problems and potentials for collective action” (p.12). This approach is what makes academic work relevant to the on-the-ground and applied work of social work practitioners and to the lives of our clients and communities. I want to use a participatory approach to ensure “subjects” not only “speak” (Bauman, 2000), but also are an integral part of problem formulation, design, and analysis. This is both to build critical consciousness and to broaden the sociological imagination (Nissen, 2013; Wallerstein and Duran, 2008).

Nonetheless, I realize that my conceptualization of social work as a field and my understanding of the purpose of social work research—as standing fundamentally on the side of the oppressed, with the goal of creating a more just world—is not the only conceptualization of social work. In the United States, we are experiencing a parallel struggle with sociology relative to our identity and purpose, with attempts to define social work research by its use of “science” (Brekke, 2012; Nurius and Kemp, 2012; Staller, 2012). That struggle is coupled with questions about who we, as researchers, are in dialogue with and if there is a need for a “public” social work (Burawoy, 2005; Hardy, 2013; Wacquant, 2011). Nonetheless, as others have noted (Nurius and Kemp, 2012; Staller, 2012), there is not a binary between science and social justice; good science can be used in the service of social justice.

The integration of critical self-reflexivity

At its core, these epistemological debates reflect conflicts in values, similar to the definition of a social problem as articulated by Timms, “conflict of interests and of values” (1967: 16). My values are rooted in Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s work, which also guided my social work practice. Moving into the academy has not shifted my values, and I remain loyal to Freire’s goal for educators, as “the permanent transformation of the world” (Moch, 2009: 93). Nonetheless, it is informative to the epistemological debates within social work that when Freire outlined what qualities “progressive” (I would argue that transformative is a more apt descriptor.) social workers needed to cultivate, a permanent search for competence was one of them. So, the social worker “has to be rigorous, has to work, to establish as much as she or he can, scientifically, his or her understanding of the phenomena of the society in which she or he works” (p.96). While he clarifies that he means, “not scientism but knowledge” (p.96), (and—as the father of popular education and critic of the banking model—he clearly acknowledges multiple ways of knowing), his focus on rigorous study is, nonetheless, a strong endorsement of science as a vital part of achieving transformation.

To achieve this social transformation, social workers need to have a critical understanding of how we are often used as tools of social control. As Nissen (2013) points out, Bourdieu’s sociology is vital to achieving this understanding. Although Nissen is discussing the field of education, we could easily substitute social work with little substantive change, “The field of education cannot, therefore, simply be perceived of as a ‘positive’ practice of ‘learning’ contributing to the ‘altering’ of competences or to ‘mobility’, but must be perceived moreover as order maintaining practices of the power that be” (Nissen, 2013: 7). Looking back on my experience as a social work practitioner, I see how I was being used as a tool of social control, even though I had a heightened awareness of the threat of cooptation.

While Timms critiques sociology for its practice of moral criticism, writing, “when it is most moral it is in danger of being least sociological” (1967: 6), my main criticism of sociology is that it does not take enough moral stances in its examination of injustices. I believe that our values impact everything that we do. We all have an agenda, if for no other reason than we cannot escape our socialization, which Timms describes as, “the attempt to bring up children to be members of their particular society,” (p.85). The scholars who claim that they have no agenda in their work are often those who reflect dominant cultural positions, and, therefore, we do not question their motives or assumptions.

Since Timms wrote in 1967, feminist and other post-modern scholars have challenged traditions of knowledge production in ways that further the emancipatory potential of a sociological approach to social problems. Timms’ concern for morality in sociology echoes what Harding, in describing standpoint epistemology, called “the intrusion of politics into science” that “prefeminist empiricists” experience when the communities being “studied” challenge the researchers’ assumptions (1993: 56). Standpoint epistemology fits well with social work values by “‘starting off thought’ from the lives of marginalized peoples” for the express purpose of producing “knowledge that can be for marginalized people…rather than for the use only of dominant groups in their projects of administering and managing the lives of marginalized people” (Harding, 1993: 56).

Standpoint epistemologies demand that we look at ourselves as knowledge producers with a critical eye. This is the only means to ensure that we not only examine the larger structures and forces that contribute to the social construction of social problems, as Timms does, but that we also critically examine our role in that iterative process, which Timms does not do in this book. While this is important for all knowledge producers, this is especially important for social work researchers, given our commitment to social justice. As Nissen so aptly writes, “This perspective urges for critical reflection and self-analysis on behalf of social work, which perceived as a field of practice related to state power and welfare policy, inextricably links to relations of power and can never be perceived as ‘neutral’” (2013: 8).

Analysis of social work practice experience

Timms quotes Merton and Nisbet (1961: 701) in defining a social problem as, “a significant discrepancy between social standards and social actuality” (1967: 12). He devotes a chapter to “Sociology and Crime,” in which he further discusses the discrepancies between social standards and social actualities as it relates to crime, focusing the majority of his analysis on “lower-class culture.” While I think that uncritically focusing on “the culture of poverty” is problematic (Swidler, 1986), I found Timms’ analysis helpful in unpacking much of my social work experiences. I worked exclusively with people who were poor. Often due to their poverty, as well as other social locations, people in the communities in which I worked were targeted by various arms of the criminal justice system; or as Timms puts it, “because of their position within the structure of that society, [they are] more visible to law-enforcing agencies” (Timms, 1967: 35). For that reason, I would like to focus on how the social problems that I encountered in my practice were socially constructed, using Timms’ analysis as a guide. My goal is to show how recognizing this social construction, and our role in it, can help us take a structural approach to social change and avoid having our work co-opted in order to uphold an oppressive status quo.

Before returning to school to begin study toward a PhD, I worked with homeless youth at an anti-human trafficking organization in Denver (a large city in the state of Colorado in the western United States) that was founded on Freire’s concept of praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970: 33). While reading A Sociological Approach to Social Problems, I reflected on my work and how the problems surrounding homeless youth are constructed. I appreciate how Timms’ approach problematizes the construction of social problems as such, writing that “one of the most valuable lessons of the sociological approach” is that “social problems do not necessarily arise from conditions judged to be pathological; they are often the side effects of valued ideas and activities” (p.17). Timms locates the “heart of most if not all social problems” as a “conflict of interests and of values” (p.16). He further sees a clash in values as preventing solutions to social problems.

In my work with homeless youth, I saw this as an ongoing issue. We were in a unique position because we were the only organization that worked locally to address human trafficking as it affected homeless youth who were US citizens and were exploited for labor or sexual purposes domestically. It was quite easy to get people to support anti-trafficking work broadly, as most people see human trafficking as an abhorrent crime that clearly violates their values, in particular, freedom and justice. However, when we brought up the root causes of the problem of trafficking and exploitation—things like an economic system that is reliant on a permanent underclass of citizens, the destruction of any kind of a social safety net in the United States, cultural attitudes which portray women as objects to be used for pleasure and profit, and an immigration system that relies on cheap labor but denies the humanity of those who supply it—it got much more complicated. Suddenly even within shared values such as freedom and justice, there was conflict about what those values actually meant given the broader oppressive systems that we live under.

There was a further clash in values when developing interventions. Unfortunately, within the anti-trafficking movement, as well as in media accounts, the criminal justice system is offered as the first, and often only, solution to human trafficking. The youth who we were working with were, with few exceptions, subject to criminal justice interventions. Youth who are homeless are among the most vulnerable to human trafficking. As a practical result, being homeless in the United States is basically illegal as “the most common tactic used by officers to deal with the homeless is some type of criminal sanction (e.g. arrest or summons)” (McNamara et al., 2013). Numerous local ordinances across the US criminalize homeless’ acts of daily living (de Albuquerque, 2011), including: sleeping, urinating, or defecating on public or private property, trespassing, panhandling, selling goods and services without a permit, retrieving food from the trash, and sitting or lying down in public. Often, merely existing in public space is criminalized as “loitering.” Thus, these ordinary acts of daily living are unlawful in most cities in the United States.

The solutions offered have been more policies that criminalize the homeless and further conflicts in values (McNamara et al., 2013). In 2012, the city of Denver passed the Unauthorized Camping Ordinance, “forbidding any person from covering themselves from the elements with anything other than their normal clothing” (DHOL, 2013: 15). This was done in the name of safety, but the question that I, and others, kept asking was, “Whose safety?” One of the city council members who supported the ordinance argued that, “We have to stand up for our businesses downtown and our women and children who are afraid to go downtown” (DHOL, 2013: 15). The rhetoric of the downtown business owners and city council members who pushed for the ban made it clear that their concern for safety was explicitly for middle and upper class people, as the ban itself makes homeless people decidedly less safe (DHOL, 2013). The ban pushes them from the relative safety of being able to cover themselves in order to stay warm in public, to facing sanctions for trying to do so. This is in a city that only has enough emergency shelter beds to house 10% of the homeless population (DHOL, 2013: 13). With an average of 700 homeless people freezing to death every year in the US, the business owners who wrote and officials who passed this ordinance should be held publicly accountable for their role in these deaths (NCH, 2010). Many police officers themselves do not support policies such as these, as they feel ill-equipped to deal with “social disorders” that are not crimes (McNamara et al., 2013: 367). These are the consequences of a solution based in the “middle-class dominated legal system,” but in which the price is extracted from the “lower-class” (Timms, 1967: 45).

Timms summarizes Merton’s critique of the American Dream as a cause of deviant behavior, wherein there is a disjunction between, “the emphasis on the cultural goal of success and the fact that many people in the society are deprived of access to the institutionalized means of reaching these goals which are held to be legitimate and possible for all members of society” (1967: 26). Timms goes on to describe the effects of this phenomena, saying that, “appreciable numbers of people became estranged from a society that promised them in principle what they were denied in reality” (1967: 26). This estrangement is the result of what Bourdieu termed, “symbolic violence,” defined as “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1996: 167; Miller, 2012).

With homeless youth, I often found myself as the perpetrator of symbolic violence. For example, when assessing a situation to determine if it was trafficking, one of the key questions that I asked youth was, “Does it seem too good to be true?” I felt a little sick about asking a homeless youth if an opportunity seems too good to be true, particularly as someone who has never been homeless. Essentially, what we asked was whether an opportunity fit into appropriate class boundaries and, thus, was not “too good for them.” We wanted to make sure that the opportunity fell under the level of exploitation that was tolerated, encouraged, and necessary under a neoliberal capitalist system, but not criminally exploitative. Exploitative customer service jobs at fast food restaurants that paid minimum wage and never enabled them to meet their basic needs were deemed appropriate. Providing sexual services, which may or may not allow them to meet their basic needs, was deemed criminally exploitative, and something that social workers are supposed to protect them from—although we could not offer better alternatives. To me, the effort to instill cynicism in youth in trying to protect them by socializing them into their “place” in society is an upsetting part of social service provision. It is one of the clearest examples of how social workers can function as tools of social control, rather than promote social change.

The fact that I often found myself (and my colleagues) being used as agents of social control was particularly disconcerting because we worked at an anti-oppression based organization that was explicitly committed to achieving social change. Early in my career, I read Kivel’s (2007) “Social service or social change: Who benefits from your work?” Kivel challenges service providers to critically reflect on how they do their work to ensure that they are not serving as a buffer zone between the oppressed and the “ruling class,” which is necessary to maintain the oppressive status quo. A critically reflexive sociological approach is key for helping social workers to see our place in the broader economic pyramid that Kivel describes. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power is useful in analyzing how social workers are used to maintain oppression (Nissen, 2013). The relationships that we were able to develop with homeless youth converted overt oppression and domination (such as what they often experienced from law enforcement) into the more covert and stable domination and oppression that they experienced as a part of the social service systems designed to “help” them. In both our research and our practice, social workers must affirmatively engage with Kivel (2007) and Harding’s (1993) enduring question: Who benefits from our work and research?

Conclusion

I hope that completing a joint PhD in social work and sociology will give me the best of both worlds: allowing me to take a sociological approach when looking at the social construction and structural nature of social problems, while critically self-reflecting about my actions in relation to that construction. I want to stay firmly committed to not only addressing social problems but also to address injustices caused by the “solutions” to those very social problems.

As social workers, what often unites us, as a profession, is our work toward social justice. However, critical self-reflection is a necessary component of working for social change and against social control. I see promise in following Timms’ model of taking the best from both sociology and social work. In doing so, we can conceptualize social problems in a way that acknowledges the structural forces that create them as well as offer the practical possibility for transformation and liberation.