Five sketches of postmodernism

Abstract

There is a long history of work in systems thinking and operational research (henceforth referred to as ‘systems/OR’) geared to facilitating organizational change and/or wider social improvement. Recently, however, the ‘improvement’ agenda has been subject to a sustained critique from people who take an explicitly postmodern stance. This paper presents five ‘sketches’ of postmodernism, and draws out some implications for systems/OR. The first sketch is of a dogmatic postmodernism that places conversation at the forefront of its agenda, but fails to enter into a conversation itself. It therefore collapses under the weight of a contradiction between its theory and practice. The second is of a more open postmodernism that is prepared to recognize its own status as a conversational device, and thereby its own transitory nature. This suggests the need for the systems/OR community to act as participants in debate, continually developing their own and others’ views. The third sketch focuses on the central contradiction of a postmodern meta-narrative condemning all meta-narratives but its own. This raises some interesting issues, not the least of which is the realization that the term ‘meta-narrative’ is usually used pejoratively. We may therefore need to moderate the use of such language to facilitate productive debates on key issues of concern for the future of systems/OR. The fourth sketch looks at the irony of inevitable contradictions in postmodern theory, and the consequent move away from the notion that the role of rationality is to harmonize ideas. Several possible consequences for systems/OR are identified: further rational (harmonizing) explanations of ‘inevitable contradictions’ in postmodern theory may be provoked, or the shift away from a traditional notion of rationality may liberate systems/OR from a relatively narrow range of analytical methods. The fifth and final sketch examines the political consequences of postmodernism as expressed in liberalism. A disturbing picture is presented of the ‘privatization’ of forms of solidarity which are not legitimated through dominant ideologies, leading to powerlessness and alienation amongst those who experience largely unrecognized oppression, or who feel solidarity with the oppressed. A key implication is drawn out: there continues to be a crying need for new ideas in social theory to address the shortcomings of liberalism and inform the practice of systems/OR. People advocating postmodernism, amongst others, may make a useful contribution to the development of these new ideas.     

Social Work and Sustainable Development: Local Voices from Mauritius

Abstract

Sustainable development is much more than an ecological and economic concern; it requires social workers to analyse and understand its impact on the broader social and cultural aspects of human life. Mauritius has been branded as ‘Maurice Ile Durable’ (Sustainable Mauritius) by its current government. Within this context, Mauritian social workers are often called upon to engage in sustainable development programs through community empowerment and development activities. This article uses the eco-critical social work theoretical approach to analyse a subset of qualitative data generated by a larger study conducted in 2008 and 2011, which included focus groups and semistructured interviews. Based on the findings of this research, the article focuses on discourses related to concepts such as control, power, and exploitation. It considers three areas as influential to eco-critical social work in Mauritius: antioppressive practice, promotion of social justice, and critical thinking by exploring related concepts such as control, power, and exploitation. The author concludes that within the context of sustainable development more attention should be paid to promoting social justice through tackling the marginalisation and oppression of certain sections of its population.     

Exploring the depths of gender,parenting and ‘work’: critical discursive psychology and the ‘missing voices’ of involved fatherhood

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out to capture the missing voices of fathers in discussions around gender, parenting and work. Using Critical Discursive Psychology (CDP), a qualitative methodology that frames discourse, language and action as socially situated, the paper sets out to understand the complexities of involved fatherhood. Using data from two distinct research projects that considered managing tensions around parenting and paid work, alongside the move to ‘involved fatherhood’, we examine the ways in which different discourses are operating in order to construct stories around gender and parenting. We are particularly interested in the ways in which participants use language and, specifically, discourses of parenting, working and caring. Through the interview excerpts we analysed how simultaneously participants position themselves in the discourses and were also being positioned by the wider societal discourses. We consider how CDP can contribute rich insights into the ways in which fathers are arranging sharing parenting caregiving responsibilities, using these insights to inform the policy landscape. We finish the paper by suggesting that CDP methodology can be mobilised by researchers wanting to capture missing voices in shifting policy landscapes.     

The knowledge,skills and qualities needed for social work in a major paediatric teaching hospital

Abstract

The place of aged care in social work has long been ambiguous, if not marginal. Social work (as do other comparable professions) often displays a reluctance to place practice in this field within the core of the profession that embodies aspects of ageism in contemporary society. Working with older people is frequently characterised as ‘mundane’, ‘routine’ and even ‘not “real” social work’. This paper examines the practice implications of the current policy context. Forms of ‘indirect’ practice are identified as central to social work in aged care, and the implications of this for the standing of aged care social work in the wider profession are discussed. It is argued that ‘indirect’ practices are core to the development of the profession and so should be seen as ‘real’ social work. In conclusion, it is suggested that unless social work affirms practice with older people and their families we will fail to be congruent with our own values.     

The poverty of postmodern human services

Abstract

Postmodernism cannot or will not tell the difference between truth and falsehood, reality and simulacra, principle and dogma, or right and wrong. As a corollary, it is unable or unwilling to make any ‘veritable‘ difference to the nature or order of things. Indeed, there is no escape from, nor anything outside of, the ’panopticon of language’. Accordingly, there is no significant probative difference between the practice and experience of genocide, and talking or writing about it. All one can do is be sceptical about discourses, even those concerned with ethnic cleansing and the like. As ludicrous as this sounds, it has not prevented postmodernism from monopolising discourses about significant aesthetic, cultural, economic, intellectual, political and social practices and sensibilities. Postmodernism manifests itself in a host of disciplines, and its presence is being increasingly felt in human services education and practice. If, as I shall argue, postmodernism is such a thoroughly baseless, reductive and inert doctrine, then why persist with it? The poverty of postmodernism prompts a timely return to the rich legacy of Marxism.     

Displacement,integration and identity in the postcolonial world

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state. It reveals that the language of ‘integration’ is embedded in colonial narratives of ‘population’ versus ‘people-nation’ which structure exclusion not only through language and ethnicity, but poverty and social space. It also shows how colonial and postcolonial registers transect and overlap as colonial constructions of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ fold into religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’. The voices of minorities navigating claims to belonging through these discourses shed light on a ‘nation-in-formation’: the shifting landscape of national belonging and the complicated accommodations required.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

Sharing and exchanging: understanding common grounds in northeast India

ABSTRACT

Northeast India, a ‘zipper region’ that gives impetus to Southeast Asian and Himalasian studies, is marked by complexities and ambiguities. The paper examines the multiple identity construction in contemporary Assam, the central state of this region and seeks to recover the other experiences that make ethnic life-world possible while challenging the ethnocentric discourses—in academia, politics, public and social movements. Acknowledging the presence of common or possibly universal processes behind the production of such discourses, it aims to interrogate the factors that cut across socio-cultural, political-economical or ecological dimensions. It further examines the multiple discourses and narratives that makes that social possible in the region. In doing so, it locates the strategic positioning of such discourses and how they deal with Indian nation-state and beyond. This paper in essence is interested in the question of possibility of various discourses—as a question of post-history.     

Reading European football,critiquing China: Chinese urban middle class fans as reflexive audience

ABSTRACT

This essay explores European football’s cross-cultural appeals in China by focusing on Chinese fans’ active readings of this globalized cultural text. Using analytical tools from both sport sociology and transnational reception studies, I understand Chinese urban middle-class supporters as a reflexive audience whose meaning-making of European football is contextualized in their local urban experience. The in-depth interviewing reveals that these fans’ interpretations of their favourite European football teams as symbols of ‘collective cooperation’ and ‘beautiful football’ produce critical reflections on the discourses of ‘competitive individualism’ and ‘utilitarian commercialism’ which are part of the rising ideology during China’s neoliberal reform. Through the comparison among European football, Chinese football, and popular ‘national’ sports in China, the participants further contest the prevalence of these discourses in China’s broader economic and social arrangements over which they are engaged in constant material struggles. I further discuss how the transnational consumption of European football offers the Chinese urban middle-class a symbolic space to project their reflexivity on the reforming process.     

Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’.     

What do we know the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education? An empirical case study evidencing contested engagement and transformative learning

ABSTRACT

In social work education there have been very few attempts to empirically capture and measure how professional training programmes prepare students to work with ‘race’ equality and cultural diversity issues. This paper interrogates the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education and evaluates the pedagogic relevance and practice utility of teaching social work students about ‘race’, racism and anti-racism. The data presented in this paper suggests that it is possible to discover the situated experiences of learning about anti-racism and measure how this teaching can affect and lead to knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The triangulated mixed methods evidence presented in this paper combines nomothetic and idiographic approaches with quantitative data for a matched pair sample of 36 social work students and uses non-parametric statistical tests to measure at two time intervals (before and after teaching); knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The paper explores how anti-racist social work education enables students to move from ‘magical consciousness’, where racism and racial oppression is invisible and thereby left unchallenged and maintained, to more critical and reflexive level of awareness where it is named, challenged and no longer shrouded in a culture of professional denial and silencing.     

The Use of Social Theory in Reflecting on Anti-Oppressive Practice with Final Year BSc Social Work Students

This article explores the relevance of social theory for social work teaching and learning about anti-oppressive practice. Use of theory in social work practice is discussed. It is argued that social theory is a toolbox from which social workers can draw eclectically in order to enhance their ability to practise anti-oppressively. A course/module which focuses on theory to understand and support anti-oppressive practice is described. The main aspects of social theory addressed in this module are outlined. These areas are firstly, human rights; secondly, traditional, modern and postmodern discourses or ‘ways of knowing’; thirdly, essentialism vis-à-vis the social construction of identity; and fourthly, an analysis of power in personal/professional relationships. The use of case studies or scenarios is discussed in relation to facilitating students' application of theory to practice. Extracts from a student essay demonstrate how one student applied social theory to a comparison of two case studies leading to strategies to empower the individuals in each scenario. The value of using social theory to reflect on and enhance anti-oppressive practice is discussed.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Discourses of rurality: Loose talk or social struggle?

This paper is critical of the existing usage of ‘rural’ and ‘rurality’. It does not simply dismiss the terms as either irrelevant, wrong, or as a chaotic conception. The paper attempts to plot the implications, and account for the existence, of a multiplicity of meanings of the term ‘rurality’. Rather than adjudicating on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ use of the term it is suggested that the disputation over the use and meaning of the term ‘rurality’ demonstrates the rupture of sign and signification that has been discussed in debates concerning ideology and hegemony, and more recently post-structuralism. The paper argues in favour of a productive dialogue between Gramscian notions of political struggle and post-structuralist concerns with language and meaning. It is suggested that a more adequate explanation of social change should be sensitive to the multiple discourses that constitute our ‘reality’ (‘urban’ or ‘rural’), and the resources that are mobilised in their favour.     

Representations of vulnerability,innocence and evil in the murder of a disabled person

Abstract

This article uses the murder of a young man with learning disabilities as a case study to comment on the representations used in the reporting of crime against disabled people. It uses social representations theory as a theoretical lens to assist us to see that portrayals of both victim and perpetrators by the media and others serves to distance them from each other, and from mainstream society. It highlights how this process of ‘othering’ serves to disadvantage disabled people and places a disproportionate emphasis on individual characteristics.     

‘Globalisation’, Governance and social work: Some implications for theory and practice

Abstract

This article focuses cautiously on the implications of ‘globalisation’ for social work theory and practice. In drawing on recent debates it is argued that, despite its contested meaning, ‘globalisation’ points to a range of rapid and fundamental socioeconomic and political transformations that have impacted upon entire regions of the work. Some of these transformations are identified and analysed in terms of their consequences for transnational, national and local populations. It is proposed that the prevailing consequences of globalisation in terms of social inequality and allied modalities of governance are negative, and that this has important implications for the profession of social work. Effective strategies for confronting the challenges posed by ‘turbo capitalism’ may be found in alliances across global social movements and professional groups, including social workers. The challenges are profound.     

‘Heteroglossic’ Discourses on Globalization: A View from the ‘East’

Abstract

In view of the broad scope of literature on globalization, this paper provides a synoptic reading of some of the globalization literatures, organized as ‘discourses’. The analysis of the discourses on globalization is confined to three overlapping discourses, namely, regional, ideological and economic discourses. Specific references and examples of local uptake of globalization will be drawn from Singapore and the wider Asia pacific region, as Beck (2002) has reminded us that we cannot even think about globalization or discuss it effectively without the reference to specific locations and places. Hence the subtitle of this paper, ‘A View from the East’, is deliberate to signal the often forgotten fact that Singapore, as well as the wider Asia Pacific region, is ‘part of the “global” sphere that the West has dispersed itself into’.     

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.