Las críticas de Schutz al concepto de acción social en Weber

… may be shared by practitioners from other professions, but also has particular expression in specific articulated values and ethical positions within the profession of social work, such as ‘client self-determination’. Professional practice in social work thus involves not just the effective application of knowledge, but also the commitment to and enactment of, particular social values. (p. 3)

Banks (1995) argues that social work is essentially a moral enterprise and that values permeate every aspect of practice: ‘Most decisions in social work involve a complex interaction of ethical, philosophical, technical and legal issues which are all interconnected’ (Banks, 1995: 11). No aspect of social work practice is value-free, regardless of recourse to knowledge bases, legal or technical decisions but is instead a matter of individual interpretation and priorities:

… what is a technical matter for one person (simply applying the rules) may be an ethical problem for another (a difficult decision but it is clear what decision should be made) or a dilemma for a third person (there appears to be no solution). It depends on how each person sees the situation, how experienced they are at making moral decisions and how they prioritise their ethical principles. (Banks, 1995: 12-13, my emphasis)

Banks and Butler agree that the essential social work ethos focuses on issues of individual rights and welfare; public welfare, and inequality and structural oppression. Challenges to social work values are seen to arise from the utilitarian principles of the bureaucratic system (Banks, 1995).

In this study, the question arises whether contextual conditions were having an impact on the possibilities and limitations in direct practice, particularly in the extent to which they challenged held social work values, such as client self-determination and respect for the individual, and whether recent changes as outlined in Chapter Two had an influence or not on individuals’ adoption of the practice innovation.

EPISTEMOLOGIES OF PRACTICE

Donald Schon’s work on the way in which ‘minor’ professionals decide what to do in action, while not specifically focused on social workers, was concerned with related (minor) professionals. From a study of how professionals approach problems or dilemmas of practice, he developed a new epistemology of professional practice (1983; 1987) which has proved to be influential in the social work field (Gould & Taylor, 1996; Gowdy, 1994) as well as in the fields of education and nursing (Palmer et al., 1994).

Schon’s work began from a critique of ‘technical rationality’ as the basis for education for the minor professions. Technical rationality suggests that positivist knowledge can be

applied to real-

life problems in a deductive manner. Instead Schon proposed44 an inverted relationship between theory and practice whereby significant dimensions of ‘theory’ can only be revealed through skilled practice, are implicit in action and often beyond conscious articulation. Professionals in practice face uncertain situations, ‘the indeterminate zone of practice’ and those in the minor professions, such as social work45, face additional uncertainty in the ambiguous ends and unstable institutional settings which they are located in.

From this perspective, positivist knowledge and formal theory are not neutral resources which can be drawn down and directly applied but are only of use when mediated through the complex filters of practice experience. (Gould & Taylor, 1996: 3)

Schon proposed the concept of the professional as a ‘Reflective Practitioner’: who ‘reflects-in- action’, does not depend on formal categories of established theory and technique but instead creates new and specific theories for each individual case encountered. This practitioner:

… is not limited to a deliberation about means which depend on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does not separate thinking from doing, ratiocinating his way to a decision which he must later convert to action. Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry. Thus, reflection-in-action can proceed, even in situations of uncertainty or uniqueness, because it is not bound by the dichotomies of Technical Rationality. (pp. 68-9)

Schon’s thesis offers an epistemology of practice which privileges tacit knowledge, and the use of intuition and creativity. It also accepts that experimentation with preconceived rules and ideas may be a necessary stage in the development of skilful practice. Instead of being ‘instrumentalists’, successfully applying theories and practice models in a methodical way, skilled practitioners are conceptualised as researchers who develop their own stock of theories through experience and reflection on experience. They build their own models and adapt them in response to the individual unique cases encountered.

Parton (2000) welcomes Schon’s work for recognising that knowledge can be derived from practice rather than applied to it and that

… social work practitioners are not so much theoretical in the sense of applying scientific knowledge as they are practical, concrete and intuitive and incorporate elements of art and craft as well as disciplined reasoning. (p. 453)

Schon has substantially influenced the ideal social work practitioner which educators now strive to develop. However, his work is not without its critics. Parton (2000) critiques it for being too generic a theory of professional expertise which fails to take into account the essential moral core

44 _{Schon’s conceptualisation of the ‘reflective practitioner’ was based on qualitative case studies of}

practitioners in a variety of fields such as engineering, town planning and clinical psychology (Schon, 1983; 1987).

45 _{Fook et al. (2000) notes but does not proceed to analyse the gendered nature of the debate of relative}

professional status: ‘some professions (usually the women’s ones – teaching, nursing, social work) are characterised as only having reached semi-professional status, as against the more traditional men’s professions (medicine and law).’ (Fook et al., 2000: 2).

of the social work enterprise. Ixer (1999) views the pursuit of ‘reflective practice’ as something of a ‘cult’ amongst educators of the professions which leaves the core concepts underexamined:

In the professions of nursing, social work and education, amongst others, reflection now features as a critical element in the enhancement of ‘knowing for doing’. It claims to unlock the shackles of theory so that the learner can engage actively with praxis (theory in practice). This is called ‘reflective practice’. Yet, despite the fact that the term ‘reflection’ is so widely used, it is equally widely misunderstood. (Ixer, 1999: 515)

Ixer cautions against the incorporation of reflective practice requirements into social work education until the conceptualisation is more refined for the social work field. Like Parton, he has concerns about the fit between the professionals upon which such a theory is based and social workers. Schon’s

… own research was based on professions which were likely, in fact, to occupy the higher ground of rationality and predictability, and hence to be less challenged by the demands of rapid problem-solving than is social work. Engineers and architects, for example, are arguably less often called on to take immediate action in the context of complex decision- making. In social work, the practitioner is faced with fast changing and highly problematic information, and is required to exercise judgement under extreme pressure, knowing that the consequence of not ‘getting it right’ can be a child abuse inquiry or a judicial review. (Ixer, 1999: 517).

Fook et al. (2000) agree with the general thrust of the reflective process, namely ‘that practitioners’ theory is often developed inductively out of ongoing specific experiences, rather than applied deductively from generalised and formal theoretical formulations’ (p. 189). They depart however from the reflective practice conceptualisation in two important ways: firstly, drawing on the work of Eraut (1994) they suggest that practitioners develop their own knowledge as opposed to modifying existing, handed-down formulations and hence engage in knowledge creation: ‘Simply using knowledge relevantly in a particular situation involves the creation of knowledge about how to do this’ (p. 190, original emphasis). Secondly, Fook et al. (2000) balance the subjective focus inherent in “reflective practice” with an increased emphasis on context and power relations. They emphasise the need for reflection to have a critical component, which ‘is also about uncovering assumptions about power relations, in order to make practice more egalitarian and emancipatory’ (p. 212).

Eraut (1994) considers that the explication of tacit knowledge is far more complex than is allowed for in Schon’s epistemology:

There are important distinctions between awareness of tacit knowledge, subjecting it to critical scrutiny and being able to articulate it in propositional form. Workers in artificial intelligence have striven to create representations of professional expertise for some fifteen years, sometimes contributing new ideas but also revealing how much professional knowledge is not amenable to capture for representation in current computerized forms … One of its best established findings is that people do not know what they know. (Eraut, 1994: 15, original emphasis)

Maintaining that Schon was ‘principally concerned with developing an epistemology of professional creativity rather than a complete epistemology of everyday professional practice’ (p.

143), Eraut identifies a number of weaknesses in the structure of Schon’s theory: it relies too heavily on specific examples (critical cases or incidents) which emphasise creativity and the use of intuition; fails to clarify what is entailed in the reflection process; and does not address the dimension of time and its impact on reflection (between reflection in ‘cold’ situations where there is time to pause and reflect and in ‘hot’ situations where reflection is rapid and constrained by the need to continue in action). Eraut argues that the concept of reflection-in-action is problematic and that Schon

… does not have a simple coherent view of reflection but a set of overlapping attributes [from which] he selects whichever subset of attributes best suits the situation under discussion. There is insufficient discrimination between the rather different forms of reflection depicted in his many examples; and this overgeneralization causes confusion and weakens his theoretical interpretations … it would still benefit from careful consideration of how patterns of reflection vary according to profession, situation and circumstance. (p. 145)