Local orders and global chaos in social work

Abstract

We live, supposedly, in a run away global world that ispermeated with risk, disaster and uncertainty. Social work, at leastat the level of policy and research, has been seen to be respondingto the globalization discourse. Its tendency is to try and deepenits own institutional reflexivity with a growing awareness of itsown 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 roleto play with any new global order, should such an order exist. Thereare 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 expertsystems hardly support claims for a ‘global social work’. This paper attempts to clear the logjam of the increasinglyunproductive debates about globalization and social work. Thesedebates both set an allegedly beneficial ethical welfarism againstthe impersonal forces of globalization and thereby wish to enlargethe ethical purchase of social work; or present globalization asan inevitable phenomenon that has deleterious effects on socialwork and therefore ought to be resisted. Social work is therebyreformulated and extended as a potential solution to some of theills of an alienating and immoral global force. Against a prospectof social work movements being individually and structurally transformativeon a global level, it is argued that local cultural orders of reflexivityare the ground from which to properly understand the purpose andremit of its practices. It is claimed that any notion of a globalor transnational social work is little more than a vanity. Localculture orders of reflexivity—concentrating as they doon the raw stuff of interactions, plans, interventions and ethics—recognizethe need for a shared culture of depth understanding that comeswith being native to that culture as a language user and agent ofthe kinesics and proxemics of ‘being-here’. Neitherthe nation-state nor irredentism provide a basis for a perfect matchbetween culture and successful practice, but without either of thesewithin whose borders each of us lives, the idea of social work asculturally sensitive to the lives of others with whom we are workingbecomes increasingly distant and difficult. This position relieson a strong conception of the ‘encumbered self’ usedin communitarian political theory. This paper argues that by ignoringthe communitarian encumbered self the literature on globalizationand social work is insufficiently sensitive to the importance oflanguage and culture and ignores the role social work plays in maintaininglocal cultural diversity. Some kinds of social or political practice do not needa high degree of cultural literacy as does social work and thereforecan engage in promoting a neo-liberal fantasy of a ‘globalthis or that’. The realities of front-line practice letalone the actual economic constraints on social welfare spendingrather insist that we set our sights at the level of the nation-stateas the basic unit of administrative responsibility for social care.It also insists that the thick stuff of social interactions is onlyunderstandable in terms of a situated self. This paper is thus anargument for the situated and embodied knowledge of social workand against various forms of unlocatable global knowledge claims.Within certain literature on globalization and social work there isa premium on establishing the capacity to see the wider picturefrom the peripheries and the depths, with the occidental socialworker looking in from the outside. But here lies a serious dangerof romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of say the lesspowerful while claiming to see things from their position.