The Project
The Project
Project, Oxford English Dictionary
You may be wondering. Why are we calling this On Caring | The Project. We all engage in projects, some big, some small, some without much reflection, some with deep and thoughtful reflection. Our capacity to reflect or engage in reflexive action is without doubt one of our subjective powers. Human beings and social structures have powers and liabilities (see our article in Social Work Research on critical realism). Ants build colonies without reflexive action, for example; they do not have the subjective power to produce projects. Their projects, to build colonies, are not determined by subjective, reflexive action. It is wired into their genome. Margaret Archer, in her very important work (2007), Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, poses three questions about our uniquely human capacity for reflexivity. First, she asks, “1) why do people act at all? 2) What motivates them and 3) what are they (fallibly) trying to achieve by endorsing given courses of action?” (p. 6). These are crucial questions. In social work and social work research, we engage in given courses of action (projects) for many and complicated reasons, toward many and complicated ends, some personal, some based on appeals to authority (i.e., we’re simply told by those with power and authority, including teachers, that we should engage in a particular course of action), and some based on sound reasoning and research (see our article in Social Work Research on research-informed values). And it is clear that many in social work, including highly placed scholars, often disagree with the values claimed and encoded by the professional association (NASW) and otherwise accepted by convention. Take, for example, one social work scholar, a former administrator at a top 10 school of social work, who has a particular and ongoing project about marriage. He writes:
“Instead, marriage has been redefined as a kind of state-registered friendship, with no necessary requirement of sex, let alone the one and only kind of sex that can ever result in new life (though obviously, it does not always do so every time or in all circumstances). Like friendship generally, there is, in the redefined version of marriage, no serious expectation of fidelity of the couple. The new marriage involves, for now, a bonding of only two adults rather than three or more. In this it imitates conjugal marriage, where the couple forms a single reproductive system of man and woman, father and mother, rather than having any inner logic of its own. As with other kinds of friendship, there is no permanence, no long-term commitment to each other or to parenting. All of this retreat from the principles of conjugal marriage preceded legal recognition of same-sex “marriage,” which was not the cause but one expression of the decay of marriage and its deinstitutionalization. With the decline in marriage, the later ages at which it happens when it does, the increase in cohabitation, the decline in fertility, and the increase in birthrates out of wedlock, marriage is no longer the social institution it was for millennia.”
One can only begin to imagine the project of this social worker. We can imagine that it emanates from personal concerns, perhaps anxieties about the changing world (e.g., changing demography, identity politics, sexual politics, race). Or perhaps the project evolves out of strong value claims rooted in a particular religious tradition, calling for a return to an imagined past, when there was order: women were domestic servants and without rights, homosexuality was closely controlled by the church or theocratic states, workers were bound to the soil or without rights, and speech was closely monitored and regulated. We now live in a world where many lack a sense of alternative future projects; and it seems that we’ve only two possible projects in our present moment: 1) return to a traditional past where oligarchs ruled, family life and marriage were tightly controlled, and the church provided the ideological adhesive.
or 2) to remain tightly bound to a deeply flawed present (e.g., neoliberalism, laissez faire capitalism).
Social work is a project born in the heady days of capitalism, long before the rise of neoliberal economic theory (roughly 1980) and ideology. And eventually social work, as it was professionalized, became increasingly allied with state interests (not all bad, not all good). How do we begin to understand these different social work projects (e.g., above, where a social worker expresses deep concern about cultural decadence, homosexuality, and the loss of family values) and others expressly opposed to those traditional projects. They are different projects, with differing modes of caring and associated reflexive practice. If all goes well, those with particular kinds of social work projects (anti-poverty, anti-racism, housing, etc.) come to know (see our post on knowing and caring) their “personal concerns and inner reflexive deliberations…” and how to go about realizing those projects.
Archer poses a second and equally important question: “How do social properties influence the courses of action that people adopt? What does Archer mean by social properties? This means that actors (social workers) must know how “objective structural or cultural powers are reflexively mediated.” (p. 6). If this can’t be accomplished, we’re (i.e., social workers and clients) simply whipped around by all manner of structural forces (e.g., class domination, political parties…), unable to reflect and act even in our own best interests.
Some years ago, Tom Frank (2007) wrote a book about Kansas, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. We were both born and raised in small Kansas towns so we found his argument interesting, though not altogether convincing, as moral atrophy (we’ll have more to say about moral atrophy—and politics in a forthcoming post) runs deeper in our political culture and is clearly not limited to a state, region, religion, ethnicity, or political party.
Nonetheless, here’s what he has to say about reflexive action, though not in a conceptual vocabulary we share with him,
Kansas Flint Hills, not too far from where we were born and raised.
“The poorest county in America isn’t in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80 percent. This puzzled me when I first read about it, as it puzzles many of the people I know. For us it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized. Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood [we would add here, the ABCs of the social work project]. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High Plains county so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. “How can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?” she asked. How could so many people get it so wrong? Her question is apt; it is, in many ways, the preeminent question of our times. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government; it has elected presidents, senators, governors; it shifts the Democrats to the right and then impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun” (Frank, P. 1).
Finally, Archer asks: “what exactly do people do? This requires an examination of the variability in the actions of those similarly socially situated and the differences in their processes of reflexivity” (p. 6).
Our capacity to engage in reflexive action should be a matter of great concern for social work research and practice at all levels. For Frank, those poor Kansans from our small towns lack what Archer calls an internal conversation; and it is in the internal conversation that we become active agents and able to alter the course of our own lives. Most important, for Archer, “Being an ‘active’ agent hinges on the fact that individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns: those internal goods that they care about most [our emphasis] the precise constellation of which makes for their concrete singularity as persons” (pp. 6-7). For Archer we all develop concrete actions to realize our concerns through the elaboration of projects. And “action itself thus depends upon the existence of what are termed ‘projects’, where a project stands for any course of action intentionally engaged upon by a human being. Thus, the answer to why we act at all is in order to promote our concerns; we form ‘projects’ to advance or protect what we care about most” (p. 7).
A caring practice and a theory of caring will need to pay close attention to how and why people form projects and the kinds of reflexive actions used (or not used) in their formation. Social work urgently needs new ways of thinking about the project of caring, while preserving the best from our historical projects. We need a robust practice theory: one that combines the personal—our internal reflexive powers or capabilities—with the social and natural worlds. Each of these, the personal, social and natural, have unique powers and liabilities to produce effects. In future posts we will deepen our earlier work on a philosophy of science for social work, critical realism (see our article in Social Work Research on critical realism). Also in a previous post we have looked at what happened when social work adopted these binaries—clinical|policy, micro|macro, psychology|political, qualitative|quantitative, and theory|practice—and how they have contributed to an ongoing crisis in knowledge production and practice: no life, no person or mind, no world, no work, no society, is lived in absolute binaries, except perhaps a completely unreflective life. But what meaning could possibly derive from an unreflective life? Existentialism is spot on here.
Finally, we must ask ourselves: what role, if any, has social work as a profession—the project of professionalization—played in addressing structural violence, racism and economic inequality? And only after the death of George Floyd and the social movement it has emboldened, did the National Academy of Social Work add racism (July 2020) to its Grand Challenges. Professionalization, an expedient way to channel good intentions (Townsend, 1998) to produce a “generous” welfare state, has disappointed again, again, and again!
Our blog epitaph (Social Work | Born 19th Century | Died 21st Century | Good Intentions Overruled) is a provocative reminder that the original social work motivations and reflective actions of the 19th century have little structural basis for how to conceptualize a 21st century social work. We need a new social work project! One that is squarely aimed at the common good. On Caring is a project to organize our thinking for a new kind of collective social work caring and action. The death of George Floyd and the appalling rates of Covid-19 morbidity and mortality among communities of color, the elderly, prison inmates, frontline workers, (see our Vodcasts) should not only be a call to action. It should cause us to reflect on the very project of social work professionalization and our 19th and 20th century social work failures to protect and care for all people.
References
Archer, M. S. (2007). Making our way through the world: Human reflexivity and social mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frank, T. (2007). What's the matter with Kansas?: How conservatives won the heart of America. New York: Picador.
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.
Longhofer, J., & Floersch, J. (2014). Values in a science of social work: Values-informed research and research-informed values. Research on Social Work Practice, 24(5), 527-534.
Townsend, E. A. (1998). Good intentions overruled: A critique of empowerment in the routine organization of mental health services. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.