6Recommendations for Action

Social work theories are intended not only to explain situations but also to provide ideas about which practical methods to follow: leading from the concept, what approaches are recommended? Starting out from the concept of coping, it is no great leap to come up with the basic theory that antisocial and/ or self-destructive behaviour is always, in part, a way of coping in critical situations in life and that the urge to achieve agency, as identified in the coping perspective, often plays out without taking into account any conformance with norms. This means that the approach must be an accepting one, i.e. one that recognizes the subjective meaning which clients’ behaviour has for them, without actually having to approve of it. It also means that clients can only be made to talk once they no longer depend on the antisocial or self-destructive behaviour which has, after all, repeatedly at least given them situational agency. This is something they need to experience in settings which enable them to know and encounter recognition and self-efficacy in a context other than that of their previous behaviour. After all, these are mainly clients whose social origins and/or backgrounds have not given them the opportunity to develop the social and communicational skills of empathy and self-control that would have enabled them to behave in a pro-social manner in critical living circumstances. One of the advantages of the concept of coping is that it can create a link between theory and practice: it can be used as the basis for developing central recommendations for action. In this context, before anything else, the essential point is that the concept reformulates the traditional social work methodology of case assessment based on the coping perspective. This leads to the insight that clients need to be provided with scope for action, within whose boundaries they earn recognition, thus managing to detach themselves from their previous situation and address the subject of their sensitivity. This can be achieved by creating functional equivalents, a way to show that the clients have a great deal of potential – something that cannot be discovered using one-dimensional, casuist approaches. The perspective of capability can take up this thread, extending the traditional concept of empowerment by adding coping-based and social elements. Here, it is important that social work itself sees these support “settings” (see Müller & Schwabe, 2009) as coping cultures and organizes them accordingly. We plan to attempt this using the methodological approach of milieu formation.

All this repeatedly demonstrates how necessary the gender-differentiated approach is when arguing in terms of coping theory. The example of case assessment, and particularly counselling – the key method used in social work – can be used to work through this as an example.

6.1Case Assessment from the Perspective of the Coping Concept

Even if social work is in future able to gain new connections and open up further in terms of social space, it will still be dealing with “cases”, i.e. with particular personal situations (and the problems attributed to them) which are assigned to social work by other social authorities. In social work, the process of case-based (casuist) assessment is generally described as having three dimensions, with tension arising between the clients’ external symptoms and inner experience of discrepancy, and the development of a support relationship between the social workers and their clients (see Hörster, 2001).

The external symptoms depend on the way that behaviour is visibly defined as conforming or nonconforming against the background of social expectations of normality. The inner experience of discrepancy, meanwhile, hidden behind the external symptoms, follows other laws. The clients, after all, are under pressure to achieve agency, often regardless of accepted norms. At the same time, in their relationship with the clients, social workers not only need to be able to mediate between the contradictory worlds of definition and experience; they also have to be able to reflect on the experiences of discrepancy which they inevitably encounter themselves.

If this basic casuistic model is now structured using the coping concept, a new way can be found to reconcile the three dimensions – a way which can, in fact, reveal a model for recommended action; not only one which social workers can follow for guidance, but also one which they can learn from. This means a shift in perspective. The focus is now on the clients’ right to make their coping behaviour – “their concept”, so to speak – the yardstick of the intervention, thus releasing it from any dependency on social work typification. For clients it is all about “regaining autonomy over their life practices” (Müller, 2001, p. 1200), not about how the institution fits with the client. Of course, there is pressure to create a fit, especially when working in the contexts of administrative support and supervision. Of course, the situation is also affected by the empathic relationship, which comes across in a multifaceted manner.

To that extent, if the aim is to open up the client’s cage, what is needed is not only supervisory, but also socio-political reflection. Service users need to be able to be brought out of their status as clients and seen as citizens. This gives the support relationship the character (or at least the imagined character) of a contract, which is an emergent deviation from the construct of “understanding”. After all, it is precisely the construct of understanding which hides the pitfalls of mixing the intimacy and the contractual nature of action within social work – pitfalls which are hard to avoid, eventually often leading to relationships of power and dependency in the care context (which are professionally legitimized) actually being stabilized.

Though the professional and administrative steps attempt to detach the case from the muddle of definitions, relationships and feelings and turn it into a neat construct (see Hörster, 2001, p. 922), this can in turn lead to the case systematically being fitted into the support system while at the same time being “excised” from the client’s situation in life and situation of coping. Above all, approaches of this kind generally ignore the fact that the support relationship involves two kinds of hidden conflict: firstly an inner coping conflict among the clients, and secondly an inner definition conflict among the social workers. Both are emotionally involved, repeatedly exploring not just rationality but also empathy. This is why a reflective third dimension is required which can raise the case onto the socio-political level and thus give it the imagined status of a contract, with the clients being given an imagined status as citizens. This casework inspired by coping theory uses analysis of the situation of coping as a framework to understand both sides of the support process. Within the dimension of dependency, it sheds light on the client’s dependency on the social worker; within the dimension of expression, it explains not only the issues sought to be addressed by means of diagnosis but also, equally, the expectations they involve.

Within the dimension of appropriation, the case is reframed as a context of enablement and, finally, within the dimension of recognition, thought is given during case diagnosis to how acknowledgement can be gained beyond the support relationship.

6.2Functional Equivalents

When we talk of creating and designing functional equivalents, we mean a method which social workers can use to add to the range of people’s situations in life and situations of coping. Functional equivalents are project settings in which clients can discover for the first time, and over a period of time, that they do not need their antisocial or self-harming behaviour to achieve self-esteem, social acknowledgement or self-efficacy.

The model of “functional equivalents” comes from structural functionalist sociology and can be seen as a “metamethodological” concept in social work to be used in many practical methodological approaches, including the following. As the name implies, the relevant project settings and the activities they involve need to contain elements (now in different contexts) which once gave the clients, during their previous antisocial/self-destructive behaviour, what they perceived as attention, sometimes efficacy and, above all, somatic tension relief (see Section 3.1). In this context it has proven effective to use educational projects involving activities, culture and adventure, focusing on people relying on one another and developing acknowledgement, self-efficacy and even self-esteem by playing out various roles. Altogether, even in counselling and group work, the effect here comes from the alternative social pedagogical “relational milieu”, which can create trust and thus help make people relax and experience acknowledgement. This then becomes a basis for addressing their own inner helplessness without fear. The new group experience plays a central role in this, as the helplessness, previously seen as an individual issue, can now be revealed as a shared, even a social issue, making it something which can be expressed. Here, an accepting attitude is required of social workers (see Section 4.4).

6.3Empowerment

The ultimate aim of social work is to enable its clients to play a role in solving their problems themselves, giving them the ability to activate any available social support, especially in their immediate social setting, from a socio-ecological point of view (Stark, 1996) and thus from the perspective of the milieu (see below). This is generally termed “empowerment”. The aim is to seek out clients’ strengths rather than their weaknesses and to develop support measures based on the actor’s perspective. H. Keupp (1996) added to this interactive, personal frame of reference as follows: “Instead of subjects being integrated into existing social contexts, people are [. . .] required to develop an ability to create such contexts themselves” (Keupp, 1996, p. 164). Empowerment is thus also described as “creative coping” (Stark, 1996, p. 94ff). However, it is not enough merely to follow a schedule in which clients are mentored through activities to help them recognize their values and strengths and then are integrated into their environment thanks to social acknowledgement. Human beings’ hidden, presumed strengths and skills are not simply there “on demand”: they have to develop, and it is this development which allows people to experience them (see also Herriger, 2010).

If empowerment strategies are to succeed, they thus have to link in with clients’ situation of coping; they cannot simply be imposed, and they require, more than anything, knowledge of psychodynamic coping urges. The term “resource-based”, which is often used in the discourse on empowerment, is far too superficial in this respect. It suggests that psychosocial urges of the kind imagined by the professionals to activate the support process are already “available” to the clients and thus to the supportive interaction. However, we know from coping theory that, in critical situations in life, a coping dynamic is triggered in clients which initially involves the development of a regressive coping pattern, with the clients striving for agency “at any price”, including that of violating norms through antisocial and self-harming behaviour. A “creative”, or as we put it, an “extended” outlook on coping thus needs to be preceded by an examination of the regressive coping urges triggered by psychodynamic factors. Here, we can see that alternative routes need to be taken, namely by providing functional equivalents (see above), which can show clients through experience that they no longer need the deviant behaviour to achieve self-esteem, self-efficacy and acknowledgement. These are prerequisites to ensure that empowerment strategies are not too much for clients; that they allow for regressive phases, and that, more than anything else, they use techniques such as functional equivalents to strengthen the social contextual conditions which can create necessary spaces for empowerment in the first place. This is the only way to make certain that empowerment strategies do not become an individualistic process, i.e. putting everything on the clients’ shoulders (for a critique of empowerment, see Seckinger, 2011).

Yet clients are not only subjects in a support relationship designed to help them find their way back into society; they are also subjects with a legal personality. And within that status they remain – as long as they lose none of their citizens’ rights – members of society the same as everyone else, even if they behave in a socially deviant manner or are socially excluded.

The most important insight [. . .] is that into the dialectic of rights and needs [. . .]. It was not until the 1970s that rights were “discovered” as an independent basis for justifying actions or lack of action. This was partly due to serious conflict between helpers full of good intentions and clients who were increasingly formulating their own demands [. . .]. Now that the social budget is growing, by contrast, the idea is growing that clients’ affairs are in good hands when left to us professionals. [. . .] The crisis in the welfare state has also made it clear to many service users that their rights are by no means guaranteed in the welfare services, and that as these services are dismantled, their rights are being put at risk, meaning that they have to stand up for them and protect them. (Keupp, 1996, p. 165)

This brings up the subject of people’s freedom to achieve fulfilment beyond their status as a client, as set out in our perspective of extended coping.

6.4Social Space Orientation and Milieu Formation

Though the empowerment concept requires social work to adopt a biographical/ spatial orientation, the theory cannot do full justice to it. Yet empowerment should also create the conditions for independent activity and activation. Activation requires both a space in which new processes of appropriation can take place and a psychosocial support to lean upon, giving people the feeling of being equal to the situation. We sum up these conditions under the concepts of focus on social space and milieu formation.

Fabian Kessl and Christian Reutlinger (2007) pointed out the different dilemmas which social work projects based on social spaces can become caught up in. For example, existing social networks and influential milieus in communal spaces can influence social work networking projects such that they come out better off, but that the socially disadvantaged clients of social work remain excluded, despite all well-intended efforts.

An evaluation of the German funding programme “Soziale Stadt” shows that socially disadvantaged groups “quickly withdraw their involvement if there is no sign of any concrete result” (Lange et al., 2003, p. 14).

In view of this, Kessl and Reutlinger recommend determining the position which social work is to take within the space at an early stage – the position from which to address the opportunities and barriers involved in extending the social space. As Kessl and Reutlinger do not operationalize this any further, we shall make an attempt to do so here, with our coping theory approach. Following this approach, the position is initially determined by the coping situation of those involved. This is the baseline position from which an initial assessment can be made of how the case in question is positioned within the social space, i.e. where the clients are located in that space. Generally, their situations of coping are regressive, with social isolation (dimension of appropriation), open or hidden stigmatization (dimension of acknowledgement), extreme dependency as part of what have become entrenched dissocial careers (dimension of dependency) and no ability, or a loss of the ability to address their helplessness (dimension of expression). As a result, they are basically placeless, have no connections to the space and have to start out by finding a position by extending their situation of coping. It is only then that we can speak of “motivation” or “starting out from clients’ interests”. The social work strategies with which we can create this position can be described using the term “milieu formation”. Within the milieu of social work, clients can experience a social lightening of the burden – social support and belonging. The social work milieu, rather than the individual case, finds a position within a local space, allowing the focus to be placed on individuals, as members of this milieu. The social work milieu protects individuals if any of them revert to their previous antisocial or self-destructive behaviour, as well as being able to build bridges for individuals to enter the local milieus. To achieve this, milieus need to radiate out into the local space; they must be positioned within the framework of local social policy and it must be possible to justify them accordingly. This makes them attractive to citizens and groups from other milieus, who can find starting points in them not only for social commitment but also for cooperation (win–win situations). Youth centres, old folks’ centres, employment projects, group homes, etc., can use this bridge to other milieus to stop being seen as institutions imposed upon people by the state (tolerated but best avoided) and instead be viewed as an integral part of the local lifeworld when it comes to making the municipality or city district a more pleasant place to live.

We consider the process of milieu formation to be of central importance for structuring social work. We can describe the milieu as a biographically available context of reciprocity with regard to the social space and socio-emotional processes – a context in which coping skills develop and which is linked to acts of normalization. Social work is guided by the perspective of “open milieu formation”, as only open, democratic milieus with the right balance of collectivism and individuality can activate coping skills in the sense of extended agency.

One structuring characteristic of an open milieu is a respectful attitude towards others’ integrity within and outside the limits of the milieu. In regressive milieus, by contrast, their members seek support, familiarity and reciprocity at the cost of others – in fact, by oppressing and excluding others. Violence, for example, occurs against the background of regressive, ethnocentric milieu formation. Thus, as the term “milieu formation” alone is ambivalent, the more precise term “open milieu” should be used. This does not exclude the possibility of us understanding (in the spirit of acceptance-based youth work and social work) why clients feel at home and at ease in regressive, authoritarian milieus. After all, we have learnt how helplessness is split off, projected onto weaker people and transformed into violence. It is only if we understand this context and accept it as a subjective step taken by clients that we can offer them a different form of open milieu formation within institutions and projects run by social workers and hope to achieve an equivalent effect.

6.5Conflict Orientation

Social conflict can be seen as a historically evolving driving force behind changes in living conditions. The welfare state, as an institutional form of social compromise, developed from the dialectic of the conflict between labour and capital. This meant that social conflicts were pacified by the social state, but the conflictive structure of social processes remains. In social work, a tool of the welfare state’s social policy which extends into lifeworlds, this conflictive structure can be seen in the tug of war between support and control.

For this reason, one guiding principle of coping-based social work is to designate the category of conflict (a category it is itself subject to) one of its central conceptual parameters. People’s situations in life and situations of coping can be assessed according to the extent to which they allow conflicts to be settled in a prosocial manner rather than drifting into the zones of antisocial violence. From the point of view of coping theory, the ability to settle conflicts is the basis for extended agency.

Conflicts are complex. They can be open or hidden and often play out differently in people’s heads to the way they do in their social environment. Social conflicts are shifted into people’s inner selves. Intrapersonal conflicts, imbalances and disturbances can be split off, leading to antisocial configurations which we then no longer describe using the word “conflict”, instead referring to them in terms of violence. Biographical conflicts and critical living circumstances never remain restricted to the self: they always tie in with society, through disruptive behaviour, participation and acknowledgement, leading as far as violence. We have seen how we can find the key to this by means of the concept of coping. An inability to resolve conflicts leads to dependency, and lack of conflict conceals situations of power and suffering. This strikes the nerve of social work, whose approaches are crucially dependent on whether the coping problems they are set up to deal with are publically recognized, or whether they are hidden and privatized. In view of this, we see conflict as a stimulus category: the driving force behind historical change, which not only has a structure within society but also has exactly the same structure within people themselves. In other words, a category which pervades people’s lives not only socially but also biographically. In this sense, Ralf Dahrendorf saw conflict as located in the uncertainty of human existence in the world (Dahrendorf, 1965, p. 150) – in terms both of society and of social anthropology. In the discourse on socialization we find positions which see conflict as a basal category of the process of socialization. This is the argument Micha Brumlik is making when he speaks of a “structured relationship” between “ways of settling conflicts, different understandings of people and fundamental, basal attitudes towards the world in terms of self-confidence, self-esteem and self-appreciation” (Brumlik, 1991, p. 255). He differentiates between a conventional step in conflictive behaviour, characterized by simple patterns of mutual reconcilement of interests, and a post-conventional step during which conflict can become a “sought-out medium” for socially reflective self-development. This points towards the perspective of extended coping behaviour. At this point, it should again be emphasized that the conflict perspective is a central part of our concept of coping. It is about aspects preventing and facilitating internal psychological and social conflict resolution, under the pressure of antisocial and self-destructive splitting which affects our clients.

Situations in life, situations of coping and coping with life are embedded in conflict structures, which is why any social work oriented towards situations in life and coping needs to understand itself as being conflict-oriented. To that extent, it is both naive and undialectical to try to build up a “good life” to counter existing conditions without any foundations in conflict theory, as, for example, the capability approach attempts to do (see Section 4.6), at least implicitly. Behind this is a free-floating and what might be called autonomous emancipatory pretension, a characteristic which Klaus Mollenhauer (1968) criticized some time ago with regard to emancipatory pedagogical programmes. In the idea of an educational science which tended to be autonomous with regard to society, he saw a tendency to become immune to social conflicts, whether that educational science was following emancipatory aims or not.

It is no coincidence that the term “conflict” has until now played no appreciable role in pedagogical theories. That would have meant theorists’ reflections including a basic consideration of the social character of education. Though autonomous pedagogy based on the humanities chose an emancipatory starting point for its thoughts, it followed a different path. It minimised and depoliticised the problem of conflict by constructing a pedagogical counter-world which, although it took a critical stance to the status quo, nonetheless paid the price which any poor utopian dream does, in that it could not achieve anything socially. This counter-world had been purged of conflict; it no longer [. . .] bore any trace of the actual conflicts of real-life education. (Mollenhauer, 1968, p. 27)

The structure of the conflict can be used to come to conclusions about any social work actions to be taken. Conflict settlement is by nature dialectic. Its aim is to bring contradictory interests (openly acknowledged or hidden) into an integrative perspective which does not level out the opposites but instead recognizes them, while still finding a way to guide participants to a different, new level, maintaining their mutual respect. It is not only the clients’ situation of coping which can be interpreted as a situation of conflict; the basic structure of the support relationship is a conflictive pattern of interaction, too. After all, it generally involves two opposing positions with contradictory interests. Looking back to the basic findings of the concept of coping with life, the clients’ antisocial/self-destructive behaviour starts out with what they see as a subjectively positive function. This function is opposed by the intentions of social intervention, which sees the antisocial and self-destructive elements of the behaviour and thus (necessarily) judges it negatively. The mutual perspective of conflict settlement and finally integration then develops through a methodology of acceptance and functional equivalents. In the meantime, situations of conflicting interaction repeatedly arise. Thus, the ability to settle conflicts is not only a capability which clients are helped to achieve; it is also a professional capability which needs to be acquired, especially, of course, as social workers frequently come from different social strata to their clients. When analysing people’s situations in life and situations of coping, and in coping-based intervention planning, it is thus necessary to find the key to these inner structures of conflict.

6.6Excursus: New Spaces, Different Times?

Social work today deals with, and will continue to deal with, clients who have grown up with the digital world of the new media, live in it and see it as a space for coping. This is particularly true of children and young people. In social work we deal with adolescents whose experience of self-efficacy is frequently fed by extensive use of digital media. What is new in terms of the social significance of new technologies and their media is that they no longer work with language, but instead now largely work with images:

The power of images is based on the fact that they are perceived as reality, rather than as encrypted symbolic systems. Under the conditions of Technology II, it is all about the effects which images have on the subjects and how society deals with knowledge and entertainment. [.] It is not necessarily about whether, as critics believe, the images herald the end of thought. [. . .] What seems far more important is that images are changing the way in which knowledge is transferred; how information is packaged and how thought is shaped. Today, images can be produced and altered at will, making it easier for anyone to integrate them into their own presentations. (Tully, 2003, p. 208f)

The parasocial dynamic of abstraction emanating from the digital web gives people a whole new connection to the world. As modern technologies are “open-ended in their use and the results they produce” (Tully, 2003, p. 208f) they can become part of people – such a part of human activities that, though the technologies shape those activities, people can believe that they themselves are behind such transformations. One crucial process can be observed, however: whereas traditional technology, based on function, had (and still has) a focus on rationality, the digital technologies are no longer tied down to pre-established concepts and measures of what is appropriate. Changing images trigger emotions. What counts is whatever promises individuals situational or biographical fulfilment. This link to biographical fulfilment, which is more libidinous than socially structured, means that as technology is used in a manner which is not tied to a specific function, this can cause the impressions left by its images to be incorporated in an identity-altering manner. The virtual network gives puberty, in particular, with its unique interweaving of the real and the unreal, a medium which adolescents find especially attractive (cf. Tully & Wahler, 2004). It provides a social space which they can “talk their way into”, in which gender-typical social thresholds are lowered and where wishes and dreams which are suppressed in everyday life can be revealed (cf. Tillmann, 2008). The networks of peers can be kept in motion, too. In spite of all this, it remains the case that not only people’s social environment, but also their social position shape their media opportunities.

The unequal availability of resources in real life also has implications for media use [. . .]. This can be seen, for example, in the available range of strategies for appropriating unfamiliar content structures, the degree to which people reflect on information and identities, and even the extent to which, or the range of different spaces in which they participate. (Kutscher & Otto, 2006, p. 98)

Altogether it can be assumed that among users, “the classic variables of social inequality” correspond with “differences in Internet use” (Iske et al., 2007, p. 54). This affects both the use of different content and the different ways in which people use the Internet. The adolescents now enter the medium themselves and can present themselves there as young people, with all their experimental lack of inhibition. They find a space where they can reproduce their experience of life. They can try out things which society forbids them to do. And the possibilities are unending. Sixteen-year-olds can already set themselves up as bloggers or alternatively perform deviant behaviour. Spaces for experimentation can be opened up, while at the same time young people can enjoy the status of adults, one normally denied to them, from an early age. It is the simultaneous existence of these contradictory possibilities which make the Internet so interesting.

The digital moratorium of the new media exerts an undeniable fascination. It fully corresponds with the emotional drama of adolescence. It allows the inner chaos of puberty, which is so hard and so risky to express in society, to be stage-managed through the media in an uninhibited, unlimited manner. In light of this, can social work continue to insist that young people need spaces for experimentation which are tied to society? This can be discussed based on the example of violent computer and video games, which are well known for being attractive, especially for adolescents who come into community youth work. Their attraction lies in their potential for interaction. In their own way, they can immerse you in a whole new reality. More than anything else, it is the egocentric nature of these computer games that can make people identify with them. All in all, however, research into the effects of violent media has been unable to prove that there is any direct effect on the real world; at best it has “proved that unwanted effects can occur in certain people with specific social backgrounds” (Fritz & Fehr, 2003, p. 53). For this reason, researchers into the effects of violent media are united in believing that whether or not certain effects come into play depends on the social and cultural milieus in which violent games are played. From that point of view, community youth work in particular can gain access by taking social work steps involving milieu formation (cf. Section 6.4).

Social work needs its own times in which to take effect if it is to do justice to its clients’ situations of coping, as these clients have generally slipped out of the time schemes of socially defined normality. Social work is “pushed for time” in view of the fall-off in the welfare state’s formative creative influence and the increased emphasis on its controlling and disciplinary function. This is not the result of an administrative programme, but is above all caused by a change in social time which, in the sociological analysis of the transition from the modern to the postmodern age, can be explained in the context of globalization.

Linear time of the kind we normally follow is a social construct of the modern industrial age and its logic of production and work. According to this, time is so closely connected to paid work that gaps in people’s working biographies can lead to considerable fractures in their experience of time. The now classic 1930s study on Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community (Jahoda et al., 1933) was the first to systematically explore how, when the jobless no longer have times of paid work, they also lose their usual, everyday schedule. Men, in particular, were observed to undergo a dramatic decline in their sense of time, linked to a drop in their self-esteem and purpose in life. This can mainly be explained by the fact that modern male identity is linked in an unbalanced manner to men’s role as workers, a sign of the gender-specific nature of people’s experience of time, which is continuing to evolve, if in different ways, even today.

The relativity of time can also be seen in people’s different biographical impressions of time and, notably, in the fact that individuals perceive time biographically, as finite, even though time extends beyond any individual human existence. This philosophical perspective on time takes on significance for thought in the social sciences when it comes to recommended actions whose effects outlast individuals’ biographical lifetimes, as in the case of the discourse on sustainability. In an age of microelectronic technologization and globalization, time is being socially disembedded and digitalized, confronting us with problems which require analysis from the perspective of the philosophy of time. In our technologically transformed economy, time is becoming digitalized, leading to problems not only with mediation between the subject and society but also with individual coping. These problems are a constant threat to individuals’ biographical agency. As the boundaries of transitions dissolve (cf. Section 7.5), people are spending more time in education and their educational biographies are differing more widely. Their route into employment is more winding and features more gaps. At the same time, the newly flexible labour market is calling for people to be available “on the spot” and to be qualified to meet current demand, irrespective of biographical development times and coping problems. Temporal conflicts of this kind, involving different logics, also occur in the tug of war between family planning and career planning, especially among young adults. The time slot during which it seems possible for couples to become parents while maintaining their careers has become so narrow that it can be described as a “rush hour” in life. At the same time, the acceleration and externalization which characterize the temporal rhythm of the second modernity are making people want to take “breathers” and “me time” and, above all, to “decelerate”.

This “new age” which has been emerging since the start of the twenty-first century, not only in chronological terms but also with respect to the work-based society, has started to break through the temporal straitjacket which is characteristic of the industrial society. The balance has been upset between the industrial pace of time and people’s own time, tied in with their circadian rhythm. Private time is becoming ever more economized and interwoven with paid work. The dynamics of social disembedding, spurred on by the new technologies, are increasingly causing people to lose their grip on “their” time as a context within which to organize their lives. As the traditional contexts of education and work become less and less reliable means of structuring people’s available time, time is increasingly having to be managed: “The potential for equilibrium which was rooted in the regularity and predictability of social, task-based time scheduling is being lost as borders become blurred. The number of short-term arrangements is rising. The pressure to constantly manage time is increasing” (Geißler, 2004, p. 9).

At the same time, the temporal structure of the Internet is pervading everyday life, creating the situation that different logics of time can be related to and connected with one another almost arbitrarily. However, in people’s actual everyday lives this does not generally work out, and temporal dilemmas arise, for example in the balance between paid work and caring or work within the family, each of which have “different logics of time, relations and action. Looking after people’s physical and emotional wellbeing cannot be compared with paid work following the market model, or organised in the same way [. . .]. As paid work, care is formally organised and rationalised to conform to the market. The economic logic of time thus pervades areas of life which it had previously escaped” (Zeiher, 2004, p. 3).

This digitalization and acceleration of social time is opposed by a discourse on time within the social sciences which aims to develop perspectives for “deceleration” and deconstruct existing temporal structures. The accelerations currently being triggered affect all ages and all aspects of life. It cannot be overlooked, for example, that the quantity of new information requiring regular processing is disproportionately greater than only a few decades ago and, moreover, continues to grow. This is seen not only in the technological world of fast-growing communications media but also in social areas of life: legal regulations quickly become outdated and traditional means of entering professions and rising through the ranks are obsolete. In an extensive analysis of changes in temporal structures in the second modernity, Rosa (2013) proposes a typology which distinguishes between three kinds of social acceleration process: technical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and the acceleration of the pace of life. He sees these three forms as joined in a circle of acceleration, meaning that they are understood to be self-propelling: “Therefore, within that circle, acceleration always and inevitably produces more acceleration: it becomes a self-reinforcing ‘feedback system’” (Rosa, 2013, p. 151). This means that people are not only under pressure from acceleration; they are also themselves involved in its dynamics, which may mean that they feel simultaneously like both agents and victims of acceleration. Thus, options and constraints are closely associated. Agency constantly needs to be regenerated and digitalized structures adapted. Though the number of options which people can choose between is growing, they are exposed not only to freedoms but also to forced decision-making.

As there is unlikely to be a “deceleration” in the medium term, the opportunities available in terms of coping will depend upon how people’s situations life correspond with those challenges, i.e. whether their living conditions continue to become socially disembedded or whether “breather” zones can be created. More than anything else, this will affect those who are fully exposed to the increasing intensity and flexibility of the labour market. Time which people dedicate to their relationships and themselves within their families or local area might act as breather zones. Social work clients are also among those affected by these acceleration processes, which act, so to speak, as mechanisms of exclusion that make it even harder to gain a foothold in society or keep up with social development. At the same time, this pressure to accelerate is putting pressure on professional social workers to rationalize, meaning that social work clients could be caught in a two-pronged temporal trap. Social work depends upon this deceleration. It needs its own time, separate to the continually accelerating functional times of economic and social rationalization; it needs alternative routes as demanded under the logic of functional equivalents.