Anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices are considered essential components of social work education and practice. This paper charts the rise and rationale for these initiatives, detailing the social and political factors that influenced their development and incorporation into the profession. The criticism of such measures from a variety of perspectives is also discussed. Whilst this was at times vitriolic and did affect policy, the claim that it constituted a backlash is contested. Influenced by a Marxist view of the state and Foucauldian insights into both the power of discourse and controlling aspects of the ‘helping professions’, it is argued that what were considered radical measures have now become institutionalized and in the process lost their original meaning. Anti-oppressive social work, rather than being a challenge to the state has allowed the state to reposition itself once again as a benign provider of welfare, and via the anti-oppressive social worker is able to enforce new moral codes of behaviour on the recipients of welfare.

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In this article we discuss what Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus can add to psychologically informed debates around social class. We argue that habitus offers a way of coming to terms with the complexity and different dimensions of social class. For Bourdieu, habitus conceptualises the internalisation of social structures, how the "outer" becomes the "inner." This distinct psychological question is critical for Bourdieu's "psychoanalysis of the social." We argue that Bourdieu's habitus ties in with psychologically informed views on classed existence, but can also function as a tool to further psychological studies by suggesting a broader focus and pointing to aspects that tend to be underrepresented in mainstream psychological research, and that are also difficult to dissect from a psychological vantage point. In particular, questions of structural (power) inequalities and their reproduction on a communal as well as on an individual level are at the core of Bourdieu's habitus concept, but these are often absent from contemporary class analysis. Finally, we argue that for all its complexity, the habitus concept can inform research on a practical level by enabling exploration of the complexity and messiness of the classed nature of everyday experience.

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