Local orders and global chaos in social work

Abstract

We live, supposedly, in a run away global world that is permeated with risk, disaster and uncertainty. Social work, at least at the level of policy and research, has been seen to be responding to the globalization discourse. Its tendency is to try and deepen its own institutional reflexivity with a growing awareness of its own place within the new information age and neo-liberal moral order. In this paper it is suggested that social work has at best a minimal role to play with any new global order, should such an order exist. There are developments within social work that could have global significance, for instance, the spread of actuarial technologies and risk management. However, information networks and the universalization of expert systems hardly support claims for a 'global social work'.This paper attempts to clear the logjam of the increasingly unproductive debates about globalization and social work. These debates both set an allegedly beneficial ethical welfarism against the impersonal forces of globalization and thereby wish to enlarge the ethical purchase of social work; or present globalization as an inevitable phenomenon that has deleterious effects on social work and therefore ought to be resisted. Social work is thereby reformulated and extended as a potential solution to some of the ills of an alienating and immoral global force. Against a prospect of social work movements being individually and structurally transformative on a global level, it is argued that local cultural orders of reflexivity are the ground from which to properly understand the purpose and remit of its practices. It is claimed that any notion of a global or transnational social work is little more than a vanity. Local culture orders of reflexivity-concentrating as they do on the raw stuff of interactions, plans, interventions and ethics-recognize the need for a shared culture of depth understanding that comes with being native to that culture as a language user and agent of the kinesics and proxemics of 'being-here'. Neither the nation-state nor irredentism provide a basis for a perfect match between culture and successful practice, but without either of these within whose borders each of us lives, the idea of social work as culturally sensitive to the lives of others with whom we are working becomes increasingly distant and difficult. This position relies on a strong conception of the 'encumbered self' used in communitarian political theory. This paper argues that by ignoring the communitarian encumbered self the literature on globalization and social work is insufficiently sensitive to the importance of language and culture and ignores the role social work plays in maintaining local cultural diversity. Some kinds of social or political practice do not need a high degree of cultural literacy as does social work and therefore can engage in promoting a neo-liberal fantasy of a 'global this or that'. The realities of front-line practice let alone the actual economic constraints on social welfare spending rather insist that we se...

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