From Aristotle to Arendt: A phenomenological exploration of forms of knowledge and practice in the context of child protection social work in the UK

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the relationship between different forms of knowledge and the kinds of activity that arise from them within child protection social work practice. The argument that social work is more than either ‘science’ or ‘art’ but distinctly ‘practice’ is put through a historical description of the development of Aristotle’s views of the forms of knowledge and Hannah Arendt’s later conceptualisations as detailed in The Human Condition (1958). The paper supports Arendt’s privileging of Praxis over Theoria within social work and further draws upon Arendt’s distinctions between Labour, Work and Action to delineate between different forms of social work activity. The author highlights dangers in social work relying too heavily on technical knowledge and the use of theory as a tool in seeking to understand and engage with the people it serves and stresses the importance of a phenomenological approach to research and practice as a valid, embodied form of knowledge. The argument further explores the constructions of service users that potentially arise from different forms of social work activity and cautions against over-prescriptive use of ‘outcomes’ based practice that may reduce the people who use services to products or consumables. The author concludes that social work action inevitably involves trying to understand humans in a complex and dynamic way that requires engagement and to seek new meanings for individual humans.

Keywords

Arendt Aristotle phenomenology: child protection social work theory praxis

Introduction

Social Workers fulfill one of the most difficult tasks for the community. They need to have detailed knowledge of the disciplines of psychology, sociology, social administration, human growth and development, research methods and the law, and to maintain a nice balance between compassion and realism, empowerment and control. They need to be aware of their own needs and prejudices and have the strength to ensure that these do not impact upon their work. They deal with those who are rejected by society … it is hardly surprising that they do not always get it absolutely right. (Lord Low of Dalston 18.1.07 taken from Hansard)

Social Work has always looked outside itself for theoretical inspiration, but the danger of spreading itself so thinly across so many understandings of the human condition is that it often imports perspectives that it then does not have the depth to deal with in a sufficiently nuanced way to understand and describe the very complex lives of its users. Set this danger within a hotly contested political context that reduces social work to “… a very narrow concern with child protection” (Parton, 2014: 2042) and is regularly re-shaped by media frenzies around tragedies such as befell Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly and others and stoked by the Risk Society (Beck, 1992); and what you have is a profession unsure of its remit, unable to grasp a coherent knowledge base and struggling to develop a professional identity. It seems important therefore to try to root those practices in a wider examination of what it is to be human within society in order to inform the judgements and decisions we make about the value and worth of childhood, family and community.

Social work academics set fortifications around their theoretical camps: psychological versus sociological; positivist versus hermeneutic; and critical theorists versus the apolitical (e.g. Narey, 2014). The nineties saw a widespread acceptance of the radical mantra of anti-oppressive practice (AOP) based in Marxian, structuralist understandings that employed catch-22 like phrases such as “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” (Thompson, 1992, cited in Beckett and Maynard, 2005). This was hard to challenge or to contextualise for who would not agree that we ought to be against oppression and injustice? While AOP as a ‘practice theory’ seems to be in decline, the social work literature still proffers a range of theoretical understandings that recognise the political nature of social work in general (Garrett, 2009) and child protection in particular (Parton, 2014) for how can we intervene as agents of the state in family life without recognising that as a political act? However, while we stand on the deck saluting the flag of social justice, we have been scuttling ourselves with neoliberal technical approaches to practice (Garrett, 2009) and, I would argue, epistemically sinking. The quest for certainty so that it ‘… will never happen again’ leads us to clutch at performance management straws that inevitably give way when it does happen again.

Surely then our appropriation of attachment theory and its growing evidence base within neuropathology would provide us with safer ground. Yet again we clutch enthusiastically to certainty in the modern project. With a few notable exceptions (Featherstone et al., 2014; Munro and Musholt, 2014; Wastell and White, 2012) we watch as the next generation of social workers suffer the consequences of intellectual inbreeding, fumbling through practice with webbed theories and six-fingered methodologies that give up on families unable to reach the optimal state of a ‘secure pattern’ attachment with their child.

These two extremes of practice are vital to our understanding of the complex worlds that our service users and ourselves inhabit, but while we wait for the battle between macro and micro to burn itself out, we seem to have lost the ability to engage on the meso level. Yet, here lies the social – the points that validate our position as social workers – what Goffman (Lemert and Branaman, 1997) called the Interaction Order. These are the points that individuals interact with their environments. Social Work seems to have lost its capacity to focus on the social through its self-righteous determination to safeguard individuals from their families, leading to calls from authors to separate child protection from social work (Parton, 2014) and, I would argue, more ethical calls to ‘re-imagine’ child protection work as family, rather than child, centred (Featherstone et al., 2014). I offer this paper as a contribution to addressing some of the fundamental ways of thinking about what child protection social workers do by addressing ways of knowing. In doing this, I will be unashamedly claiming phenomenology as a legitimate approach to understanding social work as both practice and research methodology. If we are, as Croisedale-Appleby (2014) recommends, to produce social workers as practitioners, professionals and social scientists, then we need to embrace an approach that enables all three. One could argue that we are in fact in a state that Kuhn describes as ‘essential tension’ in that the world of child protection we currently inhabit is ‘out of joint’ with any one of the knowledge traditions we draw upon. Kuhn might view the current state of social work knowledge as being in a crisis in which ‘epistemological counter-instances’ are leading us toward the emergence of a new and different analysis (Kuhn, 1996: 78).

What we find are syntheses and appropriations of thought from other disciplines being applied with varying degrees of success such as Hayes and Houston’s (2007) use of Habermas in combining critical theory with Schutz’s phenomenology as a way of theorising child protection. It is also easy to agree with Garrett (2007) that social work’s chief theoretical and practical preoccupations could orientate the profession in the direction of Bourdieu who specifically sets out to develop a theory of practice for sociological research. We are beginning to see more use of phenomenology within research (Smeeton and Boxall, 2011; Gibson, 2014; Nordberg, 2014) as well as ethnomethodological work that has had significant impact upon practice (Broadhurst et al., 2010). While Bourdieu (2012) viewed ethnomethodology as the currently active form of phenomenology, Tesch (1994, cited in Gray, 2014) distinguishes between phenomenological research and ethnography. Both are based upon description and interpretation but ethnographic research is focused more on culture while phenomenology concerns itself with the human experience of the ‘life-world’. Phenomenology’s focus then is on individuals’ ‘lived experiences’ while ethnographers make use of ‘sites’. Although Arendt (1906 – 1975) only occasionally characterised herself as a phenomenologist (Moran, 2000) and is a glaring omission from some textbooks (e.g. Dreyfus and Wrathall, 2009), many of her arguments come from her time as Heidegger’s (1919–20) student (Inwood, 1997) and her subsequent reworking of some of his thought. Her belief that we should not consider humanity to have an essential nature but a certain condition, which is only permanent in as much as it conditions and is conditioned by everything with which it comes into contact (Arendt, 1958: 9–10), clearly sets her as a phenomenologist. Arendt argues that this phenomenal nature of the world appears differently to each person (Kattago, 2014). One of her key points is that men and not man (sic) inhabit the world and we have to think of the human condition as plural and not a fixed state that applies to all. Villa (1996: 24–25) points out the resonances between Arendt’s work and that of Weber, Adorno and Foucault in making the point that society excludes the possibility of action by absorbing the public realm and emasculating plurality. Humanity for Arendt is plural and we are always therefore dealing with individual humans, not with abstract ‘humanity’. This seems to me to be in perfect accord with a view of social work that seeks to make sense of the lived experiences of individuals and it is surprising that phenomenology is rarely articulated in its literature.

The social work literature is, however, peppered with hand-wringing about the disconnect between theory and practice and whether social work is ‘art’ or ‘science’ (e.g. Cash, 2001; Gitterman and White, 2013; Hudson, 2009; Trinder, 1996). By drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s reworking of Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues, I intend to describe different forms of knowledge and the activity that flows from each in relation to child protection social work and the related construction of the ‘service user’ that follows. In doing so, I intend to argue that social work needs to recognise what aspects of itself are ‘art’ and which ‘science’ but ultimately to claim itself as distinctly ‘practice’.

The knowledge that social work seeks cannot be made in universities by individuals who presumptively seek timeless, context-less truths about human nature, societies, institutions and policy. The knowledge must be developed in the living situations that are confronted by the contemporary episodes in the field … (Rein and White, 1981: 37).

Aristotle

In The Nichomachean Ethics (2009 edition), Aristotle (384–322 BC) set out the beginnings of the contest highlighted above in that he divided the world into things that change and things that do not which led him to distinguish between two main branches of knowledge. Aristotle described the knowledge of the unchanging as theoria and knowledge of what changes as praxis, which includes knowledge of things done, or poeisis, knowledge of things made. His argument that intellect of itself moves nothing is apposite in this discussion because social work is by its very nature ‘action’. We must therefore try to understand the interplay between Theoria, Poeisis and Praxis and explore the further sub-divisions.

Theoria – Aristotle described scientific knowledge as proceeding through both induction (nous) and deduction (epistêmê). Together these constitute wisdom (sophia). He defines scientific knowledge as ‘judgement about things that are universal and necessary’ (Aristotle, 2009: 107) and therefore unchanging.

The academy concerns itself with this form of knowledge and theory is therefore afforded primacy. Much comment then is on why the practitioner is failing to use the knowledge provided to it (Marsh and Fisher, 2008) However, Aristotle himself, while privileging this form of knowledge over others, said that it ends in contemplation and produces no human action (Aristotle, 2009; Dreyfus and Wrathall, 2009). Social work is concerned precisely with human action in a constantly changing social and political context, so the use of theory or scientific knowledge is by its nature likely to have limited application.

Poeisis – Aristotle separated ‘things made’ from ‘things done’ and articulated a form of knowledge of production as art. To be engaged in production, a technical knowledge (technê) is required. It seems to me that the recent neoliberal techno-rationalist emphasis on individual outcomes for social work users requires knowledge of production. Performance indicators therefore have mistakenly sought to measure social work as a productive profession, rather than as an active one (Broadhurst et al., 2010; White et al., 2008). Knowledge here has emphasised the counting of social work ‘outcomes’, e.g. the number of children subject to a safeguarding plan, proportion of children brought into care or subject to proceedings, length of time within which assessments are completed, etc. A little thought around this would question whether there are ever outputs for social work activity and at what stage they are measurable? Understanding social work as being concerned with children’s welfare, by which I mean the total state of being well, rather than the presence or otherwise of risk factors makes knowledge derived from social work products problematic.

Praxis – according to Aristotle (2009), this derives from activity that is not about producing something and requires phronêsis (prudence) or knowledge of how to act in particular situations rather than the application of general principles. He argued that it is phronêsis that guides action. Aristotle describes the need for practical knowledge in understanding the variables that are not demonstrable by science. He argues that practical wisdom cannot be science or art but a true and reasoned capacity to act with things that are good or bad for man. Aristotle goes on to argue that within practical wisdom, there cannot be ‘excellence’ because it is a virtue and not an art. Rorty (p. 343) suggests Aristotle felt contemplative and practical lives “… provide the conditions for one another's fullest development”. However, he clearly privileged theoretical over practical knowledge.

Arendt

There is little dispute within the literature (Hayden, 2014; Higgins, 2011; Villa, 1996) that Arendt is fundamentally an Aristotelian, but her refinement breathes fresh life into his ideas. In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) challenges Aristotle’s view that theoria is a superior form of knowledge and instead privileges praxis. The Human Condition is ambitious in its scope and within it Arendt seeks to explain how she develops Aristotle’s themes and distinctions between different forms of knowledge and how these relate to human activity. In the first part, Arendt sets out the bones of her discussion by introducing the distinction between the active life (vita activa) and the contemplative life (vita contemplativa). It is here she first asserts her separation from Aristotle in her privileging of the active life over the contemplative. She positions herself as believing that there is no essential human nature – only a certain condition and that in order to be fully human, men need to fully engage in political action with each other.

Action alone is the exclusive prerogative of man; neither a beast nor a god is capable of it and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others. (Arendt, 1958: 22–23)

According to Higgins (2011: 91), she contends that as the contemplative life rose in the estimation of late antiquity, the active life came to be understood as opposite – i.e. non-contemplative life, which blurred the distinctions within it, cleaving theory and practice. By the time the active life regained pride of place in early modernity, mainly through the stress that Marx placed on the primacy of labour, its internal hierarchy had been reversed and its values distorted.

The contemplative life

Arendt then is at pains to re-establish clear distinctions between the contemplative life and the active life but to offer a more thorough description and analysis of the types of activity humans engage in within society. Arendt was definitely not anti-theoretical, but she was clear as to its place. She invites us to view theory as “not a tool but a region of thought” (Vasquez, 2006: 44), which I would argue is a useful way to approach theory within social work. When we adopt theories as tools, they tend to become sledgehammers rather than electron-microscopes and minimise our potential for thoughtful reflection and analysis.

The active life

Arendt refines Aristotle by distinguishing between three domains within the active life: For Arendt, labour, work and action are all parts of human life but are hierarchical, and in the end it is action that is the pinnacle of human activity, the sine qua non of leading a fully human life (Higgins, 2011: 91).

Labour is activity that is about maintenance of a state. Arendt argues against the Marxian idea that labour is man’s essence, that humanity creates itself through labour. For Arendt, nothing is further from the truth. She pointedly describes much of active life as Labour, which, in marked contrast to Marx, she sees has having no inherent human worth. While it is necessary to sustain life, it is simply all the activity that men undertake to maintain the status quo: growing food that is eaten, cleaning workspaces, etc. For something to possess value, it must possess durability – labour only produces consumables and leaves nothing behind. The result of the effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent (Villa, 1996: 26). She saw increasing automation in the workplace as producing a society of labourers.

Work, in contrast to labour, is a distinctly human activity that equates most closely with Aristotle’s description of poeisis – a knowledge of how to make things – or ‘art’. The distinguishing characteristic of work is its purposiveness; all work aims at the creation of a durable and lasting product, and so possesses directionality, a teleological quality utterly absent from labour. Work destroys nature through its creation of artefacts. The products of work ‘reifications’ do not find their way back into the cycle of natural growth and decay but endure outside it. In work, men are artisans and artists who create products. However, Arendt argued that the products that work adds to the world also give rise to labour (Higgins, 2011). Arendt sees technology and the consumer society as ultimately devaluing work. If what is created is only to be consumed and ends up back in the cycle of decay, the activity of creating it is labour. What is left is not a society of workers exercising a craft, but a society of labourers who consider whatever they do primarily as a way to sustain their own lives and those of their families. The transformation of the whole society into a labouring society permeates human existence with a necessity and sameness – humanity – human beings as public actors, as unique individuals – is threatened with extinction.

Action –reserves the word action for only a small subset of the full variety of human doings and efforts – action is closely connected with ‘speech’ for only man “… can communicate himself”. [There is future potential to explore the bridge that Arendt builds between Wittgenstein’s description of the linguistic turn and Habermas’ theory of “Communicative Action” (Habermas, 1977)]. She goes onto argue that man can live without either labouring or working (you could pay someone to labour for you and choose not to produce anything durable) but that a life without speech and action has ceased to be a human life “… because it is no longer lived among men” (sic). The truly human condition then, she argues, lies within a web of human relationships and it is what happens ‘in-between’ people, which is valuable. Arendt argued that practical wisdom (phronêsis), the primary intellectual virtue of deliberation concerned with action, is not merely concerned with the selection of means, as is technê or art. Rather, in deliberating, the man of practical wisdom, the phronimos, is more concerned with finding what is good for himself and his fellow citizens (Villa, 1996: 32). This represents the highest sphere of human engagement especially in co-operation and discussion. It is only in the life of action as opposed to abstract thought that humans become fully authentic and is the only realm where it is possible to achieve excellence. Action for Arendt must involve initiating a new beginning – natality (Arendt, 1958: 9). What I find particularly exciting about Arendt’s discussion of action is the idea that human activity itself creates new beginnings. She steps away from Heidegger’s rather pessimistic focus on mortality by stressing natality. Humans acting together give birth to new ideas and understandings from within the already existing set of ideas and understandings from which they come and move them onwards. New stories are created through people acting together. One of the consequences of natality is that any new understanding is fleeting, for it will cause people within this web of relationships to think and behave in new ways, which in turn will cause others to have new understandings ad infinitum. There is no product as such, but the human condition moves on.

Application to child protection social work

It is precisely this hopefulness in the capacity of humans to create new stories that I believe offers healthy prospects for social work. Too often we try to tie people down as fitting within a certain category, conforming to a set of behaviours that we understand as relating to a particular essential condition. Once we have fixed this understanding, we have a sense that we can ‘know’ what it is to be that person and how to work with them to either change their behaviour or situation or to recognise it as being beyond redemption. In recent years, child protection social work has relied heavily upon attachment theory as first described by Bowlby and subsequent theorists (Howe et al., 1999; Shemmings and Shemmings, 2011). The idea that the nature of the relationship a child forms with their primary caregiver in the first few years of life sets their patterns of behaviours and relationships for the rest of their lives is an attractive, yet potentially toxic one as it robs people of their potential for agency. Social workers stress the criticality of the early years and frequently see parents who had difficult childhoods themselves as therefore incapable of change. Social work interventions then seek to break the chain of insecure attachments often by removing children and placing them in new relationships with primary caregivers judged as being able to promote a secure attachment. Whilst this approach is beginning to gather a more critical appraisal (e.g. Wastell and White, 2012), we need to have new understandings to challenge scientific determinism.

I feel that Arendt can begin to inform this search by recognising that we cannot rely upon the simple application of high theory to very complex webs of relationships. Simply taking people through child protection processes is simply to subject them to social labour. Nor can we necessarily rely upon straightforward technical solutions to dynamic, uncertain, human issues, for as soon as we have acted with people, we have set off a new chain of meanings and understandings that that person will draw upon in acting in the world. We cannot therefore understand their lives as products of social work as those are fleeting. We have to engage with people in a form of social action, responding to their evolving condition and recognising the new understandings we are generating in-between us.

Arendt invites us to try to understand each individual’s unique perspective on their own life and to avoid slipping into a belief that there is a fixed human nature that is essential and predictive. This is a phenomenological understanding of the human condition that recognises the potential for new beginnings. While there will always be child protection concerns so severe that we may not be able to safely allow parents to care for a particular child or children at this point in their lives, allowing ourselves to believe that people can change and may be able to successfully parent in the future is particularly important. As Broadhurst and Mason (2013) argue, casting women as ‘maternal outcasts’ subject to successive compulsory removals of their children raises many ethical, legal and practical challenges to social work practitioners. It is also extremely resource intensive and logjams child protection team caseloads and the family courts.

Approaching service users as consistently capable of change also allows practice wisdom to be used in a positive direction towards keeping families together, solving problems, finding new ways to behave and creating new stories. This is inherently a more satisfactory and satisfying way to practice social work and also I would argue a more human way to live and practice – immersing ourselves in action with our fellow human beings. We need to thus remove ourselves to a sufficient distance to recognise that some of what we do currently is not ‘action’ but ‘process’, which removes us from engagement with the people who use our services and to heed Arendt’s warning that:

It is quite conceivable that the modern age – which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity – may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known. (Arendt, 1958: 322)

To illustrate the difference between ‘action’ and ‘process’, we need look no further than the recommendations that flow from published serious case reviews intended to promote learning and improve practice. Brandon et al. (2011) conclude that many of the recommendations following a child death or serious injury result in a proliferation of tasks that add new layers of prescriptive activity and leave little room for professional judgment, or, I would also argue, concern. Rather than strengthening supervision and supporting reflective practice, the tendency is to recommend more training for social workers and to create new or duplicate procedures. If we look at how these recommendations translate into what the social worker is expected to do, we see processes laid out that stipulate how often children should be visited, who should be spoken to and how the visit should be recorded, rather than to ‘act’ with concern for the service user.

If a young person has been reported missing the allocated social worker should undertake a statutory visit within three working days of the child’s return and must complete a missing exemplar, ‘Placement Information Record’ and importantly a return interview should be completed …. consideration should be given as to whether the placement meets the child’s needs. (Liverpool SCB Procedures Manual, 2014.)

While this clearly sets out a social worker’s duty to consider why a young person might have gone missing from care, it would be perfectly possible to comply with this procedure without the young person feeling that the social worker has any human concern for their well-being. Caring for children is reduced to Labour reliant upon procedures being followed and feeding the information system. This often leads to the compliance culture that Munro (2011) refers to in describing practitioners focused on ‘doing things right’ rather than ‘doing the right thing’.

If we were to translate this into a piece of Work, the social worker might be advised that when a young person goes missing from care, it is important for them to ensure the placement is able to keep the young person safe by working with them and the carer towards the goal (product) of a stable, secure placement. This requires poeisis in knowing how to work with the carer and young person to produce a stable placement and possibly technê in applying techniques to achieve that goal.

I would argue that a social worker’s Action, in the Arendtian sense of the word, when a young person is missing from care might include beginning the above guidance by requiring that the allocated social worker show concern for the young person by acting to assure themselves that the child is now safe and well and that the young person has the opportunity to talk to them about why they went missing, any worries they might have and explore any potential harm they may have come to. It is hard to proceduralise ‘concern’, but seating social work back into its Rogerian roots may lead it towards phronêsis.

Arendt’s analysis shows that theory is displaced not by action but by work and ultimately labour – the ideal of fabrication gives new impetus to cognitive pursuits in the direction of natural science – in which knowing is intimately tied to making (Higgins, 2011). Thus, even as work (whose products include tools) helps to lighten our labour, it creates a ‘second task of labouring’ in order to maintain the system. Recent innovation within child protection work is towards a series of approaches that rely heavily on such tools aimed at enabling engagement with service users which have to a large extent been welcomed by the academic and practice communities with many local authorities adopting strengths-based approaches such as “Signs of Safety” (Munro, 2011; Turnell and Edwards, 1999). While I also welcome coherent approaches to engaging with children and their families (Smeeton, 2013a, 2013b) there is a real and present danger that social workers may rely only on their knowledge (technê) of the tools and their application and thus become ‘technicians’. The other danger is that practice may become measured not by the quality of the analysis but by the completion of the task and I have already heard of social workers criticised by managers for not having completed and placed a “Three Houses Tool” on a child’s record, even when the child was pre-lingual and the tool therefore inappropriate. Again, we reduce action to work to labour. Arendt (1958: 196) claimed that “… interpretation of action in terms of making, actually spoils the action itself and its true result, the relationship it should have established”.

In constructing people as ‘service users’, we are already to some extent reducing their humanity to that of, at best, ‘consumers’ of social work labour. However, as Featherstone et al. (2014: 96) remind us “… Arendt identified the treatment of humanity as superfluous as beginning whenever people are reduced to a state, for example of being homeless or socially burdensome”. There is also a danger that in reducing practice to the technical application of tools, we reduce children and families to ‘products’ or even ‘consumables’ (Garrett, 2009; Ruch et al., 2010).

The measurement of social work outcomes seems to me equally problematic. At what point, can we measure the outcomes of a person’s life – Arendt would say only when they are dead (Arendt, 1958: 192). Others recognise that the complexity of the activity that child protection social workers engage in makes the identification and measurement of outcomes extremely difficult (e.g. Forrester et al., 2013). According to Higgins (2011: 100) “… the frailty of action lies in its unpredictability, its irreversibility and its evanescence”. Human action cannot be undone, but its meaning will be persistently re-interpreted. In ‘completing’ a social work assessment and placing it on permanent record, we are attempting to fix an understanding of the people who are its subjects and then formulate a piece of work towards stated outcomes. Assessments conducted within the domain of child protection in the current climate tend to focus on ‘risk factors’ and plan outcomes that either reduce or remove those risks. Featherstone et al. (2014) see the child-centered risk paradigm as highly problematic ethically. They go on to argue that practices rooted in this approach are likely to leave children less safe. I agree, for to reduce complex and dynamic webs of relationships to a few isolated SMART targets is to fail to recognise, as Arendt does, the limits of our abilities to solve equations with too many variables. Action is ‘boundless’ and resonates beyond its immediate context (Higgins, 2011).

Better then to engage in relationships with families that enable us to sustain a continually evolving understanding of what is happening and to effect change based upon dynamic action within the situation (Hall, 2012). While I might disagree with some of the theoretical underpinnings of Ruch et al.’s (2010) articulation, I fully support theirs and Ferguson’s (2005) assertion that placing the relationship at the heart of social work practice enables the worker to move beyond surface understandings and is intrinsically valuable as an intervention in its own right.

Conclusions

Broadhurst and Mason (2014) label the ‘informational turn’ as tethering social workers to their computer workstations at the expense of investing in the skills of direct work with children and families. There has been extensive critique of this reduction of social work to labour – feeding the Integrated Children’s System (Parton, 2008; White et al., 2008). However, Broadhurst and Mason (2014) feel that there is a resurgence of interest in embodied ways of knowing. It seems to me that the argument is a turn away from theoretical and technical rationality toward phronêsis, which according to Gillespie in Dreyfus and Wrathall (2009: 359) was a decisive step in the development of both existentialism and phenomenology.

Martinez-Brawley and Mendez-Bonita Zorita (1998) argue that social work actions should be guided not by formal theory, but a form of reflection that generates a unique theory in action, or praxis. Thompson (2005: 69) similarly states: “Theory provides us with the cloth from which to tailor our garment, it does not provide ‘off the peg’ solutions to practice problems”. My reading of Arendt, coupled with my own practice experience, leads me to assert that it is even more fundamental than that. We weave our own cloth. When engaging with a new family who need social work services we pick out the strands relevant to the situation drawing from: sociology, psychology, professional and personal values, practice experience, intuition, common sense, legislation, policy, compassion, control, etc. Assessment helps us to determine which strands are pertinent to our engagement with these particular service users and analysis helps us to decide what to do with which strands; which to pick up, which to leave, in which order to put them together. We generate a new understanding about each family’s needs and how to help them, aiming to weave particular relationships and valuing those relationships for their inherent worth. We need theory as a region of thought rather than tool, we need to labour in order to maintain the system, we need to work with service users toward their goals but ultimately we need to be involved in action with children and families in order to enable new meanings to be formed. I fear, however, that we will ultimately only be measured by how much we labour.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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