The Societal Context of Professional Working - Essay Example

The Societal Context of Professional Working Introduction The profession of social work is one of the traditional professions, going back to pre-industrial societies although it may not at that time have been known by its present name of social work. It is a profession that deals both with society and people. Social work has been undergoing transformation with the evolving of society, which has brought about behavioural changes among people. Society and the person as an entity are engulfed in a heated and transforming relationship whereby each strives to impress the other. Besides, social work strives to impact society (and people within it) and society resultantly strives to control social workers for what should be and should not be done. Thus, social work appears in-between the person and society, making the societal context strong, settling, and at times in clash with both (Chisala, 2006). On the opposite, it must remain a consideration that these societies are not equal, in the contexts of their social, political and economic frameworks. Cree as cited by Davies (2002) claims that social work pertains to societies that are distinct. As a result, social work theories and approaches must be changed to fit the context, in which they are used at any specific time; therefore, social work practices vary, depending on the context in which it is noticed. To rightly comprehend these contexts, a holistic approach needs to be applied towards social work. The purpose of this discussion is to analyse how various contexts affect social work. These various contexts can help in deriving critical insights on becoming efficient social work professionals (Chisala, 2006). Before discussing contexts, a familiarity with related terms, such as codes of practice, core values of social work practice, professional ideology, and professional identity of social work is necessary. This discussion will also include one profession as a case to analyse, the profession of nursing to understand the intricacies of societal context of working. Discussion will also analyse the notions and theory of post-structuralism and contribution of Margaret Thatcher in creating a classless society in Britain. Social work is a profession that functions in various contexts with different types of players in complicated situations, whose likings, outlooks, culture, and social activities are distinct. Thus, social work in advanced countries like Norway, United Kingdom, Denmark, United States of America and Sweden is distinct from social work in developing countries like Malawi, Uganda, Ethiopia and Tanzania. These traits of social work appear because of a number of variations in terms of resources, national policies, social issues, culture and religious outlooks. Besides, social work has many factors consisted of morality, values and practices, theories, knowledge and practitioners. Many of these complications oppose one another and there is a conflict of issues (Ife cited by Fook, 2002). It is countered that social work is an action of and reaction to the many distinct contexts in which it functions. In short, it can be stated that physical, social, political, economic, international and cultural contexts are some of the wider contexts that are impacting social work (Chisala, 2006). Individual contexts of the social worker bear on their practice. Social workers are both professionals and employees. They are also citizens and community members in the glocal contexts. They carry their own past, values, traditions, likings and education. All these factors together impress upon their behaviour with clients and impact the assumptions and decisions that a social worker makes in regard to a specific client (Shulman, 1991). These decisions may bargain the values and morality of the profession irrespective of the results of the decision, which may be good. There are instances of social workers taking leverage of the profession to further their own individual stakes. Experience reveals that one of the social workers married a client who was seeking marital guidance from the social worker along with her husband. The social worker, rather than helping this couple, landed down to proposing the woman and married her. The question of the husband filing a court case against the social worker is irrelevant but such behaviour is ordinary matter among social workers in certain countries. There is no doubt that this social worker presented a wrong image for the profession. This kind of behaviour on the part of social worker is an attack on the integrity and respect of the profession of social worker. Mostly, the profession of social workers is highly disorganised in developing countries like Malawi, as there is no registration of social workers and there are no national codes of ethics for adherence, a prompting cause for such kinds of behaviour. In advanced countries where the social work profession is safer and there are written codes of ethics, the possibility of such unethical behaviour on the part of social workers is reduced. For instance, in South Africa, social workers are registered and have formed a national association and follow codes of ethics: if a social worker is found behaving unethically, he or she would be punished and their license would be revoked (Chisala, 2006). Scenario in Scotland In Scotland, Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001 is in force for maintaining standards in social care; what is expected from employees. These standards are impeccable and are very honestly enforced. Reaching the height of adhering to these standards helps in securing and increasing the care experience of people (HNC Chapter 1, 2009). Social division, on a wider level, presents a range of values and can often be impressed by class, gender, sexual tendencies, religious linkages, age or ability. Nevertheless, if personal value base is strong enough to ‘respect all others’ or ‘like different people’, connecting with people having an opposing mindset should not be troublesome, but rather be welcomed as a positive opportunity. Opposite to this, values like ‘I don’t like gay people’ or ‘disabled people are stupid’ clearly create negative vibes, blocking open dialogue and creating negative emotions, and harming interpersonal relationships. Most often, we feel that it is not appropriate as people to have faith in those people who show it in abundance. If we do not identify with our own values and some of the possible biases we may have, we may be discriminating against and adding to this partiality in behaviour unknowingly (HNC Chapter 1, 2009). So, a value is the worth we bet upon anything. It may be a financial value (for example a house is valued £150,000) but in social care, the internal value of people is central, which sometimes is seen as unconditional positive reverence. It is very critical to sense that in social care. At the end-of-the-day professional behaviour cannot be compromised: the National Care Standards straight way tell ways to act and many legislative amendments set norms for acting in a desired manner towards others (HNC Chapter 1, 2009). Basic to the notion of values is the issue of self-awareness, and it is significant to analyse own awareness of selves. Self-awareness includes identification of one’s own personality, powers and deficiencies, preferences and dislikes and how lives have been designed and impressed by own experiences and the experiences of others. To inspect one’s self awareness, it requires to think over one’s actions, views and customs besides taking suggestions and review from others (HNC Chapter 1, 2009). Codes of Practice Related to these care principles are rules, recommendations or behaviour standards which show values. The Scottish Social Services Council issues guidelines relating to behaviour expectations in their ‘Codes of Practice’ literature. These guidelines encourage positive practice over the field and also endow staff to see to it that they are guided to perform their duties with strong policies and processes, training and growth opportunities and management’s agreement to defeat discrimination, hazardous or incriminating practice. The Codes are very clear and define agreeable standards of practice. The comprehensive Codes include safeguarding the rights and stakes of people who use services of care providers; setting and attempting to preserve the faith and confidence of people who use services; encouraging the freedom of people who use services and safeguarding them (to the possible length) from risk or damage; honouring the rights of people who use services while desiring to check that their attitude does not cause damage to themselves or others; maintaining public faith and confidence in social services; being answerable for the standard of work and levelling and bettering insight and expertise (HNC Chapter 1, 2009). Core Values of Social Work Practice Core values that stress on behaviour include respect, privacy, selection, security, secrecy, individuality and reach to services based upon personal need. Although these recommendations are in no way exhaustive yet there are fields, which widely connect to the principles stated and it would be hard to assume a positive care environment which ignores one or more of these values (HNC Chapter 1, 2009). Asquith et al. (2005) discusses the role of the social worker in modern times, analysing the importance of context. The practice of social work in Scotland is entrenched in the philosophy of the Kilbrandon Report and awarded legislative power through the White Paper Social Work and the Community, in the 1968 Social Work Scotland Act. The Act passed for an all-inclusive social work department, bringing under one roof all related social work services. Any discussion of the role of the social worker in the current times needs to be seen in the context of such past legislation being in-force. The role of the social worker needs to be discussed in the wider professional, organisational, social and political context for the shifts occurred in different aspects of society since the 1960s. Asquith et al. (2005) argue that without taking note of these wider contexts, it is not possible to gauge the crisis social work is passing through concurrently. Future path of social work cannot be chalked out without holding debates over the present happenings. The role of social workers necessarily is related to the professional recognition, function and mechanism within which social work services are offered, leading to social and economic shifts, and wider social and economic orientations. Social work is also highly defined by relating it to other professional groups and their relevant desires to be epitomised. The crisis in social work, as claimed by critics, is not purely a country-specific, in this case, the UK-only phenomenon. A number of other countries are in the process of discussing the kind of social work and the role of the social worker is being analysed worldwide. The US loan forgiveness programmes have a matching aim of what has been done in the UK, named as, golden handshakes (National Association of Social Workers, 2004). There can be two opinions over the leading role of the social worker but there is total unanimity about the core value of honouring people and observing them as complete identity. This is also showed in the dedicated practice that what is or should be unique about the social work role is the potential to follow an individually focussed approach, finding the person in the context of his/her life situation in totality. In various other professions there may be concern over a person’s one aspect of life like health, education, housing or income, but in social work profession, the professional is dedicated to working with the complete person and attending on the interrelatedness of various problems (Asquith et al., 2005). Professional Ideology With the professional outlook, not too distanced historically or notionally from welfare perspective, there is a heightening loyalty to professionalism in service offering by certified professionals whose main attraction is case management with regularity of practice. The relationship with the client is still one within which the professional has the upper hand because he/she is trained to know and fulfil the client’s requirement (Asquith et al., 2005). Professional Collaboration From the perspective of organisational change, the role of social work is conducted in close cooperation with professionals like teachers, doctors and nurses (van Zwanenberg, 2003) and actually on a greater scale, integration of social work is happening at organisation level with other fields like education, health and housing. The integration of social work with other work fields has been specifically successful like collaboration has been appreciated for being effective and useful to clients or users of services. There is also proof that social workers within state authority social work departments like those who work in GP practices (Firth et al., 2004) and in a range of different other healthcare environs can and do perform an important role as members of multi-fields teams. It creates curiosity that same discussions about working in multi-fields teams, the emergence of para-professionals and the exploration for professional limits have been taking place in the context of the role of the nurse in the increasingly sophisticated NHS (Melia, 2004). It has implications for a wider health and education plan for the future where the leading role of social work/services is definitely going to favour the need for social work to be done, not necessarily within local government departments. Implications are straight forward for both social workers’ work and place (Asquith et al., 2005). Professional Identity of Social Work The professional identity of social work need not be inseparably connected to particular organisational frameworks. Instead, professional identity should be based relatively on core values and principles to differentiate the kind of the social worker’s role, by adding people working within other departments and to safeguard against the risk of boundary deleting, as an outcome of growth in other professions. Problems of hiring and retention of social workers are inseparably connected to the problem of professional identity (Asquith et al., 2005). The Example of Nursing Profession and the Question of Ethics The societal context of nursing ethics, as an example is worth explaining the professional working of nurses. Like medicine, nursing is also a profession, considered as a vocation. Issue emerges from there only for nurses to view their roles, their relationships to patients and the resultant ethical questions to be tackled by them (Pecorino, 2002). As professional workers, nurses have the similar standards of relationships as the doctors have. They can stipulate their own parameters for care and behaviour. They carry their oaths and codes and peer review systems. They have the potential as professionals to create a list of ethical guidelines that would be different from those created in the vocational model. Their "code" stipulates a list of responsibilities, which states that the nurse, in all professional dealings, works with compassion and regard for the inner dignity, value and distinctness of each person, uncontrolled by thoughts of their social or economic ranking, individual qualities, or the kind of health issues. The nurses main responsibility is towards the patient, whether a person, family, group, or community. The nurse encourages, supports for, and works to safeguard the health, security, and rights of the care taker (Pecorino, 2002). The nurse is responsible and answerable for own nursing practice and decides the suitable process of functions relevant with the nurses duties to offer desired care for the patient. The nurse owes the same obligations to self as to others, including the obligation to maintain integrity and security, to remain competent, and to strive for own and professional growth. The nurse becomes a part of setting, maintaining, and bettering healthcare surroundings and terms of job relevant to the provision of standard health care and relevant with the values of the profession through personal and shared action (Pecorino, 2002). The nurse takes parts in the growth of the profession through add-ons to practice, awareness, management, and knowledge expansion. The nurse partners with other health professionals and the people in general by advancing at community, national, and global level to provide health care. The profession of nursing, as defended through their associations and their members, is answerable for voicing nursing values, for preserving the dignity of the profession and its practice, and for designing social policy (Pecorino, 2002). It depends on the nurses’ outlook, how they view their profession, a vocation for earning money or a service delivered professionally for the patients. Those nurses, who are members of trade unions, provide nursing services under a job contract, thus practicing a contractual model of relationship with the patients (Pecorino, 2002). Nurses practicing the professional model would possibly stop practice by voicing against degrading and substandard conditions of care for the patients. The differences between the two models can be created based on the job role and the nurses’ behaviour thus: Nursing as a profession is based on service, obligation to profession and care takers, independent as a professional, and awareness and certification. Nursing as a Vocation is based on job, contractual responsibilities, serving as a staff, and earning. Nurses have a range of relationships that become complicated and are potential to create ethical issues (Pecorino, 2002). It depends all on the structure of the profession’s model, leading to the theory of structuralism and post-structuralism. Structuralism and Post-structuralism To understand post-structuralism, clarity on structuralism is necessary. Like the “New Criticism,” the purpose of “Structuralism” was to add to literary research a set of verifiable parameters for analysis and a new intellectual exercise. “Structuralism” can be seen as an advancement of “Formalism” in the sense that both “Structuralism” and “Formalism” focussed their attention to contents of literary form (i.e. structure) instead of social or historical content; and that both ‘isms’ of thought were targeted to put the research of literature on a scientific and rational basis. “Structuralism” was based earlier on the views of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. On the lines of Plato, Saussure viewed the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as independent and not relevant to the notion, the signified, to which it pertained. Within the approach a specific society employed to language and signs, meaning was formed by an arrangement of “differences” between sections of the language. Specific meanings were of lesser value than the underlying makings of importation that made meaning itself clear, mostly stated as a focus on “langue” than “parole.” “Structuralism” was to be a meta-language, a language about languages, employed to decipher genuineness in languages, or systems of importation. The work of the “Formalist” Roman Jakobson added to “Structuralist” view, and the more leading Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes (Brewton, 1999). The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a leading personality on the demarcation between “Structuralism” and “Post-structuralism.” “Post-structuralism” is less focussed as a theoretical movement than its predecessor; actually, the content of its supporters called by the term “Deconstruction” puts a question mark on the possibility of the completeness of discussion, or the strength needed for language to convey. “Deconstruction,” Semiotic theory (a reading of signs with near links to “Structuralism,” “Reader response theory” in America (“Reception theory” in Europe), and “Gender theory” propounded by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are fields of interest that can be found under the flag of “Post-structuralism.” If ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ are both cultural notions, as they are in “Post-structuralism,” a reference to a statistically certifiable truth cannot be ensured by language. “Deconstruction” counters that this deficiency of reference creates an unending suspension of meaning, a mechanism of variations between parts of language that has no passive place or final signifier that would help the other signifiers to carry their meaning. The most significant theorist of “Deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida, has affirmed, “There is no getting outside text,” pointing a type of free game of importation in which no permanent, durable meaning is possible. “Post-structuralism” in America was initially recognised with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of “Deconstruction:” J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other interests in the period after “Deconstruction” that combine some of the intellectual interests of “Post-structuralism” included the “Reader response” theories of Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser (Brewton, 1999). Lacanian psychoanalysis, a modernisation of the content of Sigmund Freud, advances “Post-structuralism” to the human aspect with additional outcomes for literary theory. According to Lacan, the permanent, stable self is a Romantic story; like the word in “Deconstruction,” the self is a scattered mass of signs left by our acquaintance with signs, visible symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is formed by language, a language that is never one’s own, always another’s, permanently and previously in use. Barthes practices these layers of thought in his popular declaration of the “death” of the Author: “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” while at the same time using a matching “Poststructuralist” view to the Reader: “the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (Brewton, 1999). Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose views guide much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a major part in the growth of the postmodern outlook that knowledge is designed in robust historical situations in the kind of speech; knowledge is not shared through speech but is speech itself, can only be realised verbally. Following Nietzsche, Foucault conducts what he calls “genealogies,” strides at decoding the unidentified function of power and knowledge to unfold the ideologies that make predominance of one community by another look “natural.” Foucaldian studies of lecture and power were to offer much of the intellectual boost for a new perspective of studying history and doing research of the words that came to be called as the “New Historicism” (Brewton, 1999). Luke (n.d.) remarks about Poststructuralist theory that it promotes a counter-ontological analysis of the wide theories of human growth, social department and social framework that have been practiced in the past century to study and develop educational mediations. This facilitates a self-controlled analysis of the modernist and industrial-era administrative and academic models. Similarly, it promotes the added growth of testing explanative ways of inquiry to question new academic phenomena. The knowledge of philosophic post-structuralism, therefore, is that there is no academic fact, trend or phenomena that can be researched outside of speech. By such logic, academic institutions could be looked upon as complicated locations designed by and through speech detailed in different texts: from policy statements and class-room readings to live talk in classrooms. These books are observed as "heteroglossic" representations of different historical, class and cultural trends fighting for social power and capital. The question of gathering, reading, and explaining these words and studying and situating their "symbolic power" is complicated. It needs the research of the varied "linguistic markets" and "social fields" where academically attained qualification is employed (Bourdieu, 1992, pp. 51-65). Although post-structuralism offers a comprehensive epistemological analysis of how discourse works, Foucault and Derrida persistently avoided provision of wider theoretical dimensions for the research of discourse in distinct local institutions (Luke (n.d.). Politics in itself is a local and wider institution that impacts professional behaviour. The UK ex-Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher played a leading role in creating a classless society. Role played by Margaret Thatcher for a Classless Society Cannadine (1999) credits Margaret Thatcher for working in the direction of rejecting class in political discussions, stressing on the "fall of class", on the Left, explaining about a wider transformation in the traditional vocabulary of social outlook, namely, the change from the conservative preoccupation with people as gathered producers to the secondary concept of people as customers in individual capacity. As stated, credit for this goes to a certain extent to Margaret Thatchers achievement, and she was quite fully aware of what she was doing. She targeted the trade unions because they spoke in favour of organized, shared, fruitful labour. She focussed the market, the people, the consumers, and the individual, which underscored the language of social unification based on productive classes. She raised expectation in a manner that Labour could never accomplish -- to the working and lower middle classes of getting away from the limitations of impoverished hopes and irreparable lower ranking. And by enveloping herself in the flag, she very efficiently cornered the politics of sectional stakes and class based issues. As a result of her policies and her style, Thatcher chartered a long route toward attaining her aspiration of ousting the language of class from public discussion and political debate about the making and kind of British society. And the truth that Tony Blair has never attempted to recreate this language is a benchmark of her accomplishments in changing the way people consider social structures, social relations, and social identities in modern Britain. Conclusion Irrespective of what post-structuralism and post-modernism imply for the common man to understand the complexity of these notions, one can easily understand that societal context of professional working behaviour has come of age at least in developed countries where codes are laid down by amending the relevant laws. It is expected particularly in Scotland and other industrially advanced countries that professionals in different departments of life adhere to the written codes. It is very interesting to know how a wide gap prevails in the moral social codes being practiced in developing countries, while developed countries have gone far ahead in implementation of moral codes of professional ethics. At political level, the example of Margaret Thatcher is worth learning for bureaucracies to work in creating a classless society. Bibliography Agger, B. (n.d.) Critical theory, post-structuralism, postmodernism: their sociological relevance. Illuminations. 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