Abstract
In Exploring Social Work: An Anthropological Perspective, Linda Bell offers a new perspective on a long-standing question: What is social work? Through a combination of autoethnographic and anthropological methods (in-depth qualitative interviewers, survey research, documentary analysis, and participant observation), Bell draws on nearly 30 years of accumulated data collected with British and European social workers to understand what it means to do social work. Readers expecting a simple answer will be disappointed. In true anthropological fashion, Bell illustrates the complexities that shape not only how social work is practiced, but how it is lived.
Bell divides her book into 12 chapters. Those familiar with ethnography will recognize the central themes that organize the structure of the book: history; socialization; identity, values, and worldview; material culture and symbols; and social structure. Through this holistic framing, Bell highlights myriad tensions that social workers confront: care versus control, clinical versus community-based, theory versus practice, evidence versus art, local versus global. Bell builds on these simple binaries, describing how tensions take shape via state mechanisms, organizational processes, and individual actions. Thus, despite seemingly universal commitments to the enactment of social work practice, social work itself defies easy definition.
One of the gems of the book is Chapter 3, in which Bell compares British and European social work practices. The historical focus in this chapter facilitates an understanding of social work as a dialectic that both accommodates and resists political fluctuations over time. In doing so, Bell grounds the salience of the Munro Review of Child Protection of 2011, published by the British Department of Education for British social work, elucidating the unanticipated consequences related to the primacy of child protection in professional and popular discourses.
Chapters 4– 6 examine how individuals become socialized into social workers. Often, this socialization happens even before individuals decide to pursue a degree in social work. Despite a commitment to caring and social justice, the bureaucratization of social work practice, the role of the state, and debates around the standardization of social work education and practice help to produce the myriad tensions that are at the center of social work practice.
The latter parts of the book reveal the contested nature of taken-for-granted concepts such as social justice, family, and professionalism. The stories of individual social workers and ethnographic accounts of case reviews and community-based social work projects raise questions about whose knowledge counts in social work practice. The prioritization of evidence-based knowledge can sometimes subordinate experience-based knowledge to the detriment of the kinds of relationships social workers hope to build, both when they train students and when they intervene on behalf of clients.
Throughout the book, Bell makes it clear that social work cannot be reduced to the tensions inherent to its core oppositions. Rather than operating as an either/or project, social work can be best thought of as both/and. It is both caring and controlling, clinical and community-based, theory and practice. In the concluding chapter, Bell repeats ideas and themes already stated in previous chapters. In part, this reflects the author’s Durkheimian motivations to illustrate how the various parts of social work become integrated into a holistic whole. I found the recursive presentation of key ideas to be helpful, in addition to the chapter summaries, given the complex task that Bell has undertaken. This writing structure will likely appeal to social work students, particularly if this text is adopted in introductory social work or international social work classes. For readers outside of the UK and Europe, the book offers a foil to compare, contrast, and query the different policies and ideologies that distinguish social work across the globe, in addition to highlighting the challenge of social work as an embodiment of social work regimes.
