Social Work and Social Justice in Northern Ireland: Towards a New Occupational Space

Author(s): John Pinkerton and Jim Campbell
Document Type: Article
Year: 2002
Title of Publication: British Journal of Social Work
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Place of Publication: Oxford
Volume: 32: 6
Pages: 723-737
Subject Area(s): Social Care, Community, Deprivation, NI Conflict

Abbreviations: NI - Northern Ireland, HSST - Health and Social Service Trust

Background to the Research

  • Until recently social workers in NI have had to operate within the context of communal, paramilitary and state violence. Within this context the concept and operationalisation of social justice has been largely absent from social work theory and practice. Yet social justice has become a central plank of the current peace process in NI.
  • This article explores the challenge faced by social workers in accommodating social justice into policy and practice in a society emerging from political conflict.

Research Approach

  • The authors offer a critical review of social work policy and practice in NI from the late 1960s to the current day.

Main Findings

The Technocratic Expansion

  • In the early 1970s the role of social work was boosted through the formation of an integrated health and social service. During the 1970s and 1980s the profession developed within a technocratic administrative structure that was part of the British government strategy to manage the Troubles.
  • The service moved from its relatively minor and traditional welfare function in local government and hospitals, to emerge as a key young profession within the new state bureaucracies. It can be argued that, at least in practice, the boards succeeded in distancing statutory health and social services from discrimination and sectarianism.
  • Within this structure the voices of civil society were largely excluded and accountability and openness were weak. Clients and communities were usually only engaged within the context of social workers managing social problems.

The Rise of New Manageralism

  • The 1990s heralded a period of 'new manageralism' that was marked by financial retrenchment, welfare pluralism and fragmentation of services. The promotion of general management and the introduction of HSSTs and market-based approaches to the delivery of care, combined to weaken the influence and power of social workers.
  • Social work staff tended to compete with other professionals within the trusts and with employees from voluntary and private sectors for limited resources. At the same time frontline practitioners faced rising pressure from an unsympathetic legal system and more tightly regulated central government inspections.
  • The current phase is characterised by a sense of struggle for social work in the face of competing demands in the wider process of conflict resolution.

Social Work and Social Justice

  • Social work needs to engage with the diversity of experience and need being expressed within contemporary society in NI. In order to connect with this new dynamism the service must shift its practice ideology away from the controlling and technocratic, to that of an engaging empowerment. In doing this it can play a part in the larger movement towards the creation of progressive forms of organisation and activity in statutory, voluntary and community sectors.
  • Social work in NI needs to accept its clients as citizens and recognise its own citizenship rights and responsibilities. This requires a more cohesive and assertive professional identity that has at its core a commitment to social justice that acknowledges social and cultural diversity, inequalities and disadvantage.
  • The profession contains within it the values, knowledge and skills necessary to engage with the opportunities that are emerging in relation to both the state and civil society.

 

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