‘ Gnatola ma no kpon sia, eyenabe adelan to kpo mi sena ’ (‘Until the lion has his or her own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best part of the story’) (Ghanian proverb, available at: http://thelionandthehunter.org/ ). Historically, both the discipline and profession of social work have been imagined and constructed by those who oversee social work services – ‘the hunters’, according to the aforementioned Ghanaian proverb. Thus, it has been predominantly white, middle-class, non-disabled, mainly female, Global North voices that have determined what social work looks like and how it is carried out across the world. However, this is changing. Today, many more ‘lions’ are telling their stories, as this article demonstrates. Through the curated narratives of Bob, Doug and Rose, as well as that of their storyteller/collaborator, Viv, we learn that growing up in care in Scotland in the 1940s and 1950s was ‘confused and confusing’ for the children at the heart of it. Contradictory discourses competed for dominance, and the children experienced unintended consequences from the ‘care’ they received. While not attempting to universalise on the basis of three people’s stories, we believe that they have much to teach social work.

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part demonstrate, above all, the contested and complex nature of social work. Understanding social work’s identity and purpose becomes even more problematic when people waken up to the fact that social work has been implicated in processes of colonisation, often showing disregard for indigenous cultures and patterns of living. The part then explores the big questions about social work history, social work as a profession, and social work as it is practised today. It explores similar themes, but with particular focus on ‘universal’ social work, global ethics, and human rights. The part also examines social work in more detail, through the lenses of scandal and risk, both of which have played a huge part in framing policy and practice in different settings.

It has long been acknowledged that gender matters in social work, not least within justice social work, given the over-representation of men within the criminal justice system. Whilst there is significant theorising about the role of gender in criminal justice, there has been little empirical examination of how social workers understand and address gender in practice. This article sets out to redress this omission by introducing a novel study of the expressed views of justice social workers (JSWs) in Scotland on gender in their work. The findings are challenging. They demonstrate that JSWs talk about gender in complex and, at times, seemingly inconsistent ways; the concept of ideological dilemmas is used as a vehicle through which to interrogate this further. Our conclusions suggest that it is not necessary to resolve the conflicts and complexities that are an inevitable response to, and expression of, the multiple and often competing discourses within which JSW practitioners operate on a daily basis, but we do need to make space for these conflicts in practice. A person-centred approach to gender, and an intersectional approach to understanding personhood, offer a way forward, allowing insight into the complex and demanding environment within which JSWs function.

This final section brings us to practice in social work, and it does so from the perspective that practice is much more than a set of skills and methods that can be taught and replicated in all settings. Instead, practice is context specific. What is regarded as 'good practice' changes across settings and times, and it reflects the values, culture and history of individuals and societies. In that sense it is political, as well as personal and professional. A better word for this might be 'praxis', because it demonstrates that theory, values and skill come together as practice is enacted, embodied and takes place in the very particular 'real world' in which we find ourselves. As David Kolb argues: […] the creation of knowledge and meaning occurs though the active extension and grounding of ideas and experiences in the external world and through internal reflection about the attributes of these experiences and ideas (1984: 52).

This article is not a research paper in the conventional sense. Instead, it is a reflexive account of the building of a relationship which would not have happened without the existence of digital technologies and might not have happened but for the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was through reading a digitised resource (an online PhD thesis) in the first UK 'lockdown' that Bob, now a semi-retired academic in the field of adult and organisational learning, began to reappraise his upbringing in a children's home in Scotland. Meanwhile, it was in getting to know Bob (through emails and Zoom meetings) and by accessing Bob's retrospectively digitised case record that Viv, the author of the PhD thesis and now a semi-retired social work academic, was stimulated to revisit her early research from a fresh perspective. We argue that our real-life example, serendipitous and unique as it undoubtedly is, demonstrates the democratising potential of the digital transformation that is currently being played out in child and family social work. Furthermore, it seems likely that digital technologies will continue to bring new and unexpected opportunities for forming such relationships in the future.

SOWK 501: 3 s.h. Principles and Philosophies of Social Work Introduces the generalist model for practice, which serves as a base for subsequent social work courses and provides initial understanding of the needs and issues of special populations in relation to social welfare policies and services as well as social work practice. The course provides an introduction to the profession and the MSW program while helping to prepare students for their subsequent field placements. This course may be offered in multiple modalities.

Social work has long been concerned about women’s involvement in the sex industry. This article asks what can be learned from sex workers themselves about how social work might better support those who work in the industry. Based on a qualitative study in Bangladesh, it is argued that although the non-governmental organisations who worked with these women helped to increase their feelings of agency, violence and abuse continued to feature in their daily lives. It is concluded that in order to more holistically meet sex workers’ needs, social workers should understand better the ways in which agency and exploitation co-exist.

The final chapter provides an overview of the book as a whole, drawing together the themes that run through the book, and comparing and contrasting the similar and different ways of becoming and being a social worker in the UK. It ends with an optimist view of social work’s future, based on its fundamental commitment to social justice and human rights.

In many countries, women's movements continue to be dictated by gendered spaces, including social practices such as purdah. At the same time, globalisation and increased urbanisation in recent years have transformed women's lives, bringing about a significant increase in opportunities for women to work outside their homes. This article explores purdah in Bangladeshi society through an ethnographic study in one of Dhaka's low income communities. It will be argued that while new employment opportunities allow women to enter spaces that were hitherto not accessible to them, these employment opportunities are, in reality, often extensions of existing exploitative, patriarchal systems. Furthermore, women must manage their movements in specific ways in order to maintain a positive identity and moral status. These negotiations are an integral part of the day-to-day experiences of women as they navigate their relationships and employment in the changed context of their lives.

Conducting research with children raises significant ethical and practical difficulties; when the context is rural China, where there has been no tradition of qualitative research with children, these become especially heightened. This article, written by a student and her supervisor, introduces a pilot study conducted in 2018 as part of a Master’s degree programme at a Scottish university. The study was designed to trial two child participatory methods with the aim of scaling these up in a full PhD project; the research focused on the experiences and needs of ‘left-behind children’ in a town of South-West China. The study threw up a number of challenges for the student which are explored in the article. Whilst not wishing to over-claim on the basis of a student project, we suggest that these highlight the reality that methodologies and ‘good practice’ guidelines developed in a ‘Western’/’minority world’ context may not always be wholly compatible with a very different research environment such as this one. This conclusion presents a significant challenge for all those who are conducting research with children in the ‘Global South’/’majority world’, as well as for those who are supporting research students who may experience similar dilemmas in the ‘real world’ of research.

Community justice professionals operate within deeply gendered territory, yet there has been little attention to how gender is understood and embodied by the workforce. Building on findings from a mixed method study, this article explores professional perceptions of how gender plays out in criminal justice social work (CJSW) in Scotland. Our findings demonstrate that gender is an important but neglected dimension of CJSW. We conclude that advancing gender in this field requires a more inclusive theorising of gender in professional education and research, a more practical commitment to gender equality in policy and practice, and more routine opportunities for dialogue on issues of gender and justice within and across these domains.

Women fare less well than men across all academic disciplines: they are less likely to be promoted, they earn less, and many more professors are men. There has, however, been little analysis to date of the experience of women in social work education, a discipline that has historically had higher representation of female staff and students. This study set out to explore women in the social work academy through a case-study of social work education in Scotland. A mixed-methods approach was used, including a review of relevant literature; an online survey of women and men academics in social work education; and semi-structured interviews with female social work leaders, past and present. The study found that women in the social work academy faced the same pressures as other women in higher education; some of these pressures were also shared by men. Most significant, however, was the extent to which women in social work academia experienced twin challenges, firstly, as female academics and secondly, as female social work academics in a discipline that struggles for recognition in the academy. We conclude that this makes for a contradictory and, at times, ambiguous experience for women as they navigate the gendered academy.

Over the past two decades, the use of ethnographic research methods, in combination with a range of discursive, conversational, and multimodal analytical approaches, have provided vivid accounts of the complex nature of social workers' everyday communication. This paper discusses the potential and the problems of combining a video-stimulated recall methodology with an explicit theoretical framework, in order to generate critical reflexive "insider" accounts of social workers' direct encounters with children. The framework employed was based on an adaptation of Goffman's concepts of "framing" and "footing," which were integrated into an analytical process designed to theorize social workers' critiques regarding the nature of their communication with children. Three detailed case exemplars are used to demonstrate the potential of this methodology to explore the "delicate" agency required by social workers in the practice of authentic communication in complex professional inquiries with children. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and practical issues associated with utilizing reflexive methodologies in professional contexts.

The ways in which social workers experience a range of emotions that are evoked in their professional relationships with children and families is an area that is little focused upon and yet the processes involved in their expression and management can have profound implications for all involved. Theoretically informed by sociological concepts and combining data from a two-year, UK four-nation, ESRC-funded research project, Talking and Listening to Children (TLC), this paper explores the ways in which social work organisational contexts and dynamics give rise to feeling rules in the workplace and the impact of these on social workers relationships with children and families. Using Hochschilds (1983) emotional labour analytical framework, the paper highlights that the management and expression of social workers feelings are filtered through personal, professional and organisational contexts. The implications of these pervasive and powerful processes are explored. The paper concludes by considering the significant, wide-reaching implications of this focus on the experience, expression and management of emotion for everyday social work practice in both children and families settings specifically and other social work practice contexts more broadly.

This chapter presents connections between the theoretical ideas that underpin, and the practice of, family social work. It examines what ‘family’ is and make explicit the central role that families have in all endeavours to protect and promote children’s welfare and well-being. The chapter argues that the social work task is intimately entwined with the needs and interests of the family. Drawing from the experience of social work in Scotland, the chapter analyzes how child welfare law and policy conceptualizes children and their families and the implications this has for social work practice. It focuses on an example of practice with families and, in doing so, explore some of the tensions and dilemmas that undoubtedly arise from family-orientated social work. The chapter considers the challenge of promoting and balancing the linked, but separate, needs and interests of family members in child and family social work practice.

This chapter explores the place of feminism within critical social work in contemporary times. It deals with current times, as feminism has become part of mainstream culture in the global North, while a new feminist theory and practice struggles for prominence in the global South. Feminist social work practitioners and academics in the 1970s and 80s set out to bring to life the feminist mantra, ‘the personal is political’, and for many, this meant working in projects with and for women: in girls’ groups, women’s groups, domestic violence projects, sexual abuse services. Two challenges presented to feminism and feminist social work in the 1990s, the first from the outside and the second from within feminism. North/South feminist debates are particularly highlighted in current discussions about Islam and feminism. Critical feminist social work must not only pursue socially just practice but engage in wider political debates.

Evaluating effectiveness is of primary concern to social work practice; resources will always be limited, and those using services deserve the best. But what is effectiveness, and how should it be measured? This paper explores the challenge of measuring effectiveness in social work by examining two small-scale evaluations of services (statutory and voluntary) in Scotland. Both evaluations used a mixed method approach and both were conducted in a climate of funding cuts. It will be argued that evaluating effectiveness sits uncomfortably between new public management (NPM)’s imperative for measurement and efficiency within a market economy and agencies’ own need to reflect on their practice and respond to the views of their service users. Such processes force agencies into a continual cycle of monitoring and review that may, paradoxically, impede organic change and development. It is suggested that an alternative, critical paradigm in evaluation offers a positive way forward.