BJSW Advance Access originally published online on December 5, 2006
British Journal of Social Work 2008 38(3):561-579; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcl367
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Liquid Social Work: Welfare Interventions as Mobile Practices
Harry Ferguson is Professor of Social Work at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His books include Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity (Palgrave, 2004) and (with Karen Jones and Barry Cooper) Best Practice in Social Work: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave, 2007).
Correspondence to Professor Harry Ferguson, University of the West of England, Faculty of Health and Social Care, Blackberry Hill, Bristol, BS16 1DD, UK. E-mail: Harry.ferguson{at}uwe.ac.uk
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Summary |
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 Top Summary Mobile lifeThe emergence and development...Home visits and the...Getting there . ....Organizational life: dwelling in...(Re)connections, complex...References |
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This paper re-examines the nature of social work from the perspective of movement and ‘mobilities’. It shows that social work is at all times ‘on the move’, yet theory and analyses of policy and practice largely depict it as static, solid and sedentarist. The paper draws on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006), through which a concern with flows and movements of people, objects, information, practices, speed and rhythm, with complexity, fluid images and liquid metaphors, is moving to the centre of social theory. An understanding of the ‘liquid’, mobile character of social work means producing accounts which are much closer to what its practices are, how and where they are performed and experienced by service users and professionals, and the opportunities and risks inherent to them. Three key domains of practice—the home visit, the car journey and the office/organization—are examined in terms of the movements that go on in them. Viewed through systemic and complexity theories, it is shown that social work interventions in late-modernity are best understood in terms of a flow of mobile practices between public and private worlds, organizations and the home, at the heart of which is the sensual body of the practitioner on the move.
Keywords: mobilities, movement, social work, cars, home visit, information technology and welfare organizations
In this paper, I will argue that how social work is designed and delivered requires us to understand its practices as being fundamentally about movement. Social work is a mobile practice. This is most evident in the necessity to do a home visit to establish the safety and well-being of children, the needs of frail, unwell or vulnerable adults, and so on, which involves moving to and from the office and the service user’s dwelling, journeying usually in a car. When in the service user’s home, negotiation goes on about how the space is used, where to sit, stand, having to cope with being surrounded by moving or stationary people, and with images and information flowing in from the television, radio, mobile phones or even the internet. The organizational base of social work, be it the office, clinic or hospital, is also a site of mobile practices, as is the car, which is not only a vehicle which enables professional and service user to meet, but in which practice itself goes on. Social work and welfare practices involve an intimate engagement by the (mobile) body with time and space, public and private, and are as much ‘liquid’ practices as solid, static affairs.
Yet, the mobile nature of social work and welfare practices (such as health visiting and community nursing) has been completely overlooked in theoretical work, accounts of practice and policy analysis. A new sociological concern with ‘mobilities’ (Urry, 2000) and what has recently been called ‘the new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006) is emerging to study the nature and impact of movement on social life. The metaphor of modern life as ‘liquid’ (Bauman, 2000, 2003, 2005) also reflects how major social theorists are opening up this new empirical and theoretical area. The mobilities paradigm is now a significant area for cross-disciplinary scholarship, as exemplified by the Centre for Mobilities Research, which was established at Lancaster University in 2004. A global momentum is evident involving scholars from a range of disciplines and countries coalescing around the study of mobile people, objects, information, networks, flows and practices. A journal called Mobilities (published by Sage) was launched in 2006.
Against this background, it can be seen that social work practices are framed in terms of what Sheller and Urry (2006) refer to as ‘sedentarism’ and treated as though they are static. Some attention to movement is implicit to models of social work practice in how they seek to be active in promoting personal and social change, which involves skilled actions with and between the service user, family, group, community and practitioner. Some important and sophisticated work shows the dynamic processes involved in interventions which invariably go on in a context of flux as cases and service users’ lives may change (Coulshed and Orme, 1998; Fook, 2002; Holland, 2004; Healy, 2005; Munro, 2005a, 2005b). However, the literature of social work and welfare practices still lacks context as to how practice actually goes on within time and space. It is as if patients can be treated, offenders rendered safer on probation, adults helped and children protected without professionals ever having to leave their desks. The key point is that nothing is seen to be moving, in the literal sense that such practices require the mobility of human bodies, information and objects such as cars. Ignoring this makes it seem as if all were stationary, fixed, solid. Social policy and social work analysis is not alone in this, as the entire social sciences have been guilty of a neglect of mobilities, as exemplified by the failure to explore the huge implications of the motor car for social life. Urry (2000, p. 59) notes that in general, ‘sociology has regarded cars as a neutral technology, permitting social patterns of life that would have more or less occurred anyway’. But these patterns are socially created and the significance of the car to welfare practice, and much else that constitutes its mobilities, requires detailed analysis.
What is being attempted here is the beginnings of a sociology of social work and welfare practices from the perspective of the new mobilities paradigm. I shall argue that a mobile sociology of welfare practices is not just concerned with marginal, relatively insignificant issues which might be of minor intellectual interest. Rather it gets to the heart of what these practices are, how and where they are performed, capturing what gets done and experienced through their movement and stasis. It means studying the same events and processes as before: policy, guidance, management, inter-professional meetings, practitioner and service user perspectives, professional–user encounters, the social production of welfare knowledge, but in ways which shed new light on what is done and how, capturing the ‘flow’ of these practices in movement. Kesserling (2006) suggests that ‘mobility’ can be defined ‘as an actor’s competence to realize specific projects and plans while being on the move’. If that is correct, then the achievement of realizing welfare projects, such as protecting children and vulnerable adults for instance, depends on social workers’ and other professionals’ capacities to be effective, not only while seated/stationary, but also while on the move.
John Urry argues for a new manifesto for sociology ‘that examines the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities’ (Urry, 2000, p. 1). We need to understand much more about how the diverse mobilities of social work and welfare practices shape the patterning of professional work and service users’ lives and influence the effectiveness of what is done, creating opportunities and dangers. Sheller and Urry (2006, p. 209) put the matter well: ‘The car is perhaps an obvious candidate for application of a more mobile perspective, but what if we were to open up all sites, places, and materialities to the mobilities that are already coursing through them?’ It is precisely such an opening up of social work and welfare practices to their existing mobile character and to the possibility of new mobile influences that is at the heart of this paper. The paper begins by considering the mobile nature of life today. It then examines how social work became mobile through a historical account of the emergence and development of its practices. It goes on to consider the meaning of the home visit, the role of the car in social work practices and the place of the body and emotions in the mobile flows of practices and information between the office and the service user’s home. The paper ends by making suggestions for the development of a mobile sociology of welfare practices.
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Mobile life |
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TopSummaryMobile lifeThe emergence and development...Home visits and the...Getting there . ....Organizational life: dwelling in...(Re)connections, complex...References |
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The meaning of contemporary society, social work and welfare practices can only be fully understood in terms of the sheer scale and speed of movement that typically goes on in day-to-day life (Urry, 2000; Virilio, 1986). One billion cars were manufactured during the twentieth century. There are currently over 700 million cars roaming the world and world car travel is predicted to triple between 1990 and 2050 (Urry, 2004, p. 25; Hawken et al., 1999). Globally, four million air journeys take place every day (Pascoe, 2001). There are over 600 million international passenger arrivals each year, compared with twenty-five million in 1950. At any one time, 300,000 passengers are in flight above the USA. A half-million new hotel rooms are being built each year worldwide; and there is one car journey for every 8.6 people worldwide (Urry, 2000, p. 50). People in Britain are travelling five times further per year than in the 1950s, and this figure is expected to double again by 2025 (Featherstone et al., 2005). This increase principally involves new movement and not the replacement of other transport by the car. In the UK, people make around a 1,000 trips a year. Most trips go to destinations that could not be reached when cycles and trains were the main forms of transport (Larson et al., 2006, p. 62). This constitutes by far the greatest international movement of people in the history of the world. Yet, the flows of movement are uneven, with 80 per cent of the travel taking place within Western and Southern Europe and within North America. Globally, thirty-one million refugees are displaced from their homes. The increased capacities for people, goods and information to move lie behind the increased involvement of social work and welfare with mobile populations, asylum seekers and economic migrants.
It is not just people who have become more mobile, but also images, information and communications. ‘Virtual travel’, the capacity to plug into global networks of information on the internet and other electronic circuits has increased exponentially. People now ‘do’ things without their bodies having to travel physically (Larson et al., 2006, p. 60), such as view properties, gamble, purchase things without visiting shops and so on. By 2003, two-thirds of the UK adult population were internet users. ‘Communicative travel’ occurs through person-to-person messages via letters, postcards, greeting cards, telephones, faxes, email and video-conferences. In the organizational world, meetings of people who are situated in different parts of the globe or within the same country now take place. There are now more mobile phones than landlines—75 per cent of UK adults owned a mobile in 2003 (Larson et al., 2006, p. 60).
These new communication technologies are creating new dangers, such as internet child abuse, for welfare agencies to tackle (Calder, 2004). They also open up new opportunities for children and young people to communicate their wishes and concerns to welfare agencies (Parton, 2006, p. 183). Equally, what Garret (2004) calls the ‘electronic turn’ in welfare organization and delivery reflects how new modes and patterns of information management and communications are impacting on practitioners and service users. Seen from the perspective of the users of welfare, many use services because of their mobility—the homeless, asylum seekers—or their need for mobility—such as children who need to be removed from home for their protection. Similarly, welfare practitioners are involved in a myriad of ways in the consequences of the individualization of identities and lifestyles and how intimate relationships between adults, and between adults and children in families, are now less binding (Featherstone, 2004; Ferguson, 2001). What Bauman (2003) calls ‘liquid love’ is apparent in high rates of divorce and relationship breakdown, necessitating interventions into domestic violence, mental health problems, providing practical and therapeutic support for children and young people, single parents and so on. Welfare provision is also intimately connected to the mobility of family members in how services step in to provide for situations where adult children separated by distance from frail parents are unable to provide direct support. Thus, for Urry, the dramatic extent to which everyday life is now constituted by mobilities requires us ‘to develop through appropriate metaphors a sociology which focuses upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering, rather than upon stasis, structure and social order’ (Urry, 2000, p. 18).
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The emergence and development of mobile social work |
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TopSummaryMobile lifeThe emergence and development...Home visits and the...Getting there . ....Organizational life: dwelling in...(Re)connections, complex...References |
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The nature of social work and welfare practices today is inconceivable without the culture of the car and, more generally, these socio-technical developments which have transformed capacities to reach vulnerable people and provide services. I shall now begin to explore the mobile nature of social work through a historical analysis of the emergence and development of child protection. The child protection movement began in the USA in the 1870s and spread to the UK and Ireland in the 1880s through the work of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). At the outset of its work in the 1880s and 90s, NSPCC social workers, known as ‘Inspectors’, used their legs and transport on trains to reach children. There are many moving accounts in the annual reports and case records of time of Inspectors literally running while carrying dying children to places of safety (Ferguson, 2004, pp. 30–3). Yet, the practice was a relatively static affair in that the technology did not exist to get them around more quickly or more extensively to outlying areas. NSPCC inspectors began using the bicycle in the late 1890s and, in 1900, it began to be noted that increases in child cruelty cases were ‘partly owing to the provision of a Cycle for the Inspector, who has thus been enabled to visit Rural Districts otherwise less accessible’ (STAR, 1900, p. 14).
The child protectors were quick to celebrate this new impact:
. . . a tramp woman and her three children were traced from place to place and found after about 100 miles cycling, with the result that the mother was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for cruel neglect, and the care of the children given by the Magistrates to Dr Barnardo. (STAR, 1901, pp. 14–15)
In the same year, the NSPCC remarked on how ‘a large number of the cases’ were now ‘in towns and villages scattered over counties, and have involved the travelling of Inspectors from the centres at which they are stationed over not less than 1,000,000 miles’ (NSPCC, 1901, p. 5).
The expanding mobility of social work had at least four main effects. First, conceptions of time as well as space were transformed. Changes in speed of action led to the ‘shrinking’ of geographical boundaries which, in turn, transformed the temporal structures of child protection. As children could now be reached physically, so it became thinkable that they could be seen more quickly. As conceptions of space shrank, a transformed time-consciousness entered practice which became a fundamental defining feature of the modernity of social work and the ideal that professionals could and should be able to protect children in time (Ferguson, 2004). In the mid to late nineteenth century, clock time had come into universal use and now provided the organizing frame for bureaucracies (Urry, 2000, p. 107). This was exemplified in social work by the emergence in the early 1900s of periodical home visit (usually weekly), which also meant imposing clock and calendar routines upon the ‘lived time’ (Lefebvre, 1991) of the family lives of agency clients. A distinct rhythm to modern social work practices had become established.
Second, an important aim of increasingly mobile social work practices was to render families immobile. Part of the late-nineteenth-century social politics which led to the foundation of social work as a profession was that the upper and middle classes feared the ‘underclass’ now resident in the slums of the large urban areas created by the industrial revolution and sought to bring them under control by making them visible (see Bosanquet, 1874). As Foucault writes of such disciplinary power, ‘Discipline is an anti-nomadic technique’:
. . . discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. (Foucault, 1977, p. 219)
‘Seeing’ the poor was regarded as equivalent to ‘knowing’ them and surveillance as the means to inculcating civility and acceptable behaviour (Urry, 2000, p. 94). In the early 1890s, local reports even had a category of ‘decamped’ families in their returns (STAR, 1891). A complete national network of NSPCC Inspectors took twenty years to put in place and was regarded as essential in creating conditions in which it would be possible to enforce parental responsibility by closing off the gaps through which recalcitrant and evasive parents could slip. As the child protection movement grew in size and experience, it adopted an increasingly self-confident view of its ability to render visible even the most transient and elusive households by using its national network of social workers, in tandem with other professionals such as the police and health visitors to catch them up. A key shift had occurred in the governance of families.
However, the manner in which this was put into practice gave rise to a third effect of modern social work mobilities, which was that home visiting became the key approach. In the 1890s, incarceration of parents in prisons was the main response to confirmed cases of cruelty. Prosecution rates were as high as 18 per cent in the early 1890s, but dropped to 15 per cent of cases in 1901 to just 3 per cent in 1906. Meanwhile, the numbers of home visits that Inspectors made increased dramatically. In the 1890s, a typical Inspector made an average of three home visits per case, and, by 1914, the supervision rate had risen to five per case (Ferguson, 2004, pp. 45–6). ‘Supervisions’ focused upon the family home had become the modus operandi of social work and child protection.
This shift in disciplinary practices fits with that identified by Foucault as being central to the creation of modern practices like social work, which he refers to as ‘the movement from one project to another, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 209; Healy, 2000). However, the solid language of ‘surveillance’ which Foucault and his followers use is completely inadequate here, implying as it does rigid structure and control in the community in a manner that mirrors the control possible in prisons and other total institutions. A mobile sociology of social work needs to break free of the theoretical chains within which Foucauldian perspectives have imprisoned it. In real terms, what these changes meant was that the very core of social work was now constituted by home visits and what practitioners were able to achieve through them, while being mobile. A modern form of social work practice was born here which, far from the implied solid, sedentary ‘gaze’, was essentially mobile and ‘liquid’ in nature. What was seen of service users in their day-to-day lives, as professionals home visited for relatively brief periods or clients visited social work offices, was fragmented, fluid, providing transient snapshots of people’s lives.
A fourth effect was that it was the body of the practitioner moving from place to place, city to country, street to street, office to home (visit), room to room, that was the conduit through which the rules, regulations and cultural norms of practice passed. Practice was mediated through the body. In the course of developing speed over space and time-consciousness, the construction of danger to children invariably became focused on marginal, ‘dirty’ families, such that in their pursuit of them, it was dirt and smell that first hit practitioners in the face. From this formative period, child neglect dominated twentieth-century definitions of child abuse. Thus, all the senses came into play, not just the visual. Touch, hearing and especially smell became central to the embodied nature of practice. Early in the twentieth century, a mobile flow to social work practices came to define its very modernity. The mobile professional all-smelling gaze was up and running. Social work was on the move.
By the late 1940s, the state had taken over primary responsibility for social work. At the same time, further twentieth-century innovations in transport meant that the motorbike was being used by social workers from the 1940s, and the car from the 1950s. Developments in the scope and reach of corporeal travel and in communication technologies and virtual travel, sketched out earlier, and in child health diagnostic techniques and technologies such as the x-ray machine have created the mobilities which permit the protection and promotion of welfare of ever more vulnerable children and adults today.
Over time, the organization of social work within the welfare state has become more and more sophisticated, as it has come to be delivered through huge bureaucracies like social services departments and subject to reorganizations and the changing patterns and whims of government policies. Since the 1980s and 90s, this has resulted in greatly increased proceduralization and managerialism, in some measure to try and manage the risk exposed by system failures in child protection and mental health cases. This has occurred alongside new philosophies of welfare which emphasize direct regulation of practice and ‘care planning’, all facilitated by increased capacities to process and store information about service users and practice that have arisen through computerization and information technology (Webb, 2006). New opportunities are available to monitor staff through the use of databanks and assessment and other frameworks which both shape and record their work (Garrett, 2004). Some aspects of a new relationship between presence and absence also seem to be emerging through electronic tagging, which is the classic form of monitoring offenders from a distance while they are in the community, on the move. The increased use of technologies of surveillance and communication changes the frequency with which social worker and client need to meet (Aas, 2004).
The outline of these changes is well enough known to require no further detailed discussion here. What is at issue is their meaning and how social work is to be best characterized and understood in late-modernity. The dominant perspective in commentary on the state of social work today suggests that practitioners are being deskilled by procedures, audit and technologies of care and spend more and more time at their desks and computers and less and less time with service users. This is said to be exacerbated by increased emphasis on ‘joined-up’ working, inter-agency collaboration and social workers’ case management role. Moreover, it is argued, the time that is spent with service users is increasingly determined by what the procedures decree should be done, rather than this flowing from the intuitive actions of professionals (Garrett, 2003; Munro, 2004, 2005a, b; Parton, 2006; Webb, 2006). The dominant approach, then, on our terms, is to emphasize immobility: how practitioners are effectively being immobilized and constrained through regulation of their work. The possibility that there is, so to speak, more freedom for social workers to move is evident in critiques which suggest that the supposed erosion of discretion in ‘street-level bureaucracy’ like social work is exaggerated (Evans and Harris, 2004), with scope still for workers to creatively shape their practice (Charles and Butler, 2004; Ferguson, 2001; Senior and Loades, 2007). It is important that in this crucially important debate, social work is not fragmented and seen as being about either the impact of organizations and regulation or individual practices. Introducing a mobilities perspective enables us to make visible new connections and complexities. My argument is that the form that late-modern social work takes must be understood in terms of the flow of mobile practices between public and private worlds, organizations and service users, the office and the home. At the heart of this is the sensual body of the practitioner on the move. While social work’s core requirement to go on the move to fulfil its aims remains broadly the same as it was in the twentieth century, some elements of a new relationship appear to be emerging between the informational and the relational, regulation and movement, mobilities and immobilities in welfare practices, all of which require systematic empirical investigation and theoretical development. One way to deepen understandings of this is to break down what social workers typically do into visible actions performed in specific contexts, while appreciating that in practice, everything is connected and flows around/together/apart. I shall focus on three specific domains of practice: the organizational, the (car) journey and the service user’s home, reversing the usual order in which they are discussed by first studying the most neglected sphere and practice of all—the home visit.
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Home visits and the reverberations of mobile practices |
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TopSummaryMobile lifeThe emergence and development...Home visits and the...Getting there . ....Organizational life: dwelling in...(Re)connections, complex...References |
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The home visit is no less central to social work today than it ever was. Without it, social work could not exist. Or, put another sociological way, while some significant work can be done when social workers are absent and at a distance from their clients—information gathering, inter-professional discussion and assessment of need/risk, advocacy—helping and protecting people demand making human contact with them, that professionals and service users become ‘co-present’ (this formulation draws on Urry (2003a)). While some interviews take place in offices, clinics and hospitals, the main way social workers achieve co-presence is to go to where service users live. The most important reason for this is that the home so often is a central reason why social workers are involved at all, such as in assessing frail elderly people’s capacities to live there safely, or where there are concerns about child neglect due to poor ‘home conditions’. More generally, promoting children’s welfare and safety means assessing and working on family relationships in their natural surroundings—their home.
The meaning of ‘home’ has been the focus of investigation by a range of disciplines, including history, geography, urban studies, housing studies, architecture and sociology (see, e.g. Saunders, 1990). Yet, it has been virtually ignored by social work, despite the ‘home visit’ being central to its practices. While some important ethnographies of social work have been produced (Wattam, 1991; Pithouse, 1998; Dingwall et al., 1983; Buckley, 2003; Scourfield, 2003), professionals’ experiences of home visiting have not been systematically researched. This again exemplifies the preoccupation in the literature with what goes on in the public domain, between professionals, within occupational cultures, reinforcing the sedentary nature of current understandings of practice.
As Webb (2006, pp. 87–9) argues, a focus on the increased regulation of social work over the past ten to twenty years should not be at the expense of grasping the importance of the home as a place that increasingly provides meaning and security in people’s lives in a risk-obsessed world and the real and symbolic importance of the home visit, to service users as well as professionals. Jones (with Powell, 2007) shows how making sense of the risks and resources that homes and carers represent is central to work with older people. Social workers can have very different conceptions of the home as a place of safety or danger compared with the vulnerable adults who live in them. In the case she outlines of an older woman with dementia, the social worker initially viewed the home as unsafe while the service user saw it as the only place where she could feel secure. Through complex and delicate negotiation which included a detailed assessment of the service user’s capacities, the domestic space and how she moved within it, both the social worker and service user shifted positions to arrive at a plan which saw both the resources that the home offered and the supports needed to counteract its dangers respected, thus meeting need in a way that was authoritative yet fair and ethically appropriate (Jones with Powell, 2007).
As I have shown, the speed of movement that typifies social work today has a material basis to it: practitioners do move more quickly than ever across space, having effectively conquered it. This is true at least in the sense of the speed at which social workers can get to the doorsteps of where vulnerable children and adults live—the family home. What goes on in trying to find (mobile) service users/households and, once located, within private space inside the service user’s house has most certainly not been mastered by social professionals. Having to knock on a door and tell a complete stranger that they are under suspicion of maltreating their children fills even the most experienced workers with anxiety and dread (Turnell and Edwards, 1999, p. 110). In child protection, even (or often especially) when families and professionals are well known to each other, problems in accessing children within the home have been enacted time and time again in child death inquiry cases. In the Jasmine Beckford case (London Borough of Brent, 1985), for instance, social workers made countless abortive attempts to see five-year-old Jasmine at home during the time that she was being systematically abused and murdered. Jasmine’s mother and stepfather were often hostile to professionals and when the social worker did gain access to the home and Jasmine was present in the living room, the parents stage-managed the visit in a way that disguised Jasmine’s fatal injuries and prevented them from being recognized. Here, we see how patterns of conscious manipulation by parents have resulted in the effective immobilization of social workers and other professionals. Professionals’ state of fear and paralysis mirrors the trapped, immobile nature of the abused children’s experience (see also London Borough of Greenwich, 1987).
Home visiting also continues to be a deeply sensual experience. Yet, little open discussion or analysis of bodily engagement, ‘the smell of practice’ (Ferguson, 2004) and the impact of feelings goes on. For instance, eight-year-old Victoria Climbié died with 128 separate injuries to her body, having been starved, beaten and left in a freezing bathroom, trussed up in a bin-bag, strapped into a bath, existing in her urine and faeces. A crucial, yet vastly under-analysed, reason why professionals failed to get close to and protect Victoria was because she was diagnosed as having scabies. At least one social worker couldn’t get away from Victoria quickly enough when she came to the office, while two other social workers and a police officer, all independently of one another, refused to visit the home for fear of getting infected (Laming, 2003). These contamination fears and feelings of disgust doubtless came into play on the few occasions on which they did visit, as they did not touch or relate directly to Victoria, or look round the home—actions which might have revealed the torturous conditions of her life (Cooper, 2005; Ferguson, 2005).
In key policy texts, child protection work is typically represented as rational rule-following by disembodied people which goes on outside of time and space. Here, children are seen as being allowed to die because either the proper organizational structures or rules are not in place or those that are were not adequately followed. This constitutes a way of seeing welfare practice in terms of a linear model of cause and effect. Thinking about practices in terms of mobility can help us to develop a theory of practice based on understandings of flows of information and practices, how the (professional) body moves through spaces (such as the home), or becomes immobilized and fails to move (enough). This means focusing on ‘the recentring of the corporeal body as an affective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006, p. 216). We urgently need an ‘emotional geography’ of social work which covers all the sites on which it operates—the office, clinic, car, street, café, community centre and the home visit (see Bondi et al., 2006). The application to welfare practices of theories and methods from psycho-social studies which place emotions at the centre of social policy has much to offer here (Hoggett, 2000, 2001). At the core of this is the management of anxiety and emotional dynamics and what can be done in different environments (clinics, family centres, homes) to ‘contain’ workers’ anxieties in ways which enable practitioners to integrate thought and feeling and better understand and promote the safety and well-being of service users (Froggett, 2002).
We need a language to help us make sense of these experiences—the ‘something’ that happens when home visiting, and in general when policy is turned into practices through movement. An appropriate metaphor here is ‘reverberation’, which Bachelard (1969) develops as a way of describing the movement between the person and the house that disrupts any clear distinction between the two. He argues that it is necessary to understand domestic space—the home—as qualitative, sensuous and lived. Houses are lived through one’s body and its memories. Classically, the home we dwelled in at birth and as children holds special meanings and memory traces. The metaphor of reverberation suggests an immediacy in how the characteristics of houses and those in them physically affect us. What Bachelard evokes is a sense of unpredictability and deep emotional and psychological resonances in our experiences of our own and others’ homes. The question ‘what reverberates within you about this family/child/adult/older person/home?’ could help in understanding the experience of social work and the influences on how free or constrained professionals feel to move around and take control of encounters and what can immobilize them in performing the movements that are essential to doing effective social work.
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Getting there . . . and back: the car and social work practices |
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TopSummaryMobile lifeThe emergence and development...Home visits and the...Getting there . ....Organizational life: dwelling in...(Re)connections, complex...References |
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The centrality of the car and the system of ‘automobility’ to mobile life have become the subject of detailed analysis (Featherstone et al., 2005). Cars have a number of functions in social work and welfare practices. But, given that this has almost never been mentioned, let alone analysed, it appears to be assumed that what happens between leaving the office and arriving at the home visit and the return journey to the office is wasted, or perhaps ‘non-time’. Lyons and Urry (2005) show that the assumption that travel time is wasted time is increasingly mistaken. Time-use studies of what people spend their time doing on journeys show that people are productive in many ways, from sleeping/snoozing, to the by now ubiquitous use of laptop computers on a train, to taking part in a telephone conference in a car using a hands-free mobile phone. Some whose work involves long-distance driving even do actual work while driving on the motorway, such as reading work-related documents on their lap and mobile phone texts (Laurier, 2004). The workplace for mobile workers can be located in the boot of their car (Laurier, 2002; Laurier and Philo, 2003).
Cars, as Sheller (2004) shows, elicit a wide range of feelings—what she calls ‘automotive emotions’. Some love them and the pleasures of driving, the thrill of speed. Others get angry in them (‘road rage’); while some are furious with them and passionately mobilize to ‘stop the traffic’, seeking to make communities safer and less polluted. People are moved by cars—in every sense. She draws on the sociology of automobility and the sociology of the emotions to explore the ways in which the car ‘is implicated in a deep context of affective and embodied relations between people, machines and spaces of mobility and dwelling, in which emotions and the senses play a key part’ (Sheller, 2004, p. 221). The car has itself become a form of ‘dwelling’—an expression of the construction of a particular self. The importance of the car to consumer lifestyles and identity formation is such that the nature of this ‘dwellingness’ has changed from ‘dwelling-on-the road’ to ‘dwelling-within-the-car’—the car as a ‘home-from-home’ (Urry, 2000, p. 191).
The relationship of welfare practitioners to their cars is an area that is ripe for research. Smith’s (2003) research came upon the significance of the car for social workers quite unintentionally. In a qualitative study of sixty social workers’ and twelve counsellors’ experiences of fear and distress, he found that many (thirty-one) wanted to talk about the central role that their cars and driving played in their personal and professional identities and emotional lives. For some, cars represented a threat as they feared service users could follow them in cars or trace their home addresses through their car registration. Or the car could be a secure base to return to after a difficult, fearful encounter with the service user, and/or the means that would take them to such a base. Since I began thinking about the car in these terms, a number of people have spontaneously volunteered automobile stories on which I draw here, as well as from my own research and experience. The car is itself a site of actual practice in which professionals and service users are co-present, such as when social workers take looked after young people on access visits, to new placements or just out, such as to a café to talk. Cars provide enclosed confidential spaces in which supervision or debriefing and peer support goes on between the social worker and those who accompanied her on a troublesome visit. The car is also used as a transitory office between home visits to different service users in which mobile phone calls are made, notes of visits and case reports worked on.
Emotionally, cars seem to provide a comfort zone for professionals—a haven from the office politics as well as services users—a return to the secure base of one’s home-from-home. They constitute what Goffman (1959) calls a ‘back-region’ in which the ‘face-work’ and demeanour required to conduct professional interviews can be relaxed. This has the added dimension of promoting personal safety through providing the means for a quick getaway when social workers are ‘run out’ of houses by hostile clients. This is aided by the benefit of how contemporary cars have increased opportunities to control the mood and ambience, through music, film and telecommunications, which play a role in helping relaxation and restoring the self to equilibrium (Sheller, 2004). The car is also a site for spiritual practice in which, as one experienced social worker explained, before a difficult home visit, she would always drive to a tranquil spot with a nice view to gently meditate and compose herself. And she would drive back there afterwards to process what she had experienced. Smith (2003, p. 158) is surely correct to conclude that ‘in the mind of the worker, the car becomes something far more than a chassis with an engine on wheels’.
Social workers’ cars also have significant meanings for service users. They can be objects onto which the imagination works to project images of power and desire. I once had a client whose children were at risk of coming into care who was convinced the name of the social work department was written boldly across my car, aptly reflecting the deep suspicion, fear and hostility she felt toward me and the agency. The more the car has come to reflect lifestyles and something of the ‘essence’ and integrity of the owner, the more potent a symbol it has become of possession of economic and cultural capital. As the majority of welfare users—certainly in social work—are too poor to have cars, even with the best of intentions, the danger is that while cars bring worker and service user together in ever speedier times, the momentum is for cars to drive professionals, so to speak, away from a deeper identification with and connection to their (car-less) service users.
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Organizational life: dwelling in mobility |
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TopSummaryMobile lifeThe emergence and development...Home visits and the...Getting there . ....Organizational life: dwelling in...(Re)connections, complex...References |
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And so, back to the office. Organizations are not static entities. They too have been influenced by the speeding up of social life and the new capacities to circulate information and practices. Even work done in the public domain, in offices, community centres, hospitals, clinics, cars and cafés, can be understood as involving movement, as ‘dwelling in mobility’ (Sheller and Urry, 2003). First, getting to work involves a journey from home. Once there, workers occupy space—they dwell in the office—and, in that workplace, enquiries about service users and inter- and intra-agency work may go on in apparently static ways in telephone conversations, the internet, meetings and other office routines. Yet, it is a dwelling in mobility in that telephone and email contacts involve travelling across virtual space to gather relevant information about service users. Case conferences and other inter-agency case meetings always involve people who have travelled to the site of the meeting, with all the risks as well as opportunities that that move into another professional space and culture involves. And through it all, there is the inescapable fact that at least one, some or all of those professionals present will probably have to do a home visit, that is become mobile to see the service user.
A mobile perspective also allows another way of seeing relationships and tensions between managers and practitioners. The former, it might be said, tend to stay still; the latter move. Yet, while it generally goes on within more confined spaces than practice, managing involves frequent movement as decision making demands often rapid shifts from case to case to meet the constant requests for advice and support on home visits that practitioners need. Increased mobilities also lie behind the intense internationalization of social work through the sharing of knowledge through conferences, the transportability of qualifications and education and the movement and migration of social workers. The global movement of social workers enriches practice and the profession. However, in a context of significant staffing and retention problems, where there is an increased reliance on agency staff on short-term contracts who tend to come from other countries, this brings new challenges in achieving continuity of practice wisdom, professional development and maintaining good practice grounded in local knowledge. For example, in at least one very deprived London borough (Brent) in the mid-2000s, there wasn’t a single social worker in their duty teams who had trained in the UK (Laming, 2003; Munro, 2005a, p. 380).
The more that movement over space has been conquered, the more time and various aspects of social worker’s performance have become the locus of organizational control. This is exemplified in the UK by the adoption in government guidance and practice frameworks of specific and very tight timescales for the completion of assessments in childcare (Department of Health, 2000). As discussed earlier, some argue that the consequence of such regulation, backed up by electronic information management and communications, is a narrowing of social work to assessment, inter-agency work and case management, with practitioners feeling under constant pressure to move cases on through the system. This is the culture of ‘conveyer belt social work’ that was described as typical of the work by a social worker who gave evidence to the Laming inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié. He referred to how the ‘ethos seemed to be particularly about getting the cases through the system and meeting the targets, meeting the statistics, getting them through the system’, rather than ‘doing the work that needed to be done’ (Laming, 2003, p. 112). On the other hand, the emergence of such knowledge and assessment frameworks has brought benefits in focusing systematically on the temporality of children’s needs and the capacities of their carers (Holland, 2004; Horwath, 2000).
Organizationally, a new form of temporality is emerging here which Urry (2000, pp. 123–30) defines as ‘instantaneous time’ (see also Bauman, 2000). With the speed implied by the telephone, telex, fax, electronic signals, the car and so on, the future increasingly appears to dissolve into an extended present. Instantaneous time is displacing ‘clock time’ as providing the temporal structure of organizational life and has resulted both culturally and organizationally in greatly intensified demands for instantaneous responses and failsafe social work, especially in child protection. While, superficially, the conditions appear to be there to achieve it, the failure, indeed impossibility, of ever achieving instantaneous, failsafe practice in any absolute way arises from the fact that, as I have argued throughout this paper, organizational life constitutes only one site of what social work and welfare practices are. It is through movement—professionals getting up from their desks to become co-present with service users and doing something, whether in the office or, more often, by leaving it—that the flows that make late-modern social work what it is come into being.
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(Re)connections, complex systems, feedback loops, circuits, flows |
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Although I have discussed three sites of practice (office, journey, home) as distinct domains, in practice, they are deeply interrelated and connected, characterized by circuits, feedback loops, flows of bodies, cars, information, emotions, energy, power and desire; all reverberate through the system. For instance, social workers carry the reverberations from one home visit into the next visit, take their effects back to the office which, as a container of bureaucratic imperatives, relationships and emotions, has its own reverberations which, in turn, influence what workers take onto the road with them, either do or do not process in their cars, all while on the move. All of this is further influenced by what goes on in the professional’s personal life, in how the reverberations from the meanings of social workers’ own homes, intimate relationships, values and emotions come into play. For instance, their home can be a place which contributes to the emotional impact of the work being processed. Froggett (2002, pp. 137–8) gives an example of a social worker who only recognized the high degree of risk a child she had visited that day was in when she was in the bath that night. The bath provided a containing environment which enabled a state of mind which allowed emotionally engaged attentiveness and the making of links.
While reaching such insights is possible and essential to good practice, they have to be achieved in a context in which social work and welfare interventions are not under anyone’s true control. They are too circular and multi-layered, too joined up, yet too elusive for that. While individual actions matter, there is no linear model of causality available in which we can say one thing rather than another resulted in a failure to protect a child, or the delivery of good practice, whatever the service user group. As Munro (2005a, p. 382), when arguing the case for child protection to be seen as a ‘systems problem’, wisely puts it, ‘Judgement and decision-making in child protection are best seen not as discrete acts performed by individuals in isolation but as part of a constant stream of activity, often spread across groups, and located within an organizational culture that limits their activities, sets up rewards and punishments, provides resources, and defines goals that are sometimes inconsistent’. But, if it is to fully meet the key challenge of capturing the complexity of these ‘streams of activity’, such systemic thinking needs a mobilities perspective, as well as the insights from complexity theory. This means understanding social work in terms of movement and the countless ‘iterations’ of practice that go on at various sites and in the complexity of the relationships between them that create ‘fluid’ interventions and lead cases and systems to flow in particular directions (cf. Urry, 2003b, pp. 47–8).
On a deep level, both literally and figuratively, there is no stopping social work. Mobility is the air that social work breathes, the background noise, the mood music to all its performances. If we are to properly understand modern social work practices, it is crucial that we begin to conceive of them as they are practised: on the move. I have tried in this paper to open up new understandings of what social work is and the experience of doing welfare practice by viewing it through the new mobilities paradigm. It is my contention that it is the mobile nature of social work which accounts for a great deal of the creative, unpredictable and irrational aspects of its practices. Increased capacities for mobilities are central to what social work can do and to the limits of its practices. The absence of appropriate metaphors is an important reason why deeper understandings of the fluid, squelchy nature of practices such as child protection have failed to enter the public and professional imagination and why we need to speak of it as a form of liquid welfare. Liquid social work is, both figuratively and literally, ‘hard to grasp’. We need to get away from the solid language of bureaucracy, ‘control’ and ‘constraint’ which typifies how practices are represented and understood and develop much more liquid metaphors and forms of language which can do justice to how children ‘slip through the net’ and the sense of uncertainty, riskiness and of things being inherently uncontrollable which characterize the experience of social work and how it keeps on moving on. Careful management of the rhythms of practice is of vital importance to creating safe, enabling interventions and promoting professional well-being, creating opportunities for stillness, to slow things down, moments for reflection on the entire experience—decoding the smell of practice—and what is going on in the body and mind. This can happen in the office through formal supervision, peer support, spending time alone in quiet contemplation or, as we have seen, in cars, while in transit, grounding oneself, creating stillness and moorings while on the move.
What is needed in research terms to make sense of such mobile practices is the application of ‘mobile methodologies’, for instance, by shadowing professionals in the office, on the journey, on home visits using visual as well as audio data collection techniques (Baerenholt et al., 2004). We need to start looking at social work not just from the direction of the public into the private, but from the ‘private’—or ‘intimate’—outwards and from the vantage point of embodied experience. Better still, practice needs to be conceptualized in terms of non-linear flows of energy, power, action, movement and reverberations. It is then possible to see how statutory power ebbs and flows as laws and bureaucratic rules are turned into practices in the context of people’s lives. The notion of flows is needed to capture how what influences practices such as social work and the nature of interventions moves in different directions. It is tempting to say that it ‘flows both ways’, that is between professional and service user. In fact, it does not move in such a linear manner at all, but flows in and around different agencies, through parents and children and other significant persons in communities, through cars and other forms of travel, the media and culture and at all times through human persons, through bodies. If ‘mobility’ can be defined ‘as an actor’s competence to realize specific projects and plans while being on the move’ (Kesserling, 2006), this means that the entire project of social work is unthinkable and unrealizable without mobility and regular displays of skill, creativity and courage while on the move.
Accepted: October 1, 2006
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