Welfare, Society and the Social Worker

Summary This article attempts to locate some common stereotyped transactionsbetween social workers and their clients as elements in theproduction of distinctive welfare identities. By comparing thisprocess to that of a rite of passage, the client is found tobe like a ritual subject frozen in the moment of transitionbetween social categories and thereby denied a place in society.An opposition is accordingly presumed to exist between Welfareand Society. The matrix of stereotyped expectations which derivesfrom this opposition is shown often to intrude on the relationshipbetween social worker and client, constituting a pressure toresolve the tensions produced by anomaly through the impositionof a welfare identity on the client. In this respect, the specialvulnerability of marginal groups is noted and a brief discussionthen follows of the characteristic qualities of ascribed welfareidentity. Through Welfare, Society is found to displace imaginativelyits sense of entropy beyond the moral community. But the essentiallink between Welfare and Society remains and increasing socialdisorder brings the paradoxical feature of this strategy tothe fore. The preservation of the social order requires increasingconcentrations of entropy to be symbolically located in Welfareand as a result Welfare comes to take on the aspect of a threateningand subversive entity. In conclusion, it is suggested that behindthe apparent ‘crisis’ in social work lies a crisisin the management of social entropy.