Social Work, IS, a White Middle Class Christian (protestant) Profession.

And, for sure the profession is ignorantly ignorant of itself and arrogantly so.

And, for sure, the last 40 years have been about making up the numbers and appearances only.

Alernatively, Social Work, ISN’T, a White Middle Class etc etc is also true.

When we hear stuff about ‘cancel culture’ it’s about negating and negation; It’s what Zizek bashes on about and what for the past 100yrs has been a fight between national socialists (fascism), and Councils like the NHS are huge employers with active nationalist factions and international socialism or multiculturalism albeit eurocenteric and EU driven ~ seemingly movements such as BLM offering what the Unity movement didn’t.

Here’s a rub point:

We’re ALL being tossed around like bingo balls waiting for the lucky numbers to come up.

The narratives being set for us ALL are frankly crap.

On the one-hand it’s simply about ‘the kerching’ of Children’s Services offering a ROI to UKTEITs better than 8%.

While on the other is about the contribution the central government social work allocation makes to the global income of a Council.

The shift towards regionalism presents as a new cash cow. The opportunity to do something fresh and clutter free of hostilities is very powerful deception.

The Independent Foster and Adoption network has demonstrated this to Councils. The setting up of Children’s Trusts is also a kick-in-the-teeth too. The real issues are though about the ridiculously high prevalence both historically and ongoing child exploitation that involves those with duties to identify, monitor, report and act against it and don’t.

These are the current conditions. There’s been a complete dereliction of responsibilities and accountabilities. For sure there are alternatives, but when it blatantly becomes about the use of market forces as an answer to coverups, those alternatives must be so simple, yet so initially damn difficult, to turn the world upside down. I am thinking Rosa Parks.

I have been living right in amongst it all and done more social-working of the kind that’s really needed and really passing people off and then making up right within my own community.

But then I don’t hold any of the White Middle Class aspirations because I’m not middle class; it’s as simple as that. Rosa Parks-It Good and Proper.

Our society is in transition, and some say transcendence, either way the risks being taken with Children’s safety ie their right to life and a good quality of life can nolonger be assured. Unless we find are our own Rosa Parks and do something so damn different it makes the difference.

I know Kath Drescher has the same quality. And, metaphorically or alogorically this whole Review is about which bus we’re sitting on too.

Rosa Parks Saves Social Work. Discuss

In my view and experience those employees from minorty groups are still unlikely to be part of this specialist child protection service.What will be different to the services/initiatives currently in place, if it is not inclusive if social workers genuine views and experiences are not listen to and continue to be marginalized and invisible in the workforce.

Discrimination is more noticeable and continues to take place yet those in positions who can make a difference do nothing. Is this not one of the social work values? If this happens to employees in the workplace then how can an organization support or demonstrate empathy and understanding to its service users?

I simply ask what will be different if nothing is learned after so ,so many years.I am of the view nothing will change if the current practice continues.To be fair there is some practice which is balanced and inclusive however, it is sad to say this is the minority. My views are based on my experience and observations.

We’ve all walked through a hall of mirrors. Some of us have dared to Enter the Dragon and some of us have passed through the mirror.

I have been to Alec-in-Wonderland.

Once I could boast being Alec Fraher FMICoP, MIHM, AASW.

Now I am Alec Fraher cptsd, adhd, hfaust.

The former a long exercise in masking, of being an imposter in my own life. The latter, while heavy going, is authentic. This isn’t either/or it’s both and has always been so.

That I felt compelled to mask, which includes being accommodated as a teenager, is just wrong. But it’s systemic not personal, right?

Here’s the rub. Having done direct work with lots of “difficulty’ on balance I have to say that it’s the management and the machiavellian political nature of fraternal ties that’s the most problematic and actually the most scary of all.

I had no choice but to go native and bottom out the issues I made in the comments above, and that’s only half the story. And only one. There’s plenty of fire-side stories that’ll make you wince.

Here’s the rub with reflexivity:

In any assessment of whether a market exists or not it is the actual behaviourally determined and economic imprint that counts, or so one is told. It’s not true. All models of competition, which are socio-legal conditions, have reference to sets of behaviour that distinguish one from the other. Like, say, the Harvard School Model and its use of Structure-Conduct-Performance criteria drawn from a study of 780 organisations, both public and private to cluster what’s called the DNA of the organisation.(see Gary Neilson et al 2008; Or the EU Model of ‘Effective Competition’ currently being used to determine the Northern Ireland Protocol and based, originally, on the European Foundations for Quality Management, (EFQM) and crafted as a response to the US and Harvard School Model. Neither Model however good is though designed for austerity.They are steady state approaches suited to equilibria in much the same way as John Nash first thought and more latterly remodelled by Yanis Vafourcois, the former Greek Finance Minister and like John Nash, bringing genius to the table. What was ignored though is that these models create the conditions for ‘extreme commensurability’ and assume that the principle of transitivity remains constant. They don’t. The failure to recognise that the US ditched the Harvard School Model after the financial meltdown in 2008 and reverted to the more dilberately aggressive Post Chicago School Model of Competitive Rivalary. This is the active and hegemonic model in use today although the EU are playing the long game nurturing trade with South Africa, Africa and Brazil along the same lines. The UK is however locked into the US and their use of the Post Chicago School Model.

Unsurprisingly, social work when seen in it’s widest context absorbed by competition too. Constantly trying to prove the existence of values knowing the gap between what’s said and what’s done is wideningly so wide it’s not a gap anymore but chasm.

Sure, ten years of a starvation policy only added of the growing urgency to prove that the profession has at least a societal utilitarian value which is measurable.

Afterall giving children 6mths in Oxford is betterthan a life-time in the inner city or burntout outer estate, right?

It’s though the short run disruption that’s counted as a measurement of a successful outcome. The axioms within the Post Chicago School Model limit, through deregulation, the vertical issues of economic hegemony of the state ownership of welfare, the horizontal axis of measured outcomes being created by internally generated computational algorithmic reality that’s divorced from the real physical world. Getting passed the micro-macro schism is though a tough call.

Post structural and Post Marxist thinkers like, Zizek, make useful contributions to our understanding of this.

Here’s the choke point of reflection with reflexivity:

The appointment of people with known criminal pasts, and this could include,say, Benjamin Zephaniah, in social-working has become almost a prerequisite necessity to gain access to people and places now out-of-reach. Indeed, one could say that it’s a pedagogic achievement. It’s far from being new ground either. How far this goes though requires fresh thinking. I grew up in one of those places decade’s ago. Social-work and social-working were an everyday part of life it was ordinary and even though you’d never let-on a welcomed service.

If, and as I am not sure of, there’s such a thing as an Ethical Market (see the work of the, late, but brilliant Lavinia Weissman on Ecology) then are Children’s Services the place to test it?

How, if being care experienced isn’t accepted properly and substantively, within existing arrangements is the lure of competitive rivalry to be avoided? It’s, now, systemic, no? Culture wars within Social Work are locked-in. They arise from structural determinations, like which Model of Competition is in use, and the use of such models to exaggerate existing issues of discrimination within the institution of Social Work.

In Heideggerian terms the is, is also, isn’t. Discuss.

The works mentioned above are seated, inpart, on reaching an anticipatory consciousness of real possible. That’s the language of the Review. The genesis of which is nested in Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope. A utilitarian approach meets with the transactional reduction of Social Work to it’s necessarily regulatory requirements. This needs looking at and the Review says it will. My concern is that the adjustment will only be transactional too. The evidence shows up as legal illiteracy with primary legislation being driven by adopted-in secondary legislation, like the Outsourcing and Deregulation of Contracting Act 1994.

Of course tinkering with the machinery gives the appearance of improvement but really? The essence of social-working is that people need people to stick up for them when family can’t or won’t do it, hence advocacy being a core ethic.

A remedy rests within this. Imagine, and this includes an Ontological Violation, a project led by an anticipated conscious written by a yet to become Dr Kath Drescher. A balanced feminist appraisal of the future Adoption and Fostering Services. I say feminist because misogyny is rife and patriarchy in all its capitalist incarnations fails men and boys too. The incorporation of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Laura Doyle and Babette Babich into such a project would lift Social Work immeasurably and make it relevant, again.

Just saying Kath.

Earlier Martin (8/9th February) asked about a Philosophical basis in Social Work. In meeting our requirements for reflexivity, I suggest, and in the context of this Review, we’d be grateful for Lyotard and his handling of the meta-narrative, in Differend. Babette Babich, was once asked IS the moon made from Green Cheese, perhaps, her handling of the question poses similarly minded questions of knowing if a child IS being abused. Heidegger’s treatment of ‘being’ is about the ‘Aboutness of IS’. These philosopher treatise inform the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. Being a Child IS a protected and fundamentally so. Don’t let the crappy dualism of the Reviews narratives distress or distract from this. Governments and Ministers come and go. Social Work impacts across the life-span. Be the Differend. Difference not Difficulty is the basis for negotiation about pay and terms and conditions.

Developing further a ‘Social Work as Mesoscopic Inquiry: A Case Against Methods Management in Children’s Services’ is yet to be written. Do it.

This Work by Bojan Radej sets out the basis for the case to be made:

http://veronpress.com/book/1083

Weeds on the Ruin, perhaps. While Kavan Barron MP, then chair of the HofC Health Select Committee wrote the job off as a failure.Margret Hodge MP, then, chair of the PASC retained some hope saying ‘Let a thousand Flowers Bloom’.

Leadership is, or can be, distributive. Management is a whole different thing and remains largely driven by egoic personality.

This is though a 20 year old perspective as is a reliance on systemic notions of Safe Uncertainty first championed in family based work and almost ideologically at odds with Protectionist based work.

Zizek was, perhaps, one of the first to articulate a criticism of postmodernism and cultural symbolism. I say, ‘perhaps’ because the likes of Terry Eagleton, the late and great Stuart Hall, were some who saw the fragmentation long before anyone else. The presenting problems are as much to with the sneaky valorisation of psychoparaceuticality and institutional ‘interpassivity’ as Zizek called it renders the making of zero-sum games and nihilism if not annihilation the only game in town. I wrote about this in ‘Beyond the Steady State’ on 12manage.com. The legacy of a theoretical dependence on Althusserian thought is past it’s manifestations as offering praxis. The inherent dualism between micro-macro is done. The adoption of a middle ground epistemology of ‘Systems Thinking’ once a right-wing adjunct to Thatcherism is now the proposed error in knowledgement within LocHov now amenable, through the likes of Critical Systems Thinking, or Total Systems Intervention to be politically acceptable. This is the theoretical territory and the concepts shaping children’s services. The maps are wrong. The Thought Errancy is simply staggering. Zizek’s work helps but within the dualism of a Hegelialism bound by Hermeneutics. It is theoretically an ever circular dramaturgy. It is, rather bizarrely, a product of the very school of thought giving-voice to the Thatcher-Regan-Gorbachov era. The idea of Market Socialism and the rise of the Post Chicago School Model of Competition.

We are where we are because 50 years ago we started smoking from the cigarette of the Bolkenstein Directive of 1957. Were now going through the withdrawal from an addiction. It’s all ideological and illusionary.

Reading Zizek for Social Work is a good idea. Developing Social Work as Mesoscopic Inquiry is better.

The UK has much to learn from the post soviet Balkans not least because of the increased tension between the desolved nations. The organisation of a TikTok school rebellion is Anarcho-Syndalism at it’s best. That Salman Rushdie and Benjamin Zephaniah are features of a cultural renaissance are transcultural and transgenerational.

This is a once in a life-time opportunity. Taking it does though require being present and having agency enough to participate. And, with pun intended, that’s why agency v permanent staff, Council v RCCs the general either/or dualism is theoretically an error and massively so.

We have an inheritance for those crafting LASSA that’s being unpicked by, say, the insertion of the Outsourcing and Deregulation of Contracting Act 1994, which appears on the face of both the Children Act 2004, Working Together Guidance and the Care Act 2014.

WTF, right? Do something. We’re standing on the shoulders of Giants and there’s loads of us.

Imagine, and this is real, that the very services ‘commissioned’ to tackle drug and substance abuse employed a manager known by drug treatment services user’s, in this instance woman who’ve had children removed, to be a class A dealer. Imagine that the Magistrate making their DRR was also their former client, and client of the same manager. Now imagine that that the Director of the DAAT rented a property, to live in, from the dealers supplier as did, for office purpose, CAFCAS. Now imagine that 3 board level executives looking into this had historic involvement in child abuse. Imagine also that the service manager was formerly an internationally wanted heroin dealer.

Ironically, while I have grave concern about the procedural compatibility and use of procure and contracting processes in children’s services, without the rigour of due diligence it affords this rats nest would have gone on, not unnoticed, but with very little that could, evidentially and to criminal law standards, be done. I lost my case because there’s no requirement, in Information Management Requirements Law, for any record to be held.

Without tight relations with the Police and police intelligence not only are children like Toni Ann Byfield more likely to get hurt and fatally so the very integrity of children’s services are wholly and irreparably subverted. I was counselled against doing anything. I rejected the advice.

I’ve just seen this Martin. Apologise for being rude too. And, sure there’s a whole host of starting positions. I plumbed for ontology but not at the expense of epistemology nor indeed philosophy. I did so based on the notions of how indeterminacy and incommensurability, and their irreducibility defy the inherent dualism of dialectics and dialogical arguementation. Consider, if you will, that Social Work necessitates, often demanding, ontological violation as a basis for action. Suggesting, as I wrote, that advocacy is a key determination isn’t to suggest there aren’t any others. It is to suggest that this reduction locates social-working in power relations. In other comments, which is a poor way of going about this, the idea, developed by Bojan Radej, of Social Work occupying a Third Space of message inquiry and beyond the orthogonality of Hegel. Zizek’s reliance on Althusserian and Lacan limits the options available. The difficulty of my starting position though rests not with contradiction but transcendence from nihilism. Consider, the statement Nothing, Actually Works and draw from Zizek’s treatment of idea’s western buddhism or secular buddhism as some call it and one gets closer to seeing the results of Thought Errancy or as EP Thompson said The Orrery of Errors. I could go on but not here. Again apologies for being rude. And hope this provides something by way of an apology. btw I’ve been in chat with Bojan Radej for a decade or more about nothingness/emptiness and the sailing of voids. For me the nature of being-in-the-world is itself limited by a reliance on hermeneutics ~ understanding requires a material position of being-under-in the world and rather counterintutively hides the conservatism and authoritarian idea’s of the likes of Schmitt. Helen Kennedy was saying as much in 87.She was silenced. Babette Babich is a rich source of information on the idea of Thought Errancy and Desire and travels a similar path as Zizek. I rather like the, The Middle, as articulated by Bojan Radej. He’s worth checking out if you’ve not done so.

Why would I joke about ontology? I was curious to know what you think the ontology of social work is, hence my question. From your reply, I get the impression you think the answer is obvious (and so I could only be joking when I asked).

I see in one of your other comments that you have answered more seriously, and for you, the ontology of SW is advocacy. And maybe it is.

Not everyone agrees of course – indeed, some would say that by looking to define “the” ontology of social work, we miss something important, and that the philosophical underpinnings of social work are necessarily more dynamic, dialogical and interactive than that.

Anyway….hope you have a good one. (That’s not a joke either.)