4The Four Dimensions of the Situation of Coping as Means of Access for Social Work
The four dimensions of the situation of coping – dependency, expression, appropriation and recognition – are closely interlinked. For example, anyone living in a state of extreme dependency generally has few opportunities to raise this issue (expression) and usually suffers from a lack of appropriation opportunities and a lack of recognition. A similar set of links can be formed starting out from any dimension.
4.1Dependency
Dependency is a relationship forced upon people, and thus one of power, in which a situation of coping can be extremely constrained by people being undermined, stigmatized, de facto disempowered, prevented from participating and losing their options. The borders between dependency and vulnerability are fluid. Dependency comes in many forms, extending into the zone of indirect situations known as “codependency”. The social work strategy of empowerment (see Section 6.3) aims to achieve independence, as a path towards escaping dependency. The term “social dependency” is always at odds with the fact that people are social beings who rely on one another, i.e. on other people. When it comes to the process of the social division of labour in the context of the tension between social differentiation and social integration, our structural dependency on one another is a central prerequisite for social stability. The same is true of the stability of everyday social interaction. This tension is particularly evident and causes conflict in the spheres of education and social support. In New Zealand you will find the sentence: “Independency is a quality of interdependency.” Children rely upon their parents; educational generational relationships at home and in school can only succeed if there is a healthy balance between dependency and independence. In social work, on the other hand, the structure of supportive relationships makes them dependent relationships, with corresponding imbalances of power. The fact that the social workers and clients rely upon one another during supportive processes, to make them work, is often paid little attention. “The risk of dependency, of limited autonomy. Differences, different strategies for action and interaction conflicts are normal in supportive processes. It requires people to constantly come to an understanding” (Schefold, 2011, p. 23). The “client’s situation of coping” are, however, not only an interpersonal matter but can – e.g. in the case of poverty – often also be defined as a situation of dependency in terms of social structure. This can become problematic if the interpersonal dependency relationship masks the dependency caused by social structure, hiding clients’ status as socially vulnerable individuals. Werner Schefold puts this down to the fact that, as an interpersonal relationship, support restricts a case to the people involved. “Interaction problems often eclipse the problems which led to support being provided” (Schefold, 2011, p. 23).
Structures of dependency mainly evolve in group relationships. Youth workers and street workers see all too often how, for the sake of belonging to the group, young people in deviant cliques display conspicuous behaviour or even commit offences which they would not as individuals. Labelling processes can give rise to processes of dependency in that, over time, those who are labelled subconsciously adopt the characteristics ascribed to them and thus also meet the stereotypical expectations held by those supervising them.
Basic configurations of this type can be found in many fields of social work. They take on a particularly well-defined form in the case of intimate relationships. This is generally also where codependency comes in, e.g. in the case of alcoholism. Codependency begins when dealing with the alcoholic takes up more time and psychosocial energy than anything else, and this fixation on the alcoholic leads to emotional and social dependency, being bound to him (or her). “Eventually, this dependency on another person becomes a pathological condition which has a negative effect on all the codependent person’s other relationships” (Rennert, 1990, p. 160). The phases which the codependent person goes through can be compared with the phases typical of an alcoholic: keeping up a facade; trying to exert personal control over the addict so as to manage or divert the focus from his consumption; taking on responsibilities which have previously been fulfilled by the addict; accepting the addict’s rationalization mechanisms (e.g. that alcohol encourages creativity); collaboration (helping buy alcohol), and finally submitting to the logic of concealment and avoidance (Rennert, 1990, p. 160). As suggested in this example, it is mainly women who stray into the zones of codependency. Support workers for the homeless, for example, come across women who should really leave their dependent relationship, but do not have the material and social opportunities to do so – or women who have entered a forced partnership for these reasons. They have been sucked into a learned “inability” to care for themselves, which becomes fixed in dependent relationships. Workers at women’s refuges have discovered that women’s dependent status within their family continues even when they are in their refuge. Support workers have always been helpless in the face of women who, despite suffering extreme violence, return to the perpetrators and accept the blame, as they want to keep their family and relationship.
4.2Expression
The field of social work is structured by language. Within the concept of coping, the central focus of any intervention is seen as providing support as a chance for people to give expression to their helplessness. This is based on the central insight that patterns of behaviour conceal messages which can be decoded and vocalized. Children have to learn at an early stage that they are something in their own right; they need to have the feeling that whatever comes out of them will not be instantly belittled. They need the experience that they can voice their feelings; that they will be accepted as they are; and that they have an effect, in that others take them into account. Rigid social adaptation and undervaluing of children’s feelings, on the other hand, causes an inner helplessness which needs to be vented and disregarded. Later, as time passes, this may be expressed as a hatred of their own inner weakness and a hatred of anything helpless, weak or unfamiliar in their environment (cf. Gruen, 1992). This is the starting point for Winnicott (1988, p. 109ff.): the deprived child (left entirely to his own devices) gives up, becomes submissive and is hopelessly unhappy, initially showing no signs of deviance (Winnicott in Davis & Wallbridge, 1983, p. 127). If his environmental conditions improve, then, according to Winnicott, the child “begins to become hopeful again, and organizes antisocial acts in hope” (Winnicott in Davis & Wallbridge 1983, p. 127). “The antisocial tendency implies hope” (Winnicott 1988, p. 161). By committing offences such as stealing he is subconsciously trying to get others to engage with him, wants to draw attention to himself or carries out acts of destruction – violence towards objects or other children – to challenge his social environment or its firm actions and strength (in order to gain attention). This apparent paradox – attention seeking in hope as the driving force behind deviant behaviour – can be taken apart as follows. To the child, driven back into himself by rejection and lacking any empathy from his overtaxed family environment, any legitimate means of access to social attention seem to be barred out. When people who pay attention to him, such as youth workers, appear, this plants a seed of hope that he will be accepted for what he is after all. However, for some time, during what might be called a transition period, he continues to clutch at the means of deviant behaviour, as he has never previously succeeded in gaining attention by orthodox means (and is poorly equipped to compete with others to do so). If social workers recognize this link, they will find it easier to deal with this negative transitional situation. Being able to express distress, to raise it as an issue and thus escape from a vulnerable position and position oneself in relation to oneself and others without feeling any pressure to vent it through antisocial behaviour or self-harming is a basic configuration of social work which brings together the threads of diagnosis and intervention in the support relationship, not only among children and young people but equally among adults in precarious living circumstances. This reveals that language is a social medium which we navigate in and use to deal with ourselves and our environment, to gain certainty about ourselves in a social context. Language is at the heart of every counselling session. Language can thus certainly be understood as a way to address the difficulties in life which give people a sense of helplessness within themselves, though those involved can no longer put that helplessness into words. They feel a pressure to vent, which can be relieved during the counselling process. The aim is for them to regain an inner autonomy, giving them independent access to their own inner world as a basis on which to reconfigure their relationship with themselves and with their social environment. Language is the medium to achieve this.
4.3Appropriation
The concept of appropriation has until now mainly been used to describe the phase of childhood and adolescence. According to this theory, part of children’s development involves a constant extension of their close social circle as they grow older (cf. Deinet & Reutlinger, 2006). During adolescence, the process of appropriating social spaces mainly takes place through their peer group and the joint appropriation of spaces and styles that this facilitates. The attitudes and spaces adopted by young people in cliques are a reflection of their shared interests, independence and dissociation from adult culture.
Meanwhile, in the adult world, which is characterized more by functions and roles than by reference to social spaces, the perspective of appropriation takes on a new meaning, especially when it comes to the structural changes occurring in our work-based society. It is not only the unemployed and workers in precarious employment relationships who are prevented from appropriating workspaces as a form of identity work. As work becomes both more extensive and more intensive, many people involved in the labour process are today put under pressure and find it hard to establish stable work contexts for appropriation across their life course. In old age, when social functions and roles fade in importance or are relinquished, the dimension of concrete spaces once again takes on an important role. As they enter old age, most people notice a switch in the spaces they occupy: they no longer take the route to work which once structured their everyday lives, and a territorial withdrawal into their home, or an old folk’s home, begins. As well as this new emphasis on the function of the home, the area in which they live also gains a new status. Old people rely more heavily on their physically close environment, losing at least some of their spatial mobility as they age. Integration or exclusion is now largely experienced within their social space. The development of interactive technologies has added a new quality to the perspective of appropriation:
Children and young people who grow up in a media-dominated society or live in an insular life-world develop not only different understandings of spaces [. . .] but also the ability to act in various spaces at once. They create connections between different spaces, for example linking the specific biographical space they currently inhabit to distant places and social spaces with which they can communicate (on their mobile phones or computers), or to virtual spaces on the Internet (chat rooms) which are in some ways also understood as social spaces. (Deinet & Reutlinger, 2006, p. 304)
However, the new information and communication technologies work more with images and less with language. There is no longer any need for explanation; all that counts is what people like or not. At the same time, the media environment is both open to appropriation and contains its own means of appropriation. Thus, the process of appropriation within social spaces has today been extended considerably in a parasocial manner but involves ambivalent “appropriation quality”.
The perspectives of appropriation and coping mainly start to merge whenever urban development provides fewer and fewer spaces in which young people can gain public attention (recognition) and present themselves (self-efficacy). Many feel that they cannot use “their” spaces and patterns of appropriating and extending spaces as a means of integrating into society; instead they tend to feel excluded.
In a segmented work-based society with living situations which are segmented in an “uncontrolled” manner, it must be assumed that if young people’s territorializing does not lead to their integration into the system, this is because its integrative structures no longer always admit them: acts of appropriation are increasingly becoming detached from their integrative function and are left in a closed loop, i.e. without content. “Adolescents’ actions are losing their participative character; they are becoming increasingly left to their own devices, excluded from the structure [. . .]. Youths who are ‘visible’ are growing less representative” (Werlen & Reutlinger, 2006, p. 63).
The perspective of connecting appropriation and coping, as described by Werlen & Reutlinger (among others), can be applied beyond childhood and adolescence, throughout a person’s life course – especially considering that the borders between the ages are blurring (see Chapter 7). This paints a picture of an archetypal trajectory starting out with more physical, territorially rooted forms of appropriation in childhood, moving on to group-related appropriation in adolescence, then the way spaces are experienced in adulthood, mainly during coping crises (experiences of being excluded), and finishing with appropriative behaviour during old age which is once again more physical and territorial.
4.4Recognition
Recognition seems to be the dimension of the situation of coping which runs through all the other dimensions: the undermining involved in dependency; recognition as a necessary requirement for being able to talk about oneself, and recognition as an “amplifier” of appropriation processes. It is not without reason that social recognition is described as a “transitory identity”.
Due to the intersubjective character of interpersonal recognition, its daily practices involve pressure to reciprocate [. . .]. Recognising the other person becomes a precondition for being recognised oneself. However, the central aspect helping members of society develop an identity and fulfilling the functional needs of the community is not only recognition from one’s personal environment but also that coming from “various generalised other people”. Modern societies can thus been seen as a web of finely nuanced spheres of recognition; as socially established patterns of interaction which each give rise to different recognition principles. (Honneth, 2010, p. 38)
From social work experience, however, we know that the interpersonal and social dimensions of social recognition can diverge. It is not rare for even social workers to find themselves developing a good relationship to their clients but preferring to stay at a distance to the milieu they come from. This is the case because most professionals not only come from other lifeworlds but have also been socialized according to norms which often clash with those of their clients’ background milieu. Each social worker needs to be able to address this and balance it against their personal recognition of the client. In this context, it is a professional requirement to differentiate between functional and personal recognition.
Functional recognition is at the heart of acceptance-based social work: as a social worker I have to be able to recognize and accept (not approve of!) the fact that the client’s antisocial or self-destructive behaviour, which it is my duty to combat, often has positive connotations for the client, as it is their only achievable means of coping. If this is accompanied by a personal relationship developing during the support process, this also needs to be brought into balance with functional recognition (closeness and distance). The aim of the acceptance-based approach is to show clients that their social workers not only appreciate the amount of energy they need to expend on coping; they also realize that their clients have certain qualities which, taking the standard view of them as suffering from deficits, have never been recognized as strengths and have thus never come into play. It makes a difference whether, when providing family support, I view the family solely as overtaxed by their disorganized situation, or whether I am nonetheless impressed at how they have managed to just about scrape by for years, despite the adverse conditions. If processes of recognition are to succeed, they thus have to be mutual. Social workers have to be able to show clients that they too want to be recognized and valued by them and that the support work is a joint effort. This also gives the clients recognition. At the same time, recognition can be considered an interpersonal medium which can be used to set limits within a client relationship – one which clients usually accept, as a sign of mutual respect (cf. Heeg & Paul, 2013).
As we established from coping theory, our absolute urge for biographical agency involves an urge to be recognized at any price. We can use the concept of coping to show how people use antisocial behaviour, subconsciously, to draw attention to themselves, using their conspicuous behaviour as what might be called a last-ditch attempt to achieve recognition and make contact. This is also the key to Honneth’s observation on social pathologies resulting from people being denied recognition in a neo-capitalist society:
The struggle for recognition seems to have shifted into the subject’s inner, whether in the form of various fears of failure, or in the form of cold, impotent rage. [. . .] If the drive to use society as a means of developing self-esteem cannot reliably be fulfilled as there are no longer any spheres which are established as standard for this purpose, that drive does not just wither away. With no legitimising principle to lean upon, it becomes curiously unlocalised and seeks out alternative forms of expression. We can describe this social situation as a social pathology: to those who are cut off from any means of accessing established spheres of recognition, this kind of situation means they no longer have any way to gain self-esteem by participating in social life. (Honneth, 2010, p. 44)
For this reason, their search for recognition “takes the uncontrolled form of a mere struggle for public visibility or compensatory respect” (Honneth, 2010, p. 44f). We know the “stigma flaunters” of antisocial settings who are not ashamed of their destructive, conspicuous behaviour but instead proudly present their stigma as it is the only way they have to express the helplessness at its root – to have it recognized by society. The pressure of neo-capitalism has repressed the culture of recognizing helplessness, once fairly well promoted by the welfare state. One of social work’s future tasks should be to develop that culture, at least in the communal area, along with civic society initiatives and social movements.
4.5Situation in Life, Situation of Coping and Status as a Client
In the critical discourses of the 1970s and 1980s, social work was revealed to be a means of social control, a site of labelling and a cause of deviant careers. Since then, reforms have been introduced and designed with the aim of reforming social work’s organizational structures to prevent them from becoming labelling traps or launch pads for deviant careers. Systems for integrated family support (one-stop support services) have been set up to avoid clients being passed from one door to the next and thus inevitably turning into another case for the files. Programmes within service users’ social spaces are intended to free them from the institutional isolation of their status as clients – to reveal them as actors within their social environment, offering an unhindered view of the everyday conditions and skills which social workers can build upon as part of their support plans. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the living and coping situations experienced by the recipients of social care are largely determined by the framework for intervention and control set up by social work services, and in part by their status as clients. This is often not taken into sufficient consideration, at a time when the social work discourse is putting its trust in the “civil society” programme and would prefer to describe clients as “citizens”. In that case, the radical question must be asked of what it means for social work if users are no longer seen as generally dependent clients, but instead act as independent subjects with a legal personality and, possibly, formulate demands which fall outside the boundaries of social work support. The modern-day professionalization of social work has also led to professional expectations of clients now “being in good hands”. One subject not yet broached in this context is the usually hidden conflict “between helpers full of good intentions and clients who are increasingly formulating their own demands”, with “the aspect of rights, as an independent basis for justifying actions or lack or action, being left out of the picture” (Keupp, 1996, p. 165).
Clients’ situation of coping must thus be elucidated from a different angle to their situation in life and seen as contrasting with it. This particularly applies to the dimensions of dependency, expression and appropriation. Methodologically, an analysis of the client’s situation of coping should involve two steps. The first step places the social worker at the focus of attention. Supervision should not only be able to address mutual interdependencies within the client relationship but also to help social workers recognize the aspects of their own controlling behaviour which might repress statements made by clients in which they express their urge to become independent of the support. The second, important step in this context is for the support relationship to be fundamentally understood as a conflictive relationship, allowing a third-party perspective to be adopted, as in the conflict model (see Section 6.5). In other words, it is important to make the most of every opportunity which offers clients a chance to escape the two-person support relationship and find new social connections. This may be through forms of open group work or neighbourhood meet-ups, or by taking part in projects which give them social recognition from other people apart from “their” social worker and thus allow them to leave behind their status as clients. No more needs to be said about people’s situation in life and their situation of coping, seen as their position as a client in the stricter sense. The wider (socio-political) meaning of “situation in life” is about ensuring that precarious situations in life and situations of coping are accepted within social policy. Does the current definition of poverty, as set out by the welfare state, really cover clients’ situation in life – not only in material terms? Is social work open to definitions of poverty aimed at contexts in which avenues are opened up within policy on poverty (rather than just being designed to manage and ring-fence poverty)? In what areas have new, risky situation in life remained unrecognized, and thus unaccepted, by social policy, for example young adults’ precarious transitional situation or the patterns of excessive demand and violence seen in care for the elderly at home? Is there gender-political acceptance of the hidden risks faced by men? After all, the amount of public attention accorded to precarious situations of coping depends on the degree of socio-political acceptance they enjoy. Finally, this is also connected to clients’ chances of escaping the framework of social work, and how they do so.
However, it is not just the question of socio-political acceptance on the part of the state which is of significance when it comes to extending the definition of “situation in life” beyond people’s status as a client. Social acceptance of the way in which the recipients of social services are cared for and supported by the welfare state includes acceptance by other social groups. The aspect of key importance in this respect is acceptance by the middle class, representing social normality. However, in recent years this class has started to put an undefined pressure on social work and its service users. The middle class’s fear of dropping down the social ladder appears to be increasing once again, giving them a wish to distance themselves from socially disadvantaged groups. This pressure is particularly well developed in discussion in the media. In the discourse on young people and families, for instance, the spotlight of social attention is once again falling on problem youths and incapable families, rather than the social circumstances producing them. Thus, social work is again coming under pressure, following the principle of personal blame. For this reason it is once again a matter of urgency to carry out awareness-raising work starting from the immediate community, and to build up support networks, in order to create initial socio-political public spheres for social work.
4.6Excursus: The Situation in Life Approach and the Capability Approach
The capability approach, as developed by Amartya Sen in the 1980s, is actually an approach designed to fight poverty in the societies of Asia, Africa and South America which do not have any well-developed social policy. In essence, this approach can be generally described as an attempt to “create a relation” between the resources people possess and the use that they can (could) make of them. It is part of a programme focusing on the “good life”, in which basic needs and values are achieved in a globally shared understanding of humanity (along the same lines, for example, as the Human Rights Convention) in democratic agreement. Sen’s point is that instead of focusing generally on gaining these primary goods, it is necessary to open up individual abilities to gain them: “the relevant personal characteristics that govern the conversation of primary goods into the person’s ability to promote her ends” (Sen, 1999, p. 74). The central focus here is on the degree of freedom they have to gain them: what options do I have when it comes to making something of what I have in me? How can I personally develop the options for a good life and put them into practice? “According to the capability approach, people’s chances of achieving what they want are a better measurement of wellbeing than other parameters such as income (or gross national income), available goods, utility or satisfaction” (Volkert, 2005, p. 13).
In the recent socio-political discourse, the capability approach and the situation in life approach are also seen as complementary. The capability approach is even seen as an “internationally widespread version of the situation in life approach” (Volkert, 2005, p. 143; see also Leßmann, 2007). The main reason that we do not share this understanding is that the concept of the situation in life it uses is only understood in a descriptive manner, not in a historical, dialectical manner. After all, in order to open up windows in society giving people a chance of achieving what they want (see Otto & Ziegler, 2007), the capability approach would need to have a socio-historical theory of how living conditions and capabilities are developed and made possible, as is the case via the situation in life approach, in the dialectic of extension. The European form of the capability approach shifts it from the context of social history and development policy in which it came about in the 1970s and 1980s, relocating it in the European discourse on welfare policy, so to speak as a combinable module.
Sen developed the concept in a socio-historical and socio-political landscape in which – more so than today – there was still absolutely no sign of a welfare state developing of the kind in European industrial societies. Similarly to the Declaration of Human Rights, in a situation where no collective social processes are in sight, what is required is to make social potential for development (going beyond a mere everyday struggle for survival) visible and worthwhile for individuals. However, in the long term, this cannot replace adhering to the principle of the welfare state. The capability approach is blind in terms of social history and social structure, even if its advocates point out that Sen does in fact bring up the conditional socio-economic context in the shape of his socially determined “instrumental freedoms” such as political freedom, social opportunities or social security (see Sen, 2002). However, this remains programmatic and does not come from a historical, empirical source as with the concept of situation in life. This means that the concept remains appellative, and it comes as no surprise if criticism of the approach is mixed with the suspicion that modern capitalism is all too happy to deal with programmes of this kind, whose social criticism is merely appellative; that it can adapt them and market them for its own purposes. If the individual is pinpointed as the agent of his or her needs and wishes, then what sets that individual apart, after all, from the figure of the “worker as entrepreneur” and the “optimiser of one’s own human capital” as has been introduced and presented in the liberalist discussion on work and education for some years now? A second critical question is directed at the subject theory implicit in the capability approach. Can one really simply take it for granted that subjects have access to themselves like this and that the resources which are “in them” can be activated this way? Inside, people often react quite differently to what might be expected from external cues. We can examine this in the concept of coping with life. The naivety of the capability approach regarding inner dynamics can easily lead to untested assumptions with an optimistic view of how people act. More than anything else, the capability approach is a normative concept. It sets down the goals of a “good life” made up of basic socio-anthropological findings and ideas taken from global human rights agreements. In this manner, Martha Nussbaum (1999) developed a list of capabilities leading to a “good life”. Sen is against the prescription of aims; on principle, he would like to see goals being set which are open, left up to individuals or agreed upon by means of democratic discourse. After all, the whole point is to give actors individual freedom and options. This reveals how difficult it is, if not problematic, to combine universal goals linked to the collective with individual ideas of what makes a “good life”. In terms of social policy, what we are dealing with here is a free-floating programme, as the goals and opportunities for achieving them are not linked in turn to social conflict or the conditions (in respect of social history or social structure) in which those goals develop and can be experienced.
For this reason, we prefer the term “better life” to that of “good life”, as it serves to tie in the normative aspect with the empirical social conditions of people’s current situation in life. After all, it has always been the discourse on the welfare state in which the empirical, and thus tangible, levels of a life befitting human beings have been established and – against a background of social conflict – constantly re-established. At this juncture it should be pointed out once again that the normative aspect only becomes clear to clients if they have the opportunity to reflect on their situation of distress by experiencing alternative possibilities and thus seeing contrasts with a better life. In social work practice, the idea has long taken root that it is not rational explanation which promises to change normative attitudes, but the provision of “functional equivalents”. In other words, projects on which people can see themselves in a new light in different social contexts, promoting self-esteem, recognition and self-efficacy. It is only when alternatives of this kind have been experienced that normative schemes can have any effect in a manner relevant to coping. This is just as true of human rights as it is of the principles of a good life. On the subjective level, by contrast, the capability approach fits in very well with the idea of extended agency as proposed in the coping concept. Extended agency starts out, radically, from people’s freedom to achieve fulfilment and sets out to measure social conditions by whether they offer individuals positive freedoms of this kind (see Section 6.3).