9Professional Agency

The ambivalent structure of social support – empathetic yet personally distant, related to yet extending across different aspects of everyday life – long gave social work the reputation of being a “semi-profession” which fell under the professionally nebulous category of reproduction. Modern professionality, by contrast, was said to rise above everyday activities through its link to rationality and scientifically based expertise, with claims to autonomy from the organizations the professionals work for. As these claims can never truly be achieved, typical conflicts can always occur between organizational and professional principles. The professions are characterized by signs of quality which can be identified at a general, rather than an individual level and can thus be evaluated. The professions include scientifically and institutionally supported models of practice (e.g. the medical model) which may in turn develop a dynamic of their own within the system in that they only allow certain ways of approaching problems which are allocated to that profession, excluding others through the self-referential nature of their system. The professions lay claim to authority in terms of expertise and knowledge which may clash with the standards of their sponsor organizations. This is where the continuing demotion of social work to the level of a “semi-profession” comes in again – still in relation to its multidisciplinary scientific canon and inferior rights of status and advocation compared, for example, to established professionals such as doctors and teachers. It must be said that the term “semi-profession” is derived from this traditional institutional term “profession” and is thus not suited to describe the specifics of social work, which has become increasingly differentiated over the last two decades. For this reason, we propose a definition of professionality which is based on action theory and is thus relational.

“In this ideal concept, a professional practitioner is a ‘mediator’ between socio-cultural and individual values and interpretations of reality. Professionals are thus intermediary actors located between individually based support and social monitoring, legitimised by the socio-political model of regulating people’s entitlements and what can reasonably be expected of them.” This calls for “reflective professionality”: “professionals who have adopted a reflective stance [see themselves] as ‘relational’ actors; social figures with a relationship to the client on the one hand, but who, if need be, also have a relationship with decision-makers, on the other hand” (Dewe & Otto, 2001, 1418f.).

This action-based understanding of the autonomy of professional social work would, however, be falling into a trap if it did not itself address the subject of how society judges this form of practice. After all, despite its social normalization, it remains within the system of the hierarchical gender-based division of labour. Social occupations offer a particularly good chance to observe the construction of femininity and related attributions. Loving attention and care are still mainly projected upon women’s family work and enshrouded by an air of unquestioned normality. Though they are assigned high normative value, their economic status is low. This view is persistent, even though from the male point of view the social-rational side of social work is underlined and from the female point of view there are demands for the practice of care to be recognized within society “as a criterion for policy-making” (Eckhart, 2000, p. 18). Thus, the continued failure to address this devaluation is associated with an assumption that social work is gaining a higher status from its ascribed integrative social functions with regard to the social dissolution of boundaries. This means that two whole worlds of professional theory exist alongside one another: a male world of science which (gender-neutrally) lays claim to social work as a model of rationality, and a female world of science which continues to decry the low status allotted to the profession of social pedagogy through the gender hierarchy.

This fits in with the way social work and care work are currently being restructured into two groups. One is in high demand on the market and valued accordingly in view of demographic change and foreseeable social problems. It is the realm of the professional intermediary with specialized knowledge of intervention. Meanwhile, the masses who are not able to access the market, and depend upon care and support, are allotted to the second group of social services (usually underpaid or on an unquestioned voluntary basis) which are said not to fulfil the criterion of rational professionality as they involve elements of work which do not count according to the latest quality standards. The caring abilities traditionally defined as a “strength” in social professions are thus made into this group’s “weakness in terms of professional structure”. Processes of rationalization within social work run the risk of excluding aspects around feelings and relationships – of excluding care itself. In managerially controlled fields of social work, especially, direct attitudes of care and support, and aspects of work building upon the reliability of the relationship, are now considered of least value and rarely come up in debates on quality development. They are seen as vaguely necessary, required on an everyday basis, and expected to be carried out even under rationalized working conditions, but are not publicly negotiable and thus cannot be presented as achieved outcomes, even by staff. Thus, though workers act in a formal, professional manner in operational aspects, they are forced to allow their actual social pedagogical skills to be devalued. “Influenced by criteria of rationality and efficiency which guide their actions and are economically restricted in a one-dimensional manner, actors ‘learn’ [. . .] to standardise their workflows, and are thus simultaneously disempowered, to some extent at their own hand” (Roman, 2013, p. 263).

This again reveals the contradiction which is usually ignored in discussion on the professionalization of social work: the modern social discourse on professionalization follows patterns of rationality which, according to the logic of their structure, call for reproduction-related activities to be split off or expect that split as a prerequisite. As a result, the externalized growth policy of a neo-capitalist society continues to force social work to serve the needs of that reproductive aspect in as unremarkable, yet efficient, a manner as it can: social work as a form of social pacification. This draws the field into a new downwards spiral of devaluation, in which it is now nonetheless required to submit to criteria of economic rationality.

These criteria have now developed into corresponding regulations on outcome testing. In the future, you will have to prove more often, and in a different way, whether your support and programmes are working! After all, your clients have a right to effective services, and the state has a duty to ensure that public funding is being used effectively and efficiently. For this reason, funding is only to be provided to programmes and schemes which can prove they have the “desired” effect. Schemes which lead to “undesired side effects” are no longer to receive funding. This is the main reasoning behind “evidence-based” outcome management of the kind which is expected to develop in social work nowadays. Undesired side effects? The youth centres immediately come to mind. Populist reports now describe them as strongholds of revolt, aberrant behaviour and even the production of criminality. Take the social workers out of the youth centres and put them in schools!

Looking beneath the surface of these reports, which have also been driven by the media, a whole different set of effects comes to light. Of course, there are disruptive youths in community centres working with children and young people; this kind of work is far from simple. The young people first have to learn to deal with the unrestricted situation in the youth centre and need to realize that they can gain recognition even without using aberrant behaviour to draw attention. There are activating projects at centres for this purpose, but they do require time. It is not possible to measure any causal effect in this case; such effects can only be communicated in the often paradoxical causalities of their coping. Though predictions can be made, what is mainly required is trust. The “side effects” and detours of work in youth centres then turn out to be important links in a chain of effects which may not, of course, always be complete, but for which there is no alternative – unless one considers police intervention and even a prison sentence to be an alternative.

The “old” model of management by professionality is based on the assumption that the provision of individually tailored social services can only be usefully standardised to a limited extent, if at all. Individualised services are said to rely on personal ties taking place in the here and now, and characterised by a specific subject/subject relationship. Even major attempts to rationalise these services or change the “technology” by which they are provided would thus only reduce the work and working hours involved to a very limited extent. (Otto & Ziegler, 2007, p. 14)

Now the target is “managerial” outcome management:

This is a fundamental change in the logic of providing social services and, ultimately, that of the welfare state itself. Above all, as part of the reorganisation of the social services it is being pointed out that the way support is provided and the structure of the organisation need to be based on weighing up the costs and benefits. Put thus, the issue of measuring a scheme’s value becomes one of how effective it will be. (Otto & Ziegler, 2007, p. 15)

This cost-benefit analysis brings us to the market. It is really not so much about clients having a right to effective services, but more about provisions which can meet the needs of the market for social services and health, rather than meeting clients’ needs. To achieve this, they must be modular and offer if-then justification. A package of measures can no longer be approved with reservations (regarding social and biographical conditions which cannot be monitored). What is required is training pro-grammes which clients then just have to be adjusted to fit. What is social work being pushed into? Constructing modules which can be slotted into a building-block system of psychosocial activation, into a training programme? That is more the domain of medicine and psychology, the fields where models of that type in fact come from.

In other words, social work is increasingly sliding into a socio-technologically styled professionality managed according to a hidden logic it can no longer control. It is running the risk of losing its own powers of critical reflection. This can be seen, for example, whenever client profiling is required during work with children and young people, without considering whether the system is sliding into a new set of labelling processes. The labelling approach is, after all, one of the most important instruments of reflection within social work – an achievement, so to speak, which is once more being insisted upon.

Yet professional counterarguments are apparently no longer enough: socio-political reflexivity needs to be activated. Behind socio-technological outcome testing there also lies a corresponding socio-political understanding of monitoring and pacification which fears unplanned side effects and demands clear distinctions. The impending reduction of the welfare state’s horizons to a policy of social pacification means that social work runs the risk of being constricted by monitoring. This is why the professional discourse needs to open up to the discourse within civil society, as the latter has assigned new social value to the role of social services as a resource for local and regional development (see Böhnisch & Schröer, 2007). It is no longer about “attracting” citizens into social projects even though they benefit people they have nothing to do with. Instead, as the long history of social contracts shows, programmes need to link in with the integrative needs of the citizens themselves. You and your family will only feel at home in this town and this corner of society if you realize that your own children only get on well at kindergarten and school if something is done for other children and young people. You need to understand that improving everyone’s life opportunities is more likely to improve cultural quality and social well-being within the community than ghettoization, which produces exclusion, defence and fear and thus has a regressive effect on the community atmosphere. And, finally, if you want to grow old in our town, you also need to take care of generational relationships there – giving old people a public presence within society and coming to an agreement on this with other citizens. In this discursive model, municipal institutions are no longer the first (and usually the only) place for people to turn to; they are now gaining the added function of inaugurating discourses on new social contracts and providing a space for them to come about. Discourses and agreements on new social contracts start out small, hoping for later municipal synergies: contracts between teachers and pupils in their classes, contracts between parents relating to kindergartens, contracts between the police and youths, contracts between old folks’ homes and clubs, intercultural contracts between groups of residents in a neighbourhood, and social contracts with local companies which negotiate and set out their social duties within the municipality. Formal and informal contracts of this kind can act as a prerequisite and basis for “processes of negotiation on municipal policy” (Marquard, 2011).

In these contractual discourses, social work tends to play the indirect role of a mediator. It attempts to help bring together professionality with the civic interest. After all, the fact that the time is ripe for social discourses of this type is not a problem among professionals, but one within civic society, and thus a political problem. In view of the social and spatial disembeddedness of increasingly globalized economic relationships, what is needed is to increase the number of networks linked to specific social spaces, which make people aware of their own humanity, allowing them to feel and practise it – but which also support them as social beings. These social contexts do, however, still have to be linked back to the welfare state if they are to have any socio-political effect (providing a voice), or local aspects will fade in the shadow of globalized development. This kind of socio-political tension fired up “from below” emerges from people’s coping problems and challenges social policy as a “policy of coping”.

It is thus possible to imagine a professionality starting to open up to civil society, developing out of social work itself. But that is just one side of the coin. On the other, the citizens themselves have taken the reins of civil society, registering and asserting their social interests in local initiatives and movements, to the amazement of social work. This is rephrasing the old question of how social work relates to social movements.