BJSW Advance Access originally published online on October 3, 2005
British Journal of Social Work 2006 36(2):227-246; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch251
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Recognizing Social Work
Dr Ian Shaw is Professor of Social Work at the University of York, England. He is co-editor of the journal Qualitative Social Work. He writes and researches mainly about various aspects of the practice/research interface. He is currently studying the kinds and quality of social work research in UK universities.
Dr Hilary Arksey has worked as a Research Fellow in the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York since 1995. Hilary’s research interests lie in the areas of informal care, employment and disability, and qualitative research methods. She has recently completed two studies related to carers and is currently working on research, funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, into carers’ aspirations and decision making around work, retirement and pensions.
Dr Audrey Mullender is Principal of Ruskin College Oxford and holds a Chair in Social Work at the University of Warwick. She is a member of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences and served on the Social Policy and Social Work Panel in the Research Assessment Exercise 2001.
Correspondence to Professor Ian Shaw, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK. E-mail: ifs2{at}york.ac.uk
There has been little interest until recently in the question of whether social work has the characteristics of an academic discipline. This article offers a synopsis of issues arising from a review of social work and social care research funded through the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE). Following a brief scene setting, the first main section of the article gives a synopsis of the social work and social care community’s experience and judgements regarding their engagement with the research council. In the second part of the article, we review relevant policies, structures and trends from an ESRC and social science perspective. We focus on the development of research programmes, followed by an outline of the delivery and implementation of programmes. In the final section, we review the issues, themes and directions that emerged from the project. These include judgements of research relevance, research users, research utilization, the social work contribution to the development of research methods, inter-disciplinary research, the question of whether there are distinctive attributes of social work research, research capacity, career building, priority setting, and the outcomes of social work funding bids. We also reflect on the development and delivery of research programmes, and the implications of the invisibility of social work research within the ESRC. Disciplines within universities are not fixed and abiding realities. ‘Recognizing’ social work is a dynamic, socially negotiated process, shaped by the construction and ordering of knowledge claims within social work and social science communities, and reflecting power differentials that are mediated through structural mechanisms that tend to exclude new ‘claimants’ such as social work. We include a number of recommendations, and suggest ways in which the issues may have relevance beyond the UK.
Keywords: social science, ESRC, social work, research, discipline
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