A N ew Social Settlement: Rights, relationships and recognition

1. A New Social Settlement: Rights, relationships and recognition :

2. Outline • The need for a new social settlement (that is an agreement between people about how we interact with each other and with the state) • How might we locate social work in a new settlement? • What might it contributeand what might be its limitations? • What are the challenges and opportunities of bringing rights, relationships and recognition into the dialogue?

3. Questions being asked by a range of reformers • How can we tackle and transform inequalities? • How can we take care of one another and our planet? • How do we heal the atomisation that has occurred in our society? • How do we distribute power differently? • How do we build a new story of ‘belonging’?

4. Social work and social workers • These engage us all as citizens of course • But they generate some interesting possibilities and painful tensions for us as social workers • Theyare often posed by those who are very critical of us and of the models of welfare we have been part of • We have, however, something to contribute as well as to learn from such critics

5. Locating some of the contemporary questioning • Lent and Studdert (2018) identify four paradigms • The civic • The state • The market • The community

6. CIVIC PARADIGM: • Lasting from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, this was based on a patchwork of independent bodies delivering limited public services funded by voluntary contributions and, increasingly, some tax. • Conditional – deserving vs undeserving etc • Model of social work….mixed

7. State paradigm • This transformed public services from the 1940s through to the early 1980s. They were unified under central government and entirely tax-funded with the goal of providing universal, comprehensive and free-at-the-point-of-use provision. • Extended the hierarchical systems already evident under the previous civic paradigm, based on the firm belief that officials and experts knew best how to care for the wider public. Service users and communities were widely regarded as passive recipients(Lent and Studdert, 2018) • Model of social work??

8. Neo-liberal challenge • The market is ‘king’ • The state is the enemy of enterprise • New Public Management • Outsourcing …

9. Market paradigm • This developed in the 1980s. It sought to improve the cost and efficiency of public services and to widen the choices available to users by marketising provision and involving the private sector in delivery. • It did not, however, effectively dismantle the hierarchical practices of the previous paradigms. Rather, it introduced a strongly transactional element into the relationship between service and user.

10. Social investment state • Integration into the market through life long learning • Emphasis on children and early years • Knowledge economy • Targets, managerialism…

11. The ‘centaur’ state • The centaur state presents a ‘comely and caring visage towards the middle and upper classes, and a fearsome and frowning mug towards the lower class’ (Wacquant, 2010: 217). • In this model, the state has retreated from a number of areas most notably the regulation of the market but for the poor the scope and extent of state regulation has increased. • Othering and risk discourses thrive…

12. Some of the Challenges • Relational welfare (Cottam. 2018) • The Community paradigm (Lent and Studdert, 2018) • These build, to some extent, upon conceptual developments that map onto the themes of this conference

13. Conceptual work • The work of Nancy Fraser on recognition • Capabilities – human rights • Relationships as a golden thread

14. Fraser • Recognition responds to the status order of society in which some individuals are deemed worthy of greater esteem and respect than others ( eg, those with a disability) • Institutionalised patterns of misrecognition deny people the cultural value they should enjoy • Redistribution – refers to material resources – poverty and structural issues • Recognition and Redistribution are pre-conditions for ‘parity of participation’ according to Fraser

15. Capabilities Approach (CA) • The CA is a complex framework for the development of social justice that has been used in various different disciplines, such as economics, political philosophy and development studies- most well known exponent is AmartyaSen

16. The CA argues that people differ in their ability to convert means or resources into valuable opportunities (capabilities) or outcomes (functionings). Capabilities and functionings constitute the real possibilities and opportunities of leading a life which a person has reason to value thereby generating more human development and flourishing in society.

17. Conversion factors • ‘Personal conversion factors’ such as physical condition, literacy, competences etc • ‘Socio-structural and cultural conversion factors’ such as social or religious norms, gender roles, power relations and hierarchies, discriminatory practices • ‘Institutional conversion factors’ such as welfare, health and educational provisions and community resources.

18. Relationships • Challenge to transactional approaches • Relationships are key –but these are multiple and diffused • Community is used in a wide variety of ways and by many constituencies but it’s a powerful rallying call

19. The Community Paradigm • Lent and Studdertdraw from developing practices in a range of local authorities, New Care Models launched by the NHS, some social enterprises, the rise of community businesses and emerging models of education to advance the idea and reality of the Community Paradigm based upon the following: • Shifting decision-making power out of public service institutions into communities with consequent changes to governance arrangements.

20. Placing control of public service funding in the hands of communities to ensure that power and responsibility are genuinely transferred. • Developing collaborative sets of behavioural norms. It is argued that a shift to prevention can only occur when public service organisations and communities break the hold of hierarchical and transactional mindsets and embody a more collaborative set of behavioural norms. This must start with the culture of public service organisations themselves.

21. How do we think about and ‘work’ with people who have been harmed profoundly, often over generations, and who may harm themselves and others? • Have we got the right frameworks to think both/and? • How do we develop ‘services’ that are owned by, and invested in, by the people who use them? • Is there life beyond services? • What about the role of communities?

22. Why is risk thinking so entrenched? • How and why should we make claims to expertise? • Is being a professional compatible with co-production? • Why has a language of ‘what works’ become so dominant? Why do we talk so little about ethics? And about human rights?

23. The importance of remembering • “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” … though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past (Rebecca Solnit, 2017)

24. Social worker • Sociologist • Public philosopher • First American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 • Why should we remember her?

25. Remembering

26. Our strengths • We know first hand about the damage poverty and inequality do to people, relationships and communities • We know first hand about atomisation and the impoverishment of people’s spirits • In some areas we have been incredibly adaptable -work being done to respond to rights claims, inclusion, asset based work • Restorative approaches • Extraordinary energy and innovation across a range of arenas

27. Our limitations • A disconnect between our sense of identity and our actual practices • Risk dominated and programmatic orientation • Child protection has become ‘a runaway train’- top-down and expert led • We are often very depleted ourselves – worn out from saying no…fear and shame

28. Our potential • Understanding ethical trespass • The opportunity to fuse our past understandings with contemporary work to transcend binary thinking • Reflexivity

29. Ethical trespass • Trespass is inherent in the world because there are a multiplicity of social actors all with conflicting wants and interests. In any decisions regarding those conflicts, some choices are opened up, while others are closed. • Harm, potentially invisible or unknown, follows inevitably from those decisions. Some ways of being in the world are supported while others are inhibited. • Like the proverbial ripples from a pebble thrown in a pond, one can never completely anticipate the consequences of an action that go on and on (Weinberg, 2016: 18).

30. Mitigating ethical trespass • Lessons from families (Morris, Featherstone, Hill and Ward, 2018), Featherstone, Gupta and Mills, 2018) • Relationships • Rights • Recognition

31. Binary thinking …. • ‘If we can understand that injustice can strike its roots into the personality itself, producing rage and resentment and the roots of bad character, we have even deeper incentives to commit ourselves to giving each child the material and social support that human dignity requires’ (Nussbaum, quoted in Sayer, 2017: 160)

32. A Social Model Jack is 23. He was born and brought up in the West of Scotland His dad died when he was two and his mother struggled with addiction issues He was brought up by his grandmother Jack is not long out of prison and is attending a project that supports young people in his situation He lives with his girlfriend and they have a young baby Child protection services are concerned about the impact of the couple’s conflictful relationship on the baby

33. Reflexivity • ‘Bending back’(White, 2009) • Interrogating ‘discursive fields’ (Weinberg, 2016) • Building reflexive spaces

34. Going forward • “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!” • It’s an argument for tiny and temporary victories, and for the possibility of partial victories in the absence or even the impossibility of total victories (Solnit, 2017)