Abstract
How do ever-changing societal conditions shape the form and function of social work? What tools can be used to answer this question from both historical and contemporary perspectives? And how can social work maintain its value-based and emancipatory aims under societal conditions that prioritize narrow conceptions of economic growth over other aspects of societal well-being? These are some of the key questions addressed in the edited collection Social Change and Social Work: The Changing Societal Conditions of Social Work in Time and Place. Although the book’s purpose begins as a celebration of prolific and influential Finnish social work scholar Mirja Satka, its ultimate impact and implications are global and wide reaching.
The book is organized into three major sections. The first section constitutes a tour de force of changing global political and economic climates in Western Europe post–World War II. These chapters are rich in macropolitical and economic theories that help explain the impact of economic, political, and social transformations on national welfare states and social welfare services. For those familiar with these types of analyses, it should be no surprise that neoliberalism, privatization, and the waning power of nation-states are identified as primary forces shaping social work and welfare today. In one standout chapter titled “From Welfare Fraud to Welfare as Fraud,” the author analyzes Slovenia as a formerly social democratic welfare state based on equality, solidarity, and the universality of rights that was then subjected to “structural reforms that aimed at what was considered as a modernization of the social protection system” (p. 55). Such modernization emphasizes workfare over welfare, bolstered by punitive and criminalized discourses and practices targeting the largely nonexistent problem of welfare fraud. As Leskosek argues, societal beliefs that individual welfare fraud is a widespread social problem only serve to reinforce neoliberal ideology and its prioritization of individual market participation over direct government expenditure.
Sections 2 and 3 of the book locate changing global political and economic climates within specific social work paradigms and practice settings. Although several chapters in this section demonstrate weak linkages to the theoretical material in the first part of the book, multiple chapters are exemplars for how to understand local social work practices in light of changing societal conditions. In Chapter 8, Hauss describes ethnographic research of labor market integrations programs targeted at young women with children in Switzerland; her research vividly details how these social welfare services mobilize certain gendered discourses that map onto recent gendered transformations of the Swiss welfare state and labor markets. In Chapter 10, Foucauldian genealogy is advanced as a fruitful methodological approach for making “visible the conditions of social work practice in time and place” (p. 12), while deliberately avoiding “the pitfalls of totalizing social work history approaches” (p. 11). McGregor and Hoikkala accomplish this by applying a genealogical analysis to child welfare practices in Ireland and Finland; given the scarcity of Foucauldian genealogy in social work literature, their efforts are an exciting and unique contribution to this collection.
Overall, Social Change and Social Work will be useful for readers interested in two primary areas: (1) comparative international scholarship and especially contemporary European and Finnish social work, as it intersects with issues of gender, generation, and migration and (2) analytical strategies for understanding specific social work services in light of constantly changing political and economic conditions on global and national scales.