TY - JOUR
T1 - The Social Work Regulator and Professional Identity
T2 - A Narrative of Lord and Bondsman
AU - Simpson, Murray
AU - Daly, Maura
AU - Smith, Mark
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - Since the early 2000s, in a development since mirrored throughout much of the Anglophone world, social work across UK jurisdictions has been subject to external regulation. While a key justification for regulation was to enhance professional identity, there is little evidence that it has done so. Indeed, a growing literature points out conflictual and unproductive relationships between the social work profession and its regulators, within which a marked power imbalance in favour of the regulator is apparent. In this paper, we illustrate the nature of this imbalance theoretically by drawing upon the classic philosophical narrative, developed by Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), of the ‘lord and bondsman’. We seek to demonstrate the utility of the Hegelian narrative using data from a study into the views of social workers in Scotland on how they understand their professional identities, focusing specifically on those aspects of the study that address the place of regulation in this process. While exposing some fundamental problems in the regulatory relationship, the lord and bondsman narrative may also offer some possibility of a way forward through identifying these dialectics as a step towards a more self-conscious professional maturity.
AB - Since the early 2000s, in a development since mirrored throughout much of the Anglophone world, social work across UK jurisdictions has been subject to external regulation. While a key justification for regulation was to enhance professional identity, there is little evidence that it has done so. Indeed, a growing literature points out conflictual and unproductive relationships between the social work profession and its regulators, within which a marked power imbalance in favour of the regulator is apparent. In this paper, we illustrate the nature of this imbalance theoretically by drawing upon the classic philosophical narrative, developed by Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), of the ‘lord and bondsman’. We seek to demonstrate the utility of the Hegelian narrative using data from a study into the views of social workers in Scotland on how they understand their professional identities, focusing specifically on those aspects of the study that address the place of regulation in this process. While exposing some fundamental problems in the regulatory relationship, the lord and bondsman narrative may also offer some possibility of a way forward through identifying these dialectics as a step towards a more self-conscious professional maturity.
KW - Governance
KW - Hegel
KW - Philosophy
KW - Professional identity
KW - Regulation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85100972802&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/bjsw/bcaa034
DO - 10.1093/bjsw/bcaa034
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85100972802
VL - 50
SP - 1909
EP - 1925
JO - British Journal of Social Work
JF - British Journal of Social Work
SN - 0045-3102
IS - 6
ER -