The relationship between evidence and policy is never straightforward. Notwithstanding, we should reasonably expect that policy formulation should draw on well-established bodies of knowledge from a range of sources, suitably analysed. In recent years, the Scottish Government appears to have given up on what was previously axiomatic by elevating knowledge from one source, that of 'lived experience', above all others. This has occurred with insufficient academic, professional, or political critique. At one level, this lack of critique is understandable in that questioning someone's personal experience is difficult, precisely because it is personal. This article traces the turn to lived experience as the predominant political driver for social welfare policy in Scotland. It proceeds to examine the troubled National Care Service proposals to illustrate the extent and the consequences of the Scottish Government's preoccupation with lived experience. It will conclude that there is a place for lived experience in policy debates, but that the conceptual flimsiness of the term renders it an inadequate basis for policy formulation or implementation and leaves it open to political misappropriation.

Trauma has become a dominant framework for understanding social suffering across contemporary mental health care and social welfare. The rise of Trauma-Informed Care (TIC), presented as a progressive and compassionate approach to service delivery, reflects this broader "trauma turn." In this paper, we examine TIC using the concept of psychocentrism. We focus on how suffering is increasingly interpreted and addressed at the level of the individual, while social, political, and material conditions are marginalised. Drawing on scholarship from psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and critical social theory, we critique trauma discourse and its translation into policy and practice. We examine the growing authority of neuroscience and how adversity is translated into individualised interventions, risk management, and self-regulation. While cumulative adversity can undoubtedly shape people's experiences, we argue that the dominance of trauma risks narrowing how social suffering is understood and responded to. It can also constrain how people understand their circumstances and exercise their agency. Despite the rapid institutionalisation of TIC, its conceptual foundations are contested, and its empirical support remains equivocal. We argue for approaches that engage more fully with the social, relational, and everyday conditions shaping social suffering. Rather than treating trauma as a master explanatory framework, we suggest that it is better understood as one perspective among many.

The idea that speech is hateful and can cause harm is a relatively recent one that has implications for how students and faculty navigate contentious issues in the university classroom. This article traces some of the background to this development in the emergence of critical social justice ideas and the impact of these on faculty and on students. It illustrates the impact of this development by introducing a specific finding from a research study with social work students in Scotland that explored whether they felt reluctant to speak about particular subject matter. The research showed that 67% of students felt reluctant to speak about at least one contentious issue, the main reason being the perception that other students would criticise them. The second top reason, however, was that the students felt they might cause psychological or emotional harm to others in the class. Although on the surface, this may seem a benign and even caring response, the idea that engaging with views one disagrees with can cause harm, might in itself be deleterious to healthy emotional and mental functioning. Believing that words cause harm also erodes the healthy debate vital to the telos and proper functioning of a university.

This article takes as its starting point reflections from social work academics at a Scottish university around persistent tensions between the nature of social work practice and the ways in which social work students and social workers talk about it. Practice (perhaps by definition) is practical, whereas how it is spoken and written about often betrays instrumental, narrow or dated clinical orientations. Picking up on the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) definition of social work as a practice-based profession and drawing on the literature around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL), we seek to (re)invigorate the case for social work as practice. We argue that this offers students and practitioners a conceptual framework through which they might articulate and validate what they do. We begin by critiquing current orientations to social work. We then come on to propose a broadly Aristotelean concept of practice. We make some suggestions for how this might better orient social work to the nature and demands of contemporary professionalism. We conclude by considering the implications of our argument for social work education and practice.

The meaning of care in residential child care is under-developed. It can often be represented through its absence, seen as offering at best basic physical tending but lacking emotional connection or warmth. At worst, residential care settings said to be institutionally abusive can be characterised as being antithetical to what we might imagine care should be. Residential schools and especially those run by religious orders attract particular opprobrium in this regard. In this article, I adopt a broadly autoethnographic approach to reflect on how boys (now men in their late 40s and early 50s) brought up in the 1980s in a Scottish residential school recall being cared for. The article uses Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and its three pillars of love, rights and solidarity to group themes from how former pupils speak about their experiences of care. These accounts challenge the received narrative of such settings failing to offer care. The discussion reflects some ideas around care and about how we understand public care historically.

Social work, globally, has struggled persistently to justify itself as an academic or professional discipline. Its terrain is not the academic high ground, where principles and concomitant courses of action seem clear, but the domain of practice, where knowledge and actions are plural, ambiguous, situated and contested. A consequence of the diffuse nature of social work knowledge and practice is that workers can struggle to articulate what it is they do by comparison to other professions where knowledge can appear more bounded. In this article, we explore the impact of this on the profession's identity. The article is structured into three main sections: the first sets out some of social work's struggles with knowledge. We then introduce data from a Scottish study on the challenges social workers face to account for what they do. In the final section, we consider what this insecurity about a coherent knowledge base might mean for workers' professional identity. Social workers often struggle to explain what they do and why, especially when set alongside other professions whose practice and knowledge can appear clearer and more bounded. The article sets out social work's struggles with knowledge, then introduces material from a Scottish study on social work identity to explore how social workers speak about their knowledge and how it relates to what they do. It concludes by considering the implications of the diffuse nature of social work knowledge on the profession's identity.

This article provides an innovative reading of the relationship between social work and the regulatory bodies mandated to register and regulate it, which has hitherto remained largely untheorised. It achieves this by utilising Hegel’s illustrative tale of ‘lord and bondsman’. This narrative outlines the development of consciousness through dialectical struggle. We argue that the relationship of domination and servitude that has developed between the profession and the regulators is incapable of delivering a satisfactory self-consciousness for either. For the social work profession, consciousness is limited to an enforced ‘being-for’ the regulatory bodies, which appropriate the ends of practice through the labour of the profession. For both to achieve full self-consciousness, each must transcend itself and the other through a dialectical movement in which each is simultaneously ‘negated’ and ‘preserved’. The article highlights ways in which social work can more courageously address its own historical development within such a struggle.

This article uses life history research to reveal a new understanding of institutional care. The study draws on interviews with care leavers from a Latvian orphanage who narrate life histories and identify critical life events and moments of resistance to times of adversity. The methodology intentionally positioned study nineteen care leavers as experts on their own experiences, focusing on three main life phases: before, during and after living in care. Findings deconstructed and brought nuance to stereotypes and dominant assumptions about people growing up in care, providing alternative narratives of self-reliance and resistance to adversity. Recommendations for practice and policy are discussed. This rich knowledge base can be used to support and inform the practice of children in the care system in Latvia and more widely. This article explores the life stories of young adults who grew up in care in Eastern Europe. Through the process of reflecting on these experiences, participants identified essential times in their lives that impacted them. The study participants' common themes include poverty, child abuse, important relationships and moving on from care as a young adult. The findings suggest that many of the care leavers interviewed recount some positive experiences of their time in the orphanage.

In recent decades, a singular story that speaks of awful and endemic abuse in residential schools has assumed a status as normative truth. Schools run by religious orders attract particular opprobrium. A single story can act to totalise experiences and can occlude nuance and complexity in how we understand the past. Invariably, other stories are to be found submerged beneath any grand narrative that has been laid down. In the case of residential schools, these submerged stories belong to those children brought up in residential schools who do not recognise themselves in the dominant story. This article offers an account of life in a Scottish residential school run by a Catholic religious order. The author worked there over the course of the 1980s and has conducted life-history interviews with boys he looked after there. Their accounts offer a powerful counter narrative to the dominant story of the schools. The article proceeds to discuss the gulf between the two stories from a position of narrative inquiry. It cautions against attempts to judge the past from the vantage point of the present and calls for more finely grained and grounded approaches to social work history than are currently evident.

This book provides rich insights into the pre and post care experiences of boys who were pupils in a residential school where the author worked over the course of the 1980s. It describes the boys' trajectories through life, as well as detailing the rhythms, rituals, routines, and relationships that existed in the school. While the focus is on the (former) boys' experiences, these are augmented by interview material from staff members, including religious Brothers, who worked in the school. Together, these different perspectives provide unique insights into an area of social work history that is ill-served by existing accounts, making the book required reading for all scholars and students of social work; social and oral history; narrative sociology; criminology and desistance and social policy.

This article offers an account of the authors’ experiences as foster carers for an unaccompanied asylum seeker (and through him, supporting other asylum-seeking boys). We are both qualified and experienced social workers, now social work academics living and working in Scotland, whose practice is informed by socio-pedagogical perspectives. Our backgrounds have given us unique and finely grained insights into the daily care issues facing young asylum seekers set against a backdrop of global movement. We discuss the need to provide care that offers cultural safety; the centrality within this of recognising and seeking to understand religious beliefs and practices; the experiences of young people growing up in conditions of liminality, negotiating two very different cultures; the inadequacy of current social work responses; the importance of everyday care and relationships and the need for a curious and reflexive orientation from caregivers.

Platform work can be understood as a particularly acute instance of the individualization of economic risk. Responding to the broader trends of labour commodification and decline of the standard employment relationship, psychological contract theory emerged as a way to conceptualize fairness in individualized work arrangements. In this paper, we draw out the critical potential of psychological contract theory by mobilizing Lukes' theory of power. We apply this lens to 12 semi-structured interviews with platform-mediated food delivery couriers, supplemented by both online and offline participant observation, to identify ways in which platform firms use decision-making, nondecision-making and ideological power to encourage the acceptance of platform work as fair: through the unilateral modification of exchange terms, through the nondecisions of communication and technology design, and through the ideological power of neoliberalism and tribalism. In so doing, we also identify coping strategies deployed by couriers in response to violations by platform firms of perceived exchange terms, variously resistant to and reinforcing of these forms of platform power. In this way, we uncover mechanisms by which firms present risk individualization as a fair exchange of worker security for worker autonomy, as well as more and less effective ways workers can resist this framing.

A recent special issue of this journal focussed on the emergence of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) movement as a key driver of Scottish social policy. In this article, we extend the critiques advanced therein by locating ACEs within a wider cultural turn towards psychological trauma which, over the past decade, has become reified as a master theory across social welfare. Yet, the concept is insubstantial and ill-defined, and the claims made for policy based upon it are at best disputable. Its prominence is less evidence-based than it is testimony to how a particular (cultural and professional) ideology, regardless of its intellectual merit, can be insinuated into policy discourse. ACEs, we suggest, is utilised to provide the trauma paradigm with some ostensibly quantifiable substance. We illustrate our argument through reference to the Scottish Government’s National Trauma Training Programme (2020). We go on to consider some of the implications of such ideological capture for the direction of Scottish social welfare policy and practice. The prominence given to trauma perspectives has potentially iatrogenic consequences for those identified or self-identifying as traumatised. At a wider level, it reflects a professional and epistemic privileging of a narrow, ostensibly therapeutic, worldview which, in turn, acts to marginalise ‘the social’ that characterised erstwhile Scottish approaches to welfare.

This paper reports on the author's academic work on working with involuntary clients, which began with a knowledge exchange project in Scotland. I reflect back on this work and use it as a way to explore subsequent reflections on the field. These move beyond consideration of the skills required to undertake such work through locating the category of involuntary clients within wider, yet contradictory, governmental discourses on client engagement. These are identified as the strategy that sets the context for such work. But the strategy is enacted through the day-to-day tactics of social workers on the ground; such tactics, enacted in everyday encounters, are constitutive of effective but also ineffective engagement with clients. The discussion goes on to problematise the distinction between voluntary and involuntary clients and to suggest that effective social work practice, whatever the nature of that involvement, requires that clients are recognised at an ethical and relational level.