Review of A quarter century of normalization and social role valorization: Evolution and impact.

Abstract

ROBERT J. FLYNN and RAYMOND A. LEMAY (Eds.) A Quarter Century of Normalization and Social Role Valorization: Evolution and Impact Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 1999, xiv + 571 pages (ISBN 0-7766-0485-6, C$35, Softcover) Reviewed by ALDRED NEUFELDT The word began to appear in North American psychology a little over 30 years ago (Bank-- Mikkelsen, 1969; Nirje, 1969), and became more widely known through the work of Wolfensberger in 1972. Although restricted at first to the area of mental retardation, it and its successor concept, role valorization, came eventually to have a considerable impact on the ways that psychologists think about and organize a wide range of human services - residential, employment, and educational - as they affect vulnerable groups in society, notably, people with cognitive and physical impairments. These concepts have also had an impact on economic policy (e.g., OECD, 1992). But knowledge and understanding of them have not become as widespread amongst psychologists as they deserve. The book under review represents an opportunity to remedy this, and may succeed where two previous books (Wolfensberger, 1972; Flynn & Nitsch, 1982) had more limited impact. The present book grew out of an international conference aimed at examining the contributions of the normalization and social role valorization concepts since the early-1970s. Where the previous two books were largely conceptual in nature, this one devotes a substantial amount of space to research, theory, and critique from various points of view. Early formulations of normalization in Denmark (by Bank-Mikkelsen) and Sweden (by Nirje) were fairly simple in their intent and definition. Building on a general human rights framework, they sought to achieve living conditions for people with intellectual impairment. As Nirje told an American audience in 1969, this involved rights to a normal rhythm of the day, the week, year, normal experiences of life cycle, normal environment patterns, and so on. Wolfensberger saw the potential of the concept as a principle that would counteract the devalued ways in which society, including human service providers, tend to think about and act, often subconsciously, in relation to people with significant and obvious impairments. While Wolfenberger's analysis of mental retardation as deviancy was not unique, his emphasis on the role of ideology in human service planning and its relation to the normalization principle was. Furthermore, his 1972 publication was timely. It coincided, first, with a readiness on the parts of governments in Canada and the United States to give priority to funding for mental retardation. Policy makers, partly because of strong advocacy by parent organizations and partly for economic and human rights reasons, were becoming aware of the problems with large residential institutions as a service solution of choice. Moreover, there was a growing recognition that societal values, as well as scientific knowledge, should be an explicit part of social policy formulation. Since then, value considerations have become a routine part of planning in virtually all spheres. Normalization, then, was a timely concept which in the space of a decade became, in various forms, part of at least the rhetoric of policy makers and human service providers. Like many insightful concepts, it was also subject to distortion. Detractors argued that one could not (or should not) make people normal, though Wolfensberger never urged that. Normalization was also used by educational psychologists to justify mainstreaming, which was a vast oversimplification of anything that Wolfensberger had proposed. By the early-1980s, Wolfensberger decided that normalization was too prone to misinterpretation, so he advanced the new and broader concept of social role valorization (SRV) (Wolfensberger, 1983). This new concept made use of role theory more explicitly than its predecessor. …