Learning from sociological practice: The case of applied constructionism

Drawing upon field research in two distinct settings, the authors reflect upon the uses of and problems associated with social constructionism in academic and applied contexts. Miller’s research on brief therapists and Fox’s on an AIDS prevention program, both of which utilize the principles of social constructionism, bring into relief various issues within social constructionism. The authors suggest that academic contructionists’ consideration of applied uses might bear insight into the relationship between theory and sociological practice. As practitioners of everyday life who are responsible to practical concerns, social constructionists' knowledge claims are socially contingent. The mutable claims to expertise and authority in applied settings highlight these contingencies. Moreover, within applied constructionist settings, decisions to priviledge some knowledge forms over others reflect the ontological gerry-mandering problem in academic versions of constructionism. Kathryn Fox areas of specialization are deviant behavior and social control, social problems theory, and qualitative methods. She is co-author of Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modem Metropolis with Michael Burawoy et al. Currently, she is conducting research on a cognitive therapy program for violent offenders in prison. Gale Miller recent research has focused on language use in human service organizations and social problems theory. His recent book, Becoming Miracle Workers: Language and Meaning in Brief Therapy, is an ethnographic history of a postmodern approach to human troubles. He has also recently published a book with Robert Dingwall, Context and Method in Qualitative Research.     

Relational Frame Theory: An Overview of the Controversy

Although Skinner''s Verbal Behavior (1957) was published over 50 years ago, behavior-analytic research on human language and cognition has been slow to develop. In recent years, a new behavioral approach to language known as relational frame theory (RFT) has generated considerable attention, research, and debate. The controversy surrounding RFT can be difficult to fully appreciate, partly because of the complexity of the theory itself and partly because the debate has spanned several years and several journals. The current paper aims to provide a concise overview of RFT and a summary of key points of debate and controversy.     

Social Learning Theory and Behavioral Therapy: Considering Human Behaviors within the Social and Cultural Context of Individuals and Families

This article examines theoretical thoughts of social learning theory and behavioral therapy and their influences on human behavior within a social and cultural context. The article utilizes two case illustrations with applications for consumers. It points out the abundance of research studies concerning the effectiveness of social learning theory and the paucity of research studies regarding effectiveness and evidence-based practices with diverse groups. Providing a social and cultural context in working with diverse groups with reference to social learning theory adds to the literature for more cultural considerations in adapting the theory to women, African Americans, and diverse groups.     

Being neither Pollyanna nor Henny Penny: Responding to McDonald and Jones

Abstract

This paper provides an account of the earliest contributions to family theory and practice by social workers, beginning in the late nineteenth century. The paper argues that the first widespread practice of ‘family work’ by the helping professions was carried out by social workers, primarily women, despite this being rarely acknowledged in the family therapy literature. An analysis of gender and its place in the development of professional status and the ownership of ideas is provided.

Summary

This paper has traced the place of the family in social work theory and practice since the beginnings of the profession, with a particular focus on theoretical developments in social work in the United States. A number of points have been argued. Firstly, there is significant historical evidence that social workers, most of them women, pioneered family work many decades before the term ‘family therapy’ was invented. This directly challenges the claim made by a number of family therapy historians that work with families was pioneered by psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s. It is argued here that this discrepancy is largely a result of differences in professional power and gender status.

Secondly, it is argued that the impact of psychoanalytic theory on social work was profound, not only in terms of how it might have distracted the profession from further developing its early family systems focus, but also in how its multidisciplinary practice tended to place social workers, again mostly women, in somewhat limited and prescribed positions.

In addition, it is argued that social work's emphasis on the family and family intervention has waxed and waned due to these concepts not appearing to fit neatly into divisions between fields of practice, such as casework, group work and Community development. While social work struggled with finding a place for the further development of family social work theory, the rapidly growing domain of family therapy quickly colonised this field of practice, giving little credit to the ground already laid by social workers.     

Picturing social work,puzzles and passion: exploring and developing transnational professional identities

ABSTRACT

Exploring and in turn developing professional identity is a challenge faced by social work programmes, nationally and internationally. This paper developed from the authors’ shared research interest in how social workers and students of social work develop and express their professional identities. We report findings from a workshop designed to explore how a group of social workers from different countries conceptualised social work identity, including the effects of transnational and cultural contexts. Our starting point drew on theoretical concepts developed in Wiles’s research, in which the term professional identity is used to convey multiple meaning, and the method developed in Vicary’s research which uses drawing to elicit data. We found that a collective identity is shared across national boundaries albeit, and ironically, that this shared identity has components that are not cohesive and are continually being redefined. In the participants’ own words, the notion of social work identity is always just out of reach conceptually, or ‘over the horizon’. Tensions in identity were also revealed, alongside a sense of passion or deep commitment. These findings complement and add to the existing literature on exploring and developing professional identity in social work.     

Teaching research methods to social work students in India and Australia: reflections and recommendations

This paper draws on the reflections of two social work educators who have, for many years taught research methods to undergraduate and postgraduate social work students in India and Australia. The intent is to suggest measures for enhancing the quality of social work research education. The reflections are embedded in a social justice and human rights framework, privileging the educators’ unique social and cultural contexts and their commitment to engage with indigenous knowledge. The authors recommend effective social work research education requires the educator to draw on a deep understanding of their own context, as well as globally accepted research traditions. Particularly, we encourage research teachers to adopt student-centred approaches that emphasise a broad ‘research mindedness’ (in their students and themselves), building students’ practical capacities and confidence to become effective, research informed practitioners; capable of contributing to their own communities and to the social work profession more broadly.     

Bosanquet's social theory of the state

Bosanquet's political philosophy was a social theory of the function of the State as ‘hinderer of hindrances to the best life’, where individual development was supported by relationships within a community. This was worked out in the context of considerable knowledge of conditions among the London poor at the turn of the century, and reinforced by his wife's practical work and research. He sympathized with Durkheim's pioneering sociology, and was in contact with him through the Sociological Society. His ‘New Liberal’approach, seeing problems of poverty as to be met by informed charitable activity, was restricted by insufficient recognition of the structural aspects of social problems and conflicts. The bearing of his Idealist Metaphysics is critically considered, and it is claimed that, although a good deal of this may not be acceptable, it gave a background to a kind of social thinking which is of interest to those looking for a communitarian type of political philosophy.     

Tracing disorder across theories of autism,empathy, and mental health care

Abstract

Categories of mental disorders are generally understood through a biomedical paradigm of clinical research, diagnosis, and intervention. Here, diagnoses operate as professional tools, facilitating care organization and information exchange across diverse social contexts. In this article, I focus on how the diagnosis of autism-spectrum disorder operates in this manner. Autism conceived as a biomedical disorder is then contrasted with proposals by the neurodiversity movement, who understand core qualities of autism as alternative expressions of otherwise normal processes of brain development. Finally, I supplement these conversations with insights from Gerald Edelman’s theory of neural plasticity and Felix Guattari’s paradigm of ethico-aesthetic care. Understood together, these allow mental disorders and community care generally to be reconceived in terms of networks of expressive, embodied, and dynamically embedded rhythms that transcend individual persons. This serves, additionally, to illustrate a concept of empathy that traverses neurological, psychological, and sociocultural domains.     

Social Work Training or Social Work Education? An Approach to Curriculum Design

Population ageing, economic circumstances and human behaviour are placing social welfare systems under great strain. In England, extensive reform of the social work profession is taking place. Training curricula are being redesigned in the context of new standards of competence for social workers—the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF). Students must be equipped on qualifying to address an extensive range of human problems, presenting major challenges to educators. Critical theory suggests an approach to tackle one such challenge—selecting the essential content required for areas of particular practice. Teaching on social work with older people is used to illustrate this. Habermas' theory of cognitive interests highlights the different professional roles served by the social work knowledge base—instrumental, interpretive and emancipatory. Howe's application of sociological theory distinguished four social work roles corresponding to these. It is suggested that curriculum design decisions must enable practitioners to operate in each. When preparing students to work with older people, educators therefore need to include interpretive and emancipatory perspectives, and not construct social work purely as an instrumental response to problems older people present. This approach provides one useful rationale for curriculum design decisions, which is applicable to other areas of practice, and to contexts outside England.     

The theoretical costs of ignoring childhood: rethinking independence, insecurity, and inequality

Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in “the social studies of childhood,” sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology’s relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children’s perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children’s perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory.     

How and Why Do Family and Systemic Therapies Work?

My reviews of the evidence base for family therapy conducted over the past 15 years have been guided by four key questions. Does systemic therapy work? What sorts of systemic therapy work for specific problems? What processes occur in effective systemic therapy? Is systemic therapy cost‐effective? In this paper answers to these questions are given. Systemic interventions are effective for about two out of three cases. Specific models of effective systemic therapy have been developed for most common mental health problems. There are many processes shared by evidence‐based models of practice that can be incorporated into the routine practice of research‐informed family therapy. Systemic therapy is cost‐effective and in many cases leads to medical cost‐offsets. Available evidence indicates that family therapy can make a very significant contribution to alleviating suffering and making the world a better place to be.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

La sociologie clinique comme science rigoureuse et comme pratique sociale

How can clinical sociology be considered from an epistemological point of view, since it deals with social problems not in their overall dimension, but seen as specific situations where concrete people are suffering? This paper is concerned with a two-fold epistemological difficulty: from the one side, studying such problems could involve a therapeutic intervention that exceeds a purely scientific approach; then, has a clinical sociologist to deal with a social therapy? And how far does that (not) involve any political involvement? From the other side, under which conditions could he (she) generalize information coming from his (her) experience as to contribute to social theory (according to Merton's suggestions about theory and research)? An effective contribution to answer such questions can come from the concept of ‘cultural pattern’, as pointed out in this paper.     

Discourse, social theory, and social research: The discourse ofwelfare reform

Recent social theory includes important insights into language which constitute a so far underdeveloped resource for sociolinguistics. But much of this theory stops short – theoretical frameworks and categories which socially locate language are not pushed in the direction of a theorisation of language itself, which limits their operational value in research. Sociolinguistics can draw upon social theory to produce more sophisticated theorisations of language which at the same time constitute contributions to social theory. My aim in this paper is to explore what it means to work in a 'transdisciplinary' way. I argue in particular for a transdisciplinary engagement with social theory in which the logic of one theory is put to work in the elaboration of another without the latter being simply reduced to the former. My focus is upon critical discourse analysis (CDA) which I here take to be a part of a broadly conceived sociolinguistics. I shall link this theoretical exploration to a concrete research focus by referring to a discourse analytical study of the current British ('New') Labour Government, with particular reference to its 'reform' of social welfare. I shall be drawing upon the theoretical framework developed in Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999). I have referred to some of the social theory which I find it particularly fruitful to work with, but the paper is intended to suggest a way of working and is in no sense a closed list of theorists – on the contrary, I believe that we should be open to a wide range of theory.     

Social work and a love of humanity

Abstract

The idea of a ‘love of humanity’, though largely absent from social work literature, is a potent concept for challenging the dominant discourses of individual material wealth, greed and power. It can be associated with the postmodern agenda of emancipation from oppressive discourses of professional ‘expertise’. Love, or a ‘love of humanity’, has the same intent as formulations of social work grounded in postmodern critical theory, but it uses a different language. It uses a language of lived experience and personal commitment - a language that appeals to our hearts -a language passionate about, and incorporating, human rights and social justice.     

Responding to student mental health concerns in social work education: reflective questions for social work educators

In this paper, we explore ways in which social work educators might respond to students who report that mental health issues underlie their difficulty in meeting core competencies, or otherwise use the language of mental health to describe their struggles to succeed in social work programs. We discuss various trends in policy responses in Canada, the US, the UK, and Ireland. While there are general policy trends, it is clear that responding to these kinds of issues requires the development of highly flexible and situated policy processes that can respond to student realities, concern for students’ rights and privacy, and an awareness of potential discrimination against students. These processes also need to meet the specificities of practicums, particular institutional policies, the mandates of relevant professional bodies, and the precise local legislative framework that shapes these situations. Given these varying contexts, in this conceptual paper, we used a framework on disability that is informed by critical theory to engage existing school policies and propose a set of reflective questions that can guide schools of social work to create an overall responsive environment. These reflective questions are designed to help social work educators balance the rights and needs of students with the professional and institutional demands that students meet core competencies in their education.     

Current Status and Future Agenda for the Theory,Research, and Practice of Childhood Career Development

This article reviews the current status and a future agenda for childhood career development theory, research, and practice. The fragmented nature of the current state of the literature is noted, and a call is made for a reexamination and reconsideration of the childhood developmental pathways of life's work. It is suggested that the study of children's work behavior be rooted in life contexts, most notably, families, communities, and schools.     

Managing Children’s Friendships Through Interparental Relationships: Roles of Ethnicity and Friendship Context

Twenty African American and European American mothers of fourth‐grade students reflected on strategies for managing children’s friendships maintained across a variety of contexts. Ethnicity differentially located families within specific social contexts that yielded children’s friendships, then informed social processes as they unfolded within these contexts. Maternal knowledge concerning children’s friendships developed as a function of the types of relationships formed among parents encountered within different settings. Findings suggest that interparental relationships represent a key source of information about children’s friendships. Yet, maternal opportunities to establish such relationships differ on the basis of both ethnicity and the nature of contexts in which children’s friendships are maintained.     

Mapping the Terrain of Selection for Social Work: A Critical Analysis of Policy,Theory and Research

This paper explores the implications of the changing UK policy and regulatory contexts for the often competing or contradictory interests and agendas operating within the arena of admission decisions in social work education, highlighted by the introduction of the new social work degrees in 2003–04 and the associated care councils. Other contextual factors that impact on admissions to higher education more generally will also be touched upon, including the widening participation agendas; increased requirements for transparency of decision making in the selection process; questioning of the predictive quality of A‐level scores; and, concern regarding recruitment and retention issues. A critical review of relevant research into social work admissions processes and outcomes is reported on. The validity of current selection tools is examined utilising research findings from within social work and allied disciplines. The authors argue that the increased spotlight upon admissions and the ‘front‐loading’ of gate‐keeping into social work education is both unrealistic and irresponsible as it omits the crucial ongoing role of assessment throughout the process of qualifying education.