Abstract
Just as some people are unable to find any more passable way of resolving their problems than by becoming clients, others tackle the ordinary problems of living by becoming social workers in the belief that it is satisfying, respectable, relatively autonomous and even remunerative. It is, however, a limited and parasitic resolution of life’s contradictions. A world full of social workers would be quite unbearable. Nevertheless, the fact that we set ourselves up as purveyors not just of survival but even sometimes of fulfilment suggests the possession of some secret understanding which is protected, as Geoffrey Pearson puts it, by an arcane professional culture, designed to persuade both our clients and ourselves of its potency. The result is a serious loss of reality and perspective.1
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Notes and references
G. Pearson, ‘The Politics of Uncertainty’, in H. Jones (ed.), Towards a New Social Work (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 46.
G. Pearson, ‘Making Social Workers’, in R. Bailey and M. Brake (eds), Radical Social Work (London: Arnold, 1975).
P. Blau, The Nature of Organisations (New York: Wiley, 1974).
H. Prins, ‘Motivation in Social Work’, Social Work Today, vol. 5, no. 2, 18 April 1974.
G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford University Press, 1971) pp. 251–2, citing M. Mauss, The Gift (London: Cohen and West, 1966) p. 15; see also p. 63.
P. Halmos, The Faith of the Counsellors (London: Constable, 1965) p. 5.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Crazy Jane talks to the Bishop’, in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1971) pp. 294–5.
Case Con 15 (Women’s Issue) Spring 1974.
N. Kay, ‘A Systematic Approach to Selecting Foster Parents’, Case Conference, vol. 13, no. 2, June 1966.
The same syndrome is reported from across the Atlantic by Esther Stanton, Clients Come Last (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1970).
See Bill Jordan, Client—Worker Transactions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).
Quoted by P. Blau and W. Scott, Formal Organisations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) p. 82.
See J. Packman, The Child’s Generation, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
For a striking documentation of the way in which personal and political speculation were used by senior management in a hospital setting to discredit vital and well-founded criticism, see The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into St. Augustine’s Hospital, Canterbury (London: H. M. S. O. 1976) especially paras 4.57–4.80.
G. Pearson, ‘Social Work: a Privatised Solution to Public Ills’, British Journal of Social Work, vol. 3, no. 2, Summer 1973, pp. 209–25.
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© 1983 Mike Simpkin
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Simpkin, M. (1983). Blinkered self-denial. In: Trapped within Welfare. Titles in the Crisis Points Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06449-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06449-6_5
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