8Social Problems and Social Integration
Social workers’ professional interest, focused on personal support, does not necessarily coincide with that of social policy. When dealing with unemployment, poverty, addiction or homelessness, it is not the people involved who are of primary interest, but the related “social problem” which these factors can create for social integration. This needs to be regulated and reined in or contained. This interest in control is part of the political programme of “solving social problems”. Social workers need to be aware of and reflect on this ambivalence in the conflict between the interests of social work (in clients’ agency) and the interests of social policy (in social stability). Social problems are constituted in the welfare state discourse (in other words, they are social constructions) and usually relate to social conflicts and difficulties with life that are continually triggered within society and registered by the public due to their frequency and the persistence with which they appear. Above all, then, there needs to be agreement within social policy that the welfare state must intervene (see Albrecht, 1999). One factor which is key to defining and recognizing social problems is thus the collectively shared idea that their appearance poses a potential risk to social cohesion, especially if they are caused by social inequality. Another important issue is that of which definitions and solutions are eventually recognized by social policy. Thus, social problems can change depending on the current state of the discourse and how economic and political plans are being implemented.
Integration and Inclusion
In the recent discourse on social work, the term “inclusion” is often applied so widely (in society) that it almost seems intended to replace the usual term “social integration” as introduced by the social sciences. As we are using the term “social integration” here, the two terms should be compared to show that the term “inclusion” cannot by any means replace that of “integration” as its use is too firmly tied to context: the term “social inclusion” primarily refers to an organization while the term “integration” refers to the question of what holds a society together, as well as the position a person holds within society and how that person can participate. Everyone is contained in that society (all “members of society”): no one has to be “included”. Social inclusion, meanwhile, is explicitly linked to organizations: it means the emancipatory opportunity for socially disadvantaged people to be included equally in organizations which have previously excluded them. In other words it is a term from the vocabulary of organizational reform, linked to organizations becoming socially receptive. The classic example – and the context in which the term “inclusion” emerged – is the inclusion of disabled children and young people in kindergartens and schools, instead of standard special needs institutions. As the meaning of “inclusion” seems to cover everything in this context (as the disadvantage appears to be linked to the body, rather than to society), it often seems as if the term “inclusion” might no longer be needed. Yet disabled people can just as easily fall into a (particularly serious) socially marginalized position if they live in socially precarious circumstances. This is what scandalized the various 1970s movements by disabled people which aimed to change the way people thought about disability, introducing a social model. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also goes beyond calling for inclusion, pointing out the need for social participation and social integration.
In the field of social work, Hans Scherpner (1962) formalized the ambivalent context in which social problems are constituted as a conflict between person-based social support and social integration. According to this view, “integration” is a structural term which relates not to those accessing support but to the social stability and instability of a society. We intend to shed light on the basic structure of the integration hypothesis based on the problem areas of poverty and migration.
According to this hypothesis, social integration is at risk if, for example, gaining wealth at the cost of the poor undermines and breaks down the current structure according to which people earn a living without having developed another structure. In his work on the “poor” as far back as 1908, Georg Simmel pointed out that social support for the poor is not provided out of an interest or concern for poor people themselves, as people, but in fact from the systemic perspective of social integration:
Assistance to the poor [. . .] is focused in its concrete activity on the individual and his situation. And indeed this individual, in the abstract modern type of welfare, is the final action but in no way the final purpose, which consists solely in the protection and furtherance of the community. The poor cannot even be considered as a means of this end – which would improve their position – for social action does not make use of them, but only of certain objective material and administrative means aimed at suppressing the dangers and losses which the poor imply for the common good. (Simmel, 1908, p. 459)
The question of integration as posed until today, however, hides the fact that the poor are subject to forces which are inherent to social structure. These are expressed, above all, in tendencies towards segregation which are experienced spatially and physically. They experience not just poverty but also society.
Nothing is more misleading than to describe the poor as excluded. Though they are largely left out from the material blessings of the modern economic system, they are not cut out of the system itself. In fact they are subjected to its constraints more than anyone else. [. . .] And the most hellish aspect of all this is that they cannot simply opt out and go somewhere where you can build a life for yourself, unaffected by the magnetic pull of the market. Wherever you go, it has got there before you. It clings to the heels of those it lets down the most. Those who are the most excluded from it are those it fences in the most. (Türcke, 1998, p. 126f.)
Poverty is generated via the same market which creates wealth. If social welfare recipients tend to spend a large part of their money in the first ten days of the month, they are quickly accused of being bad at planning and exercising self-control. Yet they are subjected to a contradictory social situation: they are poor in a rich society where you only count for anything if you can “keep up”. They, too, have to somehow present themselves, if they do not want to hide themselves and isolate themselves completely from society. Their only remaining means of participating in this society is that of consumption, however limited it may be. Meanwhile, the market is creating further polarization by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Globalized capitalism has widened that gap, extending and complicating the question of integration, as the middle class is now being drawn into the risks of poverty.
The difficulty and thus complexity of mediating between the social work bias towards support and the social interest in solving social problems can best be described based on the issue of migration.
As when applied to the poor, the term “integration” when applied to migrants and asylum-seekers is not defined by the difficult situation which those affected have to cope with, but by the interests in stability felt by the society they are migrating to. “Integration” has become a term which no longer encourages people to discuss equal social opportunities and which no longer stands for opening doors to spaces where migrants can shape society and politics. Instead it is simply a focus for ascribing deficits: migrants are only allowed to stay in the long term if they are prepared to make up for their deficits in the German language, culture and social etiquette. This increasing attention to deficits and separation loses sight of the migrants’ skills and strengths. Young migrants, especially, have learnt to overcome transitions, to make sophisticated distinctions, to adapt to change and to adopt open-minded ways of living (see Hamburger, 1999).
However, they cannot make the most of this ability they have gained from their situation in life, and are thus not infrequently driven into patterns of demonstrative disassociation. Social work feels the effects of this dilemma on both sides, among both native and foreign youth and young adults. As access to them is closely linked to institutions, refugees and non-citizens are often only discovered when they become a problem for the child and youth welfare services as underage refugees or draw attention in schools as the children of resettling families of German descent from abroad. Those who are without papers are not taken into account at all. One thing which has, however, become very clear is that, with the complexity and many veiled aspects of contemporary migration, the traditional perspective on integration can no longer be maintained. Many social workers dealing with migrants have long known that though they should be focusing on their biographical coping problems, they constantly come under pressure from socio-political institutions, which would like to partition off the issue of foreign citizens both legally and socially, consolidating it further to keep it politically predictable. The new, complex reality of migration related to the problems of globalized capitalism is thus stigmatized based on individual cases. The path thus covertly being taken towards belonging is becoming a problem for social work because social services are turning into a focus point for migrants who are unable to access or transition into the work-based society or the educational and social system. This carries the risk that their exclusion will simply carry on within these institutions. Though social work opens up to the migrants’ different situations in life, if the field attempts to follow the conventional model of integration then it falls into an interventional trap: the migrants’ coping problems are redefined as personal barriers to integration, and their different attempts at coping relabelled as forms of deviant behaviour. Many social workers working with migrants therefore no longer rely on the welfare state and social policy, instead adopting a position of their own within local and regional networks when it comes to migration and social policy. They are turning away from the discourse on belonging, with its fixation on integration, towards the discourse on coping, and trying to focus on the belongings which the migrants create for themselves through their forms of coping. The range of actions open to social work are thus mainly measured against the integration-based socio-political definition of critical living circumstances, falling into the category of social problems. Socio-political reflection is thus a necessary item in social workers’ professional toolbox.