Abstract
Reviewed by: Mark Hardy, University of York, UK
Over the course of a career, Nigel Parton has established himself as one of the most significant voices in the social work academy. Alongside the various components that characterise a stellar academic trajectory – the papers, journal articles, citations, presentations, speeches, etc. – he has published approaching 20 books. He has made several significant contributions to social work theory, including influential interventions concerning the way in which the character of social work as a professional activity impacts on the relationship between theory and practice. He has also been a keen follower of Foucault and perhaps more than any other has applied and developed the latters genealogical analysis as it applies to social work. In the main, his interests have been in the area of social work with children and families, where he has ably demonstrated that varying perspectives about how the welfare of the child is conceived of and acted upon are not, at heart, scientific or technical but instead political concerns, closely related to the emergence and development of the liberal state. This analysis has also been influential in understanding social work more generally.
The politics of child protection is Nigel’s fourth sole authored book, all of which have focused on the ways in which shifts in (broadly conceived) politics have impacted on policy and practice in the field of social work with children and families. Although there is some overlap with these previous texts, the principal foci of the current book are those shifts that have occurred under the banner of child protection over the last decade or so in England. In keeping with a ‘history of the present’, Parton’s analysis is based on in-depth knowledge of the history of child welfare, as well as careful reading and analysis of official documents over a 40-year period and represents a comprehensive account of how the discourse of social work with children and families in England has developed over that period. Methodologically, this analysis explicitly references the ‘history of the present’ approach developed from Foucault and so – though I rarely think the term does justice to the process – in essence this represents a form of discourse analysis, in which documentary sources are used as archival data, on the basis that they have a meaningful relationship with actual social work practice.
It is difficult to do justice to any text within the confines of a review, and so here I will focus on what I perceive as the key arguments made in the book. It begins with a comparative analysis of systems for dealing with (variously constructed notions of) child protection, a review which convincingly differentiates between those systems which are characterised by optimism and trust and pessimism and distrust, respectively. These differences reflect prevailing local cultures and lead to different approaches to conceptualising the role of the state in the family. Although there have been fluctuations over time, an increasingly politicized context in England, characterised by what Parton refers to as ‘the politics of outrage’ (p. 11) has contributed to the development of a system which is unduly concerned with protecting children from abuse rather than the wider category of child maltreatment, and so, paradoxically, is not well equipped to achieve the broad objective of enhancing child well-being. Indeed, social work with children and families has come to function as a proxy for much of the feeling of inadequacy and frustration that many harbour with regard to welfare and the state more generally. This claim is bolstered by a historical overview of the development of childrens’ services which draws attention to the ways in which a waning of the ‘welfare consensus’ dovetailed but also allowed neoliberal thought to make inroads into the institutions of government. With regard to social work, the impact of high-profile child deaths in undermining faith and trust in professional practice is clear, but this narrative is complicated by those parallel ‘scandals’ in which social work has been subject to scrutiny for over intervention, a perhaps unique ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ scenario. Various policy and practice initiatives represent attempts to manage these contradictions and fluctuate according to place and time.
The book continues with a nuanced account, and analysis of, the background to and effects of recent efforts to restructure the aims and organisation of welfare provision, including social work, a state of affairs in which a lack of faith in professionalism led to an apparatus of regulation in which a presumption of poor practitioner judgment is evident. Various such initiatives – especially in the New Labour years – were accompanied by significant investment, particularly the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda. However, as Parton sagely points out, ‘because the government claimed that the changes were introduced … to ensure that tragic deaths … would be avoided in the future [it] was always going to be vulnerable if and when a similar tragedy occurred in the future’ (p. 68). The death of Peter Connelly represented an exemplar of ‘the politics of outrage’. Here, ‘the case quickly came to represent all that seemed to go wrong with contemporary managerial and professional decision making’ (p. 87). In circumstances such as these, ‘… when evil is unambiguously identified … it permits state intervention at its most aggressive’ (p. 88). In conjunction with prevailing neoliberal rationalities of government, this enables the emergence of a form of paternalism which Parton refers to as ‘authoritarian neo-liberalism’ and relatedly, ‘authoritative child protection’. Social work has been in a state of flux ever since, with constant reviews and reorganisations of regulations, training, guidance, etc., and general trends towards more active intervention. Parton traces these in detail, concluding that increasing bureaucratic regulation has paradoxically, made the situation worse. This was also the view of Eileen Munro (2011), whose work is also reviewed. Notwithstanding its merits, however, Parton regards her focus on improving the operation of ‘actually existing’ child protection systems as a distraction from the broader issue of addressing the more significant issue of child maltreatment. The book concludes by arguing that ultimately, child well-being would be enhanced by a public health approach in which the population as a whole, rather than occasional miscreants, are the primary focus of intervention.
Towards the end of the book, Parton also revisits some of his earlier theoretical work, arguing that recent shifts in policy and practice represent manifestations of the contradictions inherent within the liberal state. Here, the role of the social worker is to negotiate a balance between care and control as a basis for traversing the fine line between public and private, and in so doing ‘enable “government” at a distance by indirect methods of social regulation [in line with] the liberal ideal of maintaining autonomous free individuals who were at the same time governed’ (p. 165). He argues that this analysis enables us to understand why, despite the critique to which it has been subjected, social work remains so significant within child protection, as ‘the only profession whose core is based on a socio-legal expertise, and continually attempts to mediate across the various tensions that inhibit the sphere of “the social’” (p. 164) and so well placed to ‘govern the family’. Authoritarian neoliberalism is thus the latest manifestation of ongoing attempts by the state to manage the tension between public and private that is so central to liberal thinking. Nevertheless, in advocating a public health approach in which general well-being is emphasized ahead of much rarer child protection cases, Parton does appear to be suggesting that the care-control dualism is out of kilter and requires a degree of re-balancing. He is also clear that the well-being of children is beyond the responsibility of social work because the issue of child maltreatment is much wider than the narrow remit that social workers have ever had.
As a whole, Parton’s book is a convincing analysis, detailed, authoritative and nuanced. It is also an excellent resource, in that it provides a succinct but comprehensive overview of the history and development of policy and practice in children’s services. The early years of the ‘Con-Dem’ government’s influence of policy and practice are retraced, with excellent overviews of key intellectual influences on governmental thinking and priorities. The links between political thinking, social policy and social work practice are well theorised and appraised, and their influence on specific regulations and guidance are spelled out. For some it will represent a horrible irony that it was only with the return to power of a (relatively) right wing government that the apparatus of managerial regulation and control over practice began to be dismantled, and in his subtle reading of the relationship between ideology and practice, Parton explains why this should not be so surprising after all.
There are numerous conceptual categories that Parton utilises to good effect in this book. The ‘politics of outrage’ resonated, and could usefully be extended to highlight the way in which, under certain circumstances, the normal rules – of accountability, proportionality, justice, even truth – just do not apply. The politicisation and attendant managerialisation of the public sector have had a detrimental effect on professional integrity (in my own view, probably more so than neoliberalism as a rationality for practice, though some will regard the latter as a precondition for the former) by forcing agencies and individuals to engage in rituals of justification which rarely amount to more than elaborate forms of perception management. In social work, this contributes to, rather than challenges, expectations of infallibility.
Often, the work of major theorists is criticised for its lack of empirical substance or specificity (e.g. Garland, 2001; Rose, 1999; Wacquant, 2009) and of course there is some truth in this. However, it would be a mistake to assume that, almost by definition, non-empirical work necessarily lacks substance. Characteristically, where done well, such work is based on careful, often meticulous analysis of the relationship between forms of knowledge as represented through talk and text and sometimes subtle shifts in actual institutional and individual behaviour over time, as these manifest in actions captured within the extant research-based disciplinary knowledge base or sometimes less formally or anecdotally. Where done well, such analysis can be as, if not more, convincing than empirical social science which, in the main, tends to be relatively small scale and produce findings which are partial and provisional. Foucault’s huge and enduring influence on theory and research across the social sciences is based upon work which was resolutely non empirical and none the worse for that. All of these authors – including Parton – rely heavily on discursive sources, and, to a greater or lesser extent, treat the relationship between discourse and practice as straightforwardly unproblematic. This does mean that in the absence of empirical data to triangulate against, it seems likely that readers will have little option but to utilise their own personal experience (if they have it) in deciding whether or not a particular knowledge claim is ‘true’, which renders judgments of quality a highly individualised character. Put more simply, not everyone will agree. My own quibbles are minor. Early in the book, for example, culture is emphasised for both its enabling and constraining effects on practice, a theme which resonated for me, but isn’t really incorporated into later analysis, though this may well reflect a realistic appraisal of the constraining parameters within which efforts to make meaningful differences to policy and practice are conducted. I also thought more might have been made of the significance of the coalitions within ‘new right’ thinking in the development of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. Pat O’Malley (1999) sees some of the seemingly contradictory impulses of contemporary government as emerging from efforts to reconcile incompatibilities between liberal and conservative thinking, which, in the context of Coalition politics in England, is a potentially useful additional analytic trope.
Of more practical significance, Parton also seems to assume that there is, actually, a problem with the quality of social work practice at some level which requires certain changes to improve. I’ve yet to be convinced that is the case. This is less to do with some reification of practitioner judgment, but instead a lack of empirical research data which demonstrates this to be so. In the absence of such data, it seems to me that there is nothing to suggest that practitioners do anything other than undertake their jobs to the best of their abilities in less than perfect circumstances and to a variable but nevertheless generally good enough standard. The sorts of ‘extreme failure’ that attract ‘outrage’ are actually very rare, and there is, I suspect, very little that can be done to impact meaningfully on their instance. Indeed, it is Parton perhaps more so than any other author who has pointed out that social work practitioners have to live with uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity, and do so rather well. Perhaps it’s the rest of us who need to learn to manage the anxieties that this unavoidable reality provokes. Despite these observations, for me Parton’s latest book very definitely retains ‘the capacity to convince’. He makes a reasoned case for an alternative vision, in ways which stimulate and resonate. Whether this vision is actually ever achieved will not detract from the enduring quality of this work.