Social worker numbers are climbing, but many believe that the profession may have lost its way. Paul Michael Garrett proposes that ‘Dissenting Social Work’ may furnish a progressive alternative.

A time to celebrate social work?

On March 18, 2025, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) celebrated World Social Work Day. The aim of this annual event is to highlight the achievements of the profession, ‘to raise the visibility of social services for the future of societies, and to defend social justice and human rights’. In some respects, there is much to celebrate because it can appear that globally social work is in spectacularly healthy shape. In the United States, the overall employment of social workers is projected to grow by 7% from 2022 to 2032, faster than the average for all occupations. About 63,800 openings for social workers are projected each year, on average, over the next decade. China is experiencing a new ‘spring of social work’.

A time to bury social work?

However, some observers – within and beyond the social work – are deeply concerned about its trajectory. In Australia, Chris Maylea calls for the ‘end of social work’ accusing the profession of having betrayed its mission, and practitioners of co-operating with oppressive regimes and routinely failing to challenge practices of domination. Moreover, social work educators are conning students with empty rhetoric around ‘social justice’ and ‘human rights’ because the realities of practice within welfare bureaucracies simply do not provide the spaces for social workers to act in a progressive way. Worse, the whole social work enterprise distracts idealistic young people from campaigns and social movements better able to promote meaningful social change. Relatedly, particularly in the United States, it is asserted that the profession is wholly enmeshed in policing, with the child ‘care’ system functioning as a ‘pipeline’ leading, especially for those in minority ethnic communities, straight into the prison system.

Whilst accepting that some of these criticisms are well-founded, I doubt that these critics provide a way forward; more emphatically, they lead us into a professional and political cul-de-sac. What is more, the extinction of social work is unlikely to occur: states are invested in social work because the profession contributes to the maintenance of social cohesion needed not to maintain processes of capital accumulation. Rather than ‘ending’ or ‘abolishing’ social work, therefore, I propose the idea of ‘dissenting social work’.

A time to reorient social work?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), one definition of dissent refers to a disagreement with a ‘proposal or resolution; the opposite of consent’. The word and the actions or attitudes related to it, hints at a constellation of other words, such as resistance, subversive, dissidence and disruption. Dissent, maintains the OED, is likely to imply an alternative ‘proposal’ or ‘resolution’ that is at odds with the dominant or hegemonic way of responding to an ‘issue’, ‘social problem’ or set of circumstances. Perhaps reference to dissent also connotes an affective disposition, a mood or a vibe that is suggestive of an individual or a group seeking to ‘rock-the-boat’. As some Black feminist writers argue, maybe dissent can also find expression in anger intent on ‘setting things right’ and ensuring that there is social justice.

For me, dissenting social work interrogates dominant ways of understanding the social world within the discipline. It might, therefore, be interpreted as a form of neo-social work adding to those efforts bent on pushing back against moves to limit the field of possibilities for educators and practitioners. In starker terms, dissenting social work contests the idea that educators and practitioners ought to serve as mere handmaidens or functional auxiliaries of capitalism and the institutional orders that it requires.

Dissenting social work cannot be articulated along the lines of ‘blueprints’ or ‘action plans’, but it might be provisionally perceived as operating within a space patterned by, at least, a dozen themes, even commitments.

Table: Dissenting social work's (DSW) defining themes

These themes are far from exhaustive and the identified hallmarks should be viewed as a foundation for discussion rather than a bombastic ‘manifesto’. Operating as interlinked coordinates, the themes merely aspire to provide a ‘thinking space’. Moreover, they can, of course, be debated, refined, supplemented and even supplanted. Furthermore, I am not so naïve as to believe that dissenting social work is likely to become a majority preoccupation within the profession, but adherence to its main tenets could begin to detach sizeable and influential fractions which, in coalition with other movements in civil society, might have a significant and beneficial impact. Relatedly, collective political action is vital.

Dissenting social work, ‘common sense’ and conjunctural thinking

This project is rooted in the understanding that progressive social work practice and education can only be nurtured if we set about creating structures within the structures: new ideological and organisational formations that are committed to waging a ‘war of position’ and creating new forms of critical ‘common sense’.

Such ideas are linked to the theorisation of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). For him, ‘common sense’ is the ‘polar opposite of critical thinking, which demands that we accept no “truth” unquestioningly, but always carefully scrutinize the evidence on which it is based’. Being critical involves our posing questions about how topics, issues, themes and theories are articulated and presented within mainstream social work education. Are they spoken and written about as if they are self-evident and no longer open to questioning? Often central here are keywords such as ‘resilience’, ‘attachment’, ‘early intervention’ etc. However, critical examination of the dominant – and dominating lexicon – is vital. Situated within overarching hegemonic orders, ‘common sense’ can result in certain questions not being posed or even considered: as the bland phrase goes, ‘it is what it is’.

Perhaps dissenting social work also prompts a shift toward conjunctural thinking. An obstacle here is what Paulo Freire terms a ‘focalised view’ of social problems; that is, issues in social work being perceived through a narrow lens that fails to situate the ‘problem’ historically, economically and politically. Even though often not perceived as such by practitioners and educators, this blinkered view is characteristic ‘of oppressive cultural action’ lacking the necessary consideration of what Freire calls ‘dimensions of a totality’. Conjunctural thinking marks a rupture with such a stance. Derived from Marxist approaches to social and economic change, conjunctural analyses seek to understand complexity and the dynamic process of history at a certain point in time. Clustering or connecting different elements in this way, allows us to comprehend their functioning within a whole, which is more than the sum of its parts. One of the classic examples of this is Policing the Crisis by Stuart Hall and his colleagues, published in the late 1970s in Britain: here the authors provided a detailed conjunctural analysis of the political and media fixation with so-called ‘mugging’ (a deeply racialised construction of street robberies) which was inseparable from a more encompassing context including the rise of the New Right and the breakdown of the welfare consensus.

Conclusion

None of this is to suggest that ideas circulating around dissenting social work are free of tensions and complexities. Dissenting critique is also vulnerable to co-option and incorporation within antithetical discourses and practices in that capital’s hegemonic apparatuses are tremendously absorbent. As the Chilean feminist collective LasTesis stress, capitalism possesses the ‘brutal capacity to take ownership of everything. Even critiques of capitalism end up processed, re-appropriated, defanged as tools of struggle, and turned into consumer goods, commodities of the market. One of capitalism’s survival mechanisms to sustain its hegemony, is to absorb strategies of resistance. It absorbs them, wrings them out’. However, the aspiration to create expansive social change, within and beyond social work and not merely to create inconsequential criticism, could become the radical beating heart of social work education. Maybe that is something to think further about on World Social Day?

This article appeared first in German at sozialpolitikblog: 'Eine Zeit für Dissenting Social Work?'

Header photo courtesy of the author.