1Normalization and Dissolution of Boundaries: Social Work at the Start of the Twenty-First Century
Current discussions within social work are characterized by a prevailing mood of ambivalence. Almost all analyses of current times and predictions of future social developments point to seemingly limitless social challenges. Social work seems to be in demand almost everywhere, from support schemes for children and young people into adulthood to support for elderly people, in community work in cities and rural regions, in disaster relief and in care for refugees. This list could go on forever. In other words, in many regions the twenty-first century has started with a structure of endless challenges for social work.
Looking at some specialist books on social work, by contrast, sometimes gives the impression that the century of social work is behind us. Here, the twentieth century is not infrequently described as the golden age of social work. Many historical analyses focus on the developments which social work underwent in many Western countries during the twentieth century, leading to its current form as defined by international organizations, among others. Thus, while some extensive challenges are on the horizon, confidence in the development of social work seems fairly low among the expert community.
This is mainly due to the fact that the set of social circumstances which led to the current extent and professional structure of social work in many European countries and in North America is linked to their specific welfare policies and welfare states. In the twentieth century, social work became a focal point of socio-political modernization in these countries. In discussions on social science, this period is often regarded as the first modernity (Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1994), with social work being a child of the first modernity. It became established as an agency of socialization and a community-based social policy aimed at constructing a so-called “normal life course” starting out with people’s everyday lives.
The focus of the concepts of the twentieth century was on constructing a “normal life course” with typical lines of development and trajectories. Gainful employment and the path leading up to it are one such line. Another line was the stratification of ages, each assigned different functions. As a rule, the concepts thus revolve around the construct of a linearly developing life course: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age are viewed as structuring stages in life and related to institutionalized expectations on education and work (gainful employment). The dual (though internally unequal) structure of production and reproduction, career and family life (hierarchical gender-based division of labour) acted as a line around which gender-typical biographical attributions are grouped. In this context, the dominant constructs were successful socialization processes, typical biographies and contrasting “nonstandard” trajectories, resulting at times in “deviant careers”. Thus, in the first modernity, a socializing dualism of normality and deviance can be said to have developed. This dualism of normality and deviance is part of social work’s success story in the first modernity. It includes the structure which called for social services to be developed in welfare states and is reflected within social work as an institutionalized instance of secondary normalization.
The Social Pedagogical Dilemma of the First Modernity
In the 1920s, the social pedagogue Carl Mennicke coined the term “social pedagogical dilemma” (“sozialpädagogische Verlegenheit”). As he explained, modern people were on the one hand expected to be independent and take their own responsibility for their lives; on the other, they were placed in a society which did not give them any “clear forms of social life” but instead left some people to live in poverty (Mennicke, 1926, p. 332). Moreover, he posited, modern households were being downgraded “to pure consumer communities” and the “pace of economic life” was leaving “less and less space for really fostering” life as a society. The modern family could not, he said, in any case be seen as a reliable community to bring up children, and industrial capitalism had deprived modern working conditions of any “pedagogical quality” (Mennicke, 1926, pp. 323–324). Finally, he believed that as a whole, modern people in a city found little opportunity to “experience the inner demands of life within society”. There was no doubt, Mennicke concluded, “that this is causing many individual lives to lose any direction or certainty” (Mennicke, 1928, p. 293): “In the end, the complicated nature of modern social life means we all experience this feeling of uncertainty. All the more, of course, in times of crisis, when young people, more than anyone else, are placed under pressure by their uncertain future” (Mennicke, 1999, p. 73). The “social pedagogical dilemma” thus lay, on the one hand, in people being set free as individuals, but on the other hand in there being no adequate social conditions in which they could develop and experience social agency. Life in modern societies, wrote Mennicke, was “far too strongly concentrated on jointly coping with the burdens of life” (Mennicke, 1928, p. 283). In a nutshell, Mennicke had thus described the structure on which social work was based as regards socialization theory.
1.1From Normalization to the Dissolution of Boundaries
Discussions within social work during the twentieth century centred on arguments about characterizations of normality, extending as far as the institutionalized normalization of social work itself. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, developments within social work are best described by the term “dissolution of boundaries”. This term marks the relationship between the first modernity and the second, or reflexive, modernity. The dissolution of boundaries does not mean that boundaries are disappearing altogether but rather that the frameworks of social life are becoming dynamic. Normalized structures are dissolving or becoming mixed with new ones; boundaries are blurring and new ones appearing. What were once linear reconstructions in people’s life courses are fracturing and being questioned.
“Either . . . or” structures are turning into “Both . . . and” structures (see Beck, 2000). Thus, as the boundaries of gainful employment dissolve, the link between people’s identity and their work, which was previously central to their life history, is eroding, and as the boundaries of learning blur, education is extending, lasting beyond youth and throughout people’s lives. While, during the first modernity, the socialization regime was determined by the collectively felt conflict between normality and deviance, the socialization regime of the second modernity is characterized by blurring boundaries and individualized opportunities, accompanied by enforced self-organization. Nonetheless, the expectations of normality and the regulatory forms of the first modernity have not vanished.
Trans- as a Phenomenon of the Second, or Reflexive, Modernity
In academic discussion on the observed dissolution of boundaries, the terms used to address social topics are increasingly being prefaced with the prefix “trans-”. The talk is of transnationalism, transmigration, translocality, transsexuality, transgender, transculturalism, etc. What these different forms of trans-research have in common is that they reflexively question “naturalizations” of social phenomena of the first modernity which are seen as institutionalized, adopting a critical stance and problematizing them in terms of their history and system, as well as the consequences of each subject’s scope for action. The research on transnationalism, for example, points towards “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002): “Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of nation-states by the social sciences. Scholars have shared that national borders are the natural unit of study, equate society with nature state, and conflate national interest with the purpose of social sciences” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, p. 302). Accordingly, the concept of “methodological nationalism” is used to point out the naturalization of nationalism in social science research and problematize the equation of society with the nation state (Köngeter, 2012). The perspective of socialization theory, finally, clearly calls for reflection on the “methodological institutionalization” of life course policies (Schröer, 2013). This means that the institutionalized expectations or regulations of the first modernity have, in some cases, continued to be naturalized. With regard to blurring boundaries and transitions, on the one hand, these seem to have been socially generated. On the other hand, this is linked to a call to reflect again in each case on how, and to what extent, the subject’s scope for action can be increased in each interaction between organizational arrangements, institutionalized expectations and regulations, and the actors’ situations in life.
Currently, the question needs to be asked of how, and whether, social work’s success story from the first modernity can continue: “What initially still looks like an expansion”, during which social work “is seen as a success story, already shows that its institutions and structures are disintegrating: its boundaries are dissolving” (Winkler, 1999, p. 96). In view of tendencies for boundaries to blur and social patterns to disintegrate, social work no longer has an overview of the contexts in which its interventions and policies are needed and should be applied. Challenges, Winkler believes, are appearing everywhere: in integration, skills training, management, nursing, supervision and care. It would be almost impossible to subsume these tasks under a coherent description of social work as a profession or a discipline (see Winkler, 1999).
A blueprint for social work seems to be developing which possesses flexibly applicable knowledge and points towards how to improve that knowledge by means of corresponding interventional modules. These types of knowledge, from running a business to project management to psychosocial diagnostics, can hardly be described as specific to social work any longer. Social work is also subject to constant pressure to be innovative and efficient. In some regions there is even talk of an “efficiency revolution” (Blanke & Bandemer, 1999), as social work today is said to be in competition for “economic superiority”.
Thus, the assumption which prevailed in many countries that the need for social work will continue to be met by social workers trained in this sector can no longer be taken for granted. A new market of service provision is on its way, in which decisions are made as to who will deal with social problems; methods on how they should be addressed are increasingly based mostly on economic criteria, indicators which are often as yet obscure. In many places today, there is no answer to questions such as which agents and which settings are to be used to ease social tensions in specific neighbourhoods, to organize employment support programmes or to advise young people. In welfare states, the system at least intended social work to be the means of choice for secondary normalization. Currently, solutions and services are not expected specifically from social work. In other words, tenders are, for example, invited for projects involving regional intervention and design, and social work and other social actors are told to apply with innovative approaches. Then, it is decided which innovative approach best fits.
Social workers can apply anywhere, but their professional skills are not exclusively required, e.g. in the context of welfare policy measures. Other operators and initiatives can also submit offers, and it can no longer be assumed that, for example, out-of-home care, refugee relief or social training in rehabilitation is necessarily the domain of social work. Quality assurance schemes and concepts to prove the effectiveness of social work are an expression of the sector’s wish to assert its usual position in this new field of competitors.
1.2Rediscovery of Welfare Policy and the Welfare State
In the twentieth century, social work, though born from social policy and the welfare state, was also one of their fiercest critics. Today, social work yearns for their organized structure and the buffering “hidden hand” (Leibfried & Pierson, 1998). Welfare policy and the welfare state were a means of preventing the social services from being split up and of keeping them transparently joined together in the hand of the state. Of course, in some countries the institution of the national welfare state continues to guarantee social rights and services. Altogether, however, the concept of the national welfare state is also caught in the pull of blurring boundaries. Looking back on the welfare policies and the welfare state of the twentieth century, it can be said that their “methodological nationalism” is becoming obvious. It was more or less nationalized and naturalized in social work, ignoring the fact that it was a specific socio-political structure which had produced the welfare policies and welfare states in the century of national industrial societies.
Activation as a Collective Identity
The social scientist Stephan Lessenich showed how the relationship between the individual, the state and society is shifting in welfare policies and welfare states: “Where the state protected the individual against social risks [. . .] now individuals are expected to make their own provision for risks in the social interest” (Lessenich, 2008, p. 95). According to this line of thought, it is not only about political control but about a governmental organization of the social sphere which is compatible with the law of flexibility under the new capitalism. Social regulation is no longer achieved predominantly by means of the welfare state; instead, all citizens are activated, whether they are unemployed or have been forced out of work in old age.
For Lessenich, the labour policy programmes on labour mobility or on “lifelong learning” which are dominant in Europe are characteristic of a policy which blends “institutional strategies and forms of individual action together to create a new way of governing the social (in a broad sense)” (Lessenich, 2008, p. 116). The welfare state becomes a means of social engineering which keeps people busy, so that they are not a burden on the state and, ideally, produce a surplus which safeguards the common good. The welfare state is then limited to the function of regulating that surplus to benefit the community. The regulatory model of people’s entitlements and what can reasonably be expected of them has been replaced by one in which people take care of their own interests and produce a community surplus. This is in line with a concept of humanity in which subjects can be found who are “marketable and socially acceptable” at the same time (Lessenich, 2008, p. 85).
As both the market and society need to be constantly activated and kept mobile, the subjects who constitute this mobility need to be kept on the move, too. They are expected to experience society not as a collective commitment, as in the past, but as a shifting context of individual safety measures, in that they can feel “part” of the mainstream who are keeping in step with developments. Traditional forms of social security are often seen as causing stagnation. Lessenich (2008), however, also points towards the coping problems which people have in this new socio-political system when he speaks of the “permanent stress” from which subjects suffer due to the constant pressure to remain active.
All citizens can now be productive of their own accord; indeed, they have to be, if the “activating state” offers them such opportunities and the common good is now seen as resulting from the comprehensive application of principles of economic productivity. This turns subjects into “bearers of human capital” and follows the illusion that the world of work under new capitalism is no longer alienating (see also Böhnisch & Schröer, 2007). The mobile model of social activation via the principle of individualized human capital lacks the collective identity which the culture of welfare policy and the welfare state was intended to create, at least politically. Collectivity is now something which individuals constantly have to be reminded of in moral terms. It is symbolized accordingly, while in reality social fractures are deepening and the zones of social vulnerability are growing (Castel 2000).
1.3Disembedding and Reformulation
Fundamentally, in what form social work is required and can play a part and develop within a society depends on the extent to which that society wants to achieve social equality, on how intensive and explicit the prevailing ethical standards of justice and responsibility are and on the balance between people and the economy. Turbulence occurs when this commitment is no longer binding, when paradoxes dominate the social scene and when social norms become obscure. Pierre Bourdieu made a prediction along these lines: “More than ever [. . .] we have to practice a para-doxal mode of thought” (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 123). Such social paradoxes affect social work directly since the apparent “if . . . then” linearity of the first modernity has been displaced by the “both . . . and” logic of the second modernity.
Moreover, in view of a globalized economy, transnational interconnections are creating a normative problem, not only for national welfare policies and welfare states, but also for social work in these states. In socio-scientific discourses, this phenomenon is described as “disembedding”: within the global competition among companies, regions and municipalities, decisions on economic location are being made with social consequences, without taking into consideration local developments and social situations. This is keeping the social world under pressure, as it does not seem able to escape the hegemonic pull of the new rules of economic movement.
Today, there are discussions all over the world on how a link can be maintained to this disembedded world in order to wield any kind of influence over it. Local welfare policies intended to safeguard and shape social cohesion and the social integration of a society find themselves entangled in transnational dynamics of disintegration in which there is hardly any further scope for social action. The local economic balance (however precarious it used to be) which for decades seemed to make a deliberate social policy possible, and which was designed to develop into something like a collective identity of being protected by the welfare state, hardly appears as a reference point any longer. Today, people are required to adapt to the logic of capital, which can now take on an existence independent of labour. The “flexible” individual (Sennett, 1998) has to follow the rhythm of production and submit to the globally controlled dynamics of cost. Precarious working conditions are increasing, occupational security is dwindling and for many in Europe there is no sign of the social safety net which the welfare state was supposed to guarantee for a long time to come.
Longing for the Naturalization of the Twentieth Century
Altogether, we find ourselves in a period of transition. The individual is being revealed as someone who is vulnerable, obstinate and unpredictable. Factors considered generally agreed upon in previous models of social arrangements are now in urgent need of renegotiation. Occasionally, people long for the old naturalizations of the twentieth century: a life free of the ambivalent complexities of the reflexive modernity. But this nostalgia has negative social consequences. Today’s modernization “is thus determined in two ways. On the one hand, it releases us all into the freedom of new opportunities to make decisions and enter new obligations; on the other hand [the new risks, author’s note] set off anti-modern ideologies which presuppose the naturalness of nations, races, culture, gender and religion” (Dörre, 1998, p. 59). Born from the first modernity, professional social work is subjected to these dissolutions of boundaries and ambivalences.
With this in mind, in our book we intend to try to describe the field of social work – its themes and methods – in the face of the concept of the second, reflexive modernization. We discuss the second modernity as a time of blurring boundaries. However, social work is used to working with terms which presuppose the existence of boundaries. Its professionalization was, after all, intended to overcome a period in which it was forced to move within a field that was confused and thus, from a professional point of view, arbitrary. Today, it frequently faces the problem that the organized terms of its approaches come up against a social reality which escapes such description; which no longer displays many of the characteristics that social work’s terminology takes for granted. The institutional tools cover up more facts than they can reveal. To be able to recognize the individual’s situation and suffering in the society of the second modernity, with its blurred boundaries, we thus need to dissect the terms which are so familiar to us – but we do not need to throw overboard all that we have so far discovered on social diagnostics and intervention. Instead, it is about opening up, readjustment and re-evaluation.
At the heart of this re-evaluation lies people’s distress and vulnerability. Taking the social pedagogical perspective of coping with life, we try to look behind the “cases”, beyond the social problems soothed by the welfare state to reveal the topics which are fundamental to people’s lives, without neglecting the interdependent relationship of work and education within society which is so relevant to us. As this is largely conveyed to social work by the welfare state, which is now under considerable pressure, another task is to reformulate the legitimacy of social work by means of the welfare state. In this process, it becomes clear that social work professionalism and socio-political reflexivity in social work are intermeshed. They make up the range of possibilities for taking action – a range that will be put to the test by the demands arising from people’s situations of coping; these are difficult to calculate but no less urgent.
1.4From the Term “Identity” to the Concept of Agency
In view of these dissolutions of boundaries and paradoxes, it is uncertain whether one of the key terms used in social work during the first modernity, that of “identity”, can continue to rise to these new psychosocial challenges. The idea of a self-determined subject which can sustain some kind of a balance with itself and thus with its social environment has always been a fascination within thought on social work. However, in the light of recent social developments, this idea has to be put into perspective.
The concept of the formation of an identity assumes that there are stable social contexts into which life courses are integrated. According to this view, identity (an internalized image of oneself formed in interaction with others) is embedded in reliable social milieus and institutional arrangements. Faced with the ambivalences of society in the second modernity, this concept proves too rigid. Accordingly, the socio-scientific discourse on identity has now developed in such a way that formation of identity in societies of the second modernity is assumed to be instable and to take place in stops and starts, with identity always being challenged. This points towards biographical coping situations in which an individual is not only made aware of his or her identity in all its fragility but constantly has to “reproduce” it. Today, the term “identity work” has developed to describe this context (see Keupp & Höfer, 1997). This term stems from an understanding of the relationship between the subject and society in which the foremost question is that of how individuals can manage to establish identities for themselves in a social world which has become more confused; how they can, so to speak, cherry-pick those aspects of their social environment which will help them achieve a biography that is a personal success.
This concept is now illustrated by terms such as “DIY” or “patchwork” identities. Identities, so the argument goes, now shift and flow and are only related to one another in terms of the integrity of an individual’s biography and personal life (Smart, 2007). In social research, accordingly, “a narrative identity is presented by individuals with the help of texts and narrative means, in an attempt to establish continuity and long-term units of meaning” (Liebsch, 2002, p. 79). The focus is on “self-presentation”; there is, however, little interest in the term’s counterpart, “self-assertion”, which relates to how people cope with this task.
Abstract Worker–Abstract Consumer
Interactionist psychoanalysis uses the expression “new narcissist” (see Altmeyer, 2000) to describe individuals’ attempts, instead of finding themselves in social Others, to find social connections to their environment which offer a reflection, as an egocentric confirmation, without having to respond to others. Consumer–capitalist industry has long reacted to this development by providing the corresponding means: individuals can buy their own self-confirmation. The expressions “abstract worker” and “abstract consumer” (see Wimbauer, 2000) outsmart the concept of a balanced identity: a digitalized economy now demands identity from people as a joyous plunge into the world of the new economy, availability, fulfilment, which is to develop free of any social inhibition in the disembedded world of intensified work, and endless consumption.
Meanwhile, how people then get along with themselves and others in the socially embedded everyday world is a challenge for their personal lives. Thus, the social spaces where people can develop an identity are starting to blur. Whatever happens around me, I have to try to remain myself in my personal life: to stay authentic. The term “authenticity”, as the imagined identity on the basis of which we interpret our own life history, recurs frequently in the modern discourse on socialization. Identity is thus becoming a self-fulfilment project which makes our own physicality and temporality the central focus of our experience of identity, thereby sidelining sociability. “Individuals’ images of themselves are losing any claim to be durable and binding.” Socially directed identity today frequently only succeeds “as a selective, staged and primarily aesthetic enactment of personality. Communities and society [. . .] no longer provide structures and influences which can be found within individuals [. . .] in the form of identity” (Liebsch, 2002, pp. 79–80). Even where the term “identity work” is used, talk of achieving an identity has been replaced by the idea of the “postmodern self” (see Keupp & Höfer, 1997).
This means that it is no longer so much the aspect of identity-stabilizing coherence as the struggle for agency which is at the forefront of analysis. In addition, social psychologist Heiner Keupp now argues that people cannot simply be assumed to have a subjective need for cohesion. Today, it is no longer about cohesion or achieving a balance; it is about repeatedly “being challenged” (Keupp, 2006, p. 32). This perspective of coping, with a recurring struggle to gain agency throughout people’s life courses, even appears in contexts where identities are seen as “reflections of control tests, attempting to minimise the uncertainties and contingencies of people’s social environment” (Holzer, 2006, p. 84). Though the critical relativization of the concept of identity also points to the perspective of coping with life, this does not mean we have to give up the basic ideas behind the concept of identity. Identity is still something we look for, but this search is moving more than ever in the fragile direction of striving for agency. This, meanwhile, moves within parameters contingent on social structure which we will later address using the concepts of the situation in life and situation of coping.