Stephen A. WebbGlasgow Caledonian University,

Scotland

We now live longer and healthier lives than at any time in history. Yet we are more pre-occupied today than at any othertime with risks to health, safety and the environment.

In recent decades, we have become obsessed withsocially acceptable aspects of risk, from smoking in public places,children’s play areas, obesity, road safety, green environmentissues, food and diet. In short we live in a world obsessed withrisk and have a general hankering after zero risk.

  

Governments increasingly try to manage risk and attemptto develop sophisticated systems. New scientific technologiesand methods of risk management are developed. Measurementbecomes a preoccupation of social work and government.

Social work is inevitably caught up with this preoccupation withrisk. The difficulties of building rule bound systems which can not only shape and control social risks but enable their prediction is asymbol of our being in a risk society.

Unanticipated system failures combined with the publicspersistent belief that governments should have anticipated themcauses a spiralling of public fears about risk. Fear of crime isdisproportionate to actual likelihood of being a victim, and in thenature of democracy Governments have to respond to the fearas much as to the reality.

Risk society, according to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens is the society we live in today. But what is risk? A loose definition is that risk is the recognition and judgement of the uncertainty as to what to do. The concept of risk thus provides the basis for understanding the relation between judgement and uncertainty. Placed within the context of society, risk captures the idea that unexpectability conditions the very structure of events and circumstance. For the individual this means being faced with choices, courses of action and knowledge that often lack supporting norms, conditions and rules. We are forced to reflect, use our own judgement and make decisions where reflection wasn’t previously required.

Ulrich Beck named this phenomena in his celebrated book of 1992: Risk Society. For Beck this concept “designates a developmental phase of modern society in which social, political, economic and individual risks increasingly tend to escape the institutions for monitoring and protection in society” (1994, p.5) Here the concept of risk is connected to reflexivity because new anxieties about risks and the failure of experts and institutions to deal with them raise critical questions about current practices.

So we can ask questions about whether …

Risk is real or imagined? Is risk a simply perceived phenomenon or anactual material phenomenon?How do people perceive risk differently?What makes some people risk aversive whilstothers are risk takers?

Throughout the social services sector in theUK we are witnessing a preoccupation with:

Risk management systems Risk assessment interventions Risk governance strategies to avoid blame,

culpability and litigation

Social work deals with vulnerable populations under conditions of uncertainty and complexity. Under such conditions the opportunities for risky situations to arise are high, and knowing this social work attempts to develop ever more extensive management and scientific (accountability and insurance) systems.

In the UK social work in the last fifteen years, damaged by successive child abuse scandals has embraced the language of risk and accountability much as have other public sector institutions. Targets, performance measures and lists of procedures issuing from central government have offered a ‘calculative technology’ for the assessment and management of risk. Social work is now a risky business and some argue that it is typically a risk avoidance or a risk regulation profession.

Period Type of Social Activity FocusClassical Philanthropic work ImprovementModernity(1850-1935) Modernity Universal State Sponsored Need(1945-1979) Social Work

Late Neo Liberal Market Driven RiskModernity Social Work(1980s-present)

The Making of Modern Social Work

Thus a central argument of Social Work in aRisk Society is that the formation and structuring ofsocial work takes place within a complex system: thissystem includes a social dimension, that of risk society; apolitical dimension, that of advanced liberalism; and acultural dimension, that of reflexive or late modernity.

Lets briefly examine some of the effects on social work and wider society of this convergence of

(1) risk society(2) neo liberalism (3) reflexive modernity

Privatized risk: Individuals are increasingly required to deal with risk in personal and private ways based on notions of responsibility, choice and decision. Social responsibility, collectivity and solidarity are all undermined with neo liberal political rationality.Blame culture: We live in a culture in which people are increasingly pointing the finger of blame at each other and are no longer prepared to accept risks. The ‘no win [in litigation], no fee’ slogan perpetuated by UK television adverts, encouraging people to make personal injury claims, reflects this culture. This a society of low moral expectations and narrowly defined social norms, forcing people to constantly look over their shoulder. In the UK number of complaints received by social services has increased by 500% over the past five years.

Today in UK social work it is taken for granted that almost any critical incident will be quickly followed by an intensive search or public inquiry for someone to blame. Almost regardless of the nature of the event, after a violent tragedy we have learned to expect a cycle of accusations, recriminations, and legal actions aimed at finding someone or some institution responsible so that redress can be demanded. It is usually the individual front-line practitioner that is held accountable and rarely the organization or policy makers.

At the level of professional interventions and expert knowledge risk society had led to a deepening of calculating or instrumental reasoning. This is purposeful and practical and based on attempts to predict, estimate or count up definite results that are routinised in the social work. This reduces the social worker to a low level administrative functionary. Case management, performance culture and evidence-based practice are typical of this type of measurement rationality.

At an aesthetic level we no longer see a mountain as a mountain but as something to be overcome. Heidegger distinguished between calculative and essential thinking to show how modern societies develop a ‘world view’ that is dominated by calculation, losing the creative vitality that life offers. In contemporary societies scientific methods and technology are wholly dependent on calculative reason, as are economic, organisational and strategic planning.

(1) as an organized knowledge and set of values, what role does social work play, refuse to play, or aspire to play, in the constitution of risk society? (2) how does social work reproduce the conditions necessary for its legitimation and its professional role in risk society?; (3) how does risk reconfigure the professional identity of social work?; (4) more practically, how does risk society impact on framing the stages of intervention, decision making and supporting in social work?;

Within the complex configuration I have described social work increasingly mirrors methods derived from risk insurance or what is called the Brave New World of “actuarialism”

A systematic method of risk assessment and profiling derived from the financial insurance sector. It identifies who and which environments in society pose the greatest risk, such that they are targeted in advance and the risk acted against. Actuarialism uses methods of profiling which involve identifying clusters of risk in given environments or populations in the light of current technical knowledge. In social work, actuarialism increasingly shapes interventions in work with dangerous, challenging and unmotivated clients in fields such as mental health, child protection and criminal justice.

The increasing predominance of risk reconfigures social work in terms of an instrumental and economic rationality. The requirement to manage, channel and avert risk in social work alters relations between front line practitioners and service users and between professionals, managers and administrators. Social work practice comes to resemble an executant and functional role that is accountable in economic and legal terms. The shift from a preoccupation with social need to the handling of “high risk” determines eligibility criteria and resource allocation for service users. As part of performance target culture social workers are increasingly required to close down cases after a specified time period, amounting to a type of “short-termism”

New “technologies of care” emerge under this new political rationality of risk. We see an emerging constellation of techniques, methods and apparatus in social work that combine to de-skill practitioners and reduce their professional autonomy. Technologies of care typically entail processes whereby local skills are expropriated into abstract systems and re-organised in light of technical methods and knowledge. They are top-down instruments, that include case management systems, risk assessment and evaluation, evidence-based practice, decision-pathway models of intervention, networked data storage devices and clinical psychological profiling.

The Future of Social Work in a Risk Society?

I would like to leave this last but importantquestion for open discussion and debate, althoughI have addressed some key aspects of this in mybook in a chapter called “The Practice of Value”

Can we develop collective grounds for resistance to the deepening of neo liberalism and risk society in late modernity through the establishment of a new political morality?

What would such a political morality look like? How would we practically challenge the dominant, hegemonic rationalities?