Introduction: a practitioner's account

Given the nature of social work, with all its messiness, it might be fitting to begin a chapter on changes in social work practice since 1970 with something of a paradox. The logician Irving Copi presented the philosophical problem of identity (in the sense of sameness) across time via the following two statements about change, each of which appears to be true, but inconsistent with the other.

• 1. If a changing thing really changes, there can't literally be one and the same thing before and after the change.

• 2. However, if there isn't literally one and the same thing before and after the change, then nothing has really undergone any change. (cited in Gallois, 2016)

So, for talk about changes in social work practice to make sense there might need to be something unchanging about it too, some essence that enables ‘social work’ in 2020 to be recognised as such by a time traveller familiar with ‘social work’ in 1970. Given the changes that have taken place, I suspect that such recognition might not always immediately be forthcoming. One of the implications of these comments is that change and identity, or sameness, are bound up with and dependent upon each other. In this chapter, therefore, as well as describing some of the changes to it, I will also be interested in some of the attempts in the period under consideration to define social work, to endow it with some timeless characteristics. Paradoxically again, perhaps, such definitions and conceptions have themselves been subject to change over time.

The most simple definition of social work practice might be what it is that social workers do, although this would be circular. Moreover, one of my main contentions will be that what social workers do is often now not so much social work as a professional activity but, rather, that they are operationalising policy determined outside of the profession, for example by government. The professional practice of social work has been described as ‘knowledge, skills, and values in action’ (Trevithick, 2012, p 45), which suggests that tracing changes in social work practice requires us to pay attention to shifts in its underpinning knowledge and value bases.