Figure 6.1 Relationship between the personal, agency, professional and societal moral codes
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
This chapter will explore the nature of social workers’ duties to service users in relation to their other duties and broader responsibilities, including those to employing agencies, the profession and society. Professional codes of ethics say more about duties to service users and to the profession and tend to argue that these have primacy. Employing agencies, on the other hand, tend to require that employees put agency policies and procedures first. This chapter discusses the conflicts that arise between different sets of duties and responsibilities, particularly in the context of the increasing proceduralization and bureaucratization of social work (managerialism) and privatization of welfare services. At the end of the chapter, there is an exercise to encourage reflection on personal, agency and societal values, and a case for discussion about social workers acting as informants during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.
Chapter 5 focused on service users’ rights. According to the narrow definition of a right (as a valid claim belonging to an individual or group of individuals), if service users have certain rights, then some person or some institution has a corresponding duty to fulfil those rights. In many cases, it may be the social worker directly that has a duty, for example the duty to treat the service user with respect. In some cases it may be the social worker indirectly acting on behalf of an agency, for example fulfilling the duty to provide services for children in need. The direct duties could be said to be inherent in the role of professional social worker, and the indirect ones inherent in the particular job the social worker has. If we take a broader conception of rights – what we called the ‘manifesto’ sense of rights or relational rights, which might include the fulfilment of certain basic human needs across the world – this may require a more expansive kind of duty, what has been characterized as ‘relational responsibility’. The term ‘responsibility’ is broader than ‘duty’ and has been used in the chapter heading to encompass abstract duties in a Kantian sense and specific procedural duties defined by the employing agency, as well as the more situated relational responsibilities that are prominent in care ethics.
The concept of ‘duty’ is central to Kantian ethics, which has often been categorized as ‘duty ethics’ or deontology. Many of the religious ethical systems also have ‘duty’ as a central concept, although focused around duty to a god. In the context of professional ethics, the types of duties we tend to talk about are those owed to service users, to the profession and to the employing agency – duties to which people commit themselves when they take on the job of social worker. In this sense, a duty is a consequence of a contract or undertaking, either implicit or explicit. According to Whitley (1969, p. 54):
My duty is that which I am engaged or committed to do, and which other people can therefore expect and require me to do. I have a duty to keep a promise, because I have bound myself thereto.
However, we may have conflicting duties because different commitments may have been undertaken that are incompatible with each other in a particular situation. We may therefore have to choose between duties. For example, I have a duty to keep the information service users give me confidential, but I also have a duty to protect service users from serious danger. Therefore I might decide to break the confidence of a young person who has said she is planning to commit suicide. The duty of confidentiality may be said to be a prima facie duty, that is, it is what I ought to do, other things being equal. This notion of duty is also connected to accountability. If I have made a contract or undertaking to do something (duty), then I am also expected to be able to explain or justify my performance or non-performance of that duty (accountability). In social work, this latter aspect of a duty is regarded as important, since social workers must be publicly accountable for what they do (see Banks, 2009b).
It is important to distinguish this sense of duty – an obligation or commitment as a consequence of a contract or undertaking – from how the term is sometimes used, particularly in moral philosophy, to mean ‘the right action’: ‘what I ought to do’. We might say in relation to the case of the girl threatening to commit suicide that I decided it was my duty to tell her parents. ‘Duty’ in this sense is a definitive recommendation regarding what ought to be done, taking all the circumstances into account. ‘Duty’ here means the right action, and there is only one action. Therefore it would not make sense to talk of a conflict of duties. In this chapter I am going to use the term ‘duty’ in the first sense, where duties are regarded as commitments or obligations that may be in conflict with each other. So a duty is what I am committed to do, other things being equal. Very often, other things are not equal. It may be morally right for me to neglect one particular duty in favour of another. When talking about duty in the sense of the right action, or what I ought to do having taken all circumstances into account, I will use terms like ‘making a moral judgement about how to act’ or ‘deciding on the morally right course of action’.
The concept of duty as proposed in Kantian ethics, some forms of religious ethics (but by no means all) and professional ethics is often associated with a set of commitments that have been externally defined by, for example, the moral law, a god, a set of socially given norms, a professional association or a regulatory body. Nevertheless, it is the moral agent who has the task of interpreting and carrying out these duties and deciding how to act in cases of conflict. The notion of ‘responsibility’ encapsulates this sense of engagement by moral agents with their commitments or obligations.
The term ‘responsibility’ is frequently found in codes of ethics and literature on professional ethics, and encompasses both the rather narrowly conceived professional duties, such as obligations to respect confidentiality or to protect children, and a broader sense of a network of commitments and ties that are created together and shared with service users, other professionals, other people and groups. The term ‘responsibility’ is rooted in the notion of ‘response’, that is, responding to the perceived needs of other people, to demands or calls from others. As discussed in Chapter 3, this is a central focus of what has been called ‘the ethics of proximity’ found in the philosophical work of Buber (1937) and Levinas (1989, 1997), for example, and drawn upon by Bauman (1993), where ethics arises in response to the call of the other person. The starting point is not abstract principles outlining duties leading to a process of moral reasoning, but a pre-rational face-to-face encounter with another person who evokes my response.
Responsibility is also one of the concepts at the heart of the ethics of care, as discussed in Chapter 3, based around the relationship of caring for others, and is the focus of much attention in feminist ethics (Noddings, 2002; Tronto, 1993; Lindemann, 2019). It is also at the heart of many non-western ethical traditions that take a holistic starting point to ethics based on interconnections and interrelatedness, such as Buddhist, Confucian and African-centred worldviews, also mentioned in Chapter 3.
This links with the discussion of ‘relational rights’ in Chapter 5. In broadening the concept of duty from an individualistic to a relational focus, this brings it closer to the notion of responsibility. We discussed a similar refocusing of the concept of rights, which also leads us towards responsibility. Some theorists have developed the notion of ‘relational responsibility’ (Gergen, 2011a; McNamee et al., 1999), which may seem somewhat superfluous (if we see responsibility as centred around response to another/others), but it does serve to emphasize the dialogical and dynamic nature of responsibility and shifts the centre of concern from the individual. The starting point of the philosophy of Levinas (1989, 1997) and Buber (1937), for example, is the I–Thou relation: the dyad, or twosome. For Gergen and colleagues (Gergen, 2009, 2011b; McNamee, 2015), writing from a (social) constructionist perspective, the starting point is the social. As Burkitt (1999, p. 79, see also 2016) comments:
To supplement Levinas’s (1989) notion of responsibility located in the recognition of the other’s face, we can say that this is not just the bare face of human physiognomy but a face superimposed with social identity taken from the way the person to whom it belongs is situated in social relations.
Although the terms ‘duties’ and ‘responsibilities’ are often used interchangeably, strictly speaking the term ‘responsibilities’ is broader than ‘duties’. It encompasses ‘duties’ that may be quite specific and definable, as well as ‘responses’ that may be owed to others simply as fellow human beings. In codes of ethics, the term ‘responsibilities’ is often used in this broad sense.
Social work takes place within an institutional framework of rights and duties defined by the law, employing agencies and professional codes of ethics and practice. Chapter 4 discussed the specific duties and broader responsibilities of the social worker as laid down in professional codes. There are other rights and duties that make up the job in particular countries, such as the legal right (or power) and/or the duty to intervene in people’s lives in cases where children are thought to be at risk, or people’s mental health is judged to be a threat to themselves or others; or the procedural duty to follow agency guidelines in assessing risk in child protection cases. For this reason, Downie and Loudfoot (1978) describe social work as a ‘role-job’ – meaning that the job of social work is defined by a set of institutional rights and duties. They argue that it is important for social work to have an institutional framework because social workers intervene in the lives of others and it is in the interests of service users that they have a right to intervene. Second, social workers discover many intimate details of people’s lives and it is important that there are rules, such as confidentiality, which provide security for service users. Third, social workers themselves can find security from working in an institutional framework, for example they can fall back on their official position to give guidance on proper procedures with service users in case of legal action.
Downie and Loudfoot (1978) list four different types of rights and duties that attach to the role of social worker, to which I have added a fifth, as outlined in List 6.1. Although they use the term ‘duties’ throughout, I have indicated occasions when a broader concept of responsibility may also be relevant.
List 6.1 Types of rights and duties attaching to the role of social worker
1. Legal rights and duties relating to service users, employers and others.
2. Professional rights and duties (and responsibilities) arising from membership of a profession with its own standards of conduct.
3. Moral duties (and responsibilities) arising from the fact that the social worker is dealing with specific individuals in specific situations.
4. Social duties (and responsibilities) arising from the fact that the social worker is also a citizen who has the opportunity to do more civil good than many, for example through working towards reforming or changing social policies.
5. Procedural rights and duties arising from the fact that the social worker may be employed by an agency that has its own rules concerning how the work should be done and how social workers should behave or be bound by a contract with a service user or purchaser of social work services.
Source: Drawing on Downie and Loudfoot (1978)
When someone takes on the role of a social worker, they are in effect agreeing to work within this framework of rights, duties, broader responsibilities and rules. In particular, the employing agency will expect them to work within its rules and procedures, since it is this agency that is paying their wages. Usually, an employing agency will also expect the worker to work within the framework of the law and indeed, if it is a statutory agency, many of its policies and procedures will be based on interpretations of laws and statutory guidance.
In an ideal world, it might be assumed that legal, professional, social, moral and procedural rights, duties and broader responsibilities would complement or coincide with each other. However, this is not always the case. A social worker may judge, for example, that the employing agency’s procedures regarding confidentiality are too lax compared with the standards laid down in the professional code, or that the methods of assessment of needs in common usage entail treating service users as objects rather than respecting them as persons. The professional associations usually state that it is the principles laid down in the professional codes that should come first, as these codes are designed with the protection of service users in mind, whereas the law or agency rules may be designed for the convenience of the majority.
In taking on the role of social worker, a person takes on several different layers of responsibilities that may conflict with each other. These are often laid out in codes of ethics, as discussed in Chapter 4. List 6.2 summarizes these responsibilities and the main sources of documented external guidance, that is, guidance stemming from outside authorities as opposed to the social worker’s personal moral code.
List 6.2 Responsibilities of social workers to different parties
1. Responsibilities to service users: for example, respecting service users’ rights to make their own decisions, respecting their rights to confidentiality, safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children (acting on behalf of the state). Sources of guidance include professional codes of ethics, codes of practice published by national regulatory bodies, national government guidance, agency policies and codes of practice, the law, public opinion and charters for service users’ rights.
2. Responsibilities to the profession: for example, upholding the good name of social work by maintaining effective and ethical practice. Sources of guidance include professional codes of ethics and the professional association and/or regulatory body.
3. Responsibilities to the employing agency: for example, following the prescribed rules and procedures and safeguarding the reputation of the agency. Sources of guidance include the worker’s job description and contract, and agency policies and procedures.
4. Responsibilities to society: for example, maintaining social order, executing the responsibilities of state social work agencies as laid down by statute and challenging inhumane practices. Sources of guidance include the law, government guidance, public opinion and codes of ethics.
How does the social worker judge between these different responsibilities when they conflict? It might be with reference to the values and principles outlined in professional codes or professional literature. But what if professional codes are not explicit enough, or if there is a conflict between the principles of the code and what seems to be required by the agency or the law? There is an ongoing debate about whether it makes sense to distinguish values that social workers hold or should hold as professionals from the prevailing values of their employing agencies, the wider society in which they live and personal values to which a social worker has a commitment as a private individual. This may include secular or religious values about what is morally good/bad, right/wrong, and political beliefs or commitments about how these values should be implemented in society. We will now consider some of these debates briefly (for more detailed discussion of the relationship between professional ethics and the ethics of everyday life, see Banks, 2004a, Ch. 2).
There is a school of thought in social work (and other caring professions) that maintains that social work is a vocation, which suggests a blurring of the distinction between personal and professional life, values and responsibilities (see LeCroy, 2002; Parkes et al., 2010). This may be argued from a number of perspectives, including religious. Eastham (2002, p. 71) claims that the term ‘vocation’ is Jewish in origin, meaning, in this context, a direct invitation from God to lead a certain kind of life. On this view, becoming a social worker might be akin to someone taking on a religious calling to become a priest, whose whole life should be lived according to the moral duties of the religion, not just parts of it when he or she is performing the role of a priest. The idea of vocation has resonances with the origins of social work in the global North and West in the religious movements of the mid to late nineteenth century. Here, many of the early inhabitants of the settlement houses and neighbourhood-based ‘friendly visitors’ were committed to their work as part of a religious calling, whether to convert or educate people or simply to alleviate poverty and suffering (Banks, 2004a, pp. 26–35; Younghusband, 1981). They did not regard their personal and professional lives as separate. As Picht (1914, p. 2) comments in relation to the early settlers in Toynbee Hall (established in 1884) in East London: ‘not as an official but as a friend does he approach the poor’.
Although the origins of the term ‘profession’ come from the declaration or vow made by someone entering a religious order and one meaning of the term ‘profession’ is ‘a vocation or calling’, as social work ‘professionalized’ and secularized – that is, became a recognized occupation – it developed sets of principles and rules designed to protect clients from exploitation, patronizing treatment and variations in practice. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 4, there is a continuing debate about the extent to which such principles and rules are desirable or necessary. Some have argued that the very essence of social work is the personal commitment that practitioners have to working alongside people experiencing difficulties in life and to working to change society.
Ronnby (1993) notes the tendency for the welfare state (of which social work is a part) to reinforce existing inequalities in society and to treat those who are the poorest and least powerful as objects to be pitied or changed. His solution is for social workers to adhere to their personal ‘humanistic ethics’ and to come closer to their service users as fellow human beings. He notes that ‘techniques and routines as well as professional self-interest can prevent the social worker from acting humanely’ (pp. 5–6). This has resonances with the ‘ethics of proximity’ of Levinas (1989) and some Nordic ethicists such as Løgstrup (1997), as discussed in Chapter 3. Bauman (1993), in his discussion of postmodern ethics, is also influenced by Levinas, talking of the ‘moral impulse’ – a personal capacity to act morally, which is the property of an individual as opposed to external ethical frameworks, such as professional ethics. Bauman (1993, p. 19) emphasizes the moral responsibility of the individual over and above the various roles people play (one of which might be ‘social worker’), each with their ethical rules. Husband (1995, p. 99) applies this to social work, arguing that the moral impulse is a necessary basis for responsible social work intervention: ‘By its untrammelled innocence and generosity it is the creative core of caring.’ This view seems to entail that the relationship between social worker and service user might be one of unconditional caring, in the same way as a mother cares for her child, for example. It would involve removing the distinction between private and public morality. It has resonances with, although it is distinct from, the ethics of care discussed in Chapter 3, which is based on relationships of caring between connected individuals as opposed to the externally imposed ethics of justice based on duty, universal principles and the notion of separate individuals.
However, the view that the social worker should genuinely care about service users and treat them as she would friends or strangers in her ordinary life seems problematic in the context of much current social work practice, especially in the state sector. While an ethics of proximity based on the responsibility I feel in the face-to-face encounter between myself and the ‘other’ may be a foundation, a precondition or a starting point of ethics, there is a need, as Bauman (1997, p. 222) acknowledges, to go beyond ‘the moral party of two’ to reach justice – ‘the realm of choice, proportion, judgement – and comparison’.
Bringing the discussion back to concrete realities, when out shopping on a Saturday, I might give some cash to a man in the street who is asking for some money for food and take him home for a cup of coffee. But surely, while at work as a social worker on Monday, I should not give money out of my own pocket to a service user in the social work office who asked for money for food and take him home for a cup of coffee? First, this might leave me open to accusations of favouritism, as I cannot do this with all service users. Second, if I did give this level of personal care to all service users, I would be impoverished and exhausted. Third, this would involve developing a personal relationship with a service user, which might leave him and me open to abuse. These reasons echo those given by Downie and Loudfoot (1978) as to why it is important that social work operates within an institutional framework of rights and duties, to protect both the social worker and the service user. Case example 0.2 (in the Introduction to this book) about a social worker refusing a request for money illustrates this point.
It is doubtful if Ronnby (1993) or Husband (1995) is actually arguing that social workers should treat service users as friends. Rather, the implication is that social workers should treat service users as fellow human beings for whom they feel empathy and respect; and that social workers should regard themselves as people first and foremost, applying the same fundamental ethical principles to the situations they encounter in social work as they would to other situations in other parts of their lives. A more moderate version of this view would be to acknowledge that social workers are employed by organizations that operate by certain rules and procedures and are constrained by professional norms, societal mores and the legal system. Within this framework, they should treat service users with as much honesty and respect as possible, but it is not usually regarded as part of the job to care for service users unconditionally. It is arguably more important that social workers hold on to their own personal values not in order to give unconditional love to service users, but in order to challenge laws, policies and practices regarded as unjust and oppressive, including ‘blowing the whistle’ on institutionalized malpractice. This requires not just a commitment to a set of ethical principles, but also characteristics of moral perception, sensitivity and courage – qualities discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to virtue ethics.
One of the responsibilities of professionals is to be independent and critical of their employers, colleagues, funders and government agencies in cases where they judge that poor, unethical and dangerous practice is occurring. Generally, the term ‘whistleblowing’ is used to refer to cases when employees go outside the normal internal channels for reporting and tackling complaints. According to Davis (2019), whistleblowing involves an individual current or past member of an organization ‘going outside the normal channels … to report serious wrongdoing in the organisation … for morally permissible reasons’. These reasons may include to ‘rescue’ people experiencing harm or to avoid complicity in wrongdoing. Martin (2000, p. 139) makes some useful distinctions between different types of whistleblowing:
• Internal whistleblowing, which involves informing people further up the internal hierarchy than might normally be expected.
• External whistleblowing, which involves taking the issue outside the organization – perhaps to the press or politicians.
• Open whistleblowing, where the identity of the whistleblower is openly given.
• Anonymous whistleblowing, where identity is withheld.
Many organizations have whistleblowing policies, which support legitimate whistleblowing – recognizing that it is in their interests that employees report dangerous or unethical behaviour and unsafe practices. However, they usually require that the normal channels of complaint have been exhausted first and that the whistleblower acts in good faith and in the public interest – not for personal gain, or with malicious intent. In spite of laws and policies supporting whistleblowing, many staff are reluctant to take action and those who do, even if their actions are proved to be based on serious and legitimate concerns, may ultimately find themselves ostracized or without a job. It requires a great deal of moral courage to blow the whistle and is more effective and safer for the individual concerned if support from colleagues, trade unions, professional associations or other bodies is available (see BASW, 2014). In his overview of ‘administrative evil-doing’ in social work, Preston-Shoot (2011) notes how infrequently social workers take action to challenge their organizations, suggesting there is a serious disjuncture between espoused professional ethics and ethics in practice.
Case example 6.1 is an account of a situation in which a worker raised concerns over many years both internally (with a line manager) and externally (with politicians and policy-makers), before finally going to the media.
Practice focus
Case example 6.1: Blowing the whistle on excessive use of force in a youth custody setting
Nathan Ward was a qualified community and youth worker, employed as a chaplain in a Secure Training Centre in the UK. This Centre, Medway, was operated by a private company to provide secure accommodation for young offenders. Nathan became increasingly concerned about what he regarded as inappropriate use of pain-inducing restraint techniques and by the excessively harsh attitudes of staff at the Centre. He raised concerns with his line manager, but when no action was taken repeated his concerns to a university professor with an interest in youth justice, who wrote to government ministers. After several years of raising concerns, providing evidence and seeking change, he eventually decided to contact a newspaper, which finally led to a BBC documentary exposing the abuse at the Centre. He left the Centre before the TV documentary. Writing about his experiences afterwards, Nathan Ward (2019) commented:
I had met with the Youth Justice Board monitor, local authority designated officer, Kent Police, inspectors, MPs and a bishop, as well as internal management, and yet nothing happened. I even called the internal whistleblowing hotline and was told by the call handler that he hadn’t received the whistleblowing training yet and therefore could he take my name and number and get someone to call me back.
It was like being a whistleblower with a whistle that had no ball in it.
So, in 2007, after witnessing staff grab children by the neck while explaining ‘you will fucking respect me’, I contacted a journalist at The Guardian newspaper to see if we could do something before someone died.
We worked together over nine years, which eventually led to the Panorama [BBC Television] broadcast on 11 January 2016.
Following the broadcast, which was watched by 3.17 million people, the government set up an Independent Improvement Board. It made 25 recommendations which, on the whole, have not been implemented.
Sources: drawn from Hayes (2019) and Ward (2019)
This example shows the determination and long-term commitment needed for an individual to expose unethical practices in the face of organizational and political inertia. Deciding to blow the whistle is not a course of action to be taken lightly, as it can have severe long-term repercussions, not only for whistleblowers but also for the people they are trying to protect. Although a utilitarian calculation of potential harms and benefits can be undertaken, all the consequences cannot be predicted. Hence it is important to weigh up very carefully what might be some of the unintended consequences of pursuing different courses of action. When the press or TV get involved, despite assurances, the story may be slanted in unexpected ways, it may generate surprising public or official responses, and anonymity may be breached. When discussing the dilemmas he faced, these were some of the key points made by Ward (personal communication, 2020):
• When whistle blowing you are essentially ‘outing’ clients as victims without their consent, putting them through police interviews, etc., which they did not choose to take part in.
• With undercover reporting as used in Panorama, you are essentially filming young people without consent and retrospectively protecting their identity.
• You are causing further stress in an already stressful environment, which could in turn create further stress on those you want to protect. The experiences of children in Medway and Secure Training Centres (STCs) became a lot worse post Panorama, before they got better.
• The whistleblowing can become the crisis which then deflects from the real issues.
• Successful whistleblowing (whatever that is) can detract from real issues. Young Offender Institutions were, and still are, far worse than STCs ever were, but that debate ended overnight with Panorama, which was detrimental to the wider youth justice issues.
• It takes a lot of evidence to blow the whistle, none of which you can gather/gain/share within the policies of your organization. From a legal point of view your only defence is in the Public Interest.
Briskman (2005), writing from an Australian perspective on the abusive and inhumane treatment of Indigenous people and asylum seekers by services that are delivered by social workers, exemplifies a similar commitment to expose and challenge unjust policies and practices with which social workers are often complicit. This was achieved through undertaking research, writing newspaper articles and campaigning with others within and outside the university where she worked. Many of the social workers, who later gave evidence to the People’s Inquiry into Detention initiated by Briskman and fellow Australian academics (Briskman et al., 2008), did not give their names and had not found other channels to challenge their employers or government policies on detention. ‘Jennifer’ was one of the social workers who gave evidence. Her story is outlined in Banks and Nøhr (2012, pp. 195–7), including her struggle to find ways of meeting the needs of asylum seekers who were not entitled to services at that time and over ‘whether to speak publicly about damaging policies and practices when a culture of organisational silence pervades’ (p. 195). She felt unable ‘to challenge or subvert the workplace policies as the organisation was dependent on government funding’ (p. 197). Instead, she undertook voluntary work outside her professional job, offering advice to refugees, advocates and volunteers in a refugee advocacy group. She also wrote a confidential submission to the People’s Inquiry into Detention. In deciding to give evidence:
she gave priority to her belief that social workers had a professional and moral obligation to ensure that all people had access to services. She also stressed that the wider community needed to be informed of the existing injustices. In deciding to take action, she came to the view that acting to restore justice overrode obligations to her employing organisation. (Banks and Nøhr, 2012, p. 197)
This was a case of anonymous, external whistleblowing. A social worker spoke out, but did not feel able to follow an internal process or give her name.
There are many similar cases of social workers speaking out. Yet there are also even more cases where systematic abuse and deception have been uncovered where social workers were complicit. Cases may range from social workers’ involvement in and observation of the abuse of young people in residential care homes or in community settings to their active involvement in the torture of political prisoners or the seizure of children in political regimes of military dictatorship (see Case for discussion 6 at the end of this chapter about the involvement of social workers as informants during the last military dictatorship in Argentina). It is easy to condemn inaction from the sidelines. However, it is also important that social work as a profession and individual social workers work together to make it possible to take a stance to resist involvement or complicity with any form of exploitation and human rights abuses. As Ferguson et al. (2018, pp. 53–70) point out, it is important that social work’s ‘horrible histories’ are acknowledged – referring to those periods when social workers reinforced oppression and have been complicit in exploitative and inhumane practices (for example in Greece during the military Junta, 1967–74).
The possibility of, and moral imperative for, whistleblowing is based on the assumption that, at a personal level, individuals have a conscience and a set of values that they can and should apply to the values and norms in operation at their workplaces or prevailing in society at the time. They also can and should make critical recourse to the espoused values of the profession to which they belong. For if we do not have this view, then there is a danger of colluding with inhumane and unethical practice. Yet there is also a need for ‘professional distance’ – a separation between personal and work life – to protect not just the service user, but also the social worker and society. Social workers are encouraged to be aware of and maintain appropriate boundaries between their personal and professional lives. Many of the cases of professional misconduct dealt with by regulatory bodies and professional associations relate to ‘boundary issues’, particularly friendships and sexual relationships between social workers and current or former service users (Cooper, 2012: Doel et al., 2009; GSCC, 2008). The issue of ‘dual relationships’ is often referred to in the social work literature, for example cases where a social worker relates to someone as both a neighbour/friend and a service user. Emphasis is placed in the professional guidelines on either avoiding dual relationships, which may be difficult in small communities and remote rural areas, or being clear about the boundaries between the two (Halverson and Brownlee, 2010; Reamer, 2003).
One fairly extreme view on the separation of personal, professional and agency values is expressed by Leighton (1985). This is worth examining, as it puts the argument clearly and argues for quite rigid boundaries in a way that more recent literature does not. Leighton suggests that social work aims to manipulate and change people; social workers act not as ordinary human beings as they would in their personal lives, but take on a separate role, which requires them to appear to care, but not in the genuine way in which one would care for a friend. He gives the example of a social worker who needs to get certain intimate information from a young person in residential care (presumably for a report):
The social worker is therefore obliged to try to draw the child into a relationship for no other purpose than to satisfy the social worker’s job requirements. It is exceptional if the worker offers important parts of himself or herself to the child’s personal social world. The relationship is part of a statutory and financial transaction from which only the social worker benefits financially. (Leighton, 1985, p. 78)
He argues that we must separate the personal and the professional, so that we do not feel guilty about manipulating people and using relationships as we would if we treated someone in the same way in ordinary life. According to Leighton (1985, p. 79), the social worker is required to
manipulate people and their relationships, and must learn the art of appearing to care when his natural feeling is not to care. To survive as a private person and to do his work well he must sometimes operate within a mode of ‘bad faith’, a lack of absolute honesty in the relationship.
We may all recognize elements of truth in this depiction of the social work role, which we can connect with more recent work on the ‘emotional labour’ that those in the service and caring professions have to undertake to do their work (Hochschild, 1983; Leeson, 2010). In their critical discussion of relationship-based social work, Murphy et al. (2013) argue that relationships are instrumental to social work’s purpose rather than developed for their own sake (relationships as ends in themselves). Indeed, this instrumental approach underpins most current models of relationship-based practice based on psycho-dynamic relations, in which the social worker inevitably plays the expert role (Ruch et al., 2018). However, Leighton’s view seems more extreme. It could ultimately lead to the social worker simply taking on a job and following all the norms, procedures and practices required by the agency, regardless of whether they appeared to be morally wrong, or to be allowing morally wrong actions to occur, according to the ethical principles of the profession or the social worker’s own personal moral code. Taken to its limit, such a view could imply that workers in a secure youth custody centre where systematic physical and verbal abuse of residents is taking place (as described in Case example 6.1) could justify using extreme physical restraint themselves by saying ‘I was only doing my duty in accordance with the agency procedures’, as if it was nothing to do with them if the agency norms were immoral or cruel. It would leave little room for whistleblowing as a moral duty in cases of institutionalized malpractice.
This type of view seems to entail that there is no person over and above a series of social roles of which the private/personal is just one. Leighton gives an example of a social worker, Mr Anthony, and argues that certain values from his personal life, such as converting people to Catholicism and believing abortion to be morally wrong, conflict with professional values such as service user self-determination and nonjudgementalism, both of which conflict with the employer’s values such as assisting with birth control techniques and encouraging conformity to social norms. His conclusion seems to be that being a social worker is a totally different and separate thing from being a private individual. But is it? Surely the private individual or person decided to accept the job of social worker with its particular values and duties. If Mr Anthony was the kind of person who was such a strong Catholic that he went around trying to convert neighbours, friends and people in the street and he strongly opposed birth control, then arguably he would not have chosen to become a social worker with this particular agency. Most Catholics do not try to convert people in the street or to dissuade strangers from having abortions. Surely moral standards similar to those Mr Anthony holds for relating in his private life to strangers and acquaintances may apply also in social work. When Mr Anthony goes to the supermarket or visits the cinema certain rules of behaviour apply, which do not usually involve trying to convert the shop assistant or handing out anti-abortion leaflets in the cinema. Similarly, social work may be regarded as a particular setting in which certain ways of behaving are appropriate and to which particular duties apply. As Koehn (1994, p. 153) argues, professionals do have special duties towards their clients and service users, but these are based on ordinary morality and represent an intensification of the relationship of trust in everyday life.
Most people would probably agree with Leighton that, as a general rule, social workers should refrain from trying to persuade service users not to have abortions and that social workers do not and cannot treat service users as friends. However, it does not follow that personal, professional and agency values should be treated as totally separate. Where they conflict, the social worker as a person has a moral responsibility to decide which have primacy and to justify this decision. Mr Anthony may decide that he cannot work in an agency that involves so much work promoting birth control or that he will request not to deal with certain cases where he would feel compromised. Indeed, someone who has a strong commitment to the Catholic faith may actively choose to work for a Catholic charity that provides support to pregnant young women.
Case example 6.2 is about a Christian social worker practising in an East Asian country, who finds herself facing a dilemma when her agency takes on a new area of work.
Practice focus
Case example 6.2: Dilemmas for a Christian social worker in Taiwan
Linda is a licensed social worker employed by a non-profit, faith-based organization (FBO) located in a rural area of Taiwan. This organization is run by a local Christian church and provides social services for children and young people. Since this agency is one of the few social service agencies that employs professional social workers in that area, the local government approached this organization to take on a contract to provide services for low-income women. The services included financial assistance, legal advice services, employment referrals and psychological support. The director of the agency, who is a priest, decided to cooperate with the government because he saw it as an opportunity for evangelism and for the organization to develop its work in this area.
One year later, the FBO started to provide social services for the women in the community. As an experienced social worker, Linda was asked to be the supervisor of this new programme. A small but significant number of women using the service are single women who are pregnant. Usually, women in this situation tend to have an abortion due to the low toleration of unmarried mothers in society, particularly in rural areas. This is challenging for Linda. On the one hand, Linda’s own Christian beliefs and the mission of the FBO would entail taking an active pro-life stance (anti-abortion). On the other hand, the government requires the agency to implement the principle of separation of church and state in the work it does. Hence, the staff of the organization should not persuade an adult woman to keep her baby and look after it herself or let someone adopt the baby. Linda is also aware of two important professional principles in social work: value neutrality, meaning social workers should not impose their own personal values on clients; and self-determination, meaning social workers should respect clients’ own decisions. She feels she is facing conflicts between her personal beliefs, professional standards, the agency’s goals and government policy as well as societal pressure. Linda spends some time considering what she should do.
Linda, the social worker in this case example, is clearly more troubled than Mr Anthony about how to reconcile her religious beliefs and various aspects of her work. Without knowing the background, it is difficult to surmise what her options might be. The way the case is written suggests Linda is facing a dilemma: should she support women who wish to seek abortions or not? However, it is unclear what not supporting them would entail. For example, it might involve referring them to another agency (if one exists); or presenting options but not actively supporting women in seeking abortions; or resigning her job. Clearly, this is an issue as much for the director and the agency as a whole as it is for Linda. If the board and staff of the agency have not yet fully thought through the implications of the government contract, then Linda’s first task may be to encourage (and indeed perhaps demand) reconsideration of the decision and/or development of clear policies and guidelines for staff. This case neatly exemplifies the tensions between different moral codes and hence responsibilities attaching to different roles. Figure 6.1 illustrates the cumulative layering of personal, agency, professional and societal moral codes.
Figure 6.1 Relationship between the personal, agency, professional and societal moral codes
The two positions outlined above, that there should be no separation between personal and professional values and that they should be kept completely separate, represent divergent views at a theoretical level. In practice, individual social workers may give more priority to personal, professional or agency values, depending upon what kind of work they do, how they view their jobs and lives, the conflicts and pressures arising in their work at particular times, and the professional and societal norms operating in the country where they work. Table 6.1 outlines four ideal typical models of social work practice that I have called the committed/radical, professional, technical-bureaucratic and quasi-business models. These are ‘ideal types’, as they are artificial categories and it would not be expected to find the practice of workers and agencies conforming neatly to these models. However, they are presented to help us explore the different emphases that social workers may adopt in their practice according to their ethical stance and their particular work settings.
Table 6.1 Models of social work practice
1. The committed/radical practitioner model sees the social worker as a person who has chosen to take on the job out of a personal or ideological commitment to work for change and who puts this first. This model encompasses many different types of approach, ranging from the individual caring relationship or ‘ministration in love’ model to the more collectivist approaches espoused by Marxists, feminists and anti-racists. Although the same heading has been used to encompass all these approaches, there are obvious differences in focus ranging from the empowerment of individual service users to societal change.
2. The professional model focuses on the social worker as a relatively autonomous professional with expertise gained through education and guidance coming from the professional code of ethics. Her first priority would be the rights and interests of service users; her identity as a social worker would be as a member of the profession first, and as a private individual or worker in an agency second.
3. The technical-bureaucratic model regards the social worker first and foremost as a worker in an agency with a duty to carry out the prescribed tasks and roles of that agency. Guidance comes from agency rules and procedures.
4. The quasi-business model focuses on the social worker’s role in providing competitive services to customers in a marketplace. Guidance comes from customer choice and the norms of the market (including profit).
All four models are evident in the social work literature and social work practice, although the fourth is the most recent and challenging. The professional codes tend to contain elements of the first three, with emphasis more on the professional model, tempered with duties to the employing agency (technical-bureaucratic) and personal commitment to work for societal change (committed/radical). Social workers have never comfortably fitted into the role of ‘professional experts’ because of the ideological tendency to identify with oppressed service users and the fact that social work is frequently located in state-sponsored or state-funded agencies.
The technical-bureaucratic model is, arguably, becoming more dominant, at least in the state sector and large not-for-profit organizations. Many commentators (starting in the 1990s) have expressed concern about the ‘de-professionalization’ of social work, which relates to the increasing specification of tasks and procedures, attempts to reduce indeterminacy in decision-making and reduce reliance on or trust in autonomous professional judgement, and the adoption of competency-based approaches to education and training (Banks, 2004a; Dominelli, 1996; Hugman, 1998b). Some have argued that the growth of ‘evidence-based practice’ could be seen to be part of this de-professionalizing trend, as it places emphasis on use of research findings regarding what works, focusing on measurable interventions within a managerial and social control framework, while neglecting reflexivity, flexibility and creativity in the social work role (Gray et al., 2009). Yet equally it can be argued that the evidence-based approach offers opportunities for greater professionalization and is a way of advancing claims to professionalism (Malin, 2000, p. 21). The reasons for this, of course, are that it is an approach based on scientific rationality that appears to give more credibility to the effectiveness of professional interventions, hence enhancing the notion of professional expertise in dealing with increasingly technical and complex tasks. Payne (2014, pp. 49–59) offers a useful summary of recent debates and arguments for and against evidence-based practice.
The quasi-business model as applied in social work does not simply apply to social workers in private practice or private sector care organizations. For the whole idea of being a professional is that professional workers retain their approach and values in whatever setting they work – whether as a lawyer, doctor or social worker in private practice or a for-profit organization. The quasi-business model applies to social work in all settings and refers to an orientation of social workers (and the agency for which they work) towards defining the services they provide, and those who use them, in terms more commonly associated with market transactions (see Harris, 2003, 2009, 2019). The critiques of this model, with its focus on the service user as a consumer-customer, were discussed in Chapter 5. What this means for the social worker is that the relationship with the service user becomes more one of brokerage (if the worker is a care manager) or customer care and service (if the worker is a direct service provider).
With the increasing fragmentation of social work in many countries, and with services previously provided by the local state being shifted to the private and not-for-profit sector, there is also a growing opportunity in some areas of work for workers to operate within more traditional professional or committed/radical models of practice. For example, specialist advocacy or counselling projects can be established with an unequivocal focus on the individual service user–worker relationship, where it is clear that the advocate or counsellor is primarily concerned with the rights or interests of the service user. As it is increasingly recognized that people in powerless positions or who find it difficult to speak for themselves should have independent advocates to support them, this results in the separation of the advocacy role from the general social work role. This means that the state-sponsored social worker may be concerned with allocating and rationing resources between many service users, whereas the advocate will push for the wishes, needs and rights of this particular service user (see Dalrymple and Boylan, 2013).
Similarly, there is a growth of a range of ‘detached’, outreach or street-work posts with specific service user groups, often defined as ‘hard to reach’, which recognize the importance of workers having personal and life experiences close to the experiences of those with whom they are working. For example, Deverell’s research in the UK with HIV prevention outreach workers showed that many workers did the job because, as gay men, they had ‘a keen interest in seeing HIV prevention done amongst gay men … and because politically I wanted to be involved in a job that had something to say to me personally’ (worker quoted in Deverell and Sharma, 2000, p. 29). Deverell found that at times the workers felt ‘more like a peer than a professional’ (p. 30), with workers using the terms ‘vocation’ (p. 35) and ‘way of life’ (p. 31). Yet while recounting many instances of when they were ‘off duty’ but still responded to requests for advice, many workers were also aware of the importance of setting certain professional boundaries and standards in the work, which could otherwise be fluid and open-ended, with the potential for exploitation (of service users by workers and vice versa). A director of a mental health charity, who herself had experience of chronic depression and anxiety as a teenager, says she went into social work to make sure that ‘the things that went wrong for me wouldn’t go wrong for other people’ (Anne Beales, quoted in McGregor, 2010). However, she was very aware of the danger of burn-out and becoming a ‘workaholic’, and the need for good management.
Some community and social development work may also have this character, particularly in countries where social work is less organized as a profession. For example, Herscovitch (in Healy, 2001, pp. 174–5) describes the practice of a social worker, herself a Cambodian refugee, working on mental health issues in a large refugee camp in Thailand through training ‘natural helpers’ (Buddhist nuns). Many faith-based organizations have explicit religious values as part of their mission, and social workers employed in those organizations may join them in order to live out these values in their working practice, as demonstrated in Case example 6.2.
A social worker may often find herself working within several or all four models, and hence experience conflicting responsibilities. The emphasis of the work will vary not only according to the individual worker’s view of her role, but also according to the particular piece of work being undertaken and the type of work setting. A social worker employed as a counsellor by an independent voluntary organization to work in complete confidence with people with HIV/AIDS will find the organizational and work setting much more conducive to operating within a professional model of practice than a practitioner employed by the local state, working in a team, a large part of whose job is to assess and plan care packages for older service users. A community development worker employed by a neighbourhood residents’ association with a campaigning brief will find it easier to work within a radical model. A youth development worker, herself a committed Muslim employed by a local mosque to undertake informal educational work with Muslim young people, will readily be able to see her work in promoting young people’s spiritual development in terms of her own faith commitment. Exactly how these practitioners work and put these values, principles and commitments into practice will also depend upon their personal qualities, levels of confidence, knowledge and skill and the broader cultural and national frameworks of values, policies and laws. For example, an HIV/AIDS counsellor working in India or Zimbabwe would have a different role from one working in Britain or Finland. The implications of a white counsellor meeting a black service user, or vice versa, will be different depending on the context. A Muslim youth development worker working in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands or Britain will face a different set of dilemmas and problems than she would in India or Malaysia.
If we look briefly at some of the key ethical principles for social work, we can see how the organizational and work setting changes the interpretation and implementation of these principles. Here, I take the principles of confidentiality, the primacy of service users’ choices and interests and distributive justice, and outline how these might apply to social workers in four different work settings and employed as an HIV/AIDS counsellor; a care manager for older people; a community development worker; and a youth development worker.
• HIV/AIDS counsellor: confidentiality is a key focus of the counselling relationship and it is important that the counsellor can assure complete confidentiality (privacy) between herself and the service user, except in circumstances where it is legally permitted or required that the counsellor disclose information, for example where another person is likely to be seriously harmed or where a court requires information. There is nevertheless potential for tensions and dilemmas in this role, precisely around when, if ever, it is judged right to breach confidentiality, for example if the service user refuses to disclose their HIV status to a sexual partner. In Case for discussion 4 (at the end of Chapter 4), the French social worker working in a women’s refuge is not a counsellor as such, but similar strict requirements regarding confidentiality apply in such settings.
• Social worker/care manager for the elderly: the limits of confidentiality are much broader and may include other members of the team and other healthcare professionals and service providers. If a particular social worker is unavailable or sick, it would be expected that another social worker would consult the service user’s file and continue with the work. The relationship between service user and worker is not a private one.
• Community development worker: while acknowledging the need to respect the confidentiality of certain personal information relating to individual residents, confidentiality might be regarded as relatively unimportant in the context of residents working together collectively to achieve change.
• Youth development worker: this worker will take account of the importance of family and community in the context of the Muslim faith and culture. While recognizing confidentiality as important as part of the relationship of trust with particular young people, this will be balanced with a concern for the young people’s welfare and safety and the needs of the wider group/community. There is potential for generational and cultural tensions, especially if the young people have grown up in a western country, straddling the different value systems, as exemplified in Case example 1.3 about the young Bangladeshi men in Wales.
• HIV/AIDS counsellor: the counsellor may need to ration time between one service user and another and, in exceptional cases, consider the interests of others (for example if a service user has not disclosed their HIV status to a partner). However, within these limits, the counsellor can focus on the needs and interests of the service user. It will depend on the style of the particular counsellor and the nature of the service user’s needs as to whether the counsellor respects the service user’s own choices and decisions or adopts a more parentalist or directive style.
• Social worker/care manager for the elderly: this worker will need to keep in mind the needs and interests of other people as well as the service user, for example any family carers, neighbours, service providers and other current and potential service users who will need resources. While the service user’s own choices and interests may be respected as far as possible, there are many limitations on this.
• Community development worker: this worker would see the promotion of individual self-determination or empowerment as part of the process of collective empowerment to achieve change. However, there may be conflicts between individual, group and community development, including subgroups within the neighbourhood.
• Youth development worker: this worker may be concerned to facilitate the spiritual development of each young person in the context of the teachings of Islam, focusing on a concern for the self-determination of young people as Muslim young people. However, there may be conflicts between young people’s decisions and choices and those of the wider Muslim community.
• HIV/AIDS counsellor: except for the rationing of time between service users, this worker does not have a direct role in distributing resources between individual service users. However, the worker may choose to campaign and draw to the attention of service providers and policy-makers the inadequacy of resources for this service user group in particular and the discrimination they face in society; indeed, the social work codes of ethics include this as a principle.
• Social worker/care manager for the elderly: this worker does have a duty to distribute the resources of the agency fairly between individual service users and to manage them efficiently. In making a decision about what course of action to take, resourcing issues will be as important as an individual service user’s choices and needs.
• Community development worker: this worker will be concerned to achieve redistribution of resources (power, wealth, good housing) to residents as a group according to need, linked to a striving for equality of result, and may use campaigning and community action approaches.
• Youth development worker: this worker may be concerned to get young people’s voices heard in the organizational structures of the mosque, in the wider Muslim community and in the neighbourhood more generally – challenging religious discrimination, racism and ageism as part of a broader movement for social change. The youth development worker may be able to see herself clearly as an advocate for Muslim young people, although there is a lot of potential for tensions between young people, adults and the wider community.
These simplified examples do not explore the details of the potential tensions and dilemmas within each role – handling ethical conflicts and dilemmas is the subject of the next chapter. But the examples above do indicate how the work setting, the type of agency and the role defined for the social worker influence the extent to which a social worker may work more within one model than another. In the UK and many other countries, there has been an increasing shift towards the technical-bureaucratic model within statutory social work, alongside tendencies towards a ‘quasi-business’ approach. In Japan, for example, these trends have been particularly strong (see Ando, 2010; Ito, 2010, 2014; Kosaka, 2010).
Since the late 1980s in the UK, and many other countries in the global North, there has been a growth in the production of quality standards, procedural manuals and assessment schedules in state-sponsored social work. This is particularly noticeable in the field of child protection, although these trends are evident throughout social work and the public, independent and private sectors generally. There has also been a growing trend to set targets for both services and individual workers and to measure performance in terms of outcomes. These developments are often discussed under the label of the ‘new public management’ (NPM) in the context of the growth of neo-liberal policies and programmes (Clarke, 2004; Dunleavy and Hood, 1994). While some have argued that we are now in a ‘post-NPM’ or ‘digital governance’ era (Christensen, 2012; Dunleavy et al., 2006; Pollitt, 2010), the economic constraints on public spending in the UK and many parts of the world mean that concerns with measurement of performance, particularly linked to cost-effectiveness and value for money, have been a continuing feature of welfare services since the 2008 global financial crisis. The characteristics of the so-called post-NPM, which include integration of services and agencies, do not seem to have stemmed the tide of fragmentation and specialization of welfare services. What has increased on the digital governance front is the widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT), enabling greater managerial surveillance of social workers’ cases and monitoring of targets, hence further curtailing their discretion in everyday practice and relationships with service users (see Harris, 2019). There are several interrelated features of these trends, including:
• Marketization: a concern to offer ‘customer choice’, alongside increasing efficiency and competitiveness in service delivery.
• Consumerism: a concern to offer a consistent standard of service, linked to service users’ rights and quality assurance.
• Managerialism: an approach that seeks greater control over the work of employees, intensified by the use of ICT/digital technologies.
• Authoritarianism: an emphasis on the social control function of practitioners.
• De-professionalization: a process that entails characterizing social workers as officials carrying out agency policy and/or as sales brokers.
If we take the example of child protection social work, these trends were given added impetus by a series of public inquiries into child abuse cases where either children died in their homes or they were taken away from home unnecessarily and it was said that social workers should have acted differently. This led to a vast quantity of guidance and advice from central government about how to assess children thought to be at risk, how to monitor them and their families, how to conduct interagency case reviews, how to investigate suspected cases of child abuse and how to prepare evidence for court (see Featherstone et al., 2018; Featherstone, 2019; Munro, 2020). In the context of child protection work, Howe (1992, p. 496) argued in the early 1990s that a new perspective was emerging based on a view that
Injury and neglect suffered by some children results in the demand that children should be protected; that protection is achieved by improving, standardising and prescribing full and proper methods of investigation and assessment; and that bureaucratic forms of organization appear to be the best way of handling the ever more detailed and complex requirements of this new perspective.
Yet, despite a proliferation of policies, procedures, assessment schedules and the development of vast national computerized systems for monitoring and recording interventions in the late 2000s, further child protection scandals occurred. Social workers became increasingly demoralized at the impact on their work, in particular the depersonalizing effect of the nationally defined systems, which required a vast input of time entering information into computers (White et al., 2010). This led to a questioning of excessively procedure-driven practice in public welfare services, partly fuelled by the economic recession and a desire to drive down welfare costs by cutting back on bureaucracy, but also by a realization that such approaches were not necessarily achieving good outcomes for children and families. A major review of child protection was conducted by Munro, an academic from the London School of Economics and Political Science. At the start of her first report, Munro (2011) comments:
A dominant theme in the criticisms of current practice is the skew in priorities that has developed between the demands of the management and inspection processes and professionals’ ability to exercise their professional judgment and act in the best interests of the child. This has led to an over-standardised system that cannot respond adequately to the varied range of children’s needs. (p. 5)
For some, following rules and being compliant can appear less risky than carrying the personal responsibility for exercising judgment. (p. 6)
This led to attempts in some local authority children’s services to shift the focus of practice by introducing relationship-based models of working (see Ruch et al., 2018) and an approach developed in Australia in the 1990s called ‘signs of safety’, which involves working in partnership with families and building on strengths (Turnell and Edwards, 1997). There is some debate about how widespread or fully such an approach is being or can be adopted in cash-strapped local authorities with persistent staff shortages (Baginsky et al., 2018; Featherstone et al., 2018, p. 41; Stanley et al., 2018). Nevertheless, alternative models of protecting children are being promoted, particularly stressing the importance of taking account of the social and structural contexts within which children and families are living (e.g. the social model of Featherstone et al., 2018), the organizational factors influencing decision-making (e.g. the systems approach of Munro, 2020) and seeing the issues as being as much ethical as technical. For to regard child welfare and protection purely as a technical exercise ignores the ethical questions about how much ‘abuse’ society is prepared to tolerate, balanced against how much interference in family life is thought to be justified. As was argued in Chapter 1, social workers are faced with trying to balance these contradictory, ambivalent and changing societal values. If their major role becomes one of surveillance and collecting evidence, rather than close supportive work and/or therapy with families, this leads, at best, to bureaucratic practice, which focuses primarily on issues of needs or risk assessment and resource allocation as determined by agency rules and procedures. At worst, it leads to defensive practice, such as going by the book and denying personal responsibility (see Harris, 1987; Whittaker and Havard, 2016).
The growth of customer-oriented and business-like models, as discussed in Chapter 5, is most prominent in the adult social care field. Here, a toxic mix of market principles, cost-saving measures and a target culture has created a confusing and ethically challenging environment for social workers. Baldwin (2011, p. 188) characterizes this as the ‘EasyCare’ model of social work – inviting comparison with ‘low-cost airlines that reduce services to the minimum and charge for extras’. Case example 6.3, from a social worker working in adult social care, shows this point clearly.
Practice focus
Case example 6.3: The social worker as sales agent and cost-cutter in a digital age
This account was given by a social worker based in an adult social services team in a local authority in a large UK city. It is the story of just one of the range of ethical dilemmas relating to staff shortages, rationing and cost-cutting inherent in her daily work, as she commented:
Practice is strictly monitored by managers for its quantity, efficiency and contribution to meeting ‘targets’ and deadlines. For instance, we have to ‘sell’ a piece of equipment [one of several kinds of home alarm systems for use in an emergency] to service users at least once a month and our performance is often evaluated by quantitative measures – who sells well and who does not. When we questioned this, the management told us that selling this equipment promotes service users’ independence. But most of the frontline practitioners didn’t feel that was true, as we had to remove the home care service [visits from a carer] at the same time and a number of service users wished to keep the carers’ visits instead of having a machine. As the target was really strict, we were sometimes begging service users to buy one (or at least try the service for a few months) to meet the target.
This social worker eventually left her job as she felt it compromised her professional values and integrity too much.
Clearly, there is a cost-saving imperative at work here, as well as ‘management by results’ and an approach that depersonalizes and privatizes services offered to older and disabled people. Such approaches to practice can be distinguished from the ‘professional’ model, which focuses more on the individual worker–service user relationship with guidance from the code of ethics, and the ‘committed/radical’ model, which stresses individual or societal change and does not separate out the personal from the professional or agency values (see Table 6.1). While there is an increasing emphasis on the ‘technical-bureaucratic’ and quasi-business models, there are constant tensions between all four and this is part of the reason why ethical challenges are endemic in social work, because of the many layers of responsibilities involved.
Another feature of the case is the replacement of human contact by an alarm system. Similar ethical issues arise in relation to other more sophisticated machines, such as ‘carebots’ (robots that perform tasks to support people in their daily living), or even ‘social work robots’ that might perform routine tasks of assessment and monitoring currently done by social workers (Morley et al., 2019). Developments in assistive technology and artificial intelligence have undoubted benefits in supporting people with impairments to function in new ways and helping facilitate desired independence from human intervention. However, the dangers of replacing human contact are significant for people who are isolated and lonely. Similarly, the use of social media, video-conferencing and other online technologies that became common during the COVID-19 virus outbreak was a lifeline for many people living on their own at a time of social distancing. Yet the lack of physical presence and human contact can put a severe strain on people’s mental health. Furthermore, use of digital and online technology raises many issues relating to privacy, confidentiality, informed consent and boundaries that need to be carefully considered as these modes of communication become increasingly common in professional life (see Reamer, 2013b; NASW, 2017, section 1.07).
Rhodes (1986, p. 137) notes the contradictions between the individualized, caring concerns of social workers and the impersonal requirements of bureaucracies and argues that ‘being a good worker may mean acting unethically’. However, working in a bureaucracy does not inevitably mean acting ‘unethically’. Indeed, as du Gay (2000, 2013) argues in defence of bureaucracy, the impartial rules that are the hallmark of a bureaucracy play an important role in professional life. Such rules could be seen to be derived from utilitarian approaches to ethics that focus on the fair distribution of resources. In fact, it is vital to see such work as very much in the sphere of the ethical, rather than the purely technical. This enables us to debate the fairness of bureaucratic rules and principles and to question the value of the assumptions on which they are based and in whose interests they have been devised. Otherwise there is a danger that we become ‘defensive’ practitioners. The ethical decisions regarding resource allocation or what is to count as child abuse may have been made elsewhere (by central government or agency managers), but that does not absolve the social worker of the responsibility to challenge these decisions if necessary. For example, we need to guard against the preoccupation with the distribution of existing resources that the bureaucratic approach encourages and think about arguing for more resources for social work service users. This can be very hard in situations where resources are tight, but it is nevertheless important that practitioners continue to document unmet needs as illustrated in case 6.4.
Practice focus
Case example 6.4: Where have all the mother and baby units gone?
A social worker in the UK was working with a young couple expecting a baby. The young woman had learning disabilities and it was judged that she would struggle to look after the baby on her own. However, her partner was assessed as capable of supporting her and plans were made for him to have a bed in the hospital with her when she gave birth, and for them to care for the baby together on discharge from the hospital maternity unit. Unfortunately, at the time the young woman was due to give birth, her partner was ill and was hospitalized himself. He was due to be in hospital for several weeks. Hence the social worker had to make arrangements for the baby to be removed from the young woman and placed into foster care. The social worker deeply regretted this outcome, as she felt it was damaging for the young woman and for the baby, but felt she had no alternative. The ideal course of action would have been to place the young woman and child in a mother and baby unit, where the young woman would have been supported to care for her child. But the local authority had closed its mother and baby units, so there was no option but to remove the baby from the mother.
This worker spoke with a sense of regret, but resignation. She presented this case at a ‘dilemmas café’ event in a group with other social workers. Colleagues from other local authorities confirmed that their mother and baby units had also disappeared, with no service replacing this critical role. This raises the question of what the role of social workers is in raising concerns about inadequate services. In a climate of severe cuts in welfare services, social workers may doubt whether highlighting unmet needs will achieve any change. But it is important to amass evidence and to link with social workers and practitioners in other areas to share information in order to pass it on to the professional association, relevant campaigning bodies or other groups. In the dilemmas café a social worker from another area suggested a possible alternative to splitting the mother and baby. This social worker worked for ‘Shared Lives’ – a scheme that enables service users who are unable to care for themselves to be placed with a family to offer support. While this service was very much under pressure (as it is much cheaper than residential care) and usually provided placements for individuals, it might provide a possibility for a mother and baby to live in a supportive family for several months.
There is a tendency to assume that questions about the distribution of resources, efficiency and cost are not ethical ones. They are, and it is dangerous not to regard them as such. Seeking the cheapest service may not be an unethical decision, if it can be argued that this results in more people getting some level of service, rather than a few people getting good-quality service. This may be based on utilitarian ethical principles about promoting the greatest good for the greatest number of people. What is unethical, of course, is simply to accept inadequate levels of resources without questioning them or pressing for better provision.
The social worker in an organization where bureaucratic and/or business-oriented approaches frame the work can and should still be both a ‘reflective’ and a ‘reflexive’ practitioner. In summary, we may distinguish between defensive, reflective and reflexive practitioners as follows:
• Defensive practitioners. If we extend Harris’s (1987) notion of defensive practice to the field of professional ethics, then defensive practitioners ‘go by the book’ and fulfil duties/responsibilities defined by the agency and the law. There is no need to take the blame if the prescribed rules and procedures have been followed. Social workers are ‘officials’ or ‘technicians’. Doing ‘my duty’ means fulfilling my obligations to the agency, rather than doing what I know to be the morally right action; personal and agency values tend to be separated, and the latter tend to be adopted while in the role of social worker.
• Reflective practitioners. Building on Schön’s (1983, 1987) notions of ‘reflection-on-action’ (after the event) and ‘reflection-in-action’ (while doing), there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of reflective practice in social work (see Banks, 2003b; Fook, 2002, 2016; Gould and Taylor, 1996; Mantell and Scragg, 2018; Martyn, 2000; Thompson and Thompson, 2018; Sicora, 2017). Reflective practitioners are able to recognize and analyse ethical dilemmas and conflicts in their practice and consider how and why they arise, for example through unequal power relationships with service users, contradictions within the welfare system and society’s ambivalence towards state welfare and social workers in particular. They are more confident about their own values and how to put them into practice; integrate knowledge, values and skills; learn from experience and mistakes; and are prepared to take risks and moral blame. There is a recognition that personal and agency values may conflict and that the worker as a person has a moral responsibility to make decisions about these conflicts. Critical reflection, as defined by Fook (2002, p. 43), involves a focus on issues of power and a redevelopment of practice and theory in relation to changing power structures to become more emancipatory. According to Béres and Fook (2020, p. 3): ‘Critical reflection involves learning from and making deeper meaning of experience through a process of unsettling and examining deeply hidden assumptions in order to create better guidelines for action and so improve professional practice and develop a more ethical and compassionate stance.’
• Reflexive practitioners. Often the terms ‘reflective’ and ‘reflexive’ are used interchangeably. However, as Fook (2002, p. 43) points out, ‘reflexive’ is also used to refer to a stance taken whereby the practitioner is able to locate herself in the picture and recognize how she both influences and is influenced by the people and events she is observing. Reflexivity may embrace reflection, but is a more complex process, as Taylor and White (2000, pp. 6, 34–5) outline in their exploration of how knowledge is made and used in professional encounters. Reflexive practitioners are aware of the dominant professional constructions influencing their practice and subject their own knowledge and value claims to critical analysis. This may involve questioning received ideas and professional practices, as well as analysing how truth claims are made, how professionals and service users perform as credible, reliable or morally adequate people, or how form-filling prescribes action. Critical reflexivity would focus on how dominant discourses construct knowledge and values, on the potential for challenging and changing existing power relations and on the role of social work in changing welfare systems (see Kessl, 2009). Critical practice, as Adams et al. (2009, p. 334) stress, is transformational.
This chapter has discussed the many layers of often conflicting duties and broader responsibilities that social workers have to balance and choose between. It has been argued that the critically reflective and reflexive practitioner needs to be aware of how these conflicts arise, to make informed ethical judgements about which responsibilities have priority, while recognizing how the ethical frameworks she is using are themselves constructed and contested. She may have to operate within several contradictory models of social work practice and be able to recognize and hold the tensions between them. If the social worker takes on one model to the exclusion of others, then important aspects of social work practice will be ignored. If the social worker regards herself exclusively as a ‘professional’, ignoring the constraints imposed by the employing agency, then she may become narrow and elitist. If she wholeheartedly takes on board the technical-bureaucratic model, she may become a defensive practitioner, mindlessly following agency rules. If she sees service users as customers choosing care in a market, she may lose her sense of collective and professional responsibility for tackling social evils and promoting social justice. If she sees her own personal religious or political beliefs as paramount, then she may become unaccountable to her agency or to service users. To recognize and balance these layers of responsibilities is part of what it means to be a competent, committed and ethically reflexive practitioner. We need to recognize that personal, professional, agency and societal values are interlocking, yet in tension.
Putting it into practice
Reflecting on personal, agency and societal values
Aims of the exercise: to show how the values of the individual, the agency and society may be similar and/or conflicting.
1. Think of the job that you are currently doing or one that you have done in the past:
– What are your main aims in the job?
– What roles do you play?
– Describe your major achievements in this job.
– What values do you think underpin your work in this job? (What you regard as your major achievements may help you think through what your values are.)
2. Now imagine looking at your job from the point of view of the agency you are working for or used to work for:
– What do you think the agency’s aims are?
– What do you think is the agency view of the role you are playing?
– What pieces of work do you think would be highly valued by the agency?
– What values do you think underpin the agency’s work?
3. Now imagine looking at your job from the point of view of society as a whole, or ‘the public’:
– What do you think are the public perceptions of the aims of the job?
– What role do you think the public regards you as playing?
– What pieces of work do you think would be highly valued by the public?
– What values do you think underpin public perceptions of your job?
4. Are there differences between your values and those of the agency and/or society? If so, why do you think this is the case?
Practice focus
Case for discussion 6: Social workers as informants in Argentina1
A tribunal conducted by a professional association for social workers in Argentina involved a retired male social worker who had worked for many years at a local hospital. Records were published giving the names of those who served as civilian intelligence agents during the last military dictatorship. These records showed that this particular social worker had been involved as an informant as a civilian member of an intelligence detachment between 1976 and 1983. The principal function of informants was to infiltrate organizations, unions and universities and provide information to the armed forces. During this time many people disappeared, including many social workers and social work students, as a result of the work of the informants. These informants were also responsible for the abduction of many children. This involved denouncing their mothers, taking them to clandestine maternity clinics and keeping them alive until the moment of childbirth. After the birth of their children, the mothers would ‘disappear’. The abducted children were categorized as ‘spoils of war’ and registered as their own by members of the armed forces or their relatives and acquaintances. In other cases, the children were sold or abandoned in nameless institutions.
The professional association for social work (Colegio Profesional de Servicio Social del Neuquén) held an ethical tribunal in the town where the retired hospital social worker had practised. This led to the cancellation of his licence to practise and a denunciation of his role as an informant. Local social workers were shocked, including a former colleague in the provincial hospital who instigated the complaint. She commented that when her colleague’s name appeared on the list, his former co-workers were very affected ‘by having shared many years of work with someone who has known all the intimacies that this profession has’.
The Argentinian Association of Social Workers and the Latin America and the Caribbean region of the International Federation of Social Workers issued a repudiation of the social workers involved as informants in Argentina. The statement published by the Latin America and Caribbean region of the IFSW included the following declaration:
We call this ethical declaration of repudiation for each professional or social work student who has been involved in such violations of the ethical principles of provincial, national and international Social Work. Also to put the validity of these acts in value, so long as the action carried out by people who participated as informants, not expired 30 years ago, and that crimes (complicity in the kidnapping, disappearance, murder and appropriation of people) remain in force through the concealment of information that would enable the location of the dead and 300 adults who now know their true identity.
Afterwards, in an article on the website of the professional association, Norberto Alayón, a social worker and lecturer, made the following comment in relation to professional ethics:
Cases such as these are also crucial for keeping the memory, because dictators do not emerge just because of the terrible action of the military, but also and perhaps primarily, by the management and support of certain civilians, many of them recognized professionals.
Questions for discussion2
1. What do you think were the main reasons that the professional association for social work of Neuquén decided to remove the licence and condemn the actions of a retired social worker for crimes committed 30 years ago?
2. At the present time, in countries with liberal democratic regimes, professional associations and individual social workers would not hesitate to condemn social workers who were complicit in human rights abuses. But how many do you think would do this if there was a military dictatorship ruling their country?
3. This case is an extreme example of crimes against humanity committed by social workers, in a very specific context. How similar do you think some of the ethical and political issues are in this case to those raised by the complicity of social workers in inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees in the case from Australia in the earlier section on whistleblowing?
4. What measures do you think professional associations and other networks of social workers, social work academics and students can and should take to ensure that social workers do not abuse their professional positions and are not silent observers of abuses committed by others?
Banks, S. (2004) Ethics, Accountability and the Social Professions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan (now Red Globe Press).
Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between the ethics of everyday life and professional ethics, while Chapter 6 explores aspects of the new managerialism in the light of interviews with professional practitioners.
Fook, J. (2016) Social Work: A Critical Approach to Practice, 3rd edn, London, Sage.
Useful outline of a critically reflective and reflexive approach to social work practice, based within a clear theoretical framework with a focus on strategies for practice. Covers issues of power, diversity, discourse, deconstruction, reconstruction and narrative approaches.
Lavalette, M. (ed.) (2019) What Is the Future of Social Work?, Bristol, Policy Press.
An edited collection that considers challenges facing social workers in the contemporary climate of austerity and neo-liberalism, including chapters on topics ranging from child protection and mental health in the UK to the refugee crisis in Greece.
1 I am grateful to Laura Acotto, past vice-president of the Latin America and Caribbean region of the IFSW, for permission to use this case. The information is taken from the tribunal records of the Colegio Profesional de Servicio Social del Neuquén (23 April 2010) and the statement of the Latin America and the Caribbean region of the IFSW: ‘Disclaimer statement of ethical civilians who served as “informants” to the military dictatorship (1976–1983) and were accomplices in the genocide and disappearance of 30,000 Argentines among whom were abducted children who currently remain unfound.’
2 I am grateful to Maria Moritz for suggesting some of these questions.