Abstract
How does social workers' agency come about amid the structural constraints they face in their everyday practice? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a social services department in Israel, this article offers insights into social workers' agentic performances. Fieldwork lasted four and a half months (March–August 2021) and included daily participation in the department life, multiple interviews with all staff members (n = 28), and participant observations at various professional meetings. We identified four modes of agency among social workers: challenging bureaucracy and regulations, standing up to colleagues, supervisors, and managers, pushing through austerity, and disrupting professional norms and expectations. We conclude with illustrating social workers as Willful Subjects, recognizing the limitations of social workers' agency while acknowledging its powerful effects and prime importance.
Introduction
In this ethnography, we seek to shed light on social workers as willful subjects, that is, to examine the sometimes subtle ways in which they express agency. How do public social workers find ways to express agency under the many constraints that define their work? What kinds of agency are expressed? In what follows, we attempt to answer these questions to illuminate and contribute to the understanding of the potential power of social workers’ agency to resist current neoliberal influences.
It has been well established that the neoliberal turn in Western countries is leaving a significant mark on welfare regimes and by extension on the everyday practices of those who provide public social services. Front-line social workers in Western countries are operating within systems that were not built to meet the needs of their service users. In this article, we use Sara Ahmed's notion of the willful subject (2014) to explore agency as a mechanism through which social workers navigate structural constraints in their everyday practice. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a social services department (SSD) in Israel, we ask: In what ways do social workers enact agency in their everyday practice in public social services? By offering agency as a framework through which to understand everyday practice in public social services, we aim to recognize and understand the potential power of social workers’ agency in resisting current neoliberal influences and contribute to the conceptualization of agency in social work. We begin by briefly reviewing neoliberalism and the welfare state and the concept of agency in social work. We then present social services in Israel as the context of the study, followed by the ethnographic method we used and the findings. Last, we discuss social workers as willful subjects and identify agency as a concept that is key to improving the understanding of everyday practices and struggles among front-line social workers.
Neoliberalism and the welfare state
Neoliberalism, with its focus on the market as the organizing principle of social life, has vastly affected the welfare state. Ongoing cuts to government expenditures and the restructuring of welfare state programs reflect an increasingly pervasive residual approach to public health and social services. In these times of austerity and social welfare retrenchment across Western societies (Korpi & Palme, 2003; Pierson, 1994), when social rights and benefits are evaporating and inequality is on the rise, the dilemmas and tensions faced by public social services providers intensify.
In Israel, social spending continues to be one of the lowest in OECD countries: in 2019 social expenditure constituted 16.3% of Israel's GDP, compared to an average of 20% in other OECD countries. Accordingly, the share of Israeli families living in poverty and the degree of inequality between Israelis has remained among the highest in the OECD (Andeblad et al., 2018).
In the context of social work practice, neoliberalism's concern with marketization, the minimization of the public sector, and the reduction of public expenditure have had a profound effect on how social workers deliver services (Penna & Brien, 2013; Rogowski, 2020). The partial or full privatization of services once delivered by the state; the introduction of new public management techniques into public services that gave rise to evidence-based practices, performance measurements, and risk assessments; the adoption of corporate management language; and the prioritization of budget management and control all limit the role of social workers as they move away from face-to-face work with service users (Penna & O’Brien, 2013). Burnout, stress, heavy workloads, and rapid turnover are some of the major effects of neoliberalism on the everyday experiences of public social workers (e.g., Sinai-Glazer & Krane, 2021; Baginsky et al., 2010; Collings & Murray, 1996; Tham, 2006). In this article, through the concept of agency, we seek to shed light on how social workers navigate these multiple constraints.
Agency in social work
Human agency is the capacity to act otherwise and the power to make a difference, to change a course of events (Iverson et al., 2018). Although the concept of agency is vital to social work, it has gained interest mainly concerning service users’ capacity to act otherwise and make a difference (e.g., Sinai-Glazer & Brummans, 2022; Chase, 2010; Lister, 2004). Agency among social workers has received relatively limited attention (Parsell et al., 2017).
Unpacking “agency” analytically and empirically requires recognizing the duality of agency and structure; individuals are responsible for their social behavior, yet social structures play a role in facilitating or hindering their attempts to enact agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Iverson et al., 2018). Hence, agency should always be understood in relation to the contexts within which it is manifested, and viewing social workers as agents requires constantly taking into account the structures within which they operate. In our case, considering both the individual's agency and the structure is vital since under the ever-growing body of regulations and procedures social workers are expected to abide by, losing autonomy and discretion and becoming “scripted agents” are real risks (Are Trippestad, 2015). Agency stagnation (Nicotera, 2015) and “paradoxical agencies” (Are Trippestad, 2015, p. 12) have been documented among nurses and teachers as undesired positions that lead to burnout and rapid turnover when professionals feel they can no longer make a difference. Given that social workers are often in the business of social work to make a difference, their sense of agency must be nurtured.
Social services departments in Israel
The participants in this study are front-line social workers who work in a social services department (SSD). Social services departments, which exist by law in every local authority in Israel, are the main institutions that provide psychosocial care, including counseling, advocacy, and community outreach to various populations. Their operation model is mainly a generic one. The SSDs provide services to all citizens in the local authority, primarily through family social workers. According to a survey from 2020 the main issues addressed by social workers in SSDs in Israel were people with disabilities (29% of registered files); older people (27%), parental and/or child dysfunction (22%), and poverty and unemployment (15%). Other issues include family violence, precarious housing arrangements, and mental health challenges (Ministry of Welfare and Social Security, 2021).
Since the 1980s, the social care provided by the SSDs has become progressively limited due to the encroachment of neoliberal values and managerialism, which have replaced the previous social-democratic orientation (Gal, 2017). Large caseloads (approximately 120 families per full-time social worker on average), limited budgets, and restricted opportunities for professional supervision have all shifted the focus of the helping relationship from support to information gathering, risk management, and surveillance (Gal, 2017; Lavee & Strier, 2018).
Methods
This ethnographic project included intensive fieldwork at a social service department. Ethnography research on social work is limited, yet its relevance and potential for developing deep knowledge of social work practice and policy have been well demonstrated (de Montigny, 2018; Ferguson, 2016; Valenzuela, 2021). Since fieldwork requires high levels of commitment, in choosing the SSD where the fieldwork took place, the most crucial inclusion criterion was the staff's willingness to participate in the research. Since SSD managers are the gatekeepers of fieldwork at SSDs, the first author contacted five department managers with whom she had had good relationships in the past. Several meetings in which the first author explained the research processes and goals in an attempt to recruit the manager and the staff were held. Eventually, one department agreed to take part in the research.
The social services department where fieldwork took place is located in central Israel. It is a regional department that serves approximately 35,000 citizens in nearly 30 small communities that differ widely in terms of socioeconomic status. In general, this local authority is rated 8 to 9 on Israel's socioeconomic scale (which ranges from 1 for a low socioeconomic level to 10 for a high level). The SSD provided services through its 28 staff members, 24 of whom were social workers. As in other SSDs, they served a wide range of populations coping with various psychosocial issues, such as old age, disabilities, children at risk of abuse and neglect, youth in distress, poverty, housing problems, and addiction.
The first author spent four and a half months at the department, interviewing all staff members (n = 28), participating in staff meetings, and taking part in the daily routines of the department and its staff. She spent approximately 390 h at the SSD from March to July 2021.
Participants
The participants in this study were the SSD's 28 staff members (three identified themselves as males, the rest as females). Their average age was 46 years (range: 29–64.5 years). On average, the social workers had 18.5 years of professional experience (range: 2–40 years) and had worked 8.5 years at the same SSD (range: 0.5–37.5 years).
Data collection
The department manager gave her initial agreement to join the study after she met the first author (they had been part of a joint project 10 years earlier) and heard from her about the study, its aims, and the details of the fieldwork. After this initial agreement, the researcher was invited to a staff meeting (conducted on Zoom), where she had the opportunity to present the project, explain what was expected of the staff members, and discuss how participants’ privacy would be maintained throughout the fieldwork. Shortly thereafter, the department held a social gathering before a holiday. The researcher asked to join this event and met some of the staff in person for the first time there. Once the holiday was over, the staff returned to full-time work on site at the department after over a year of rotating between working from home and at the department due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Data collection included three main segments: individual interviews with staff members, participation in various staff meetings, and “deep hanging out” (Geertz, 1998) at the department. Meticulous notes were taken throughout the fieldwork.
All staff members were interviewed at least once, and some were interviewed twice. In total, 40 interviews that lasted one to two and a half hours were conducted. Interviews began with the signing of a consent form, were audio-recorded, and followed a loosely structured interview guide that traced the daily routine of the social workers at the department, their views on professionalism, and moments when they felt meaningful as well as moments when they felt despair. Participants were prompted to provide detailed examples from their everyday practice. All interviews were transcribed and carefully reviewed by the authors as they simultaneously read the texts and listened to the recordings. The transcripts were sent to the participants with an invitation to comment on them. No participants sent written comments regarding the content of the transcripts, but those who received their transcripts while the first author was still in midst of fieldwork commented verbally on the strange experience of reading their own words so thoroughly, down to the last syllable. Transcripts that were reviewed after the fieldwork was over were sent to participants by email.
In addition, the fieldwork included participation in and observation of meetings. Permission to observe was secured from all participating members at the beginning of each meeting. Meetings included weekly staff meetings, ad-hoc professional consultations between several social workers, steering committees of specific projects where supervisors and professionals external to the department joined in, and multi-professional meetings with service users.
Alongside personal interviews and scheduled meetings, the first author participated in the department's daily routine, having coffee and lunching with staff members and generally engaging in “deep hanging out” (Geertz, 1998) that included small talk about life, child-rearing, marriage, vacation plans, Netflix offerings, and more.
Data analysis
In ethnographic research, data collection, analysis, and writing are inextricably linked (O’Reilly, 2012). Nevertheless, we began the formal analysis by transcribing the recorded interviews and rereading the field notes. The analysis loosely followed Tracey's iterative approach (Tracy, 2013), alternating between open analysis of the data and the use of existing models, explanations, and theories. First, all transcripts were holistically read and discussed thoroughly to answer the question: “How is agency manifested in what social workers do (or do not do)?” We then uploaded all the transcripts to Dedoose (qualitative analysis software) for initial sorting and coding. First-order descriptive codes were developed to capture how and when social workers enact agency. We then developed second-order analytic themes that reflected issues emerging from our review of the literature. At this point, we sorted acts of agency into various distinct modes and began to identify the four modes of agency described in this article. Ahmed's concept of the willful subject began to emerge at this point as a relevant and powerful anchor. We continued our analysis by using this lens until the modes of agency we identified were sufficiently illuminating, contextualized, and grounded in the raw data.
Ethical issues and challenges
All interviews began with the signing of a consent form by the interviewee and interviewer. To maintain confidentiality, we use pseudonyms throughout the findings section and mention minimal identifying details. This is especially pertinent given that all the social workers in the SSD where fieldwork was conducted participated in the study. All participants received the transcripts of their interviews and were invited to comment on them..
Findings
Our analysis points to four modes of agency: challenging bureaucracy and regulations; standing up to colleagues, supervisors, and managers; pushing through austerity; and disrupting professional norms and expectations. It is important to note that these modes of agency are not mutually exclusive; the same social worker would often express all modes of agency during fieldwork in various situations. All social workers expressed all modes of agency under different circumstances. We present here key examples to demonstrate the four modes of agency we identified.
Challenging bureaucracy and regulations
Regulating everyday social work practice through standardization, bureaucracy, and forms is an essential component of the neoliberal welfare state (e.g., Dustin, 2007; Rogowski, 2020). Notably, challenging bureaucracy and regulations was the most prevalent form of agency among our research participants. A good example of this mode was the introduction of a new mandatory computer program to the social workers. The Ministry of Welfare and Social Services introduced the new computer program to standardize the traditional psychosocial reports that social workers write for and about their clients. The following scenario is from the field notes taken while the first author attended the meeting in which the staff was introduced to the new software. Steve, a software engineer, came to the SSD to provide guidance on the new program to the social workers. He explained that the computerization process was intended to help in managing committees and creating uniformity between SSDs across Israel. Steve demonstrated how to choose family members on which to write reports and identify strengths and challenges for each family member from a drop-down menu. Bracha, a veteran social worker, commented that the program “lacked a human touch” because everything is presented in drop-down menus. Zehava, also a veteran social worker, remarked, “you’re doomed if you don’t have the right rubric to choose from,” and continued “why do I need this thing?! I’m retiring!”. Hardly five minutes into the meeting, the discussion was becoming heated. Zehava once again wondered “why do I need this thing?!” Tal, a young social worker, answered, “This whole thing is about liability. In case something happens, they can open [it] and look,” and Michelle, a veteran social worker, added, “this is unbelievable.” Steve continued with the instruction, and the mumbling and grumbling went on.
Steve showed the output of a final report on the screen. The social workers in the room were furious: Our reports are written like stories, and this looks like a table. This is how it comes out?! In rubrics?? Like at the doctor's [office]. I’m
going to drink whisky. What is this thing?! We’ve become clerks. Before we know it, there will be a button that you press to give you the
solutions [to the families’ issues]. They’ve turned us into bureaucrats. No emotion, no soul, no discretion …
This [the new program] makes me so angry! Am I a social worker so
I can fill in rubrics?? I’m not a doctor! And all of this for what? So they
[the Ministry] will know the numbers! It makes me very mad.
This meeting demonstrated that the social workers saw the adoption of the new software as an attempt to regulate their report writing. Steve played the role of representing the Ministry and explained the rationale behind this move. What Steve did not discuss overtly, but the social workers realized immediately, was that this computerized tool also comprises a form of surveillance over the social workers and allows the Ministry to see what is being done at any given moment without needing to request the data. It seems, though, that what triggered the social workers more than anything was the attack on their discretion in report writing and their ability to imbue reports with what they consider necessary “emotion and spirit.” The words they would use to portray service users and insert information they believe to be of professional value and relevance are replaced with drop-down menus and rubrics to be filled in. It appears that the writing of reports, often described as daunting, is nevertheless an important professional activity and a means of expressing agency that the participants in our study did not want to give up. While their resistance might have stemmed in part from fear of change and technophobia, the description of this meeting illustrates how the social workers challenged the bureaucracy and regulation that decreased their sense of agency.
Another example of agency in the form of challenging bureaucracy and regulation was demonstrated by Dana, the social worker of a national program that offers social and educational support to youth. To receive funding, Dana is required to prove to her supervisors that teenagers are registered in the programs she offers. Registration in the programs is conditional upon the participants being listed as welfare clients. This bureaucratic hurdle poses a real challenge, as the following excerpt reveals: There is an expectation that we will open a file in the SSD for youth who come to the programs we offer. I tried to talk about this to various supervisors to no avail. It is a known problem in this program nationwide. If I am doing a workshop on positive sexuality in one of the high schools, and I see kids two or three times, I won’t open files in the department for everyone who comes! [But] if we don’t open the files, we don’t get the money to run the programs. So we find all kinds of workarounds. Say there's a family already registered and one of the kids is an adolescent. I will “steal” that adolescent and register them on their own and in the program … Another thing that I sometimes do when I have no other choice is to open a file for six months for that adolescent without their knowledge or consent. I absolutely hate doing this. It stands in contradiction to everything I believe in, but if I want to offer the program, I sometimes have to [resort to this] workaround … After six months, I close the file, but when necessary that kid will continue participating in the program … This [our interview] doesn’t go to the Ministry, right? [laughing]
During a professional meeting, Ravit, who works in the SSD's addiction unit, provided another example of how bureaucracy and regulations are challenged. The family under discussion was in the care of several social workers, and they all came together to consider their complex situation. The father was in Ravit's care for his sex addiction. During the meeting, she explained that while sex addiction should be treated by professionals from the Ministry of Health, not the Ministry of Welfare, she was working with him in the absence of other options.
During her interview, Ravit elaborated on this case and others where she took service users under her care when she was not supposed to, for example, one service user who continued to smoke cannabis once a week and another who continued to abuse drugs and alcohol occasionally. She commented, “Of course, I’m not supposed to see them. Treatment should be terminated after three months if the person is not 100% clean [of drug and alcohol abuse]. But I do continue, and I just don’t talk about it with my supervisor…”. When asked why she challenges these regulations, Ravit explained: “I am certain that some things have their own rhythms and things should unfold, and this doesn’t always happen in accordance with the pace set by, you know, supervisors or whatever.” As evidence of her deep conviction, she shared that the service user who had been abusing alcohol on and off for a year had finally checked himself into rehab, explaining, “I knew it was a matter of time until he would be ready for full-on institutional rehab. I gave him the time he needed.”
The staff meeting described above, as well as the examples of Dana's and Ravit's bypassing of regulations, demonstrate social workers’ agency in challenging bureaucracy and regulations. Social workers find ways to bend the rules in the face of procedures that determine who can benefit from certain services and when and how they can do so.
Standing up to colleagues, supervisors, and managers
In addition to challenging bureaucracy and regulations, agency was evidenced in the form of social workers doing or saying things that were not in line with the explicit or implicit expectations of colleagues, managers, and supervisors, as Bracha's story demonstrated. Bracha was the family social worker of a family with a very ill baby. Following claims that the parents were not taking the baby to all the medical appointments—a situation that put the child's life at risk—a child protection officer became involved with the family. Eventually, the baby was removed from the family and placed in foster care. When the time came to consider whether to return the baby to its birth parents or extend its stay with the foster family, all the professionals involved in the decision, except for Bracha, were unanimously in favor of extending the baby's stay with the foster care family: There was a very clear disagreement between us [the professionals]. But not in front of the family … at every opportunity I had, in every discussion—and there were plenty—I voiced my opinion loud and clear. In every report that was written, I made sure that there would be a side note with my minority opinion that I thought this baby should be back with its parents.
A similar case of voicing a minority opinion was observed during a professional meeting concerning a family in which both parents, who lived apart, suffered from addiction. The discussion revolved around how the father, whose institutionalized rehabilitation was coming to an end, would see his three children, who lived with the mother. The six social workers in the room, all involved with the family in different roles, discussed whether he would see his children freely or under supervision. The question of supervising the meetings was grounded in the concern that he might pose a risk to his children. Much of the discussion was technical and involved who would do the supervision, how, where, and when. At some point, Rotem and Ravit disputed the question of risk altogether and argued that he was the father and it was his right to see his children. They both noted that he had completed rehab and posed no danger until it was proven otherwise. The discussion was becoming loud and heated, and the other social workers in the room thought supervision was necessary. Rotem and Ravit insisted that he was now drug-free and should be treated as such. Rotem left the room after Ella, the family social worker and case manager, shouted at them that they are being unreasonable and putting the children at risk.
Michelle, a child protection social worker, also shared a story about standing up to supervisors. She was asked by her supervisor to transfer all the material on a certain family to the SSD in the family's new hometown. As a child protection officer, Michelle has the power to share clients’ information with other state institutions without clients’ consent. Because the mother had refused to sign a release form to share her information, Michelle was asked to use her legal power to transfer the material. She refused. The supervisor was furious. Michelle explained her position as follows: I was not involved in this case. I was not called upon as a child protection worker. That means that the children's situation was not so dire, right? So why are you now overriding their right to refuse to share information? You didn’t ask for my opinion at any point. You just want to use my legal power to do something without the mother's consent. I have no grounds to do so… [The supervisor and the department manager] were furious. They didn’t talk to me for two weeks.
Another example of agency as standing up to others, this time to the direct manager, was demonstrated by Rotem, who described a tense situation in which they were asked to take on a leading role by the department's manager and refused to do so. The social services department had the opportunity to receive extra funding for opening a violence prevention center. Rotem was the obvious go-to social worker at the department to ask to take on the establishment and management of this new service; they had the right credentials, seniority, and practical experience to take on this role. But Rotem refused: I asked for more hours and professional supervision as conditions to take this on … they [the department manager] said no, so I said no as well. They were furious, still are… This was the first time I drew a line and said no.
The enactment of agency even when it means standing up to colleagues, managers, and supervisors with whom they engage daily is demonstrated in the actions that Bracha, Ravit, Michelle, and Rotem reported.
Pushing through austerity
Finding ways, at times very creatively, to push through austerity was another mode of agency we identified among social workers. We choose three examples to demonstrate how the research participants worked around meagre resources and attempt to overcome austerity daily.
Ella explained how she went above and beyond the call of duty to find ways to support the families she works with: Several times, I independently requested and received special donations for families in my care. I got tickets to a waterpark. I got a yearly membership to the pool. Things like that. I mean, I won’t always get things, but no stone is left unturned. I will do whatever I can.
Tal also shared a story about doing whatever she can to fight austerity. An older service user in her care had been battling poor dental health for many years and wanted to treat their dental problems once and for all. Tal set out to find ways to budget dental treatment, using her personal network and demonstrating creativity: I contacted a dental student who needed the hours for their internship. They agreed to see my client for a nominal fee. I told my client, “whatever they ask of you, I’ll file a request for participation … and I’ll get full reimbursement. I don’t know how but I’ll do whatever I can”. … and I knew I would go into [the department manager's] office and talk it over as much as needed so that eventually they would approve my request.
Bracha shared a story about a single mother with young children struggling to make ends meet. When she shared her suicidal ideation, Bracha suggested the mother go to an outpatient mental health clinic for three months of intensive therapy. The service user complied, but could not afford to lose three months’ income. Bracha then ensured everything possible was done to make this plan feasible, and the removal of the children from the mother's custody was avoided. [The mother] understood she needed this intensive intervention, but could not afford to lose her workplace and income. So we built a very practical and meticulous plan. We calculated how much income she would lose during this time. There was no budget line we could use, so we worked around it … I’m a bit concerned [the interview] is being recorded … there are other budgets … for example for clothing, for buying a closet, and things like that. So for that period, we used whatever budget line we could. It's not like we did something completely illegal, but, you know, we did cut some corners. We stepped out of the box and found creative solutions.
Bracha demonstrates agency by pushing back on austerity. She needed available cash to help her client through a rough patch, but budgets are meagre and designated for specific purposes. When service users’ needs do not fit the correct budget rubric, there is little that can be done, but Bracha managed to bend the rules to help her client. The implications were life-changing. If Bracha had operated strictly according to the rules, she would have had to report the mother's suicidal ideation to a child protection officer (due to the risk it posed to the children) and very likely begin a harrowing process that might have ended with the children's removal from their mother's care. Bracha did report to the child protection officer, but only after establishing a feasible plan.
Ella, Tal, and Bracha persevere in pursuing monetary goods and services for their clients in the face of austerity. Their everyday practices and struggles to provide their clients with what they need demonstrate not only the meagre resources available to them but also the rigidity of budget distribution and the efforts required to use them in different, sometimes creative, ways.
Disrupting professional norms and expectations
Another form of agency among social workers was evident in acts that disrupted professional norms and expectations as understood by the social workers themselves. Alex talked about a single mother whom she desperately wanted to assist: … I was completely on board to find creative solutions for some of the dire issues she was facing. I went to this warehouse and I sifted through children's clothes and I got her a huge bag of great clothes. I also got shoes for her girl and lots of other items. I did lots of things for this family. Later, very gently during a supervision meeting, my supervisor told me that this was not part of my job and I should not be doing these things because [the service user] might get used to everything being delivered to her doorstep. My supervisor scolded me for overdoing it for that family … I flourish in these places of working creatively… but it's not professional and it is not what I am supposed to do … my heart is more that of a volunteer than a social worker. Being a social worker is right for me, it's the closest thing to what I want to do but it's not exactly it. So I do my best to be careful, but there are problems every once in a while. [laughs]
Alex draws a line between being a professional social worker and a volunteer. It seems that the narrow job perception she holds is uncomfortable for her. Yet her half-apologetic tone points to her alignment with and acceptance of this limited view of professionalism.
Michelle shared a story about defying professional norms. Some years ago, a client of hers was suffering from conjugal abuse. Michelle described the relationship between herself and the couple as a close one, as the following excerpt shows: One day [the service user] called, terrified, to tell me that her husband was furious and on his way home “to finish me off”. Now… a conventional social worker would have called the police right away. [Bringing in the] police means jail, and that's it. The story is over. Either he kills her … or she’ll be out in the streets. I mean, that's it for the family. So I took another social worker from the department with me, and we drove crazy fast to make it to their home before he came back. When he came in, he saw me. I already had his respect and trust. He looked at me and said, “What are you doing here?! Go away!” and I told him I wouldn’t go. “We are here to protect you from yourself. We’ll sit here as long as it takes until you give us your word that you are calm”. He protested but I didn’t budge. We sat there for hours, and eventually, he said, “Go, everything will be alright.” Only I can do such crazy things [sigh].
Michelle describes herself as an unconventional, “crazy” social worker. This craziness saved the family, according to her account. She later spoke of how grateful that family was for all that Michelle has done for them over the years.
Alex and Michelle demonstrate a form of agency that challenges and disrupts professional norms and expectations. Although not many stories of this kind were told during fieldwork, the ones reported here represent another mode of agency among social workers.
Discussion and implications
This article portrays social workers’ modes of agency as they arose in this ethnographic study: challenging bureaucracy and regulations; standing up to colleagues, supervisors, and managers; pushing through austerity; and disrupting professional norms and expectations. These four modes of agency position social workers as “willful subjects” (Ahmed, 2014).
The stories showcased throughout this article, accounts of self-willed, obstinate social workers intentionally and deliberately doing what they think and feel they should do, are stories of willful subjects. It is interesting to note that these actions resonate with critical social work practice, although our participants did not identify themselves as critical social workers. As Webb (2019) notes, “in performing these tasks the critical social worker opens up the prospect that things may have been different … In this way, critical social work helps stimulate the critical, creative, experimental and even utopian impulse” (p. xxxix). We do not claim that our participants were always willful, stubborn, or critical. The ethnographic fieldwork also exposed moments of silence and subordination. Yet incidents of willfulness were abundant, and we chose to focus on them in order to reveal the various ways in which social workers can become willful even when operating in established mainstream social services.
In Willful Subjects (2014), Ahmed opens with the Grimm brothers’ story of a willful child being punished for disobedience. Even when buried and covered with sand, the child's arm continues to rise, confusing and angering all the adults. Ahmed presents this disobedient, willful child, portrayed in the German fairy tale as a warning to willful children of the dire consequences they might face, as a subject worthy of admiration. Disobedience and willfulness are risky. Indeed, they cause the willful child's death. Yet, Ahmed calls upon us to be willful whenever and however we can, to raise our hands even when they are covered with sand or to scratch our fingernails against the brick wall to leave a mark, even if it is only a tiny one.
This article demonstrates what agency and willfulness look like and how they can change the lives of service users who gain access to services and programs that were not open to them, service users whose families are kept together, and those whose social workers fight for their rights. But does social workers’ willfulness, as depicted in this article, challenge the very structures against which social workers act as agents? Does their agency collapse into a radical vision that challenges neoliberalism? We could not identify evidence of such political awareness and motivation that guided social workers’ agency. The above stories of agency are mainly local and idiosyncratic. Some tell of performances of agency intended to serve the agent herself in her intra-organizational relationships. One might claim that such agency does little to challenge the structural constraints that permeate social workers’ and service users’ everyday practices. Giddens (1984) offers useful observations regarding agents’ actions: “acts have unintended consequences; and unintended consequences may systematically feedback to be the unacknowledged conditions of further acts” (p. 8). In other words, the question of the agent's intention and motivation becomes key; if social workers’ acts are not clearly motivated to create a new order, promote social justice, and challenge neoliberalism, but the unintended consequences of their actions do just that, can they still be called agents? Are they even performing agency? Giddens answers in the affirmative: Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place (which is why agency implies power)… Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently. Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened. (Giddens, 1984, p. 9, emphasis added)
The seemingly unheroic agency, this mundane willfulness of social workers, should be understood in the context of their working conditions and the structural constraints they are required to navigate in their everyday practice. We do not seek to glorify agentic performances or create a romantic illusion of heroic agency performed ‘against all odds’. On the contrary, we want to emphasize some elements of the daily working of social workers that portray their modes of agency as we observed it over an extended period of fieldwork.
Our findings are in line with those of previous research that calls for greater attention to the nuanced actions of social workers. Marston and Mcdonald (2012), for example, unpack the ways in which educational texts in social work contribute to the naïve conceptualization of social workers as “heroic agents” and the considerable mismatch between social workers’ everyday practice and the promise of being an agent of change. The authors call for a more humble starting point that takes into consideration what is and is not possible in the neoliberal welfare state while “maintaining a politics of hope” (p. 1034). In considering agency, they propose a more nuanced, less-than-heroic, examination of social workers’ agency. Fine and Teram (2012) also unpack the meanings of covert versus overt actions social workers take against social injustices and recognize nuanced ways of performing and realizing agency among social workers. They claim that neoliberalism erodes social justice to the point that merely being a social worker is considered heroism.
Another line of research highlights social workers’ micro-resistance: deploying complex strategies to support the realization of social justice and human dignity (Schiettecat et al., 2017), prioritizing professional discretion over system guidelines (Parada et al., 2007), and practicing critically within hegemonic discourses (Timor-Shlevin, 2021) are examples for how social workers find ways to work within the system while maneuvering and resisting some of its aspects to better meet their service users’ needs. Weinberg and Banks (2019) outline various methods social workers use for ethical resistance and conclude with a concern regarding the “burden of ethical resistance at the micro-level [when] working with individual service users.” They warn that “[if ]social workers do not make the links between ethics and politics and turn to overt and collective resistance, then social work's mission as a social justice profession is seriously undermined” (p. 373). At the same time, Weinberg and Banks, like most of the scholars cited above, recognize that “as spaces for discretion narrow, so scope for resistance also narrows, pushing social workers towards small-scale and covert actions” (p. 373).
We recognize that highlighting agency among social workers could, paradoxically, result in overburdened social workers feeling inadequate if they do not go above and beyond the call of duty to respond at an individual level to structural issues. We wish to accomplish just the opposite by joining the above body of scholarship that recognizes social workers’ agency, even when it is covert, nuanced, or idiosyncratic. By using Ahmed's concept of the willful subject to shed light on social workers’ modes of agency, we aim to gather the individual stories of agency and willfulness into a collective project. As Ahmed puts it, “it is not only about bringing individual stories together, but hearing each as a thread of a shared history. Strays, when heard together, are noisy” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 21). Thus, this article comprises an addition to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to highlight the importance and crucial value of seemingly small, tenacious acts of agency and willfulness.
We see social workers’ agency and willfulness as something to be acknowledged and nurtured. We see their scratches on the brick wall; they leave a mark and make a difference. Without oversimplifying complex structural problems or placing the burden to promote change on individual social workers, we maintain (radical) hope (Krumer-Nevo, 2020) and careful optimism and encourage us all—front-line practitioners, academics, and policymakers—to continue scratching the brick wall and collecting the dust under our fingernails. This is our proof that we are doing what we can under the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Limitations of the study
The study presented here was conducted in a social services department in a relatively affluent region of Israel. Arguably, social services in more affluent environments can do more prevention work and carry out fewer emergency interventions, allowing social workers more room for agency. This claim could be further examined in future research on the workings of social workers in less affluent regions and with a diverse clientele in Israel, particularly ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs. Furthermore, social workers’ agency is performed against the backdrop of neoliberal-capitalist regimes that may require social workers to be subtly willful subjects, but willful nonetheless. Further research is needed to bring this subtlety to light and conceptualize it.
Footnotes
Ethics
The study was approved by the research ethics board of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Declaration of conflict of interests
The Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
