The Myth of Global Social Work: Double Standards and the Local-Global Divide

Abstract

The push towards “global standards” in social work is part of a movement to generate uniformity, quality control, and benchmarking for professional education programs. It acts as a powerful vestige of modern institutions and professional associations to prescribe through processes of standardization, formalization, and technical specificity. In social work “global standards” attempt to create a fixed set of minimal requirements to which all professional programs should adhere. Standards are viewed along two dimensions: (i) as a necessity due to the changes and scale of complexity in social work; and (ii) as a vehicle for importing dominant forms of knowledge, values, and skills. Those parties who enthusiastically underwrite attempts to construct “global standards” in fact create a powerful network of allies that undermine local or cultural differences and fail to reconcile them. Global standards in social work undercut indigenous skills and values and negate the expertise of professional judgement. They constitute an unnecessary and politically motivated intrusion in the world of social workers. Ultimately, standards such as these are an illegitimate, impersonal, and voluntary means of regulation. As such, global standards are inherently political because their construction and application formally regulates the local practices in which they become embedded. Over time, they modify the position of social work practitioners and alter relations of accountability to the standards themselves.

Full text

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Global ‘double’ standards in social work: A critical analysis
Mel Gray and Stephen A. Webb
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The two leading international social work organisations, the International Association
of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and the International Federation of Social
Workers (IFSW) have recently pushed hard to develop the Global Standards for
Social Work Education and Training. These ‘global standards’ were compiled as the
joint work of the two international social work organizations representing educators
and practitioners respectively to serve as a guide for schools of social work around the
world. First presented at the international social work conference held in Montpelier
in 2002, they were adopted by the social work community in Adelaide in 2004. The
standards aim to establish homogenous guidelines for social work education
internationally. In so doing, they seek to formalize and standardize what is taught
across diverse cultural, racial, religious, and ethnic contexts. Undoubtedly this reflects
optimism about the possibility of a ‘universal profession of social work’ which can
span vast social, political, economic, geographical, and cultural divides. With one fell
swoop the standards aim to be simultaneously universal or global with some emphasis
on the local context. This global-local divide is then seemingly accommodated by the
rhetorical claim that these ‘global standards’ are, in fact, ‘minimum standards’ and
‘flexible guidelines’ within the parameters they establish for international social work
education programs. They set benchmarks for those involved in establishing new
schools of social work, the contributors for which are mostly social work academics
from affluent Western countries. For others, in developing or democratizing countries
in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and China, the expectation is that they must adopt
‘the core knowledge, processes, values and skills of the social work profession, as
applied in context specific realities’.
The ‘global standards’ are a vain attempt to show that social work is responding to
globalization. Here we can trace the inclination for social work to deepen its
institutional power base with a growing awareness of its place within the information
age and neoliberal moral order. It seems to us that social work has, at best, a minimal
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Mel Gray is Professor of Social Work at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia; Stephen Webb
is Reader at the University of Sussex, UK

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role to play within any new global order, should such an order exist. Debate about
whether globalization is actually a real phenomenon is fiercely contested in the social
and political sciences. This seems to have gone completely unnoticed by IASSW and
IFSW.
It strikes us that a strong dose of realism is necessary for IASSW and IFSW. Against a
prospect of social work movements being individually and structurally transformative
on a global level, local cultural orders of reflexivity are the ground from which to
properly understand the purpose and remit of social work’s practices. The notion of a
global or transnational social work may be little more than a vanity. Local cultural
orders of reflexivity—concentrating as they do on the raw stuff of interactions, plans,
interventions and ethics—recognize the need for a shared culture of depth and an
understanding that comes with being native to that culture as a language user and
agent of the kinesics and proxemics of ‘being-here’. As Webb (2003) states, ‘By
ignoring the communitarian encumbered self the global standards are insufficiently
sensitive to the importance of language and culture and ignore the role social work
plays in maintaining local cultural diversity’ (p. 194). Communitarians think
attempting to globalize standards is wrong, and based on a mistaken and altogether
unrealistic picture of ourselves. Who I am is defined by my class, ethnicity, religion,
and membership in a tradition and community. Hence, my good is what is good for
the roles I inhabit. One detects a deep contradiction in the ‘global standards’ in this
respect.
In denying the importance of the encumbered self, proponents of a ‘global social
work’ fail to recognize its enriching communitarian value. With the encumbered self,
relations to others in community are experienced as part of the very fabric of identity,
rather than external possessions we abandon or discard according to the vagaries of
universal duties, abstract contracts and ‘global standards’. Only encumbered selves
can participate in the construction and maintenance of a good society, and only they
can escape the anomie and mutual estrangement that afflict our lives under a
neoliberal dispensation (Sandel, 1984). Professional social work organizations seem
to give little consideration to the important role that NGOs perform in the ‘global
context’ where change activities are more than the mundane protection and regulation
of aspects of clients’ lives which are the remit of social work. Neither the nation-state

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nor irredentism provide a basis for a perfect match between culture and successful
practice, but without either of these within whose borders each of us lives, the idea of
social work as culturally sensitive to the lives of others with whom we are working
becomes increasingly distant and difficult.
Against this backdrop, the failure of the ‘global standards’ to grapple with cultural
diversity beyond hortatory claims to ‘the promotion of respect for traditions, cultures,
ideologies, beliefs and religions among different ethnic groups and societies’
(Sewpaul & Jones, 2004, p. 493) is problematic, and potentially discriminatory. Little
is said about the challenge of cultural relevance in social work education and practice
and of the dangers of applying liberal Eurocentric ideals, such as individual freedom,
human rights and political empowerment in non-western, non-democratic contexts
like China or Islamic countries. The potential value conflicts and contradictions are
rife within such a scenario. Some quarters in Islam, for example, are vehemently
against organ donor transplants.
What does it mean to consider ‘the impact of interacting cultural, economic,
communication, social, political and psychological global features’ (Sewpaul & Jones,
2004, p. 503) and how does one simultaneously claim cultural relevance in and
cultural sensitivity to particular contexts? Is it possible to be tolerant of diversity to
the point of radical relativism—in fashionable postmodern discourse—and be able to
argue unashamedly for homogenizing, standardized, universal, global standards? It
strikes us that here we have two incompatible global double standards. We want to
straddle the divide of the global and local godheads, having a foot on both sides when
cultural relevance—whether expressed as indigenization, localization or
authentization—is a counter trend to universalization, globalization and
internationalization, all of which smack of cultural imperialism. How can social work
accommodate these two irreconcilable positions? On the one hand social work takes
the moral high ground critiquing homogenizing forces, grand narratives and
territorializing forces like globalization, neoliberalism, colonialism, and imperialism
in the name of ‘difference’. On the other hand it argues for cultural relevance and
sensitivity in local sociocultural contexts most affected by these territorializing
agendas. You can’t have it both ways.

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Social work is no different now than it was in the last century as it spread from the
west to the rest with its colonizing civilizing mission replacing local, Indigenous
healing practices and communitarian values with psychologizing individualistic
treatment regimes. What is different now? ‘Global standards’ are more of the same.
They are a ‘levelling down’ process that seeks to impose a benchmark standard to
bring diverse nations across the world with varying levels of socioeconomic wealth
and political stability to a global ‘gold standard measure’ which is essentially
Western, Eurocentric, Anglo-American. This flight of fancy by the likes of IASSW
and IFSW is thoroughly paradoxical.
Culturally relevant social work practice is by its very nature localized and
‘indigenized’. Put another way, indigenization raises challenges for universalization
and the challenges are compounded by international efforts which can quickly become
imperialistic depending on what is proposed as ‘universal’ or ‘global’ in social work
(Gray, 2005; Gray et al, forthcoming). Internationalizing processes tread on the toes
of indigenization or the adaptation of western social work to local cultural contexts. In
densely multicultural societies how does one include ‘the traditions and cultures of
different ethnic groups and societies in the core curricula in social work education
programs’ (Sewpaul & Jones, 2003, p. 10) modeled on international standards? Which
cultures and societies’ perspectives must we include and whose ‘knowledge of how
traditions, culture belief, religions and customs influence human functioning and
development at all levels, including how these might constitute resources and/or
obstacles to growth and development’ (Sewpaul & Jones, 2004, p. 497). One might
usefully ask how much cultural diverse practice Sewpaul and Jones have actually
undertaken themselves at a coal face level to inform the construction of the gold
standards? We know from practice experience the extreme difficulties faced when
social workers from very different ethnic backgrounds try to mediate conflicting
cultural values. The crucial question is who gets to decide whether a particular
cultural practice is an obstacle or a resource, a moral virtue or not? Presumably, the
various mouthpieces of IASSW and IFSW?
There is a naiveté at work here which is bizarre from a profession which claims to be
politically and culturally sensitive. The ‘global standards’ process is itself a political
process of formalization in which international social work seeks to dominate social

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workers in local, cultural contexts who are unable to build practice from the ground.
This is largely because they are lacking in infrastructural systems and resources and
trained personnel not because they lack ‘standards’.
Social work should be aware of the dangers of over standardization and its tendency
to ‘inhibit the profession’s ability to respond effectively to local needs … [Thus they]
impede the goals of [the] professional development’ (Midgley, 1992, p. 24) of
culturally relevant social work in diverse local contexts. There is a strange irony,
vanity or blindness in the claim that one can at once appreciate ‘and respect …
diversity in … race, culture, religion, [and] ethnicity’ (Sewpaul & Jones, 2003), in
other words ‘otherness’, while simultaneously promoting sameness. This move by
IASSW and IFSW is not about ethics, effectiveness or raising standards for social
work, put plainly, it is about power.
References
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