Social Work: Critical Theory and Practice

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Social Work: Critical Theory and Practice

Jan Fook

ISBN: 0-761972-51-X 2002 179 PB pages London: Sage Publications

Margaret Alston
Social Work and Human Services; Centre for Rural Social Research, Institute of Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga NSW

Phil Harington
Centre for Social Work, Auckland College of Education, New Zealand

Social work is a professional specialism which has a problem articulating its 'bag of tricks'. It seems innocuously enough to be one of 'the helping professions'. In reality social work is in the complicated business of linking individuals, families and communities with appropriate responses. It works on the capacity for policies and services to meet the expectations of citizenship. It aims to provide the appropriate service and still be fair and indeed emancipatory.

On the one hand, the social worker must respond to the individual's narrative about the factors which explain why they have a social worker in their lives. On the other, the social worker is obliged to note other narratives, possibly contesting, possibly in quite different terms and levels of authority, which are also bearing down on the environment the individual occupies. In this situation, 'warm fuzzy stuff' probably won't be adequate. Fook is keen to smarten up the imaginative and analytical acuity of the practitioner for this critical and invariably demanding context.

For readers in the allied health professions and for some sociologists, this book could be something of an assault. It applies postmodern theory to social work practice. For many, postmodernity is an acquired taste, but in Fook's approach it becomes a vein of ore which can be mined for its insight, its disciplinary processes and its intellectual heft as a way of working on behalf of clients in social settings where their access to civil and personal rights are at risk.

The book is divided into three sections. First, Fook usefully reviews the tradition of radical and critical social work theory and practice. The second section moves deeper into a sociology of knowledge and challenges the privileged narratives, that is, the practice narratives of other professions and their cultural forms. In one of the boxes inviting students to examine their own learning, Fook asks 'would you think differently about ideas … if you read them in a book … by Jacques Derrida, or they were told to you by your aging aunt?' (p.35) Social workers can often be in the unenviable position where the views of the aunt, victim, patient, and perpetrator (often re-packaged as rights) must be weighed as carefully as the views of those with more esteemed opinion and more authority. Thus, any challenge to that authority must be accurate, robust, justifiable and ultimately create new balances in the dynamics of practice. This text is committed to such practice.

In the third section, Fook gets where she wants to be: redeveloping practices. There are chapters on deconstruction and reconstruction, empowerment, conceptualising problems, narrative strategies, and working in context. Fook outlines, but more significantly, legitimates how social workers may systematically, transparently, tactfully and effectively devise forms of practice which will enable enduring changes: better outcomes for the people and communities with whom they deal.

While I am uneasy that the enigmatic language of postmodernity has been imported into a place where plain speaking is important, Fook cannot be blamed for forming it, or for its popularisation. She has undertaken research (Hawkins, Fook and Ryan 2001) suggesting the social justice language used in the social work education can wither as the language of practice. Can a profession be so pliable? Professional practice would be vulnerable if practitioners took their lead from the language of their milieu. In this text Fook is motivated to put stronger substance, skills and analysis into social work's repertoire. It should guide social work practice to be more disciplined, thorough, evidential, democratic and reasoned.

I support this endeavour and the direction it could herald for the profession. Fook has taken a logical and committed step forward from the material she has previously published. She urges a serious, methodical and robust approach to the pragmatics of the coal face. She wants social work to be a profession which can engage in genuinely emancipatory practice. It will be interesting to see how it moves from here as it is a profession which could do with the shove.

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