Social Work Practice

Introduction

In 1981, the National Association of Social Workers in the USA defined ‘social work practice’ as a professional endeavour, which aims to:

• 1
  enhance the developmental, problem-solving, and coping capacities of people;
• 2
  promote the effective and human operation of systems that provide resources and services to people;
• 3
  link people with systems that provide them with resources, services, and opportunities; and
• 4
  contribute to the development and improvement of social policy.

This broad definition of social work practice fails to attenuate the frame or sensibilities of practice-related issues as they are understood by students and practitioners. As mentioned in the Introduction, practice is always situated on the moving border between process and event, between the real and the possible. Generally speaking, social work is the nexus of ‘arrays of activities’ or practices that practitioners perform with greater or lesser commitment, dexterity, and skill. The term ‘professional practice’ tends to refer to where a student is required to extend knowledge and skills within a practical environment or ‘practice setting’. Another frequently used term in social work is ‘best practice’, which is a technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven to lead reliably to a desired outcome. A commitment to using the best practices in any field is a commitment to using all the knowledge, methods, and skills at one's disposal to ensure success.

Social workers tend to agree there is no such thing as a coherent, unified ‘practice theory’, only a body of highly diverse processes, tasks, agendas, skills, and interventions that are loosely defined as a ‘practice approach’. Fields or sites of intervention are specialist domains of practice – mental health, children and family work, disability and aged care, and so on – often exhibiting their own ‘logic’, specialities, processes, and priorities. Practitioners often rely on strategies which, even if they are not aimed at explicitly formulated goals, still turn out to be objectively adjusted to the situation. Action guided by a ‘feel for the context’ has all the appearances of the rational action but is just as likely to involve nuanced sensibilities and judgement. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's (1986) model of skill acquisition progressing from competency and proficiency to expertise helps capture the way practice is determined simultaneously by experience, context, and knowledge. This is sometimes called [Page 208]‘practice wisdom’ relying on intuitive or professional judgement as a type of cognitive heuristic.

Section 3 concentrates on the important area of social work practice. The definition of social work practice is a contestable one but successive attempts to define it revisit a number of common components such that contemporary social work practice is seen to incorporate all of the following tasks: (i) direct intervention; (iii) risk assessment and decision making; (iii) advocacy; and (iv) community work. The notion of enabling, often achieved through negotiated change, is also linked closely with the theme of personal empowerment in social work. The degree to which the goals are identified by the individual or externally prescribed is debatable. Nevertheless, in this context, approaches like reflective practice and crisis interventions have become popular. From a different perspective, advocacy on behalf of or alongside the service user has also been seen as an important component of the role of a social worker. Some regard social work as a problem-solving activity that focuses on the whole of a person's or family's life, their social support network, their neighbourhood, and community. However, it is generally agreed that the process and the relationship form a core part of social work practice with service users and can represent the service in itself. This section, while not exhaustive, develops and identifies core elements of social work practice from a range of contexts, cases, and environments to give the reader a good understanding of different types of intervention.

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