Professor Ian Shaw

1. ‘Challenges of Life: a Global
Perspective’
Ian Shaw
University of York, England
‘Social Work Day’, 15 March
2011

2. Challenges of Life
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climate change,
terrorism,
a lifelong disability after being knocked from a
bicycle,
economic recession,
turned out of your family home in Islamabad after
changing faith,
an earthquake registering 8.9 off the north-east coast
of Japan.

3. …or
 It
was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
(Paul Simon, ‘The Boy in the Bubble’)

4. Globalization?
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a new managerialism;
disempowered social workers by restricting access
to resources;
increased the techno-bureaucratic nature of practice;
shifted away from relational social work;
turned service users into consumers in a quasimarket;
reduced solidarity;

5. More from Dominelli
 moved
away from universal services to
residual ones;
 led to an agenda of treating people as
responsible for their problems;
 increased the impact on local practice of
poverty, the drug trade, trafficking, etc;
 increased the impact of migration

6. Is globalization….
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The spread of free market policies in the world
economy?
The westernization – indeed, Americanization – of
forms of cultural, economic and political life?
The proliferation of new information and
communication technologies?
A process of community integration for humanity?

7. Not new
 space
is killed by the railways. I feel as if the
mountains and forests of all countries were
advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell
the German linden trees; the North Sea's
breakers are rolling against my door
Mid 19C

8. And should we see it as….
 new
forms of non-territorial activity.
 geographically
distant events and decisions
have a growing impact on ‘local’ life
 speed
or velocity of social activity

9. Hong and Song
 Social
 Loss
 The
polarization among and within states
of states’ autonomous powers
decomposition of civil society

10. Is it possible to achieve global social
justice?
 Cosmopolitans
 Communitarians

11. Reminders from communitarians and
cosmopolitans

‘learning from the
experiences of
indigenous peoples
does not absolve other
social workers in the
global north from
innovating…’
Dominelli

‘it is better to look for
what unites people
rather than how to
preserve diversity’
Trygged

12. Glocalization?
 ‘think
globally, at locally’
 ‘internalized
globalization’ (Ulrich Beck)

13. Social work and research

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‘quite a difficult process.
It wasn’t
straightforward, you
know’

‘practice puzzles’
Choosing a research
topic

14. Doing the research

‘I’m not this neutral
encouraging person,
I’m much more acting
as a practitioner.’

‘That will be a challenge
for me—interviewing
children’

15. Opening up

practitioner research can ‘open up so many possibilities I
had not thought of’ and constructively unsettle conventional
assumptions about the boundaries of insider and outsider
roles.

‘I think what I am and what I would like to be are different. I
am a practitioner and that is my job, so that’s what I have to
do and I’m bound by the context of that because that is my
income, that is my livelihood. I would like to be more of a
researcher. It’s opened up a whole range of things that I’ve
never done before and so I would like to pursue maybe ways
of combining the two.’ (Gillian)

16. Epiphanies?
 ‘You
are asking open questions and
gathering information from them – not really
questions, just what they are saying . . . I
don’t know, I just feel a bit . . . uhhh, the
truth’.

17. 80 years ago

Existing case records seldom, or never, picture
people with their “passions, hopes, and history” or
their “temptations”, or “the little scheme they have
made of their lives, or would make if they had
encouragement”. The “characters...do not speak for
themselves. They obtain a hearing only in the
translation provided by the language of the social
worker”
Ernest Burgess

18. on the inside ‘out’

It seems best to describe the experience of
practitioners, in their practitioner-as-researcher work,
as possessing a sociality outside, or at least on the
margins, of both research and practice—an
uncomfortable but creative marginalization marked
by an identity that is neither research nor practice.
Terms such as use, insider, and own account are
useful as much for the complexities they raise as for
the directions in which they point.

19. More on glocalization
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senior managers this would involve being mindful of
how policies are appropriately implemented at the
local level, of how local inventiveness needs to go
hand in hand with top down innovation.
educational leaders, need glocal literacy
In social welfare the question presents itself whether
the potential exists to create new social actors and
structures that are essentially “local in spirit but
global in character,” capable of responding to local
social problems.

20. Global economies/
national social welfare
 major
challenges to your and to my society –
to Hong Kong universities, NGOs,
associations of social workers, government
welfare departments.
 Should we work to strengthen civil society
through citizen groups, social movements,
etc?

21. When we do not agree
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Our over-riding concern should be the truth of claims, and not their
political or practical consequences.
Arguments should be judged solely on the grounds of their
credibility and plausibility, and not on the grounds of the personal
characteristics of those advancing the argument.
We should be willing to change our views, and should behave as if
others are also so willing, at least until there is strong counter
evidence.
When this has happened, and when agreement does not result, we
should accept there may be some reasonable doubt regarding the
argument we are advancing. Note that this applies when the first
three conditions have been met.
There should be no restriction on participation in such discourse on
grounds of political or religious attitude

22. Ian.shaw@york.ac.uk
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/spsw/staff/shaw