Healy Chapter 1-Practicing Social Work (Why Context Matters)

• Social workers


  Guided by their practice purpose, which varies considerably across institutional contexts and among practice situations
• Many factors contribute to our sense of practical purpose, including the philosophies and ideas shaping our institutional context
• Different factors do not line up with a social worker's formal professional base and individual framework for practice
• The social worker must then negotiate conflicts between their formal professional base and various client/employer expectations
• Institutional contexts must be understood as integral to how we practice
• Social work


  • Lacks a common knowledge base and agreed ways of building knowledge
  • Does not have a primary instructional base as opposed to other human service professions
  • The social service agencies in which we practice vary in a number of ways, including: size, purpose, and management structure
• Primary task of social work

  Varies by practice context and may include things such as therapy, risk management, research, etc.
• Some primary tasks may be incompatible with others
• Social workers may have some discretion about how they execute their primary task, but they cannot usually determine the nature of the task; rather this is determined by institutional context
• Reframing our practice as contextual


  Means we reframe our practice as working with environments rather than working despite environments
• Four components through which social work practices are constructed

  • The instructional context of practice
  • The formal professional base of social work
  • Our sense of practice purpose
  • Framework for practice
• Four first-offer principles that are widely endorsed in many national professional codes and in the practice literature

  • Respect for and promotion of individuals' right to self determination
  • Promotion of welfare
  • Equality
  • Distributive justice
• The sets of ideas dominating most mainstream health and welfare agencies are markedly different from the discourses underpinning human service professions in social work
• Discourses


  Structured or knowledge, claims, and practices through which we understand, explain, and decide things
• From a post-structural view, discourses are the sets of language practices that shape our thoughts, actions, and our identities
• A discourse analysis approach urges us to be skeptical about attempts to define social work as a single thing or a unified set of practices; instead it encourages us to recognize the diversity of social work practice
• Discourses influence who is regarded as an expert and who is considered to be a client, how client needs are constructed, and what types of intervention are seen as worthy
• Discourses


  • Biomedical discourse in medical contexts
  • Consumer rights discourse in mental health and disability fields
• From a discourse perspective, it is vital that social workers understand and use the language practices that dominate our practice contexts if we want to maximize opportunities for our own clients' perspectives to be recognized in these contexts
• Theories for practice are usually developed within specific practice domains and are meant for practice within specific client groups
• At best, theories can provide partial insights into direct practice and that each of us must take an active role in how we use and develop them
• Theories provide "a" rather than "the" base for professional practice
• Enlightenment


  An array of intellectual, cultural, and political forces that emerged in Western Europe during the 18th century, promoting ideals of objectivity, rationality, and individualism
• Social work can be broadly termed as humanist in that social workers place the realization of human potential as their central concern
• Consumer rights movements have grown over the past four decades in areas of health and welfare provision, particularly disability, women's health and mental health, to underpin consumer-directed alternatives for service provision
• The growth of spiritual and religious themes in service provision can be attributed to both agitation from within the profession by social workers who believe that recognition of spiritual lives is essential to holistic care, and to the expanding role of religious charities in the provision of non-government social services in post-industrial societies