How We Understand Theory and Practice

On Caring | The Project

What is theory? What is practice?  What is the role of a “caring” theory in a “caring” practice?

Caring requires theory and practice. Caring requires that we be in a continual conversation with theory and practice: theory to practice, practice to theory… Theory isolated or cut off from practice is idle speculation. Marx once famously wrote: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it (Theses on Feuerbach, #11).  Let’s examine theory first. Theory has two components: a) a mental scheme or conception, and b) contemplation, speculation, or a looking at.  In its broadest sense, theory is the product of the mind, and its work is to create abstract or symbolic representations of social and client realities. Theories ask: what type of society do I live in? What are the conditions necessary for flourishing? What kind of person am I? In short, theory is an explanatory account of something. Theories are stories we tell about the worlds we want to explain or understand. Theories are constructed out of questions about the nature of  a) what constitutes a social work knowledge claim (in philosophy of science, this is called epistemology), and b) what constitutes the nature of social work reality (in philosophy of science, this is called ontology). We all have ways of knowing (i.e., epistemologies). Some are commonsense and empirical. Others are scientific. Children have particular ways of knowing and very young children have by virtue of their cognitive development limited ways of knowing, even magical ways of knowing. And some adults continue to have magical ways of knowing. We each have ontological understandings. Some, for example, even today refuse to accept the reality of a spherical or ellipsoidal earth. Others have no doubt about this fundamental reality and their ontological assumptions. And then there are things we experience but cannot see (e.g., gravity, sexual drive). For some, because we cannot see some things they must not be real (e.g., behaviorism). Yet most have to accept gravity, climate change or viruses (and many other things) and not doing so has grave consequences.

In caring with theory we must always remain open to the possibility of being wrong. We must be careful about making claims to know with certainty. We are fallible. Why? Our theories are always partial accounts. They never account for an entire event or reality. And because our theoretical accounts are always partial and refracted by history we cannot use theory in the human sciences to predict. Because humans exist in open systems, where events are constantly changing and some events cancel out the effects of other events, even moment to moment, (this is called countervailing tendencies) we can only talk about what some call central tendencies. It is also in this way that we must not confuse (or reduce) explanation with prediction. Why? In one especially important approach to science, called positivism, it assumed that if A explains B, B could have been predicted from A. This symmetry between explanation and prediction does not exist. What causes something to happen has nothing to do with the number of times it has happened; for example, it takes only one gravitational event to explain gravity. We must look elsewhere to account for causes: to causal mechanisms and how those mechanisms have been activated and under what conditions they are acting.

For us a theory of caring in social work exists in a necessary tension between our philosophical assumptions and our actions. Theory has one foot in philosophy (its most abstract moment) and one foot in practice (its concrete and empirical moment). In other words, “caring” theory exists in a restless tension between the universal and the particular.

Because client and community facts do not speak for themselves, theory must name the attributes, the powers, and the characteristics of reality (for example, mind, body, brain or politics and economy) that are not readily transparent. A client says: “I can’t afford to pay my utility bills.”   Theory does the work of ‘seeing’ what is otherwise not visible. In this instance, a client’s social class position: a restaurant worker without employment compensation benefits laid off due to Covid-19.   A person’s class position must be first abstracted: seen through the lenses of political and economic realities, and then made particular in the case of a restaurant worker.  “Nearly one-in-four U.S. workers – 38.1 million out of 157.5 million – are employed in the industries most likely to feel an immediate impact from the COVID-19 outbreak (see PEW Research Center  Report on Restaurant and Service Workers.) Theories of social class help us see and ask: why are so many restaurant workers required in our economy? Why don’t these workers have job protections? Why is fast food so cheap? Theory allows us to ‘see’ things not so apparent.

Indeed, a trained social worker would be unnecessary if theory could capture everything or could do all of the work. In short, theories provide the practitioner with the flexibility to see clients, social problems, organizations, or institutions from multiple perspectives. Theory allows the practitioner to take into account the immediacy of present reality and then weigh specifics against what we know about the general. It follows, then, that theories can be wrong, or practitioners can make mistakes in applying theory. Thus, there is no standpoint where theory might rest and be assured of getting social or psychological realities exactly right. Social work exists in this uncertain tension.

There is yet another complication: social workers are social beings; they learn theory through life experience, including professional university programs. We do not have intrinsic perceptual capacities that can be used automatically to recognize and make sense of clients and their environments; instead, social workers acquire theory through education, supervision, and experience. Theory is dependent upon the social worker’s human agency.

As social workers move throughout the day, even moment-to-moment, they have two basic orientations toward understanding caring practices. The first addresses the central significance of subjective experience: client and practitioner. This orientation gives emphasis to the viewpoints of the workers and clients and their subjective understandings and meaning making (N of 1). The second is aimed at understanding the enactment or performance of social work activities. Here, emphasis is on social conduct, that is, on how social workers act, what form their actions take, and the outcomes of their actions. Both practice orientations have conscious and unconscious dimensions, tacit and implicit dimensions (Fook, 2002). While neither is dominant, they both depend on the social worker habits, impulses, emotions, intuitions, values, and desires.

Social workers act within the limits and potential of their own personal agency and history by applying their personal perceptual and action capabilities to client and community realties. Social workers have the perceptual and linguistic powers to ask, to observe, to listen, and to read symbolic systems, including all forms of language and life: oral, written, images, and screen. Someone who studies the history of social welfare policy may depend heavily on reading legislative and organizational documents and may use these data to derive a theory of social welfare. Another may read the hundreds of memos and manuals associated with a particular welfare office and with these data theorize how welfare policies are implemented. Still other practitioners are engaged in frontline work; they listen, ask, and observe clients who seek welfare support and determine (that is, take action) the type of assistance needed. Social work is the act of using perceptual capacities to gather relevant practice information.

Practitioners see, feel, listen, and think about a specific client experience—for example, the death of a loved one. Others may experience administrative decisions to reduce mental health services. Still others, acting as policy activists, experience how federal and state governments are relying more on business/managerial solutions to resolve problems and less on the right thing to do and what matters most to people.

Social workers study the empirical world served up to them; then, hopefully, they use theory to guide action in that world. For example, social workers use theories of grief and mourning or trauma to assist clients in naming experience and in living through that experience. Practice, in sum, is our human capacity to perceive the environment and, with these perceptions, take action in the world. And it is in the recursive process of theory-perception–action experience that change is made possible.

Theory exists in an uncertain tension position between the abstract (philosophical assumptions) and the concrete (practice reality). There is yet another reason why theory exists in this tension: because practitioners, researchers, and scholars make up theories used to view reality. Theory is never independent of the theorist. Practitioners are part of the world theory attempts to understand. This complicates the work of theory-building and practice; it may appear that one cannot separate their theoretical constructions of reality from the actual reality that theory is attempting to represent. This is sometimes called a social constructivist view: a philosophical position that asserts social workers construct reality (Greene & Lee, 2002). The practice side of social work, however, brings an immediate and present reality to the worker; for example, a client who has just experienced the death of a loved one, an administrator reducing services, and a government that has reduced taxes and social service spending. In each of these hypothetical illustrations, no amount of social work theory will make those actual realities disappear (no theory can make Covid-19 disappear!). In other words, there may be competing theories about the grieving client (or Covid-19’s effects), the decline of social service spending, and the role of government, but those competing theories reference a particular reality at a specific time and space. In short, theories compete to represent reality not to create reality. The world is concept dependent, for sure, but the world is not dependent on our concepts. Our understanding of systemic racism, for example, depends on our concepts (e.g., the concepts race and system) but the fact of racism does not exist only because we have concepts to describe it. If only racism was a simple narrative (a concatenation of ideas) all we’d need to do is change the narrative. Crazy! Racism, like other forms of oppression, is more than a narrative. The narrative is the outcome of underlying, sometimes invisible, structures or mechanisms, all of which in combination produce narratives, sometimes contradictory narratives.

Consequently, the immediacy of any specific reality (i.e., its here and now component) bumps up against practitioner theory of caring and produces the context for the role of theory in practice. The practitioner is constantly testing theory against a specific reality, searching for the best or for a “good enough” fit. Good enough because no theory can see everything about a given social reality. The lack of an all-encompassing theory means that practitioners must remain “actively” and “reflectively” (see our post on the Project) engaged with clients or communities in applying theory to any given practice reality (Archer, 2010; Schön, 1983; Van de Ven, 2007). To be complacent and to assume that theory does all the work without one’s in vivo, reflective input, is to assume that some omniscient social scientist, or guru, has the theory, and the role of the social worker is to simply apply the theory, regardless of the context and what matters to people (Sayer, 2011).

References

Archer, M. S. (2007). Making our way through the world: Human reflexivity and social mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Floersch, J. (2004). A method for investigating practitioner use of theory in practice. Qualitative Social Work, 3(2), 161–177.

Fook, J. (2002). Theorizing from practice: Towards an inclusive approach for social work research[https://doi.org/10.1177/147332500200100106]*. Qualitative Social Work, 1(1), 79–95.

Greene, G., & Lee, M. (2002). Using social constructivism in social work practice. In A. R. Roberts & G. J. Greene (Eds.), Social workers’ desk reference (pp. 143–149). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Longhofer, J., & Floersch, J. (2012). The coming crisis in social work: Some thoughts on social work and science. Research on Social Work Practice, 22(5), 499–519.

Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and social science. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Sayer, R. A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values and ethical life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think action. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Webb, S. A. (2001). Some considerations on the validity of evidence-based practice in social work. British Journal of Social Work, 31(1), 57–79.

Zeira, A., & Rosen, A. (2000). Unraveling “tacit knowledge”: What social workers do and why they do it. Social Service Review, 74(1), 103–123.