Phlogiston and social work

June Lait

The work of Sir Karl Popper is of great value to one struggling to find a conceptual framework for the ragbag of ideas that underlie what those who teach it call Social Policy. (I never use the phrase now without a slight intellectual frisson, remembering how I was felled in the midst of some wordy peroration by a Professor of Computer Science. He remarked coldly that the word 'social' renders meaningless any term it precedes.) Popper would be unlikely to dismiss anything quite so peremptorily, though in Conjectures and Refutation he seriously questions the existence of social wholes like 'classes' and 'nations', which, come to think of it, lights a rather nasty fuse under the academic viability of sociology, not to mention history and politics.

I need Popper to warn me of the danger of 'all explanatory theories that act as a revelation to weak Minds', for I think I have formulated an hypothesis which, if not refuted, will serve to answer some of the questions which baffled Professors Olive Stevenson and Phillyda Parsloe in their extensive study of 'more than forty Social

Service area teams in eight local authorities.' commissioned by the DHSS. My hypothesis is that there is no such thing as social work. 0 Popper is to be heeded, one must not see.It confirmatory evidence for one's hypothesis, but must strive, and encourage others to strive, to obtain evidence which refutes it. There is of course a plethora of evidene.° which seems to demolish my hypothesis. There are thousands of people, by no means all fools or knaves, who consider they are doing social work, and thousands more wh° consider they are teaching or supervising ?r (to use the curious terminology of this aspiruig profession) 'supporting' those who are doing it. Handsome livings are being inael,e by Directors of Social Service who purPc". to provide it for local authorities. There. is even an organisation called the British Association of Social Workers which conr missioned a working party to define It. They produced a document entitled The Social Work Task and started with the 'working definition' that 'Social Work is the purposeful and ethical application of 1:`1.sonal skills in interpersonal relationshIns

directed towards enhancing the personal and social functioning of an individual, fam ily, group or neighbourhood, which necessarily involves using evidence obtained from practice to help create a social environment conducive to the wellbeing of all.'

Well, as a physicist friend of mine pointed out, giving a thing a name — however long

winded — doesn't ensure its existence. For many decades scientists walked and wrote about a substance called phlogiston • supPusedly given off during the process of

combustion. Indeed enterprising fellows bottled it and sold it to an admiring if gull ible public, much as social workers sell their services to a less admiring but captive taxand ratepaying public today. But the work of Priestley demolished phlogiston, and a similar exercise might well be suitable on social work.

During 1977 Miss Matilda Goldberg and colleagues from the National Institute of .Social Work examined all the cases received in an area office of Southampton Social Ser vices Department (their results were pub lished in an essay, 'Towards Accountability in Social Work'). Their purpose was to analyse the characteristics of those who sought and received Social Work help, to attempt to assess the service given, and to

describe how far social workers considered they had been successful in attaining their Objectives.

Their findings are complicated, and repay careful study, but — briefly — they are that of 2000 cases received only 6 per cent were being dealt with after a year, and of that 6 Per cent half were managing with 'only occasional check up and surveillance'. Over ,50 Per cent of the sample had material problems, such as poor housing and low income, and almost all the elderly had physical problems. Of this latter group '93 per cent received some practical service, over half aids and adaptations, a third home help, and dearly two thirds help with applications ,concerned with holidays, special supPlementary benefit allowances, and occasionally with long or short term admission to a welfare home'. In the whole sample 'the Problem solving activity most frequently associated with social work — namely casework — was only recorded for a fifth of all clients'. Among the families dealt with were a number who repeatedly found themselves in financial and other crisis. They Were dealt with 'on a short term ad hoc basis "other than to get involved in long lasting suPportive relationships with very uncertain ?l000mes Imy italics. The social workers ilound it very difficult to obtain a clear mandate from these clients to explore beyond the obvious trigger events Imy,italics] and eventually it was decided to continue with short

term crisis help'. My interpretation is that tile workers' sanity overcame their training and they acknowledged the world's and the clients' irremediable imperfections, though Probably remaining professionally impervious to their own.

Undoubtedly the workers in Southampton were doing something and Miss

Goldberg tells us pretty clearly what it was. They were screening incoming demands, mainly for straightforward practical services, providing practical help for the elderly and disabled, acting as a kind of

• Citizens Advice Bureau, and taking on the role of go-between or advocate vis-a-vis the. Department of Health and Social Security, the housing department, and other statutory bodies. Miss Goldberg asks whether

social service departments are suitably designed for these functions, or social workers suitably trained. She suggests that changes are needed to free the social worker from the chores of practicality, so that they can concentrate on those clients 'who appear to need help beyond the specific service requested'. Their training should have 'a broad sociological framework for assessing social factors in the occurrence of problem situations'.

In my view her findings tend to the quite different conclusion that social service departments as they presently exist are redundant. One could ask (as indeed some of us did vainly ask before the departments were created by the Social §ervices Act 1970) why workers — the bulk of whose work comes via referrals from other agencies, and who appear to spend much of their time referring it back — should be accommodated in free standing agencies with ill defined but ambitious objectives. Should these workers not rather be attached to those departments in which the problem arises, and which alone have the power (if indeed anyone has) to deal with them? More radically it could be argued that if the basic agencies, like housing and the DHSS, didn't have social workers to get in their way they would get on with their own jobs more effectively. In this case the best thing social workers could do would be to disappear altogether.

As to training (and when I use the word I am conscious that it is not a term inter

changeable with education, but relates to a lob-specific' activity) it seems that the preoccupation of so many social work teachers with the imparting of skills in 'interpersonal relationships' (what other sort are there, one wonders) or with 'broad sociological framework for assessing social factors in the occtirrence of problem situ ations' (whatever that means) is irrelevant to the jobs social workers actually do. The justification of such areas of study may be 'that, unlike the supplying of practical information about benefits, aids for the disabled or rate rebates, they can be styled 'professional', thus giving satisfaction and status to their teachers. These studies appear initially to give satisfaction and status to the students who imbibe them, but applied in the real world where their pretentious inappropriateness is cruelly apparent, they turn to the dust and ashes of frustrated ambition. Miss Goldberg makes this clear when she says that 'in only one third of the cases did the social workers feel they have achieved the aims they set themselves', and reveals that the achievement occurred exclusively amongst cases given short-term practical help.

Professor Olive Stevenson throws further light on social worker frustration when she reports that although 99 per cent of the social workers she studied had to deal with clients' financial problems, only 33 per cent liked doing so. She confesses herself puzzled by the fact that the attempt to offer social workers 'specialised expertise concerning clients' problems' has in almost every case she examined failed. She asks 'Do the advisers lack credibility, either personally or because they are not in line management? Are they insufficiently available? Do teams build up psychological barriers against 'outsiders'?' Should not Professor Stevenson consider the possibility that the advisers lack credibility because they are advising about Social Work, and that, like phlogiston, there really is no such thing?