Carolyn Taylor

Knowledge, Truth and Reflexivity: The Problem of Judgement in Social Work

• Summary: The authors argue that social work is as much a practical-moral activity as it is a technical-rational one. In order to pursue these themes, they explore the place of realist knowledge in social work and their alternative position on the complexities and ambiguities of practice. • Findings: Social work has long been troubled by the adequacy of its claims to professional status and about its possession of appropriate levels of knowledge and expertise. The dominant responses to this have been managerialist and procedural, or rational and technical, as represented in the evidence-based practice movement. This article acknowledges the contribution of such approaches, but argues that they are unrealistic in that they fail to recognize the practical-moral dimensions of social work and the role of emotion and normative judgement in assessment and intervention. • Applications: The problem of judgement is an essential area for exploration. The range of rationalities upon which social workers depend in making their judgements requires rigorous analysis and debate within the profession. This article opens up a discursive space in which to rethink our understanding of knowledge making in social work.

Trafficking in Facts Writing Practices in Social Work

In contemporary social work writing has been given limited attention. Documents tend to be regarded as a medium for the transmission of information about something else. In the social sciences there has been greater recognition of the pervasiveness of texts and the functions they perform. Texts are active in influencing and structuring the world and this applies as much to social work as to everyday activities in modern society. Insights from ethnomethodology and literary criticism can help us to explore writing practices in social work, and these are used here in relation to reports, case records and reflective practice. They show how these work to persuade of their claims to truth and, in doing so, how they categorize practitioners and service users. By focusing on texts we further our understanding of social works communicative practices and professional culture.

Knowledge, truth and reflexivity: the problem of judgement

• Summary: The authors argue that social work is as much a practical-moral activity as it is a technical-rational one. In order to pursue these themes, they explore the place of realist knowledge in social work and their alternative position on the complexities and ambiguities of practice. • Findings: Social work has long been troubled by the adequacy of its claims to professional status and about its possession of appropriate levels of knowledge and expertise. The dominant responses to this have been managerialist and procedural, or rational and technical, as represented in the evidence-based practice movement. This article acknowledges the contribution of such approaches, but argues that they are unrealistic in that they fail to recognize the practical-moral dimensions of social work and the role of emotion and normative judgement in assessment and intervention. • Applications: The problem of judgement is an essential area for exploration. The range of rationalities upon which social workers depend in making their judgements requires rigorous analysis and debate within the profession. This article opens up a discursive space in which to rethink our understanding of knowledge making in social work.

Knowledge, Truth and Reflexivity

• Summary: The authors argue that social work is as much a practical-moral activity as it is a technical-rational one. In order to pursue these themes, they explore the place of realist knowledge in social work and their alternative position on the complexities and ambiguities of practice. • Findings: Social work has long been troubled by the adequacy of its claims to professional status and about its possession of appropriate levels of knowledge and expertise. The dominant responses to this have been managerialist and procedural, or rational and technical, as represented in the evidence-based practice movement. This article acknowledges the contribution of such approaches, but argues that they are unrealistic in that they fail to recognize the practical-moral dimensions of social work and the role of emotion and normative judgement in assessment and intervention. • Applications: The problem of judgement is an essential area for exploration. The range of rationalities upon which social workers depend in making their judgements requires rigorous analysis and debate within the profession. This article opens up a discursive space in which to rethink our understanding of knowledge making in social work.

A Complex Terrain of Words and Deeds: Discourse, Research, and Social Change

As the range of chapters in this book demonstrates, qualitative research takes many different forms. In this chapter, we focus on one specific kind that broadly speaking falls within a social constructionist perspective. Discourse analysis (hereafter DA) has developed in a variety of different disciplinary environments including linguistics, psychology, and sociology meaning that it is better regarded as a ‘family’ of approaches rather than a single, formal method. Additionally, DA has a complex theoretical pedigree which can seem daunting to those new to its concepts. Its influences include hermeneutics, interactionist forms of sociology, the ‘ordinary language’ philosophy associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the speech act theorist John Austin, the work of Michel Foucault and post-structuralist writing (Atkinson and Housley, 2003; Cheek, 2000; Francis and Hester, 2004; Kendall and Wickham, 1999, 2007; Potter, 1996, 2001; Wooffitt, 2005; Wetherell et al., 2001b).