The Multiple Relationships Between the Discipline of Social Work and the Contributions of Michael White

Abstract

Michael White, the Australian narrative practitioner, died in April this year. Given White trained in social work and has had a large impact on many social workers, it is timely to investigate the opaque relationships linking White and his work with his discipline-of-origin. The present examination proceeds in three steps. First, a schematic outline of White's intellectual influences and achievements is set out; second, the alignments, as well as tensions, between White's work and his discipline-of-origin are considered; and, third, it is argued that White was informed by, and went on to produce a body of work that further informed, the contesting spirit that is the wellspring of the discipline of social work. This conclusion is reached mindful of the fact that White remained antagonistic to the role played by the professions in general and that he did not identify with the title ‘social worker’ in particular.     

Completing the Story: connecting relational and psychological processes of exclusion

This paper explores how my understanding of and approach to investigating youth transitions and social exclusion, shifted when conducting a case study about Ray, a mature student in transition from a further education college. Having relayed the findings of a study about Ray's experiences of social exclusion, I will discuss the events and reconsiderations that prompted a change in my relationship with Ray. I will reveal how I began to know Ray is his own right, and grasp his feelings and views about his life, and show how this caused Ray to become a participator in and not merely the subject of the study about his life. This (methodological) reconsideration prompted me to perceive my original relationship with Ray in exactly the same way as I had understood his relationships with his mother, his lecturers and with officials--a relationship between the barer of 'expertise' and the subject of this knowledge. The paper will conclude that the new, closer relationship Ray and I developed enhanced the validity and the richness of my understanding of his social exclusion.     

Village on the Border, anthropology at the crossroads: the significance of a classic British ethnography

Village on the Border was the seminal anthropological study of a mainland British rural community. It was written and published during a period of unsurpassed scholarship and creativity in British social science. To explain the impact it had on social anthropology, British studies and public discourse at the time, I look at the influences on Ronnie Frankenberg and his work of the then state of social anthropology; of the particular academic environment in which he was trained and worked; and of his personal background and political convictions. This analysis shows that although the book clearly bears particular historical and intellectual influences, it was explicitly set within comparative ethnographic frameworks, and in due course greatly influenced work elsewhere. Both methodologically and substantively, it should be seen as a significant contribution to the comparative study of local‐level politics, gender relations and the role of the ‘stranger’, as well as the authentic origin of modern anthropological studies of rural Britain.     

Popular sovereignty and the historical origin of the social movement

This article seeks to explain why the social movement had its historical origin in the 1760s. It argues that the rise of the social movement as a particular form of political action was closely linked to a new interpretation of sovereignty that emerged within eighteenth century British politics. This interpretation, which drew inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau??s social contract thinking, not only resonated with the radicalism of John Wilkes and his followers?? struggle to promote civil liberties to Englishmen of all classes, it also spurred a transformation of the repertoire of popular contention. The article traces the evolution of the concept of sovereignty in British political thought from the Restoration to the Wilkites and discusses how this evolution informed the contentious actions of the Wilkites as they formed the first mass movement to promote a specific political issue.     

Was Freud a Medical Scientist or a Social Theorist? The Mysterious "Development of the Hero"

Rather than viewing Freud as a presumptuous Viennese physician who late in life attempted to "apply" some of his provocative psychological speculations to various social phenomena, this essay argues that from first to last, Freud was a social theorist. Indeed, what drew Freud to the study of biology and medicine was precisely the hope of addressing scientifically the most fundamental cultural problems: the nature of man and his culture; the origins of religion, morality, and tradition and the nature of their extraordinary power; the sources of social order and disorder; the direction of contemporary cultural development; and, finally, the problem of how to live in a disenchanted and psychologically impoverished world. Reading Freud in this manner moves his "cultural" texts from the periphery to the center of his work and makes possible an appreciation of the more complex, coherent, and illuminating social theory that lies at its heart.     

The Quintessential Rural Sociologist*

Alvin L. Bertrand's career and research have made him an exemplar of humane social scientist, scholar, and academician. For many of his peers, Bertrand is the quintessential rural sociologist. Spending almost all of his career at Louisiana State University, Dr. Bertrand has addressed an extraordinarily broad array of social phenomena, often of a community problem variety, in his research. His research employed a social systems analysis frequently focused on the rural context and had a strong applied orientation with the result that his findings have been widely used as the basis for the formulation of important national and international program and policy decisions. Bertrand's work has attracted wide attention abroad as well as in the United States. Because of his many contributions to the discipline of sociology, he has received numerous awards and recognitions and has also been elected to various offices in professional societies and associations, including the presidency of five such groups.     

Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism

Charles Tilly’s work on repertoires of contention and social mechanisms was pathbreaking. In this article, I argue that his understanding of both concepts overlaps with social-theoretical work informed by the philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. There is no evidence that Tilly was influenced by pragmatism, but I argue that the overlap is substantial enough that large portions of his oeuvre can serve as illustrations of the explanatory power of pragmatist social science—and that Tilly’s theorization of mechanisms in particular would have been even stronger had he engaged pragmatism directly.     

孙本文与20世纪上半叶的中国社会学

作为20世纪上半叶居于主流地位的社会学综合学派的代表人物,孙本文在其从事研究的近30年间对中国社会学的早期建设做出了突出贡献。留学美国哥伦比亚大学和芝加哥大学的经历直接影响到他从文化和心理因素入手,建构社会学综合学派的学术努力,这使他的学说带有鲜明的文化决定论和心理还原主义的色彩。在社会动荡、战争频仍的年代,孙本文充当了中国社会学建设者和评论者的双重角色,最早尝试用社会学理论来推动苦难中国的社会建设,并致力于创建一种中国化的社会学理论体系。这些努力,既反映了知识分子面对危机时的天真与无奈,也反映了社会学家介入现实时的执拗与不甘。而1949年革命胜利之前由他个人写成的《当代中国社会学》,庶几也就成了即将黯然退场的旧中国社会学家们的集体谢幕词。     

Becoming a Social Worker: Chris' Account

Chris Murray, a young African-American male, admitted on a scholarship to a social work masters program, reflexively explores his negotiation of difference in dialogue with an Australian female social work educator twice his age. Standpoint theory and the concept of intersectionality are used to frame Chris' experiences at a private northeast US university after achieving an undergraduate degree in his southern home state. His initial access to university came through military service. Chris was interviewed by the author as part of her international study project examining social work students' experience of diversity in the classroom. The open-ended interview was designed to allow self-identity of difference. Chris ethnographically recounts to a stranger a subjectivity statement of who he is in relation to studying social work. Chris' story works the hyphen between the binary of subjectivity and objectivity through the particulars of his personal history and world-view and his expectation that I as a social work educator share his seeking of social justice. His detailing of what moved him to become a social worker and contextual complexities negotiated along the way connect to wider discourses on how agency and structure play out in lived experience in seeking social justice.     

To Pass Through on One’s Wings: The Poetry of Oleh Zujewskyj

Ivan Dmitriev has virtually disappeared from memory, but in the late eighteenth century he was known as one of Russia’s foremost poets. What even fewer readers know is that Dmitriev’s most significant contribution to Russia’s literary heritage may have been his decision to make poetry the centre of his prose autobiography. In the literary and social context of the 1810s and 20s, this was a remarkable step because it showed Dmitriev’s conviction that poetry had an inherent value that earned it a place in the narrative formulation of one’s “life plot.” Dmitriev’s approach is even more remarkable when his autobiography is compared to the prose autobiography of Gavrila Derzhavin, the greatest poet of his time. Derzhavin’s autobiography ignores poetry almost completely, and usually refers to the author’s literary endeavours only when they intersect with the dominant thread of his political life. This article looks at the social and literary contexts in which these autobiographical texts were written, and then examines closely the style and substance of each text to explore the way each poet creates his own life story. This comparison shows that the great poet Derzhavin depicts himself almost exclusively as a statesman, and it is the long-forgotten Dmitriev who reveals a profound allegiance to poetry as the most important part of his life.     

HERBERT BLUMER'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGY

Herbert Blumer's work has had considerable impact on the growth of twentieth-century sociology. He kept alive an interest in George Mead at a time when Pragmatism floundered. Although it is unlikely that Mead's work would have been overlooked, there can be no question that Blumer's forceful advocacy helped bring it to the forefront of modern social thought. Park first organized the subfield of collective behavior, but it was Blumer who kept it going in the face of opposition from structural-functionalism. Whether or not collective behavior endures as a separate area of specialization, sociologists will have to concern themselves with the manner in which human beings adapt to problematic situations. Although his views on methodology have been controversial, some of his positions will probably prevail. His insistence on the direct observation of people in their indigenous settings and his contention that human agency must be taken into account in explanations of social processes are difficult to counter.     

Marshall, Mannheim and contested citizenship

In this paper we address tensions in Marshall's account of the successive emergence of civil, political and social rights in citizenship. These tensions were Marshall's implicit and typically modern assumption of human nature, his privileging of the analytical rationality that follows from it, and the disjunction between the fixity of that rationality and the 'evolution' of his central metaphor. When he returned to it by emphasizing strains between democratic, welfare and capitalist moments that were co-present in the 'hyphenated society' rather than successive, he did so in a pessimistic tone at odds with the progressive modernism of his first schema. Although Marshall noted that conflicting principles in citizenship arose 'from the very roots of our social order', he did not elaborate the point in this first tripartite model. We argue that by adopting a single and typically modern form of rationality Marshall foreclosed on the contradictions that he held to be characteristic of academic disputes over citizenship. Since Mannheim had focused on the effects of such contradictions, his work allows a fruitful revisiting of Marshall's themes. To blend the two models we read Marshall through Karl Mannheim's early studies of political knowledge. Here Mannheim had anticipated the shift from stages to co-presence, and had prefigured a resolution of Marshall's sense of impasse. In his account of liberal, socialist and conservative thought-styles--the ways of seeing and knowing that are characteristic of particular ways of life--he saw political change as a dynamic interactive effect of individually calculating, dialectically collective and culturally symbolic forms of rationality.     

Translator's Introduction to Max Weber's Essay on Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology*

The essay on “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” is Max Weber's first systematic statement of his own sociology. Weber had written earlier as an economist and as a methodologist of the social sciences. But in this essay, he sets forth the method and indicates the scope of his interpretive sociology. He delineates the boundaries between it and two neighboring disciplines (psychology and law) and defines some basic concepts or categories of social action. The essay first appeared in 1913 in Logos, an interdisciplinary journal of which Weber was an editor.     

Pierre Bourdieu: theorizing the digital

ABSTRACT

Pierre Bourdieu is known for his research in the areas of education and cultural stratification that led to a number of theoretical contributions informing the social sciences. Bourdieu’s interrelated concepts of field, capital, and habitus have become central in many approaches to inequality and stratification across the social sciences. In addition, we argue that Bourdieu’s ideas also feature in what is increasingly known as ‘digital sociology.’ To underscore this claim, we explore the ways in which Bourdieu’s ideas continue to have a major impact on social science research both on and with digital and Internet-based technologies. To do so, we offer a review of both Bourdieusian theorizing of the digital vis-à-vis both research on the social impacts of digital communication technologies and the application of digital technologies to social science research methods. We contend that three interconnected features of Bourdieu’s sociology have allowed his approach to flourish in the digital age: (1) his theories’ inseparability from the practice of empirical research; (2) his ontological stance combining realism and social constructionism; and (3) his familiarity with concepts developed in other disciplines and participation in interdisciplinary collaborative projects. We not only reason that these three factors go some way in accounting for Bourdieu’s influence in many sociological subfields, but we also suggest that they have been especially successful in positioning Bourdieusian sociology to take advantage of opportunities associated with digital communication technologies.     

Lev S. Vygotsky: The Man and the Era

Our interpretive essay situates the life and thought of the famed psychologist-educator, Lev S. Vygotsky within the confines of the frequently deadly political and ideological struggles taking place in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. We analyze from a psychological point of view Vygotsky's rise and fall in a situation of revolutionary social change, class struggle, class hatred, ideological warfare, deliberately induced mass starvation, and the development of a totalitarian state based on the systematic use of terror. Whereas most Western psychologists have given minimal attention to the political and educational purposes for which Vygotsky's psychology was created, we emphasize that his Marxist orientation had a central influence both on his scientific preoccupations and on the course of his life. His revolutionary identity was anchored in a highly dynamic community with shared goals possessing a semi-sacred quality. Consequently, he experienced his later exclusion from this community as a kind of social and spiritual death.     

Staying with it: A case study

Abstract

This is a case study which illustrates some of the conflicts and dilemmas facing local authority social workers in child protection. The worker had to learn to understand and deal with his feelings about a client, who was at different times unable to communicate verbally, sexually procative and seductive, hostile and aggressive. For the client there was a gradual shift from acting out her fears and fantasies about men, to being able to verbalise and trust the worker.

The worker moves towards an understanding of the client's problems and also of his own difficulties in dealing with the case. He believes that his personal involvement was of value to the client.     

Victor Branford and the building of British sociology

Victor Branford was a central figure in the institutional development of British sociology in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. He is, however, a neglected figure and little is known about his life and his work in sociology. This article presents a biographical account of Victor Branford and outlines his sociological ideas. Particular attention is given to the part played by Branford and his second wife, Sybella Gurney, in the establishment of the Sociological Society and The Sociological Review. Writing between 1903 and 1930, he set out a distinctive view of the nature of sociology and an account of modernity, which he saw as underpinning a conception of a third way in politics that goes beyond capitalism and socialism. He tied this view, set out in the years after the First World War, to a conception of the public role of sociology in which the sociologist was to be a leading element in the building of social citizenship through social reconstruction.     

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.     

The Body,the Ghetto and the Penal State

This article dissects the author’s approach to ethnography, social theory, and the politics of knowledge through a dialogue retracing his intellectual trajectory and the analytic linkages between his inquiries into embodiment, comparative urban marginality and the penal state. It draws out the practical connections and epistemological rationale behind his main research projects, explicates the distinctive ways in which he deploys observational fieldwork in each of them, and examines the roles of intellectuals in advanced society in the era of hegemonic neoliberalism. Rejecting both Humean empiricism and neo-Kantian cognitivism, the author argues for the use of ethnography as an instrument of rupture and construction, the potency of carnal knowledge, the imperative of epistemic reflexivity, and the need to expand textual genres and styles so as to better capture the taste and ache of social action. In the public sphere, he proposes that social science can act as a solvent of doxa and a beacon casting light on latent properties and unnoticed trends in social transformations so as to disrupt and broaden civic debate.