TY - JOUR
AU1 - Donovan,, Jennifer
AU2 - Rose,, David
AU3 - Connolly,, Marie
AB - Abstract Social work is a discipline innately engaged in and influenced by the political and social context in which it is practised. The disciplinary response to the constancy of social change, however, has demonstrated a profession continually dogged by issues of identity, legitimacy and direction. This paper compares the debates of the UK and USA as examples of very differing national responses, and suggest they are clear examples of how national responses to global change in political and philosophical environments are central to the identity dilemma and the form it takes. It presents Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social actions as a way of understanding both the disciplinary responses to change and the pervading sense of crisis that can accompany them. The paper argues that the crisis felt by the discipline can be seen as an expression of conflicting aspects of Bourdieu’s framework and that, in understanding this, it is possible to provide a range of points at which the discipline may act in order to reduce the sense of adversity, moving beyond the weakness of perpetual ‘crisis’ and closer towards a position of adaptive strength. Comparative social work, critical reflection, political issues, postmodernism, social work and sociology Introduction Social work is a discipline innately engaged in and influenced by the political and social context in which it is practised. As such, social and political change impacts on social work in the same way as it impacts on the broader community—social workers, after all, are part of their communities. Unsurprisingly, they are influenced by political and social pressures in both personal and professional ways (McDonald, 2006). The disciplinary response to social change, however, has demonstrated a profession continually dogged by issues of identity, legitimacy and direction (Lavalette, 2011; Higgins, 2015). As early as 1915, questions were being asked as to the professionalism of the discipline (Flexner, 2001) and, more recently, issues framed as the ‘crisis of social work’ (Houston, 2012), the ‘struggle for the soul of social work’ (Higgins, 2015; Singh and Cowden, 2009) and the ‘failing profession’ at ‘the crossroads’ (Lymbery, 2001; Bradley et al., 2010; Dominelli, 2004; Gitterman, 2014) have occupied the academic literature almost as much as issues of practice and client intervention. While authors have attempted to highlight this as the responsiveness of the profession (Gibelman, 1999), there remains an enduring sense of crisis. The identity and change debate or discourse, found across various articles, journals and publications, is no doubt reflective of the issues and external forces impacting on the profession. Theorising as to the debate itself, however, and the examination of differing international disciplinary responses, has been more limited. The first section of this paper examines how changes in political and philosophical environments have shaped both social work itself and the current identity crisis discourse found in academic literature and discussions. It compares the environment and discourse of the UK and USA as examples of differing national responses, and suggests that, while they present examples of culturally different responses to the issues of change and identity, they also both demonstrate a dichotomous debate. The second section draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. It suggests that theorising social work’s response to change through a Bourdieusian lens leads to the examination of social work change in the context of its participating arenas, what is valued in the those arenas and social work contributions not valued. The paper argues that the crisis felt by the discipline can be seen as an expression of conflicting aspects of Bourdieu’s framework and that, in understanding this, it offers an opportunity to move beyond the dichotomy and weakness of perpetual ‘crisis’ and towards a position of enhanced understanding, resilience and strength. Changing political and philosophical ideologies and the social work response Political and philosophical ideologies have shaped the initial creation of social work and its ongoing development and growth. Understanding these influencing contexts at a disciplinary level gives not only insight into the disciplinary responses found in the identity crisis discourse, but also a contextual platform from which a Bourdieusian lens can be applied. When Western social work emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the height of modern philosophy (Weiss et al., 2003). It was a time where grand narratives, objective reality and humanism were embraced, and where individuals were seen as separate and autonomous from the society in which they exist (McDonald, 2006). While influenced by both the socially based Settlement Movement and the direct practice of the Charitable Organisations Society, this modernist foundation saw social work embrace the age of reason drawing on the modernist works of Marx and Freud, understanding the world rationally through the knowledge of science and social science and applying this understanding to client interventions in order to achieve increases in objectively understood standards of well-being (Howe, 1994). These modernist foundations of social work are also evident politically, with social work at the centre of developing welfare states in both the UK and the USA, from the end of the Second World War. During this time, Western nation states drew on the collectivist foundations of the war years, to pursue an expanding role for the state in the provision of welfare and assistance services (McDonald et al., 2003). Central to this was the constant and seemingly endless economic growth experienced during that time and the capacity of nation states to harness the financial prosperity of households through taxation and wages growth and the growth of financial markets to pay for the centralised role they had taken in welfare provision (McDonald, 2006). The expansive welfare state that developed in the UK was firmly based in collectivism and social citizenship, and furthered a history of dominant social structures being central to the lives of its citizens (McDonald et al., 2003). In this structure, social work became a unified and dominant discipline, enjoying centrality and stability in a system where disciplinary values of collectivist care for others and the promotion of social and political rights were echoed in the political economy and ideology (Brodie et al., 2008). In Scotland, this was taken even further with ‘the belief that social work could be a positive and radical force for social change’ (Brodie et al., 2008, p. 699). In the USA, this period also saw the development of a welfare regime; however, the political ideology remained far more individual than collective-focused, as was the case in the UK (McDonald et al., 2003). Based on cultural concepts such as independence and the inherent capacity of the ‘heroic individual’ (Epstein, 2007), the state remained smaller, with social work taking on less of a central role in its service provision. Growing economic globalisation and the financial downturn of the late 1970s and 1980s, however, saw the emergence of individual, market-based neo-liberalism and the re-emergence of conservative governments (Harvey, 2007). Despite resistance in the UK, particularly from Scotland (Mooney and Scott, 2015) and to a lesser extent Wales (Drakeford, 2012, p. 184), rather than remaining a conservative ideology, neo-liberalism continued to spread, taking on a ubiquitous presence in the political landscape. Third-way politics, such as New Labour, created a place for neo-liberalism in left and centre ideologies, enhancing its ‘hegemonic stature’ (Giddens, 1998). After the global collapse in 2008, this place was cemented further, with economics once again becoming the key driver of political change with elections in Britain endorsing a conservative, austerity government amidst resistance to these measures from both Scotland and Wales (Jordan and Drakeford, 2013; Mooney and Scott, 2015), and a resurgence of neo-liberal policy in the USA (Lavalette, 2011). These political developments led to debates of social work’s role within this political context. Questions of professional boundaries and goals (Garrett, 2003), and the capacity or willingness of the profession to work within this dominant ideology (Ferguson, 2001) gained prominence. At approximately the same point at which the push towards neo-liberal ideology changed the political foundation upon which social work was based, the movement of ideas from modernism to postmodernism also shook its philosophical foundations (Powell, 2001). Rather than universal theories or a universal truth, it asserted meaning and ‘truth’ as created, and therefore only understood, through the language and the context of the local (Howe, 1994). While aspects of the social work discipline embraced the capacity of postmodernism to break through the reliance on the oppressive underpinnings of universal theories, avoiding the damage of scientific categorisation and assessment and the ‘oppressive expertise’ of neo-liberalism (Gilbert and Powell, 2010; Dybicz, 2015), others saw it as questioning the dependability and legitimacy of the intellectual foundations of social work and supporting the individualised neo-liberal agenda (Webb, 2009). The ‘crisis of change’ debates during periods of both political and philosophical upheaval reflect this dualistic discourse. Fought between those who embrace external change and those who questioned or rejected it, it amounted to a debate of ‘true’ social work—what should be its core identity and disciplinary drivers and what should not (Walker, 2001). Political change was felt strongly in the UK (Ferguson and Woodward, 2009; Ferguson, 2008). Social work education reforms and professional regulation have been seen as comodification of the disciplinary skill set, and increasingly reflecting and supporting the neo-liberal ordering of social work and welfare services (Van Heugten, 2011). Social and cultural contexts, and hence person-in-environment and structural social work, were argued as becoming invisible (Carey and Foster, 2013). Others have raised concerns over the response of social work to ‘new public management’ (NPM), citing the valuing of efficiencies and targets over an understanding of policy or practice (Rogowski, 2011). While resistance against these political influences was championed through activism, social movements (Ferguson and Lavalette, 2007) and critical reflection (Fook, 2012), the sense of a strong and overwhelming external force was enhanced by members of the academy embracing and working within these neo-liberal structures (Ferguson, 2001; Brown, 2015). It is this internal, dualistic debate within the discipline that has kept the sense of crisis alive and the focus on identity strong (Higgins, 2015). In the USA, however, while concerns have still been raised as to the impact of neo-liberalism on the discipline and its practice (Woodcock, 2012), the sense of dual, opposing views and therefore the sense of identity-based crisis is far more limited. During the initial shift to neo-liberalism in the 1980s, concerns were expressed that the state was abandoning the values of social work (Gibelman, 1999). Shrinking state services forced high numbers of workers to look outside the state for employment, with many of them choosing to take up private practice. This response, however, was arguably a return to the individual, autonomous foundations of US social work (McDonald et al., 2003) and diluted, at an early point, the influence of the state and therefore of state-embraced neo-liberalism on social work identity. For the USA, the issue of postmodernism and the erosion of grand narrative-based macro practice has raised far more debates in relation to social work identity (Noble, 2004; Webb, 2009). To reject postmodernism was to willingly close your eyes to the ‘truth’ of social work control and harm that the movement revealed; however, to embrace postmodernism was to deny the strength of the disciplines foundations and evidence base, to ignore structural oppression through fragmentation and the primacy of the individual, and to lose sight of the idea that the ‘ethical problem for social work should not be with difference but with inequality and injustice’ (Webb, 2009, p. 309). Using Bourdieu to understand responses to change While evident to different degrees, the sense of crisis that surrounds these discussions is seemingly perpetually ongoing in both the USA and the UK. If we assert, however, that the discipline is truly looking to resolve crises, then the question must be raised: what is missing or less pursued in the current discourse which may assist this ultimate goal? Can we theorise about these different responses to global change in order to understand and move past them? The final section of this paper puts forward the work of Pierre Bourdieu as a possible framework through which change and therefore current and alternative responses may be examined and understood. Over the last twenty years, the work of Bourdieu has increasingly come to the attention of the social work academy. It has been promoted as a sociological theory which can add to the discipline’s understanding of a range of practice areas (Peillon, 1998; Houston, 2002) and as a framework for social action and social context (Garrett, 2007a, 2007b). This attention, however, has been focused on its use for practice and practice theorisation, rather than an examination of the discipline itself. In his 2007 paper, ‘Making social work more Bourdieusian’, Garrett (2007a) raised the possibility of Bourdieu being used to stimulate an internal examination of the discipline. This paper attempts to further this proposition, albeit in a preliminary way. As a framework that sits outside the current dichotomies of the change discourse, Bourdieu has the capacity to reveal the otherwise unseen historical underpinnings of social work identities, provides explanations for differing disciplinary responses and moves the identity crisis discourse beyond its current dualistic positions. It is particularly the sense of crisis in the current discourse which makes the work of Bourdieu so relevant at this time. While critics of his work suggest it can be deterministic (Witz, 2004), Bourdieu himself suggests that there is a ‘margin of freedom’ open to social agents and that this margin is enhanced in times of crisis (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 148–9). It is specifically at these times that there is a greater capacity for individuals or, in this case, disciplines to understand and therefore break free from the histories and paradigms which have dictated action, and to forge a new path. Bourdieu’s theory of social action The work of Bourdieu provides four key concepts: habitus, field, capital and hysteresis (Bourdieu, 1977), which together provide a broad and contextual understanding of the change crisis in social work. While it is important to understand all of these concepts in their integrated context, it is the workings of a social work habitus that provide particular insight into the identity crisis debates and the capacity to move it beyond current dualisms. Bourdieu describes habitus as the internalisation of extended experiences, conditions and constraints, ‘durable, transposable dispositions’, which are layered upon an individual, group or institution (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53). Importantly, this is a chronological layering, where those experienced early or for an extended period of time have a greater strength than those which are short-term or more recent. The embodied dispositions of the individual and the group are shared dynamically, with the individual adding to the group and the group adding to the individual. At a group or disciplinary level, it is the commonality of dispositions amongst members which adds to a sense of belonging and shared knowing (Maton, 2012). Individuals often choose occupations or training based on their own sense of compatibility with the discipline (Peillon, 1998) and, as such, disciplines reinforce and replicate the habitus that exists within them. While habitus and identity are similar and dynamically related concepts, they should not be read as interchangeable. Habitus is essentially the implicit, to identity’s explicit, expression of self. Habitus is the unseen sense of being—the history of experiences influencing social action (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 55). While identity and socialisation theory suggests there can be an explicit formation process culminating in identity or socialisation achievement (Valutis et al., 2012; Miller, 2010), habitus is a dynamic, ongoing layering which may favour extended experiences but which is constantly in flux and never finalised—‘a history which is endlessly transformed’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 116). For social work, it is this ongoing creation of a disciplinary habitus that is central. How the interactions between the experiences of individual practitioners and the discipline as a whole have been historically layered upon its habitus, the capital value imbued in these dispositions and the unseen carrying of this history forward when facing change is key to understanding disciplinary responses. Bourdieu defines the second concept, field, as ‘structured, social space’—spheres of existence in which individuals or a group such as the social work discipline interacts (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 40–1). A field may be small, such as within an organisation or workplace, or may be very broad, such as the welfare field, or the broadest—the social field. While defining the boundaries of a field and the consequential decisions of inclusion and exclusion can be complex, what will set one field apart from another is its specific set of rules and requirements (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008). These are what provide actors within the field a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 63), the implicit knowledge of what is required of them, the hierarchies within the field and what is valued in each actor. For social work, the field of interaction is quite broad. In the UK, it has been predominately state-based, focused on local authorities and, more recently, state-initiated systems of ‘private or independent’ provider organisations (Garrett, 2014, p. 515). In the USA, the field in which social work interacts is even broader with the inclusion of strong private practice and philanthropic welfare sectors, as well as the state (McDonald et al., 2003). The third component of Bourdieu’s framework, capital, relates to this concept of value within a field. Bourdieu describes capital across four avenues—economic, cultural, social and symbolic (Bourdieu, 2001)—with others adding political capital (Peillon, 1998) and gender capital (Huppatz, 2009), which can both stand alone or be exchanged with one another. Capital provides a way of understanding both the level and form of value placed upon the attributes of social actors. It defines where a social actor, such as the social work discipline within the field of the state, will be placed in the field’s hierarchy and ultimately ‘govern its functioning in a durable way, determining chances of success for practices’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 97). The final concept of Bourdieu’s framework, which is particularly relevant to the social work identity/change discourse, is that of hysteresis. This is the sense of disconnection created when major change occurs in a field, altering its rules of capital and in turn altering an actor’s feel for the game. Bourdieu describes the hysteresis effect as when ‘practices incur negative sanctions when the environment with which they are centrally confronted is too distant from that in which they are objectively fitted’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 78). In times of social stability, change in habitus is slow and gradual, maintaining the match between habitus and field. But, at times of dramatic change, positions become unstable and indeterminate, inertia of habitus and inability to match the changing field can result in a crisis of disconnection, the loss of place and missed opportunities (Bourdieu, 1977). Placing the current social work crisis in this framework reframes political and philosophical change as being changes in the rules and capital of specific fields in which social work operates. It takes McDonald et al.’s (2003) concept of social work’s ‘lost niche’ and understands it as hysteresis. The debate between Ferguson (2001) and Garrett (2003) can now be understood beyond the dichotomy of political debates, as differing responses to hysteresis: Ferguson (2001) proposing to alter the habitus of social work, to enhance dispositions such as individual-based practice, to better reflect the valued capital of neo-liberal state and welfare fields versus Garrett’s (2003) argument for a change in field rules, supporting the role of disciplinary activism to challenge systems reflecting field rules which no longer value the cultural, social or political capital of social work. Likewise, the work of Ferguson and Lavalette (2007) around resistance through social movements can be seen as advocating for forces to change field rules by reinforcing the radical habitus of the discipline. Such a lens forces particular consideration of the social work habitus, the capital it holds in different geographical and practice fields, and the impact of field-specific changes on social work’s feel for the game. However, it also poses possible paths forward, with field, capital and habitus three points at which the discipline may alter its responses or perceptions and, in doing so, alter the course of the discipline, its sense of hysteresis and the identity/change debate. A ‘social work habitus’ As a reflection of historical dispositions and shared experiences, the habitus of social work is one which, by its nature, will have developed differently in different geographical and practice fields. While, at their core, social work in the USA and across the different countries of the UK have similar historical and conceptual foundations, their developing habitus have grown in different contexts, absorbing differences in emphasis and nuance. In their foundational similarities, social work in both the UK and the USA developed from the Settlement Movement and Charitable Organisations Society, which grounded in the social work habitus a sense of duality including both individual and system-based interventions. Both also developed out of the work and occupational pathways created for white, middle-class women (Walton, 1975). However, as social work developed as a discipline in the UK, the social field there layered upon it dispositions such as a strong role for the state and a welfare state grounded in collectivism (McDonald et al., 2003). Its centrality within the state for such a significant duration etched upon the UK social work habitus the naturalness of its positioning—a sense of comfort in being a ‘bureau-profession’ or ‘state-mediated’ profession (Lymbery, 2001; Brodie et al., 2008). In the USA, meanwhile, the same social work conceptual foundations were combined with dispositions of small government, an emphasis on the ‘heroic individual’ (Epstein, 2007) and the predominance of the modernist, grand narrative psychoanalytics (Gitterman, 2014). As opposed to the UK, diversity of practice arenas beyond the state left the key shared disposition as that of therapeutic clinical practice, rather than a place or field of practice. While these historical dispositions are important in understanding disciplinary action in the current crisis discourse, further consideration must also be given to the strength of other shared disciplinary experiences. The impact of Christianity, historically strong in the USA, for example, is a contested aspect of habitus. Some authors lament a loss of religion in the discipline (Reamer, 2003), while others have established the capacity for religious views to be held beyond professional socialisation and social work education (Ringstad, 2014). Likewise, in a predominantly female and white discipline, the degrees to which the feminist, civil rights and immigration movements have impacted habitus in both the USA and the UK will also be significant. Some disciplinary literature highlights only small minorities representing men and limited class or ethnic diversity (Johns and Jordan, 2006; Schilling et al., 2008) and yet others suggest a complexity in the discipline, finding female social workers remained predominantly as direct service providers, while the growing number of men were more likely to be in policy, administration or academia (McPhail, 2004). Connections have also been drawn between gender and career choice, which may be indicative of differing habitus development in different practice areas (Daniel, 2011). Attempts have been made to understand the demographics of the discipline including a late 1990s attempt of a US professional census (Gibelman and Schervish, 1997; Schilling et al., 2008). However, as changes occur with the profession, such as new university and fast-tracked graduates joining the profession in the UK (Manthorpe and Baginsky, 2016), their dispositions will be new layers upon the group habitus, changing it and in turn changing the discipline’s capital and place within fields. Habitus, as a way of understanding responses to change, however, must also be understood within the context of its unconscious relationship with field and field capital rules (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 56). In the context of the identity/change discourse, understanding habitus and field in context is essential to understanding the impact of political and philosophical changes on the field, the impact of these changes on the place for social work within those fields and the habitus-based, disciplinary response. Social work fields and capital Without directly referencing Bourdieu, the concepts of field and capital remain the most considered aspects of his work in the current change discourse, exploring boundaries, rules and capital exchange. The literature concerning the impact of neo-liberalism on social work examines the bureaucratic field, the capital value placed on management, evaluation and outputs, and the capacity and willingness of social work to deliver this skill set in order to engage in the capital exchange (Hibbs, 2005; Higgins and Goodyer, 2015; Welbourne, 2011). Likewise, the literature around social work research methodology and evidence-based practice considers how disciplinary research attributes have changed in order to exchange upon dominant postmodern or neo-liberal forms of capital preferenced in that space (Karger, 1983, 1999; Miller, 2013). More broadly, the social and symbolic capital attributed to social work in the wider social field has been considered as a reflection of the communities served by the discipline, reflecting the limited social capital of the undeserving poor (Gibelman, 1999). As with habitus, analysis of field and capital also points to key differences between the USA and the UK. During the welfare state, across the UK and in particular in Scotland, disciplinary practice and values coalesced with those of the dominant player, the state and the discipline was afforded a high degree of political capital, to both utilise public resources and represent a large section of the community (Peillon, 1998; Brodie et al., 2008). Together, they impacted and influence the rules of the field, building a disciplinary identity and workforce based on this field and role. Movement to a neo-liberal, corporately rationalised and privatised welfare regime, while resisted in Scotland (Drakeford, 2012), has left social work vulnerable in this partnership, more likely to be in conflict with the state-defined field rules, and as a discipline failing to hold onto its historical political capital (Brodie et al., 2008, p. 704). As Garrett (2014) points out, the pitch for privatised welfare organisations may seek to align this new field with elements of the social work habitus such as creativity and autonomy and yet, in essence, they remain at odds with the collectivist disposition of social work habitus and spaces of continued conflict between habitus and field rules. Postmodernism, it can be argued, was felt less in terms of change, due to the dominance of the bureaucratic field. In the UK, the match between the social work habitus and the bureaucratic field is so strong that postmodernism was initially viewed more sceptically—another introduction of individualising practice modes supporting the purposeful, neo-liberal ignorance of social structures (Parton, 1994; Webb, 2009). While this view has more recently been critiqued, with arguments that postmodernist practice can indeed combat the neo-liberal focus on professional expertise (Gilbert and Powell, 2010; Parton and O’Byrne, 2000), postmodernist practice remained at the fringes of social work, influencing but not altering the habitus on which it is built or the fields in which the discipline interacts. Alternatively, in the USA, it can be argued, not only was the discipline less attached to one field and the state, but the state itself has always been far more focused on neo-liberal-type values such as independence and individual autonomy (McDonald, 2006; Finch Jr, 1976; Turner, 1968). It has been suggested that it felt far more of a disciplinary unease during the expansion of the welfare state, with the diminishing of the individual in favour of the collective (Finch Jr, 1976), resulting in a disciplinary move away from the state in the 1960s and 1970s. As such, the later political shift to neo-liberalism produced little change in the rules of diversified social work fields, and rather a return to familiarity and a subdued social work response to the political change. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is far more prominent in the US change/identity discourse (Noble, 2004). It can be argued that a focus on practice, with a diversity of practice arenas rather than one primary space, elevates the academic field to a higher degree of importance and influence. As postmodernism swept through that field, elements of the discipline embraced its concepts and found an increased degree of field alignment (Dickerson, 2014). However, unlike neo-liberal political change, postmodernism did not take on a ubiquitous or unquestionable presence. Specific fields of therapeutic work based on social constructionism developed, such as narrative therapy and collaborative helping, where postmodern concepts of an unknowable truth and the privileging of consumer over therapist expertise were espoused in the capital rules of the field (Dickerson, 2014). Other areas of practice remained firmly planted in the modernist history of social work, such as evidence-based practice and psychotherapeutics (Gitterman, 2014). The conflict of the change/identity discourse, therefore, is essentially a dualistic conflict between the influence of these two sides. Which shared dispositions should be supported and elevated, and how are these competing dispositions shaping professional identity and habitus (Specht and Courtney, 1994)? Social work hysteresis Utilising the Bourdieu triad draws attention to how external change impacts both the discipline itself and the arenas in which it interacts. However, considering the crisis nature of the discourse, it is the additional concept of hysteresis, which takes this analysis and provides a key insight into the formation of the current dualistic disciplinary response and potential alternatives. In the current discourse, not only does change create a mismatch between habitus and field in some areas, but it has also generated dualistic conflicts within the discipline between points of habitus fracture and elements of habitus alignment. It is this conflict which poses such a difficulty for the discipline in finding a way forward and past the sense of crisis. Caught between elements of field and habitus which are both at once matched and mismatched has kept the discipline caught in a cycle of crisis unable to move beyond. In the UK, this internal conflict is the growing mismatch between a social work habitus opposed to neo-liberalism but for which the sense of place in the state also remains strong. Statutory social work continues to employ over 80 per cent of UK social workers (Moriarty and Murray, 2007; Welbourne, 2011) and, without alternative fields in which to assert a sense of identity and value, it remains corralled within the boundaries of the state. Those seeking paths outside the state, such as education placements in community-based organisations, continue to be referred to as ‘non-traditional’ placements and viewed as questionably ‘social work’ (Scholar et al., 2012). Unable to maintain its identity within it, but unable to detach itself from an identity based upon it, this perpetual sense of hysteresis is at the heart of the social work identity crisis in the UK. It is worth noting, however, that, at the time of writing this paper, the Brexit vote had just taken place, highlighting even further the differences between the four countries and in particular the divergence of Scotland from the rest of the UK (Ramaswamy, 2016). With the possibility of a significant fracture should Scotland conduct a second independence referendum, the existence of a UK social work habitus and hysteresis response may be of less relevance in the future, as opposed to understanding the differing independent dispositions of British, Scottish, Irish or Welsh social work and the diverging fields to which they respond. In the USA, this conflict and crisis is more pronounced in its response to philosophical change. Postmodernism presents an alignment with elements of US habitus focused on the individual and the centrality of individual capacity, and yet the habitus is also strong with the duality of the social and structural (Specht and Courtney, 1994). It is possible to highlight a field/habitus match between practitioner desire for individuality and creativity (Finch Jr, 1976) and the ‘art’ of postmodernist practice, and yet there also remains a strong connection with scientific, analytical approaches and expert-centred practices (Gitterman, 2014). It is a discourse expressing a discipline caught between philosophical movements, unable to now embrace either fully with habitus and fields caught with feet in both camps. Conclusion The identity/change discourse of social work, and particularly that of the UK, is one caught in a cycle of seemingly perpetual crisis where, despite a diversity of views, there pervades a sense of being put upon by external forces outside and beyond the discipline’s control. However, by focusing on internationally different responses to change and reframing disciplinary behaviour using the work of Pierre Bourdieu, it is possible to theorise a position of disciplinary self-awareness and from this begin a new understanding of social work’s responsiveness to change. While the framework provided by Bourdieu does not set out an obvious path for resolution, it does, by examining the discourse in this way, develop a picture of the different competing elements in the change debates. It highlights the centrality of shared disciplinary experience to a common sense of identity but also demonstrates the importance of understanding whether this social work habitus is changing or self-perpetuating, and the potential of this to produce alternative change responses. It provokes questions of the range of fields in which social work acts, international differences between fields, the consistency of capital rules across those fields and the potential for identifying fields that may be more suited to an alignment with social work habitus. The framework, however, makes no judgement on potential outcomes and it is arguably for the discipline to make sense of this as an identity failure or an expression of responsiveness (Gibelman, 1999). This paper has been a brief foray into such an analysis, highlighting future work, such as the exploration of changing social work habitus and field analysis, which could shed light on the crisis discourse. The work of Bourdieu has a place, not just in the practice of social work, but in its theorising of disciplinary self-awareness. 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TI - A Crisis of Identity: Social Work Theorising at a Time of Change
JF - The British Journal of Social Work
DO - 10.1093/bjsw/bcw180
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-crisis-of-identity-social-work-theorising-at-a-time-of-change-f0T0eVl87N
SP - 2291
VL - 47
IS - 8
DP - DeepDyve
ER -