Review article

This paper attempts to discuss the Chinese cultural implications of the recently proposed document: ‘Global Qualifying Standards for Social Work Education’ by the IASSW and IFSW. It seems that this document still embraces an ideology of western social work imperialism in perceiving the development of social work in other countries. With reference to Chinese culture and social work education in Hong Kong and in mainland China, the writer advocates that responsibility and rights, stability and changes, social norms and equality, as well as empowerment and relation, should be fully articulated in the definition, ethical principles, and core purpose of social work practice as well as in the mission and curriculum in social work education within Chinese communities.     

Raising the Titanic: Rescuing Social Work Documentation from the Sea of Ethical Risk

Abstract

One of the most contentious issues in social work practice concerns what should be written about people who access social work services, how comprehensively, and in what format social work assessments, interventions, and outcomes should be documented. The present paper describes a structured approach linked to an action research project that was undertaken by hospital-based social workers to identify and minimise problems associated with documentation in the medical record. The Social Work Ethics Audit provided social work staff with a risk-management tool that highlighted documentation as a key area of ethical risk. Through a process of evaluating existing recording practices, social workers were able to meet the challenge of improving social work recording in medical records, returning it to its proper place as a vital component of clinical and ethical practice rather than an administrative task submerged beneath competing priorities. It was anticipated that the social work documentation proforma that resulted from the ethics audit process would have applicability in other health care settings.     

Social Media and Social Work: The Challenges of a New Ethical Space

ABSTRACT

Social media and other online technologies have transformed communication between social workers and service users, with many practitioners engaging and working with clients through social networking sites. While there are numerous ethical issues associated with online practice related to con?dentiality, dual relationships, and boundary crossing, there is lack of clarity about how to deal with such issues. This article uses a case example to develop a nuanced understanding of ethical issues and ethical behaviour in online spaces. We argue that social workers need to link their knowledge of the complex interplay between discourses that underpin daily practice like those related to power, permanency, authorship, audience, embodiment, and professionalism to social media created spaces. In doing this, social workers must retain their commitment to ethical values and critical reflective practice. We conclude with recommendations for education, research, and practice.     

Coffee by women: the ‘duty of ethical enjoyment’

This article explores the contemporary trend of deploying feminist values in the case of ethical branding. Using the psychoanalytical concepts logics of fantasy and enjoyment, we analyse the campaign by Swedish coffee brand Zoégas, Coffee by Women, to understand how a combination of development discourse, ‘women’s empowerment’ and the opportunity to ‘do good’ is employed to sell coffee. The analysis shows that the campaign depicts the threat of a future lack of coffee, creating anxiety in the consumer, supposedly motivating her to purchase Zoégas, as Coffee by Women is claimed to secure and educate new generations of coffee farmers. Simultaneously, this is presented as ‘empowering women’ in the global South. We argue that this narrative builds on a colonial fantasy of global sisterhood and shared interests that works to conceal the political conflicts connected to global trade and climate change. Through a commodification of feminist values and aesthetics, this fantasy works to redirect the desire for social change towards consumption, offering an enjoyable solution that disregards any wider responsibility. It has been argued that the structure of the social bond before the era of mass consumption was characterized by a prohibition on individual enjoyment for the benefit of the common good. After the arrival of mass consumption, the social bond instead became marked by a duty to enjoy. In the contemporary context of ethical capitalism, we suggest that the social bond is rather structured by a ‘duty of ethical enjoyment’, containing elements of both prohibition and pleasure.     

Knitted warmth: the simple analytics of social cohesion

Self-interested agents are randomly matched to play a variant of the prisoners dilemma in which social capital increases the return to mutual cooperation. The stock of society-wide social-capital investments is social cohesion; the rate of return to social-capital investment increases with social cohesion. I derive sufficient conditions for equilibrium cooperation when agents know only the level of social cohesion. In communities, there exists better information and some social standard of behavior that supports equilibrium cooperation. I distinguish between characteristics of individuals and those of populations, and between mechanisms that favor cooperation in low-information “mass society” and in information-rich settings.     

Grappling with Realities: Policy and Practice in HIV Social Work

In 2012 the NSW HIV Strategy 2012–2015: A New Era was released, with a goal of eradicating Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) by 2020. This new policy, prioritising biomedical treatment, has raised challenges for social work practitioners working in the HIV field. We undertook a research project exploring the implications of the Strategy on social work clients and practice. A questionnaire was sent to 57 HIV social workers and 32 (56.1%) responses were received. Thematic analysis identified five main themes affecting social workers and their clients. These were a new stigma, treatment benefits, the complexity of people's lives, the psychosocial voice, and ethical and professional tensions. We propose that a more holistic HIV strategy including the psychosocial realities that inform HIV transmission, testing and treatment options, and adherence be adopted.     

Developing Anti‐oppressive Ethics in the New Curriculum

This paper describes the development of an anti‐oppressive ethics and values module appropriate for the new social work degree. It is contended that there has been insufficient attention paid to ethics teaching in social work education generally in the UK, and in particular there has been:

• ?failure to develop discrete modules on ethics and values in social work;

• ?minimal critique of conventional ethics with social work values that take oppression and diversity seriously;

• ?insufficient use of recent feminist ethical contributions relevant to social work;

• ?limited development of interprofessional ethics teaching that take service user and social work values seriously; and

• ?neglect of ethical decision‐making guides that can encompass legal, ethical and social work values.

The paper proposes a rationale for an anti‐oppressive ethics module that will enable traditional ethical theories to be placed within an anti‐oppressive social work values context, and aim to provide students with a more adequate guide for decision‐making. The module will be developed in consultation with service users and interprofessional colleagues. It will take into account the British legal and policy framework, the General Social Care Council code of practice, as well as the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education requirements, but placing them within an anti‐oppressive framework drawn from the authors' current and previous work in this area, and will have special reference to recent feminist moral philosophy. The authors have recently been re‐located into a Faculty of Health and Applied Social Studies and will be developing the new module on ethics in consultation with health lecturer colleagues specialising in ethics with the aim of developing interprofessional co‐operation and sharing of perspectives between staff and students. They write with long experience of both practising and teaching social work, and with diverse experiences of ‘race’, gender, class, and also being both service users and providers.     

Student to Practitioner: A Study of Preparedness for Social Work Practice

Abstract

Australian social work graduates face an increasingly complex work environment where the role of the social worker is often overlooked or misunderstood. In order to examine the anticipated and concrete practice reality for social workers, this qualitative study examined the expectations of social work students preparing to enter the workforce (n=29) and the experiences of new social work graduates in the workplace (n=9). Findings suggest that undergraduates have a realistic understanding of the challenges they would encounter in practice, including anticipated value and ethical conflicts, and allied professions' conceptions of the social work role. They did not anticipate the busyness of the workplace or the level of supervision offered.     

Interaction Ritual Chains and the Mobilization of Conscientious Consumers

Markets for “socially responsible” products are comprised of activists who lead protests, organize boycotts, and promote the consumption of these goods. However, the ultimate success of these movements is dependent upon the support of a large number of consumers whose self-professed values often contradict with their own purchasing patterns. Consumer support of socially responsible products cannot be explained by consumer culture theories, which privilege identity, attitudes, and behavior, or mass consumption theories, which emphasize location and advertising’s influence on consumption patterns. These perspectives are informative but unable to explain why some consumers will only buy socially responsible products while others with similar value systems possess much more contradictory consumption patterns. I extend Collin’s theory of “Interaction Ritual chains” to show that rituals and emotions—more than identity or coercive advertising—explain how ethical consumers are mobilized. I show how face-to-face interactions between consumers and producers produce solidarity and motivate support for the Fair Trade movement. This paper employs a micro-sociological approach to contribute to studies of ethical consumption in three notable ways: 1) it emphasizes the importance of “contexts” and is able to explain contradictions in consumer behavior; 2), it contributes to our understanding of “brand communities” by describing the micro-sociological processes that both help to build these communities and create value within the products that organize these groups; and 3) it offers the potential to develop a predictive model for the purchasing patterns of consumers.     

A Pilot Study Evaluating Students' Interest in International Social Work Education

International social work (ISW) has gained traction across the USA with a number of schools taking the lead in promoting the values of social work through exchange programs, service learning, and volunteerism. The internalization of campus through the proactive action of institutions to incorporate global perspectives into teaching, learning, and research in order to build intercultural competence among students, faculty, and staff has received little attention. This paper assesses the level of interest of social work students at a large urban university in the southwestern USA in embracing ISW and how they conceptualized their learning needs. Using a self-administered web-based survey offered to a total of 1,500 social work students with 18% respondent rate, the research determined through a chi-square test that students in Bachelor of Social Work, Master of Social Work, and PhD programs had a significant difference in preferences in areas of interests (χ² = 153, p ≤ 0.000). Overall, students demonstrated interest in direct practice (74.3%) and community and administrative practice (16.6%). Students also differed in their level of interest in participating in international exchange programs (χ² = 9.6, p = 0.047). Discussions address specific and unique interests categorized broadly as ‘globalized social worker,’ ‘humanitarian social worker,’ and ‘policy social worker,’ each of which requires specific skillsets and advanced behavior skills.     

Navigating Ethical Challenges in Social Media: Social Work Student and Practitioner Perspectives

ABSTRACT

The portable, accessible nature of technology affords social workers opportunities to venture outside traditional service contexts by engaging in the virtual realm. This qualitative article uses two small-scale exploratory case studies to investigate the concept of ethical challenges in online peer networking and blogging by a social work student and social work practitioner. The article seeks to address the opportunities for and complexities of navigating technology and social media, while also emphasising the need for social workers to acquire a range of skills and competencies, and use well-established frameworks to engage in ethical online practice.     

Ethical implications of the promotion of elder volunteerism: A critical perspective

This critical inquiry explores the question: What are the ethical implications of promoting normative ideals for healthy aging, such as volunteerism and civic engagement, that specifically emphasize productivity and contribution? In this paper, we identify the values and ethical standpoints embedded in the discourse promoting volunteerism and productive aging and then describe what this suggests about how older adults are viewed, valued and judged. More specifically, we argue that older adult volunteering has at times been framed in a manner that dually suggests: a) lifelong productivity is a necessary condition to be a good old person; and b) lifelong productivity is a necessary condition to be a good old citizen. We then demonstrate that the current promotion of older adult volunteerism and productive aging is ethically troubling because: 1) it fails to capture the full potential of the self — and in particular, the aging self; and 2) it grounds justice in a narrowly defined and unfair distributive scheme. An alternative model of aging is then presented based on equal regard for all persons insofar as this approach is inclusive of the diversity of older adults and aging processes, and policy implications are discussed.     

Linking economics with psychology an economist's view

This article deals with some mutual prejudices between economists and other social scientists. By means of a rather new instrument of research, the so-called Income Evaluation Question (IEQ). it is shown that norms with respect to income can be measured quantitatively. It is basically an attitude question. The results are used to derive equivalence scales for family size and climate differences. In the psychological field they are used to estimate the impact of past experiences and the anticipated future on present norms. In the sociological field we mention an application to derive the impact of the social reference group of an individual on the individual's norms. The examples show that research instruments from the psychologist's list of instruments may be fruitfully combined with economic model building to shed some light on central problems in the social sciences, economics included.     

Appeals to social norms as policy instruments to address consumption externalities

We consider appeals to social norms as a policy instrument to address consumption externalities. We explore whether appeals to social norms can be an efficient policy instrument and compare the efficiency of such appeals to the efficiency of taxation in addressing consumption externalities. We find that when the existing norm helps to shift consumption towards the socially optimal level of consumption, taxation welfare dominates appeals to social norms as a policy tool. While previous studies have found that economic instruments are superior to information in other contexts, we arrive at a different conclusion for situations where the norm shifts behavior away from what is socially optimal. In such cases appeals to social norms can be a better policy instrument than taxation.     

Predictors of Feminist Activism among Social Work Students in the United States

While social workers advocate against domestic violence, sexual harassment, and restrictive reproductive practices, there have been virtually no studies on the reasons behind their feminist activism. To address this oversight, this study documented the extent of feminist activism among American undergraduate social work students (n = 159). When moving to explanatory analysis, our data suggest that feminist activism was related to greater educational attainment, knowing activist peers, recognizing heterosexism, and internalizing a commitment to social justice. Moreover, electoral activism was tied to the rejection of traditional gender norms in the family and perceptions of social movement tactics were crucial to protesting for women's rights.     

The ethics of gambling: guidelines for players and commercial providers

Current academic and popular debate on gambling rarely focuses on the ethics of gambling, but concentrates on narrower questions of social impact. This article suggests a philosophical foundation for the ethical provision of gambling services. It argues from a moral realist base while paying close attention to the concrete facts of present policy and practice. The article identifies certain objectively good reasons for gambling. Having established gambling is not wrong per se, it advances generic principles that gamblers and gambling providers should follow in order to act ethically. From these generic principles are derived applied principles from which, in turn, operational norms for actual gambling businesses can be articulated. The article concludes that gambling can be offered and chosen in ethically acceptable ways, but that this will require a major shift in self-conception by the gambling industry.     

Engaging communities: Ostrom's economic commons,social capital and public relations

This article discusses the research of economics Nobelist Elinor Ostrom. It argues her analysis of long term community co-operation contains important insights for public relations, especially in the area of community engagement. Informed by Ostrom's focus on common pool resource management, the article highlights the importance of organisations adopting an attitude of mutuality to the external stakeholder environment. It also associates public relations practice with the promotion of a social commons. It then examines Ostrom's insights on the role that face-to-face communication plays in the generation of social capital and the norms of behaviour that promote co-operation. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the practice of public relations in organisations and suggests areas for further research.     

Reclaiming civil society: the future of global social work?

The topic of global social work has become a controversial one in the European Journal of Social Work, as the March 2004 edition acknowledges in an editorial statement. This statement was prompted by a pungent critique from Stephen Webb, in an earlier edition of the journal. Webb (2003), p. 191) dismissed the topic as being of marginal interest: ‘?… social work has at best a minimal role to play with any global social order, should such an order exist’, adding that ‘a global or transnational social work is little more than a vanity’. Lest the reader should still harbour doubts, Webb (2003), p. 196) added with powerful political import: ‘these writers on globalisation and social work posit what is tantamount to ethical welfare imperialism’. Strong words! We beg to differ and offer an alternative vision of the relationship between globalisation and social work that connects it to the vital democratic force of civil society.