An interesting article from Ireland and Scotland (MacKenzie et al, 2026) offers social workers some help in making sure their relationships with children are respectful. It’s not yet in publication, but available on the Internet, click on the doi at the end of this post to view.

When I was involved in child advocacy projects, colleagues connected attitudes to young people with ‘adultism’, assuming that children often needed control or management to fit in with adult expectations. Young people mostly go along with this, expecting the adults around them to set boundaries and lead them forward in their lives. They often appreciate what parents, teachers and the like contribute to their lives.

But it’s a bit different when you are an outsider, called in to investigate or manage a child protection or other family issue. You don’t often have a lengthy or deep relationships with the child – just the occasional contact to check out their ‘wishes and feelings’. And why should they tell you? It’s clear from the number of young people who talk about being ‘disrespected’ that it’s not uncommon for them to feel that they are not treated with respect.

MacKenzie and her colleagues teased some practical answers from their systematic literature review on the qualitative evidence: they were looking for what children felt was respectful in their dealings with adults.

Understanding respect and disrespect

While respect is an important value principle in social work, and there’s a huge philosophical literature, it can be hard to turn into a practicality.

They note 7 different ways of understanding respect in the literature:

• As a value, moral duty or right;

• As an attitude to people or a disposition towards others;

• As a social practice, leading to a pattern of behaviours (never mind what you believe or your attitude to others);

• As a relational factor in your dealings with people, how you feel about the people you’re dealing with (with social practice comes out of your feelings);

• As a cognitive orientation, how you perceive and think about your dealings with others (never mind about your social practice or your feelings);

• As a disposition to consider others’ wishes and feelings;

• As generated by an external factor (for example, a beautiful object or intelligent person), an obstacle that you need to surmount, or an institutional factor, such as the law or the importance of the school).

You might only have focused on one or two of these, but thinking about more might help you to build up a wider range of ways of being respectful of young people. The researchers give examples of these (from the literature), and I’ve added to some of these a social work example:

• Respect for the obstacle or challenge: a mountain climber’s respect for the challenge of the mountain; a sports person’s respect for their opponent’s ability; a social worker’s respect for the challenge of overcoming a young person’s caution in cooperating with an unfamiliar outsider;

• Respect for directions or norms about how to act: respecting the terms of an agreement and a child’s rights;

• Recognition respect: respect for a judge entering a court or for the national flag; respect for a social worker’s responsibilities and the justification for their actions;

• Evaluation and recognition respect: the environmentalist’s respect for nature or the artist’s respect for the Mona Lisa; the social worker’s respect for the collecting evidence of the complexity of truths about the situation they’re dealing with;

• Appraisal respect: for a colleague’s cooperation, for their personal commitment, for their scholarship; respect for a social worker’s hard work and commitment.

They also note ideas such as Honneth’s (1982) of recognition’, which suggests there are three spheres of recognition: love, rights and solidarity. Disrespect in each case might arise as physical maltreatment, denying legal rights, and social devaluation and these cause constraints on freedom, sources of blatant or subtle harm, and impair self-growth.

Practising respect: four themes

From the various studies, mainly drawing on the attitudes of children and young people to adults that respected or disrespected them, the researchers came up with four main themes that social workers might well think about.

Recognition and moral worth

This is about ‘recognition that affirms others’ agency, dignity and moral status’. This ‘…supports moral development, social solidarity and equitable relationships across diverse contexts, including schools and care settings’. Different sources of respect here include ‘…respect-due, which is universal and premised on human dignity, and respect-earned, which is contingent on qualities that one possesses or acquires (appraisal respect) (s. 4.6.1).

This includes respect for a young person’s agency, their capacity to take action to achieve what they want, their behaviours, emotions and cognitions, that is, how they understand, feel about and react to what is happening to them. A social worker needs to identify and respect a young person’s efforts to take action in their situation, trying to understand, react and think things through. A study of children leaving care draws attention to:

…[r]ecognition respect, acknowledging individuals as distinct and valued members of a group, is essential for self- realisation and moral personhood, affirming young people’s entitlement to rights; denial constitutes disrespect and exclusion (pp. 14-15).

In this and another child welfare service study:

good relationships resulted in emotional recognition, participation was the basis for legal recognition and affirmational support underpinned social recognition (p. 15).

Relational and reciprocal dynamics

Studies identified this kind of respect as a ‘communicative virtue’ or skill:

…a mutual, relational process, grounded in dialogue, active listening and authentic engagement in interpersonal interactions. It plays a critical role in identity formation, educational and romantic relationships, and collaborative settings…Young people learn from and value each other’s identities, experiences and contributions. It involves mutual appreciation, attentiveness and consideration, which nourish a sense of being valued, safe, and understood in personal and communal interactions (s.2.6.2).

This emphasises thinking and acting carefully in trying to convey respect to the people we’re dealing with. And helping them to communicate about their respect (when they feel it - sometimes they won’t, so we need to help them think how they communicate what they feel about someone else’s behaviour and actions, or our own).

Behavioural, emotional and cultural constructs

Here, respect is:

…expressed through behaviours and emotions, involving social norms, equality, caring and recognition of authority. Respect is shaped by cultural, gendered and familial contexts (s. 4.6.3).

There were five dimensions in a study, which show how these interact:

…social rules about the proper way to act; equality in which respect is given to all persons; caring; social power in which respect is conferred upon individuals who hold authority or possess high social status; and personal attributes such as trustworthiness (p. 16).

What this tells us is that helping someone with communicating respect is a complicated matter - it’s not just a case of doing what you’re told.

Educational and developmental value

Some studies saw respect as:

…as a moral and epistemic value that supports moral development, harmonious co- existence and inclusive relationships. Respect is a teachable moral value and a developmental goal. It is linked to school ethos, pedagogy and citizenship and diversity education (s.4.6.4).

Social workers and residential care workers, following this kind of respect, might make sure they are clear with young people about these values in the communications they have with young people. They could be explicit in appreciating when young people act in these kinds of ways. And could work at teaching directly ways of communicating respect, as well as demonstrating respect to young people.

Social justice, inclusion ad power

Some studies saw failings in organisations and people that young people were involved with in the areas of:

…social inclusion and citizenship rights, highlighting how state-imposed, punitive respect agendas fail to acknowledge and respect young people (s.4.6.5).

In these cases, simply trying to enforce acceptance by young people of the actions and decisions of organisations or people in authority is inadequate to achieve young people’s respect. Actions speak louder than words, when respect is not accorded to young people’s concerns and interests.

Social workers need to find out about and try to ensure appropriate respect for what young people believe is important and what they want to see achieved. If decisions can’t meet young people’s aims and values and fail to take them into account, they are not likely to be successfully imposed.

Getting to know young people’s specific respect values

Here are some excerpts from quotations from young people:

Adults don’t seem to know what we’re like because the media is a very powerful tool, all you see on the news is the youths who broke the windows and got drunk in the park, things like that, that’s all you see, that’s the only portrayal that you see (p. 17).

That emphasises the general point about adultism. A different point in a study about what girls thought respectful in relationships with adults:

[She] speaks with respect [to boys her own age], even if they say something she doesn’t like. The ones who are not “in line” insult and abuse their boyfriends… She [also] speaks with respect with older men, doesn’t get close to them. But the girls who are not “in line” sit close to older men, and don’t respect them (p. 17).

A social worker might not agree with all or some of that. But young people in any community and culture have gained a view of what respectful and disrespectful in their social setting. Social workers perhaps need to understand and appreciate the specific requirements and views about respect that are current in a culture and the generation of that culture they are working with.

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Honneth, A. (1992). Integrity and disrespect: principles of a conception of morality based on the theory of recognition. Political Theory, 20(2), pp 187–201.

MacKenzie, A., Fargas, M., McAlister, S., Byrne, B., Cassidy, C., Corr, M. L., ... & Schubotz, D. (2026). Theorising respect and disrespect by and about children and young people: a qualitative systematic literature review. Children & Society. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/chso.70031.

Supporting young carers’ strengths

Social workers often find that things that social care services worry about also have positives that go alongside the negatives. Recent social work thinking focuses on looking for strengths in the situation rather than starting with the problems. One reason for this is that if you start from problems, you view everything that you do as a struggle with the negative. And this often leads you to see people negatively. Strengths work is often twisted, especially by politicians who want to cut welfare spending, as a search for resources among people who are already having a tough time, rather than providing a modicum of the right kind of help to build on strengths and help them flourish.

A case in point is a recent study (Swensson et al., 2026) of ‘adolescent young carers’ in Sweden. It finds that positives and negatives go together in the experience of caring for family and friends with health or other difficulties. Rather than leaving them to it so that they save the state some money, providing the right kind of support enhances what they are doing and helps them flourish for the future. The researchers looked for what might support young carers, because doing so helps them to flourish as well as the people they care for. They studied 3015 children aged 15-17 years in 11 Swedish schools and found 702, 23%, were ‘adolescent young carers’.

‘Young carers’ are usually thought of as:

…individuals who provide care, assistance and/or support to a family member with a health- related condition, such as a mental or physical illness, a disability, or an addiction (Becker 2000).

But they also provide help to non-family members such as friends as well. They provide a variety of help to others including domestic tasks, household management, emotional care, sibling care, financial care, and personal care, often on a regular basis and therefore accept quite a high level of social responsibility. The researchers argue that because they are also transitioning from school to higher education or to their first employment, they face a number of challenges in their lives. But the research also looked for positives in their experiences.

Previous research has shown that young carers experience negatives because of their caring responsibilities:

• Have poorer health than peers;

• Are more often absent from school or drop out;

• Have restricted employment opportunities;

• Report feeling worried, sad, and experiencing anxiety, shame or stigma;

• Become socially withdrawn or have restricted opportunities to socialise;

• May have needs neglected by the family;

• Have limited personal freedom.

But there are also positives; a study of reflections on being a young carer in the past found that the caring role led to personal growth and that they became more ‘other- centred’. Another study found evidence of the development of social skills, responsible health- related behaviours, self- confidence and in dependence through coping with complex situations and crises. By not concentrating on the negatives, but building on the positives, both the young people and the people they are caring for might be helped.

Some factors affected how young people saw their caring experience. Positives included:

• fewer household management tasks;

• low levels of care responsibility;

• being socially recognised;

• having supportive family and friends.

Negative aspects included:

• financial and practical management care tasks;

• having a higher level of external control.

Feeling supported has been found to help young carers develop skills and ‘make sense’ of their role, giving them a more positive identity as a carer. Other studies have found variable factors. So the picture is unclear (p. 2).

Being a young carer in the Swedish system has received little attention and recognition of their needs for information and support. Having a well-developed ‘welfare state’ led to professional and public attitudes that young people should not or do not become carers, which leads to poor support. Part of the reason for the research is to get a better picture of young carers’ experiences and needs.

The present picture

The study found that almost half of the young carers were 16 years old, around two-thirds were female and most born in Sweden. 425 (61.3%) had one or more family members with a health- related condition, and 456 (65.7%) had one or more non-family members with a health-related condition, with mental illness being most common (p. 4). Most provided low levels of care, mostly domestic tasks; 90 (13%) said their school results were negatively affected by their caring role. About a third reported that their families received financial or formal support help, and around 40% had support in their caring role. The most common health condition among the carers was mental health problems (around 40%); they were about the mid-point in their perception of their own general health.

Positive and negative experiences

Positive and negative experience of caring were not two ends of a single scale; many young carers experienced linked positive and negative experiences, unlike research findings about adult carers, where caring is often unvalued drudgery. It seems that is because young carers may see their situation as temporary, and may see caring as novel, raising their self-esteem, if it is not too demanding. The negative side weighs more heavily if caring becomes intensive or affects other part of their life, including school results (p. 8).

While other studies have found positive experiences to be more associated with receiving support, and better support has been part of efforts to improve the young carers’ situations in many countries, this study suggests it would be more valuable to emphasise provide school-related activity.. Focusing on coordinating support in the family and home situation has often predominated, but adding a focus on the young carer’s education can also help, particularly emphasising parental involvement in improving educational well-being.

While the study shows a similar level of positive evaluation of being a carer as other previous studies, it also showed that perceptions of being in good health yourself, meant that young carers were less likely to see caring as negative. It looks as though health-promoting support and would benefit young carers. Services for them might emphasise help to build positive well-being, rather than focusing on negatives in their experience. The researchers say:

…it is also important to offer positive psychological and educational interventions to help young people cope and flourish, such as more leisure time, school- related support and self- care tools [and recommend]… positive psychological and educational interventions to help young people cope and flourish, such as more leisure time, school- related support and self- care tools (p. 8).

Gender issues

As in previous research, many young carers were girls, possibly because of traditional gender norms of family and social expectations,. Some gender matching also seems ot be going on between care recipients and carers in personal care (as opposed to domestic or practice tasks). Although this was not a common type of care responsibility, many more mothers that fathers had health-related conditions, so this may have affected the tendency for females to become young carers.

Some conclusions

The researchers conclude that positive and negative experience may go together if caring demands are not too onerous and if emotional elements in caring roles can be reduced. Health and well-being promotion may be a useful support to young carers. It is also important to make sure that educational and school-based support is picked up.

Looking at strengths and supporting family and voluntary care is not only a matter of leaving them to it. If there are negatives in caring situation, services should not keep out of the way in the hope of people carrying on, because this often leads to family and community care breaking down. Instead, strengths work can look for positives that can mean that both carer and cared-for people can flourish with a modicum of the right kind of support.

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Becker, S. (2000). Young Carers. In M. Davies (Ed.). Blackwell Encyclopedia of social work. (p. 378). Oxford: Blackwell.

Svensson, M., McKee, K. J., Barbabella, F., Magnusson, L., Brolin, R., & Hanson, E. (2026). Positive and Negative Experiences of Caring Among Adolescent Young Carers. Children & society, https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.70030.

I’m looking at a piece of research (Steinberg et al., 2026) which tries to explain why, worldwide, social workers don’t like working with older people. This is likely to lead to a problem in recruitment to social work in a world where in many countries the population is ageing. We’re likely to need more people who want to work with older people, rather than fewer. So what can you do to provide social work education that will motivate people to take up social work with older. My answer, based on what this study finds is summarised in this diagram:

It doesn’t surprise me when I think about the issue, because most people coming into social work, and this would be true about anyone committing to a lifelong career that involves university level education, are likely to be youngish. And their experience of life is mainly their childhood and undergraduate university education. Most of that will involve family life and being with other young people. They are partnering up, thinking about having children, and if they have experience of social problems it is likely to be about family issues. They know about and are interested in younger people, offending, drug problems, family conflict and social issues that affect childhood.

Of course, they will probably have had grandparents but it’s likely that their grandparents will be relatively young, rather than being at the stage where they require care and health services.

There is a historical factor, too. Social work in many countries started out from help to families in poverty and having difficulty with bringing up children, or from psychiatry or helping people with health problems in adulthood that are dealt with in hospitals – family and children social work, medical and psychiatric social work were the elite practices.

In the first half of the 20^th century when social work was emerging, there were relatively few old people. Working with people with long term conditions, such as intellectual (learning) or physical disabilities or the problems of ageing was mainly done in institutions and has often been lower status and is likely to be seen as mostly low-paid care work. Now there are more people surviving into their 80s and 90s, that still seems true.

And, by the way, it’s not only social work where this is a problem, it’s found with doctors, nurses and other health professions too. One of the reasons why health services keep on treating people heroically when it’s obviously futile is that they just don’t like to give up. And many patients and families appreciate that sense of commitment.

Another bit of history: I lived through the Seebohm reorganisation in Britain in the early 1970s. All local government social work, sometimes called public welfare in the USA and other countries., was merged together. For a while all social workers gained experience with the whole range of clients, but most people preferred child and family and mental health practice. And there is more political, press and public interest in those fields, with issues around child protection becoming a big priority. There was, therefore, a lot more law and mandate to work in those fields. That was where social work seemed to have all the pizzazz. Big problems as well, hard to do sometimes, but people saw these issues as priorities.

And generally, ageism is widespread: there is a public interest in making sure children have a good future, while older people have had their lives, they’re slow and crotchety. You see this today in the contempt some young people have for older adults in their lives that they have to keep helping with their electronic devices.

Add together all these general social prejudices, political and social priorities and the age and stage of young people coming into social work and it’s not surprising that doing social work with older people does not engage the interest of many people on social work courses.

What can we do, then, to get more people interested in working with the consequences of ageing in our societies? There is a lot of evidence that including information about work with older people in social work courses does help students to realise that this is an interesting and worthwhile area.

Research on what motivates social work students

The study sampled 269 Israeli social work students, to find out what made them not want to work with older people but excluded eight who were over 45 – apparently people over this age are most likely to want to work with older people).

The researchers started from a theory (called ‘the theory of planned behaviour’) which suggests why people decide to do something. According to this theory, it is three things:

1. Attitudes towards the behaviour – what makes it seem positive or negative? And in the case of social work with older people that’s affected by the sorts of things I’ve been discussing.

2. Subjective norms – what do people think is expected of them by people they value and who are important to them? People see that their profession and others around them value working with older people.

3. Perceived behavioural control – do people think that they are effective and have the personal resources to do this kind of thing? Would they be able to do well at working with older people?

What the researchers wanted to know is: can social work education help shape behaviours so that social workers in training want to work with older people?

There is already quite a lot of evidence that if courses provide information about older adults’ needs, useful interventions and different kinds of practice experience, students’ knowledge, interest and willingness to work in this field is enhanced. Other studies have shown that fieldwork and practice education in this field also enhances motivation. This is true in other healthcare professions too.

Psychological theory suggests that if you reduce prejudices about a field of interest and increase people’s intergroup and interpersonal contacts with people already in the field there will also be more positive attitudes.

What the researchers wanted to test was what approaches would work with students on social work courses now.

They found that around a third of students completed a compulsory course on ageing and about two-thirds reported dealing with at least one older adult in practice education. Only 7% decided on specialising on ageing in the latter part of their course.

The researchers found that greater exposure to knowledge and placement experience with older people meant that students felt they improved their understanding of this field. But it did not affect their intention to work in this field unless it was also associated with subjective norms and behavioural control. Improving their knowledge and understanding did not work alone: they also had to have people who were important to them encouraging this interest and they had to feel competent and successful in the work. This is consistent with the psychological ideas that direct contact with people involved in the field helped them to build skill and confidence.

On the other hand, the researchers also found that including ageing in general courses about sociology, policy or general practice theories did not have the same impact as more specialised courses on ageing. This was because a more general course did not go into enough detail on the specific losses and issues that affected older people. Similarly, improving knowledge about ageing did not help students’ motivation to work in this field unless it was connected directly with social work learning as well.

This benefited student in the latter parts of their course who specialised in social work with older people.

The magic answer seems to be that social work courses need to include knowledge and experience of ageing and issues concerned with older adults. Plus it needed to have specifically social work practice material on working with older people to give confidence that students would work successfully in this field. Plus again it needed to demonstrate through involvement in the field that worthwhile people found it valuable work to do.

This is all about social work with older people, but I think it has lessons for social work education in every area of practice, set out in my diagram. A programme to improve commitment in less popular areas of practice needs to include general understanding, specific practice teaching in that field and a chance to be involved with people who are really committed to that field.

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Steinberg, N. P., Zahav, R. E, Halperin, D… & Benyamini, Y. (2026): Social work students’ intention to work with older adults: The role of social work education. Educational Gerontology, DOI: 10.1080/03601277.2026.2630693

Housing is often central to the family troubles that social work tries to sort out. Reading an article on ‘housing insecurity’ made many links with my childhood, affected by my parents’ post-war housing difficulties, even though they protected me from it. That’s also true for the situations of some of the children and young people (from 0-16) covered at length and in all their complexity by Hock et al’s (2024) systematic review of qualitative studies on the impact of housing insecurity in the UK. Unfortunately, some of these young people had their lives so disrupted that they were inevitably aware of what was happening.

For me, as a baby of the post-war era, housing insecurity was just taken for granted in London’s shattered landscape, as it was for some of the families covered by the study of recent housing insecurity. In wartime, my father was in the forces on the other side of the world, while my mother’s family lost their dockland home and business in the London bombing in 1941, and were shunted round England for a while before finding places in South London to live not so far from their ‘30s home.

By the time I was on the scene, Dad was back from the war, and we had two upstairs rooms in an aunt’s rented property, around the corner from another aunt’s bigger family, sharing with my grandparents, all renting. I wasn’t aware, of course, quite how on the edge we all were. The waiting list for council (public-sector) housing was a source of hope, my parents told me, but it was 18 years long. Dad’s wages were not enough for a mortgage, and eventually, his boss gave him a private loan on a minuscule 2-bedroom home near his works. He paid it off weekly for the rest of his short life (by this year I have outlived him by 22 years). We moved to this house, and he and my mother both had extra jobs throughout my childhood to make ends meet.

When the boss died, some years after my father, he left us a small legacy. My mother said, a trifle bitterly I think: ‘We could have done with that thirty years ago.’ In my mind, being able to get a mortgage and, at the end of my working life, being able to pay it off, was a crucial symbol to me, and many in the 60s generation, of the security offered by the social progress made in the post-war years. But it’s not so easy now.

A study of housing insecurity

This study of the present-day research on housing insecurity uses a Children’s Society (originally the Church of England’s children’s charity) definition of the issue:

those experiencing and at risk of multiple moves that are (i) not through choice and (ii) related to poverty (p. 2)

The researchers identify 6 elements of families’ housing insecurity from this beginning:

• Housing instability – hard to pay rent, frequent moves, overcrowded, doubling up with friends and relatives;

• Unstable or precarious housing – where they live offers no sense of safety or security; possible homelessness or precarious circumstances;

• Financial insecurity – more than 50% of income spent on housing;

• Spatial insecurity – unable to remain in a dwelling or neighbourhood, possible eviction or forced moves;

• Relational insecurity – experience of houses bound up in relationships with others;

• Residential mobility – frequency, number or distance of moves.

The Covid 19 pandemic increased financial pressures on families and social isolation due to not being about to share accommodation so easily. This recent stressful period also emphasised the fear of health risks due to housing pressures. More widely, negative health impacts from instability and poor housing quality are well-established. US research has shown that reducing housing insecurity improves both parents’ and children’s emotional health.

Although evidence of general ill-effects is well-established, it is less clear how longer-term effects arise; the researchers set out to discover what the processes were.

The researchers analysed 59 studies and my diagram offers a model of how they look at these issues.

They found several groups where children and young people were particularly affected by housing insecurity:

• Low income or on housing benefits;

• Lone parents and large families;

• Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers;

• Children at risk of discrimination because of protected characteristics, such as disability, ethnicity, sexuality.

The interaction of exposure with impacts and outcomes varied with three different groups:

In the general population -

a wide range of factors interacted in a policy and social context in which housing costs were rising, and there was an increase in short-term tenancies. As a result, families had trouble paying the rent and faced eviction, experienced multiple moves together with homelessness, temporary accommodation and problems finding housing.

This led in turn to living in undesired locations, being exposed to problem behaviour in the neighbourhood, not feeling safe, losing stability and experiencing overcrowding and properties being in poor condition. Finding housing meant involvement in complex procedures, such as waiting lists, or having to decorate houses before being able to move, which was difficult where the home was overcrowded.

For families, this led to difficulties in accessing services, escaping negative situations, noisy and crowded living spaces, reduced family wellbeing and problems with food and hygiene.

Children were affected by all these, and consequential family and social relationship issues, long journeys to, or having to change, school, to see friends and to leisure opportunities.

Outcomes included mental health problems or reduced wellbeing, tiredness, physical health problems, child development problems.

Protective factors identified were: friendships, normalising lifestyles, home-making, protective parenting and ere, renting help.

Similar factors affected other major groups.

For people experiencing domestic violence…

housing issues often revolved around staying in the family home, or having to leave it, and consequent uncertainty. Protective factors here included support for parents and children, safety in the various environments that families moved to, reasonable hope for better accommodation, and gains from the experience of living in different places.

For the migrant, refugee and asylum seeker population…

tiredness, together with physical and mental health problems were likely outcomes. Again, protective parenting and support was an important protective factor for children.

Protective factors are important

One of the issues that really struck me, reading this, was the importance of tiredness. It’s obvious, when you think about it, but it’s easy to miss it, or take it for granted.

The study started from being able to identify the problems, and the lengthy and detailed study (which I’ve barely touched the surface of here) was the identification of protective factors, which had been unexpected when the study was devised. So I’ll emphasise them: the researchers say:

…we identified specific protective factors that were perceived to lessen the impact of housing insecurity on wellbeing among children and adolescents. These included friendship, keeping the same school, normalising housing insecurity, home-making, having a plan, hope, protective parenting, and some interventions.

Friendship was a key protective factor. Retaining connections with friends and peer networks following moves was important, and school facilitated this. Indeed, another related strategy was to keep children and young people enrolled in the same school during and after moves, to retain some stability.

Some sources noted that children and young people tended to normalise and destigmatise their housing insecurity as something to be expected given that the family is poor or receives benefits. This response could be a coping/defence mechanism to try to deal with the negative impacts of being insecurely housed.

Another, more positive, coping strategy was to make the property feel more like a home…

Parents also acted to protect children and young people from the negative impacts of housing insecurity, by concealing the full extent of their financial and housing problems, including children and young people in decision-making (for instance, allowing children and young people to influence their parents’ decisions on location, where there was a choice), and presenting their situation as an adventure (pp 29-30).

What this research tells us is that it is possible, if parents are able to work at it, to protect children from some of the consequences of housing insecurity. And reading this study reminded me again that this is what my parents did, post-war.

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Hock, E. S., Blank, L., Fairbrother, H., Clowes, M., Cuevas, D. C., Booth, A., ... & Goyder, E. (2024). Exploring the impact of housing insecurity on the health and wellbeing of children and young people in the United Kingdom: a qualitative systematic review. BMC Public Health, 24(1), 2453.

Professionals’ doubts about arts in healthcare

Healthcare professionals sometimes, in my experience, pooh-pooh the arts as airy-fairy and woolly-lovely, rather than robust contributors to care. They are always looking for proof of effectiveness from all sorts of activities, including social work, which they tend to regard as hangers-on to the main business of giving people drugs and physical treatment. This is why I have my doubts about doctors as so-called ‘social prescribers’; they often don’t really have an underlying commitment to the social as a contribution to well-being.

But the arts (and social work) are often really welcomed by people struggling with health problems in their lives, including older people. My earliest experiences of social work were as a student at the Blackfriars Settlement, just south of the River Thames in Southwark. Both the pre-school children and the old people’s clubs enjoyed arts activities as part of their programmes there, and it became famous in the 1960s for its workshop employing disabled people to create artist-designed carpets and hangings for sale.

At the other end of may career, just before retirement, I worked in a hospice. One of the most exciting things about the service was the increase in arts activities of all kinds for people dying of a variety of illnesses; drama, music and art and craft work of all kinds. I turned up in later years to join the community choir, which aimed to bring people in the community into being involved with dying patients. All this was led by Nigel Hartley, a music therapist, who recently retired as the Chief Executive of the Mountbatten end-of-life care services on the Isle of Wight, just off the coast of southern England.

The artists wrote a book about their work (Hartley & Payne, 2008). I contributed a chapter on evaluation methods for artistic work in healthcare to that, because all kinds of creditable methods of evaluation of the arts are perfectly possible id you think it through.

Most people die in old age, of course, and so I have always thought that arts activities should play a bigger part in providing for older people, many others. So I was pleased to see a very number-crunchy Hong Kong-based psychological study of people with ‘chronic pain’ and depressive symptoms (Liu et al., 2025), which you can read on the Internet.

Why does chronic pain lead to depression?

Some of the introductory discussion also helps us to understand what is going on with pain. Chronic pain (more than 3 months) is common among older people - between 27 and 86% in various studies, so that means more than a quarter and sometimes more that three-quarters of older people. There are often no specific causes, such as damage to the body, but from complex interactions between biology, psychology and social factors leads to older people experiencing pain.

It leads to:

… significant distress, disability, lower quality of life and social isolation for older people, and also increased expenses and strain on healthcare systems (p. 1).

Often this has a big impact on them, including periods of depression, with one study finding 13% of older adults experiencing chronic pain alongside depression, with each condition aggravating the other. There are various theories about why this is, and varying treatments try to address different issues.

• Concern about overlaps between the neural mechanisms in processing and responding to pain and depression in the brain has led to drug treatment, but while this suppresses physical responses to pain, there are complications.

• Exercise and psychological interventions are also effective. For example,

  …exercise, such as resistance training, balance and aerobics, effectively prevent falls and improve physical limitations imposed by pain (p. 2).

• Mental health strategies use cognitive-behavioural therapy to adjust people’s attitudes and feelings of control over their pain, including newer ideas such as mindfulness techniques. In Chinese culture, however, stigma about mental health and similar treatments makes such techniques less acceptable.

Co-production of an arts protocol

The study aimed to introduce a community-based arts programme which would distract people from their pain and help them to feel more in control of their lives. It was felt to be more acceptable and linked to ordinary community activities. To facilitate acceptability and create activities that would be valued by participants and their community, the project went through a process of co-development of an arts programme that would be valued. Three older people were involved as volunteers to lead group discussions, based on a literature survey of activities that had been found worthwhile elsewhere.

Various professions, including social workers and counsellors, with the groups worked up a programme based on five principles:

1. balance between novelty and familiarity in the choice of art materials;

2. allow different levels of participation, ranging from appreciation to modelling and creation;

3. bring awareness to self-control over the perception of pain when creating artworks;

4. reinforce positive feedback within and between members in groups;

5. generate a sense of fulfilment through making and sharing art products (p. 4).

An important aspect of this was using arts materials:

… as an object of transference for clients, projecting their internal feelings, emotions and memories. Compared with traditional psychotherapy, using art materials could enhance participants’ self-exploration, encouraging them to externalise their feelings and emotions (p. 4).

The project ran eight weekly 2-hourly sessions, each using different materials, set out in the table shown.

There was a research evaluation. Over the longer term, tests showed that mental health improved and so did ability to carry out various physical activities, possible because of increased self-confidence.

Qualitative measures found that the programme was acceptable and feasible to provide. Patients gained insights from the programme in copping with their pain: they did drawings of their pain and this increased awareness of bodily sensations and accepting and controlling pain. They experienced an improvement in both the process of artistic work and in the achievement of artistic outcomes. Sharing art products with their families is an example.

All participants mentioned the effects of group and peers, and they attributed the changes they experienced to the therapeutic alliance with the facilitators, the non-judgemental and safe environment in the group for them to share, the camaraderie among group members so that they felt understood and accepted, the resource sharing and the overall harmoni[ious] atmosphere (p. 5).

Anyone with experience of people’s responses to group activity and arts work would have expected this. And it’s only a small study. But it’s good to see different professions building up experience of social and psychological help.

Working to produce evidence of good effects is also valuable, because well-reported small studies give ideas to others who can pick them up, and can be accumulated to produce, over time, more solid evidence of their value.

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Hartley, N. & Payne, M. (Eds)(2008). The Creative Arts in Palliative Care. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Liu, T., Kanagawa, H. S., Lee, J. K. Q., Leung, D. K. Y., Wong, S. M. Y., Kwok, W. W., ... & Lum, T. Y. S. (2025). Power of creative arts for older people with chronic pain and depressive symptoms: co-development of the Rewire with Arts protocol and findings from a pilot study. BJPsych Open, 11(4), e132.

As someone who’s spent quite a bit of my life working in mental health care, and a similarly extended period in end-of-life and palliative care, I was intrigued to see a Hong Kong article on end-of-life care for severely mentally ill people (Cui et al, 2026). This is pre-publication, so click on the doi number in the references at the end of this post to read it.

The writers brought together stakeholders in doing something about end-of-life care for people with severe mental illness (SMI), including people with SMI, members of their family and professionals in mental health and palliative care. Care for this group was described as ‘suboptimal’ – why am I not surprised?

A co-design process

For those, like me, interested in co-production the way the carried out the project is interesting. They worked to get all the stakeholders involved, including specifically people using the services and their relatives, in planning and organising a service. It was in three phases

1. A literature review to be able to present people with information about what’s known and ideas about what issues the research and professional commentary says are important. In the past, I’ve produced a newspaper-style information sheet for easy reading, as well as a summary for professionals to read. I sometimes found the professionals preferred the easy-reading version, too.

2. On-site consultation with three relevant clinical teams – going out to them is important, because you pick up a range of views from people who are often not consulted about policy and service development ideas.

3. Research-to-practice design workshops then allowed people to identify needs and adjust ideas about how people would design a service. In my experience, it’s important to have an actual project or concrete action in prospect to design for, rather than just looking for general discussion. One workshop was for people looking at residential service planning, another focused on living in community and home environments.

The design workshops shifted backwards and forwards between a larger group (15 and 23) and smaller working groups. The process was:

• Introduce the idea and practice of co-design;

• Key insights from the literature review;

• Small groups on end-of-life care (which many people involved were not familiar with);

• Discussion on feedback to build consensus;

• Small groups repeated on how you could adjust interventions;

• Large group to formulate proposal and priorities;

• Notes sent out for members to check (and probably to offer afterthoughts).

At the outset, people with SMI did not get much end-of-life care. The problem was identifying when end-of-life was approaching, in the midst of coping with a major illness affecting cognition and emotions. Often, because approaching end-of-life was not identified, people seemed to die very quickly, without specialised end-of-life care. A big problem was that the medical and nursing concentration on mental health issues meant that physical medical care was neglected or not dealt with sensitively, being downplayed, so major illnesses were not identified, and their progression to end-of-life could not be monitored and provided for.

Looking at the human and service barriers

The barriers to getting end-of-life care for people with SMI included:

• People with SMI and their carers were not aware of end-of-life care, often had limited support networks, so they did not see people who might pick up physical problems, had low motivation to seek medical help with physical symptoms and did not like to talk about the end-of-life, had difficulties with communication which meant that physical health issues were not communicated, or seemed low priority, and so were not assessed.

None of this is abnormal, even in countries where quite extensive end-of-life care is available.

• Communication was also affected by cognitive or emotional difficulties arising from the mental illness or high levels of psychoactive medication, prior negative experiences of medical intervention (including past compulsory treatment), and ageing effects (because mental illness leads to a higher level of dementia than in the general population).

Also very common with people with SMI and their families.

• Palliative care assessments were not geared to the needs of patients with difficulties arising from their mental illness, For example they assumed a normal capacity to discuss spiritual and mental health needs, when the worry about mental illness made such issues unclear to the people with SMI and their carers.

• Organisational barriers also existed. Medical and nursing support was focused on mental health care, and staff were ‘unprepared’ to perceive end-of-life care needs and rovide palliative care.

• Guidelines for ‘dying in place’, where SMI patients were living, were unclear, even though legislation and policy provided for choice.

A lot of countries claim to provide ‘choice’ for how you get your end-of-life and mental health care, but services run on their own tramlines.

• Lack of collaboration and understanding between health and social care sectors to work jointly on living arrangements at end-of-life.

• More broadly, mental health stigma led to assumptions that people with SMI would not be able to respond with end-of-life care services, or lacked mental capacity to agree to treatments and make use of advance directives (not to use intensive healthcare interventions to preserve life when less intrusive interventions were more appropriate).

• Legal advice on end-of-life care issues was not available in SMI settings.

• Cultural taboos against discussing death and providing services at end-of-life led to unease in family relationships and service provision.

Service design responses

Many of the responses were about communication liaison systems. Inevitably, services have their focuses, but that should not get us stuck in not thinking about a group of people who have very real needs. And, so both the World Health Organisation says, and common human decency requires, a right to care at the end-of-life.

Many of these issues may have had a special resonance in the cultural and service context in Hong Kong. But they are present in end-of-life care everywhere. A lot of work has been done on providing end-of-life care appropriately in prisons, which assume that they provide for people in younger or middle age-groups, but increasingly also have disabled, elderly and dying inmates.

Thinking about the special end-of-life care needs of people with SMI and their carers is, therefore, probably a universal requirement for policy development across the world. It’s good to be introduced by the Hong Kong study to an involving process for looking at what’s needed.

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Cui, J., Zheng, C., Yeung, C. C. Y., & Chan, H. Y. L. (2026). Co‐Designing End‐of‐Life Care for People With Pre‐Existing Severe Mental Illness: Insights From Multiple Stakeholder Consultations. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 35(1), e70226. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.70226

Here’s a Muslim migrant mother interviewed by a study of attitudes to Norwegian child welfare services:

The first thing that people tell you when you put a foot in Norway is: be careful of the barnevern [child welfare services], they will steal your children. Like the angel of death appearing to take the Children away. They put you on alert and create fear and terror. My husband as well was terrified (p. 6)

One of the issues about social work that comes up from consumer studies across the world is that social workers are child-snatchers who take away your children. The picture is mixed. Most people don’t know a lot about social work or the public services, they don’t come across these services in their lives, and the only picture they have comes from the media, which tends to raise the hard cases. There is also a human concern with child abuse, and a worry that society is not very good at protecting children from it. Another common worry is about all official services is about overreach in using their authority.

There’s been a certain amount of research into this, in various countries, including the UK and USA. Much of this shows that people who have experience of social workers, or are involved with services, often understand the potential difficulties of this work, are understanding about the use of authority and are often positive about how social workers have helped them.

I was intrigued to come across a recent study in Norway (Page et al. 2025; this is pre-publication, click on the doi number in the references at the end of the post to read it), which focused particularly on recent Muslim migrants. They interviewed 24 first-generation migrant parents.

One of the worries (worldwide) with migrant groups is that there are often cultural differences between the majority population and the migrants, which leads to fears of misunderstanding and discrimination again migrants. At the moment, also, there are fears of Islamophobia affecting migrants from this particular group, and some general hostility to migrants because of perceptions of a lot of unwanted migration taking place in recent years.

In Norway, there was also a particular worry about children welfare services which…

has struggled with its image to a far greater degree than similar services, with about a quarter of the population mistrusting the agency (p. 1)

There was also evidence of a ‘disproportionate over-representation of non-western migrants (p. 2)’ in child welfare service cases, although only a slight increase in child removals. Research is cited that has shown that Muslims believe the agency is a discriminatory, bad-faith actor in the public services, displaying cultural ignorance.

What’s unusual about this particular study is that the researchers worked hard to find first-generation migrants who had experience of child welfare social workers and also looked for others who had not had first-hand experience.

The general picture they found was the people with first-hand experience of child welfare services and social workers were mostly positive. People who did not have direct experience had picked up very negative perceptions, like the one quoted at the head of this post, to the extent that this was a ‘day-to-day worry’ among Muslim migrant parents.

Here’s another one:

…when I got pregnant, I was hearing people here telling everybody ‘don’t have kids! Norway will take away your kids! Barnevern would take your children!’ I knew nothing about barnevern. I was terrified and could see everybody feared kids been taken away (p. 6).

Among the parents with first-hand experience, there was only one (of 12) with a bad experience:

When I told them (the hospital) I didn’t know what happened, it was like giving them my daughter in a golden plate. They told me to come after 2 days for a control. They contacted the barnevern. There was not an investigation. They wanted to trick me. All this was a scenario to see how I would be dealing with my daughter, and they wanted to observe me…

Eventually, though, an investigation exonerated her:

…At [the local hospital] they didn’t believe me but luckily, I had everything documented from the healthcare centre and the testimony of the nurses and employees there to support my case. They came to my house checked with everybody. The barnevern could see I was a caring mum; I had food and toys for my daughter. They still don’t know how this happened. Most papers from the healthcare centre say that the mother is worried or concerned, they could see I wasn’t a negligent mother. I feel I was treated unfairly maybe because of my background.

Other cases were resolved positively; here’s an example:

And they (CWS) spoke to a doctor in [our former hometown], they spoke to our family doctor, they spoke to the nurse from the infant healthcare centre, and then they call us and say that these people are saying a lot of positive things about you, and that we are not worried about the children staying with you. But, normally, the Child Welfare Services here help people. A lot of immigrants here think that the Child Welfare Services just want to take their children, but no. The Child Welfare Services are good here. They just want to help children and work with how children can live with their parents (p. 8).

The researches looked at why the image of the service was so negative. Some people thought it was regional variation, but the study was not big enough to show whether this was true. Most, though, thought that they had heard exaggerated stories through social media:

Most talk about things when they don’t have neither the right information nor the experience. They just create fear among migrants and I don’t understand why. Social media are the migrant’s worst enemy when it comes to information (p. 7).

So the researchers argued that improved cultural understanding might be needed within child welfare services, but the main focus should be on good communication with other agencies and migrant organisations about their aims and practice.

It’s true generally in social work that you can’t take for granted that people will feel good about what is, after all, always an intrusion into their lives. This is particularly so if your role is to check up on some aspect of their private lives. It’s easy to misunderstand what you’re doing or come up against a ‘no problems here’ response, when people would benefit from some help. It’s always sensible in social work to be very open and explicit about what you’re doing, expecting, thinking. And to explain why.

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Page, A. G., Chahboun, S., & Moufack, M. F. (2025). ‘Like the Angel of Death Appearing to Take the Children Away’: The Portrayal of the Norwegian Child Welfare Service Among First‐Generation Muslim Parents. Child & Family Social Work. 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.70105

Older people isolated from help in their own communities

My family has recently become involved with several people in their nineties within our community, who in various ways are too frail to be on their own. None of them have close relatives, and their distant relatives are also geographically distant. They have nobody, therefore, who is realistically able to find out whether their elders are living well in their old age, and keep pushing the local services to help keep them going.

And social and health care services have largely given up on maintaining consistent contact with our older people in any organised way; the view of many policy-makers and politicians is that it’s too expensive and dependency-creating. Recent Finnish research (Mira, et al, 2026) found that the most important factor in keeping people living independently in their own homes was having local family members who could keep a regular eye on what is needed. Not that they wanted to stress out their family lives by doing everything required to care for their elders, but they were needed to push for responses from something called ‘society’ when life pressures on older people become too complicated or too much.

This is the same issue that we find with our local elders, and it raises the concern that current policy is to avoid social services getting involved until people are on the edge. Critics say that this is a result of ‘neoliberal’ political and policy thinking, which rejects the economic and social value of helping the human beings around us in our lives.

On cooperating, not competing

But I don’t like just to label our move away from helping others as just an economic and political philosophy. A recent article in the British Journal of Sociology (Dobbernack, 2025) about neoliberalism rather plays to my thoughts, as a social worker, about the concept. To me, it always seems to be recruited to become the cause of whatever failing in society that a speaker or writer is concerned about. And a not too clear or specified cause, as well.

Please note that the online citation is 2025, but it’s now been published in 2026, click on the doi number in the list of references at the end of this post, or on the underlined citation in the previous paragraph to read it.

The article title is: ‘why neoliberalism doesn’t spell the death of society: commonality, regulation, and the politics of social cohesion’. Critics of so-called neoliberalism as a political stance tend to use it as a catch-all for what’s wrong with right-wing views which dismiss the importance of ‘society’. And these critics say, in various ways, that this political view dismisses the idea that people’s relationships are about our participation in a human society.

Hence, looking at this title, the critics come from a position of valuing society as a shared heritage, whereas neoliberals apparently don’t like the ‘commonality’ of human beings. So what we have here is an ideological, political conflict not some rational analysis of society. The critics of neoliberalism also reject any regulation of economic management of the wilderness style, with animals tearing each other apart in the jungle or desert, savouring brute competition ‘red in tooth and claw’ (Tennyson, In memoriam A. H. H., 1850). Similarly, the critics also do not like the neoliberal emphasis on doing away with social cohesion.

I’m not sure neoliberalism favours social conflict rather than cooperation, either. To me, it seeks smooth acquiescence of the masses in the organisation of society, so cooperation would be OK, provided people were prepared to submit to economic coercion. It’s the priority to economics over everything else that I object to.

That’s what the critics say. I find their claims that economic determinism is the crucial factor in neoliberal thinking as rather overdone. It seems to me that neoliberal ideas of the value of displacing of the ‘social’ as a way of thinking about human relations are vague and contradictory. In my recent book on why social work is important in society (Payne, 2024), I argue that most human beings set out to help and support one another in their lives, and it’s neoliberalism’s failure to acknowledge that human feeling that seems both objectionable and frankly just unrealistic. It doesn’t understand what it is to be human. Social work has always been about mutual aid, both unorganised and also organised through professional help. I’m fond of quoting Kropotkin:

…practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral (2022[2002], p. 71).

He argues that it is characteristic of human beings that their success as a species in evolution derives form their capacity to cooperate rather than to compete. I would say most people know that this is true, and that is what the neoliberals are unable to cope with.

Recent ideas about neoliberalism

Dobbernack’s article focuses on the importance of recent work by Wendy Brown (2019). She has loads of esoteric books, but Dobbernack (pp. 19-20) starts from the view in her book:

…claiming that when ‘the social vanishes from our ideas, speech, and experience’ (Brown, 2019, p. 71), commonality disappears, democracy diminishes, and authoritarianism prevails.

If people accept neoliberalism, they withdraw from public life and democratic institutions and participation in anything that is shared. Dobbernack moves on from this to argue that sociology and social thinking should pay attention to the way in which it is a political agency. That is, neoliberalism is a political view that seeks to influence us to act as though there is no alternative to refusing to think about anything social and mutual.

But my experience is that there is no way that most normal people accept not behaving in socially cooperative ways.

The generality of this critique of neoliberalism is, to Dobbernack,

…shorthand for more specific concerns, such as the dismantling of social protections, the privatization of collective goods or the decline of public institutions (p. 20).

The critique tells us that we must also act politically to defend a focus on society against the neoliberal view that our political system must avoid defining its political objectives in social terms.

But Dobbernack (pp 23-4) explores the distinction between two views of the social:

1. As symbolic investment in human relationships and utopian imagining (p. 23) that shared communication about collective meaning is fragile but essential, so that moral purpose and social unity and shared political and cultural experience becomes important.

2. As reference to a social administration and bureaucracy to enact policies that allow for the regulation of society to achieve a social state.

These two views of what ‘the social’ is about conflict with each other.

Social work is an example of the conflict in ideas about ‘the social’

Social work is an example of the second view of the social. The mere presence of a profession that is concerned with the social suggests the value of organisations, policies and regulation of activity in society with aims to enhance and protect social relations. One aspect of having a social work profession says that social relations are important to all human beings and it is important to develop the social in practical ways. This is especially so when social relations are strained in some way. Social work as social helping thus expresses the value of organising to contend with things that are going wrong in social relationships.

But because this view of social work says it is about the regulation of the social, it leads to criticism from the alternative view. Social work is about organising and responding to problems with society. But the utopian position about the value of commonality, a shared human society, has greater ambitions than simple organising to make societies better. It is about promoting and developing that mutuality in society.

Social work, then, gets attacked from both sides: it’s not utopian enough and it’s too regulatory for many people’s tastes.

Brown, W. (2019). In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dobbernack, J. (2025). Why neoliberalism doesn’t spell the death of society: commonality, regulation, and the politics of social cohesion. British Journal of Sociology. 2026; 77, pp. 19–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70031 .

Kropotkin, P. (2022[1902]). Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. London: Penguin Classics.

Mira, P., Turja, T., Mari, A., Johanna, E. & Marja, K. (2026). The sense of security and associated factors among older home care clients: a register study. 40, e70187, https://doi.org/10.1111/scs.70187.

Payne, M. (2024). Why social work is important. Bristol: Policy Press.

In healthcare jargon, there’s a trajectory for long-term care needs now. I found a while ago it is being summarised in a new abbreviation: LTC.

Now some of our friends are reaching their late 80s and into the 90s, we can see the progression of LTC needs over years or decades, from people who were really fit and can now do less and less as time goes on. More so than when I was a social worker, when we tended to arrive when there was a crisis that needed the professionals to step in. But before then, there were long years of minor aggravations in life. Indeed, we can see our own trajectory in the past and wonder about it in the future.

You come across people who still have a huge house from the time their family life needed and that they will find hard to live in if they become increasingly disabled. I don’t want to say that everyone who is ageing or who loses a spouse should ‘downsize’ but it’s only sensible to think about how you will plan for a misfortune in which it’s hard to carry on your present way of life at a time when it’s also hard to make changes. We know several people who are still here, but imagined that they’d be long gone before the conveniences of the past have been deleted from modern life. We all need to keep up with the changes, because in the end things will become impossible unless we can use the latest computer or phone system.

A recent article about LTC in Italy (Gubert, 2025) is surprisingly instructive about this pattern. The article is pre-publication, so click on the doi number in the citation at the end of the article to read it. Thirty years ago, I would not have bothered to look at an article about the detail of care services in another country, because like most social workers I thought I mainly need to know how to cope with the systems in their own service system. But now, I look at this and think: ‘It’s human life, and never mind the system, life brings us similar experiences in communities in many urbanised countries.’

The article looks at the interaction of care needs over the long-term in two Italian cities and how this interacts with both informal and public care and the decisions that professionals make in the various situations they deal with. It distinguishes between how the care needs trajectory interacts with requests for and agreements to provide social care services. Broadly, if people had lots of informal care, the demand and need for public care was delayed. When there was little informal care, they either applied early, or nothing happened until there was some kind of emergency.

One thing that’s instructive is the research fundings in article subheadings. This is a very broad summary, but it tells you what you would expect.

• Informal care leads to delay in needing to use public care

Where there is lots of informal care, people’s approach is to try to delay requests for public care, and for funding for help. The request only becomes pressing when the informal care is unable to manage, or until the informal care resources are depleted.

• Lack of informal care leads to earlier public provision

Where there is minimal informal care, or none at all, requests for help tend to be earlier. This can be where people realise there is going to be a problem, so they ask early, or it becomes pressing where it becomes an emergency.

I’ve tried to distinguish simply between the ‘yes informal care’ and ‘no informal care’ scenarios in the diagram, using Gubert’s subheadings.

The study shows that services can do something about the issue. If services get to know about the situation, they can provide fairly light and cheap public care such as monitoring, developing social support or providing easy to use equipment for independence with the activities of daily living. This then delays the need for heavy, difficult to find and more expensive public care until there is some kind of emergency. My experience of this, round about my community, is that this relies on people realising and coming to accept that it is better to build up networks of care early on, the ‘I am alone’ scenario in the diagram.

Public services can also reduce the demands on them by encouraging as much light-end support around the community as possible, so that people can plug into it early. If it’s not there or people don’t know about it, they can’t use it. And they also have to stop what I call ‘rationing practice’ getting a hold in the public services. Gubert says:

…the findings on delayed access suggest that many family carers seeking public support are turned away and face significant pressure from the outset of the care trajectory to take on most of the caring… (p. 11)

If social care services and their workers get into this mindset, they will not be able to use the cheaper, lighter end of support to delay heavy care demands emerging. At least, they should be redirecting people to find informal resources that they are comfortable using.

One of the problems arises from the reality that people do not like to convert their friendship networks into caring networks. And, as studies found a long time ago, informal care from family carers may not be so easy when people are not local to their older family members, but are spread out across the country. Clare Wenger (1994) showed there was a distinction between family-dependent informal care networks, locally integrated networks where there were lots of connections, self-contained and wider local networks where links were nor so close and private rather restricted networks. You can’t assume there is ‘informal care’ or not. there are just as many ways of informal care as there are care needs to provide for.

That’s why assessing older people’s care needs is not a tick-box exercise. You have to look at so many factors in their lives and communities to make sensible decisions.

Gubert’s study reminds us that it’s not just informal care and public care, but what kind of informal and public care, and how they can interact with each other at different phases of the variety of trajectories of care needs in people’s lives.

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Gubert, E. (2025). Sooner or later: accessing long‐term care policies along the care trajectory. Social Policy & Administration. 0:1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.70027

Wenger, C. (1974). Understanding support networks and community car: Network assessment for elderly people. Aldershot: Avebury.

Social policy aligns with rich people’s preferences

An interesting recent study (Persson & Sundell, 2025) asks why, generally, social policies align with rich people’s preferences rather than with what poorer people want. This is so even though the poorer people are usually in the majority. The paper is pre-publication, so if you want to see it, click on the doi in the citation at the end of this post. It’s one of several papers derived from different aspects of the same study of 43 countries. They compared public opinion on various policy areas with information about the policies that are actually implemented.

Social workers are interested in this, because they often work with poorer citizens, and hope for, advocate for or campaign for policy change. Social workers and campaigners often argue that, in a democracy, voices for the interests of the poorer people should have influence in making policy decisions and acting on the policies that are adopted.

Status quo bias among the rich

But if it’s true that the poor majority can’t use their numbers in seeking policy change, why is this? Democratic theory argues that governments should be responsive to the interests of the majority.

Policy-making and implementation, however, suggests the opposite. It seems to have a conservative bias, favouring the status quo, which in turn favours the richer people. Some views suggest that this is because the rich have more resources and levers to pull to get the policies they want enacted.

But not so, say Persson and Sundell, after their study of policies in 43 countries. The first point is that richer people are more inclined to prefer the status quo rather than change. This isn’t surprising because it’s the status quo that made them rich. To get what they want, they don’t need to seek social change. The status quo bias in politics favours the rich rather than the poor, because the poor need to get change in policy to further their interests.

The rich have asymmetric blocking power

The second point follows from this, that all the rich have to do to get what they want is to block social change.

And it turns out that blocking change is a whole lot easier than achieving it, at least for rich people. They have asymmetric blocking power.

Why is this? There are various reasons, which have to do with the existence of multiple blocking factors in policy-making and political systems.

• Sometimes a supermajority (for example two-thirds of voters rather than a simple majority) is needed to make a change, whereas you only need a simple majority to stop something happening.

• Very often, institutional systems put a series of hurdles in the way of change.

  • For example, you have to get a committee to recommend it, get the lawyers to draft the change helpfully, get two houses of a Parliament, such as Senate or House in he USA Congress, or the Houses of Lords and Commons in the UK) to agree. We are seeing this in the debate about ‘assisted dying’ in the UK at the moment: it’s got through the House of Commons but at the moment is being argued again in the House of Lords.

  • Different levels of decision-making may be required. For example, in the USA recently, different states have taken varying views on abortion, and some state have resisted or supported the present federal government’s decisions on deporting illegal migrants. In the UK, health and social care policy is different in Engand, Northern Ireland and Scotland, each country having different political parties in a majority.

  • And a general policy change might be handled different ways in different local government areas, where, again, different political parties may have influence.

  • Another factor may be that legislation or policy decisions leave administrative discretion, or there is a process of ‘rolling out’ action in decisions that are made, for example having pilot schemes in a few places that may lead to practical change in implementation.

• Persson and Sundall review (p. 3) many decades of policy research, from Marx onwards, which suggests that these and other ‘institutional rigidities’ favour protecting existing structures.

• Blocking requires less coordination, therefore, than changing things, not just in advocating a legal or policy change, but in achieving results.

• Status quo bias is also a common preference in many social situations, even where change would be rational. Psychological research shows that people tend to over-estimate the potential instability that a change might bring about, or are attached to systems that they have personal and financial investment in.

• Preferring the status quo also arises because the process of getting to the point that something is recognised as an issue that requires action, thinking through the options and deciding, often involving several actors, what to do often leads to ‘drift’, in which previously rational and supported policies are not updated or developed.

Persson and Sundell thus argue that it is important to distinguish policy proposals that support the status quo and those that support change. When you compare these with the outcomes you get different results. They offer two examples. In the USA, public support for private healthcare is the status quo, even though the US is an outlier on this, since most other countries prefer public healthcare. Thus, in the USA, this policy status quo is supported by public opinion. In the other example, there is no public support in many countries for increased immigration, but immigration nevertheless has increased. So this was an unsupported social change.

Most policy-change, however, requires excessive public support. Persson and Sundell looked at policy change in a variety of countries, and public support for it. They found that where there was a fairly low level of policy change the status quo predominates and this fits with public opinion because the higher income people are more satisfied and lower-income people are not numerous enough to develop a change agenda. In countries where there is a lot of policy change, there is greater public support for the changes that are enacted, lower-income people have more impact with their preferences. The main reason for the differences are the ease of blocking change, and they suggest that research is needed to identify institutional changes that would make it less easy to block change.

They conclude:

Unequal democratic representation can arise in different ways, both when policy change happens and under the status quo. Policy congruence occurs primarily through maintaining the status quo rather than implementing reforms. Income-based inequalities in representation are driven largely by high-income citizens’ greater satisfaction with the status quo, not that they receive the policy change they want. These patterns hold across most of the individual countries in our dataset…

The group that favors the status quo has the upper hand in politics. In most cases, it is the high-income citizens that are most satisfied with the way things are. The status quo represents accumulated previous policy wins. Therefore, only a slight edge in policy wins for the rich compared to the poor can over time become a large advantage if these wins are defended and the policies kept in place. Over time, even a rather limited number of policy wins for the rich compared to the poor can translate into a large advantage if it is transformed into a status quo that is maintained over time. What might begin as a modest edge can become a solid wall, built brick by brick from the wins the poor could not stop (p. 8).

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Persson, M., & Sundell, A. (2025). Blocking the poor: status quo bias in policy congruence. Policy Studies Journal. Policy Studies Journal, 2025; 0:1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70083.

A study on being emotional as a social worker

An interesting study on how being emotional interacts with being professional in social work practice has come out in the British Journal of Social Work (van Vliet et al., 2025), it’s pre-publication, so click on the doi number in the citation at the end of this post to read it. It looks at conflicts in emotional responses that social workers feel doing their work with the expectations of their professional roles. It’s a Canadian study by Canadians but has general interest.

The research carried out a simulation to get at the personal responses of 34 social workers to contradictions in their work. They got actors to be the clients in realistic social work situations and then asked about the contradictions and uncertainties that came out of their feelings in the situation.

Affect theory

It uses ‘affect theory’ and the concept of ‘cruel optimism’. Affect is a psychological concept which refers to the overall emotional state of a person or social group. You have emotions, but your affect is the general picture of how your emotions come out in your social behaviour and relationships. It’s pronounced affect – you emphasise the first syllable.

The point of the idea of affect is that emotions don’t just well up inside you; they are part of your interactions with others. People get a sense of you over time by seeing how your emotions generally work in your relationships with them and others around you. So your behaviour or performances in social situations builds up your identity or reputation in the minds of other people. This creates boundaries between you and views of each other. How you are emotionally is partly how social work is for the people around you while you’re doing it.

How does this matter in social work? Social workers get into relationships with their clients and other people they work with, and during the history of the relationship the others get a picture of you as a social worker, at least partly by seeing your affect. The problem for social workers is that, at least in some views of what it is to be professional, that means being reasoning, neutral and balanced in their response to the people they work with.

But social work also requires them to be personal in their interactions with others, to display emotional reactions to their clients. Social work requires clients to feel trust in you, to like you, to feel you’re on their side. So (the traditional view) you have to show you are emotionally invested in them, while also demonstrating this professional neutrality and distance. People will see it if you hide something, creating ‘distance’ in how your emotions seem to work. So how can they also experience you as someone who feels for you? The affect ‘professional’ gets in the way of the affect ‘like and trust’.

Research outcomes

The reflections of the workers on their experiences came out in two themes. One was regulation and authenticity. This is about their need to have emotional control and yet also present themselves as emotionally invested in the client. The other was tensions about expertise. In this case the issue is that they have to present themselves as secure and competent helpers, while allowing for constantly learning and responding in their relationship with the client. So they couldn’t show themselves to be an all-knowing expert, when the work involved being alongside the client in exploring their uncertainties and difficulties. But their agency and profession want to maintain their reputation by fielding ‘experts’ to do the job; displaying your uncertainty is not what they’re after.

Most social workers feel these conflicts in their everyday work, and this study seeks to find out how this works in practice.

Regulation and authenticity

Some previous studies have showed that social work education encourages practitioners to maintain control over their expression of personal emotions. ‘Handling’ emotions is attached to being a successful social worker – not to be too intense or over-sharing. Participants in the study, asked to say how they respond to uncertainty, made an effort to suspend their reactions to avoid having an impact on clients.

…I think about how [my emotions are] impacting the current situation and then I suspend them…these sessions or the people I meet, it’s not about me, it’s about them. So, I guess my thought is I have to be able to deal with my own stuff without bringing it to them, bringing it to our interaction. (Experienced p. 7)

Watching video of a reaction:

…I forgot that I should be masking…I feel uncertainty about my performance (recent graduate, p. 7)

Several participants tried to hide physical responses or discomfort, like the woman in the picture that heads this post, even though this was an authentic response. This is a tension in professional practice. In a professional setting, the ability to control feelings was a mark of success.

Conversely, social workers are encouraged to bring out their personal responses to build rapport, and build support based on their personal experience. Emotions are tools to be used and the successful social workers is expected to know what emotional response is appropriate and deliver it.

Thus, in what the authors call ‘the authenticity struggle’, professional social work seeks to suppress ‘non-professional’ emotions and at the same time use personal experiences to connect.

…the other thing in terms of uncertainty is how much self-disclosure is appropriate?...he was talking about how he feels…And for me that’s a feeling I feel frequently…I think…of self disclosure and how much was appropriate? How much was useful to his situation? (p. 9)

The response to this was to suspend the feelings, but also to be more open. But this can feel artificial, not being professional because of being inauthentic.

The authors make the connection with emotional labour, in which emotions are ‘commodified’ as a tool. In turn, this connects with self-reflection in practice. This aims to help practitioners have a critical awareness of themselves as they work, using their feelings of empathy. But this disrupts an older sense of professionalism. Sometimes the idea of displaying vulnerability in the relationship helps resolve some of these feelings.

I think vulnerability…prioritizes the heart of the relationship and not the façade of a nice therapist client thing. It’s a realer dynamic that would ultimately help Dave have better outcomes…more truth into what’s really going on for him (p.10)

In this way, authentic connection can reaffirm an authority of the professional as able to manage their emotional responses as part of their practice.

The tension of expertise

The social worker is expected to be an expert in the helping process, while the client is the expert in their own life.

…some people sit there and they’re like, tell me what to do, you’re the expert. You do feel pressure that I’ve got to have the right thing to say…my pressure is on for what comes next. What I’m about to say next (p. 12).

This tension was particularly strong if worker and client did not share similar social status or life experiences.

…I’ll say like maybe on a scale of 1 to 10 I have, like, maybe a 2 on discussing race. That didn’t make me that nervous, but I think I could still be more comfortable with talking about race, especially with people that aren’t my same race or gender (p.13).

This led them to review explicitly where they stood, in their self-reflection or supervision, to consider what experience and capability they did bring to the situation.

Discussing the study, the authors argue that people felt more able to manage these uncertainties as they gained experience. With the ‘tension of expertise’, they had to work on presenting themselves as competent, while also empowering the client’s expertise in their life situation and experiences. They argue that thinking through these conflicts as they arise helps to build the boundaries between and connections among the people they work with.

Uncertainty is a resource to identify the things you need to work on. If you become aware of hiding your authentic uncertainty, that awareness is the very thing that allows you to have an authentic exploration engaging the people you are working with in dealing with the uncertainties in the situation.

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Van Vliet, L., Todd, S., Gheorghe, R., Occhiuto, K., & Tarshis, S. (2025). Feeling professional: Emotions, uncertainty, and contradictions in social work practice. British Journal of Social Work, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf221

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In my Social work history bites post earlier this week, I reflected on how ways of looking at the social conditions that created the past are still available to us in so many ways, on the Internet, in local museums and in published learning resources. Wherever we are if we choose to look. And they help us to think about those past social conditions still affect our lives today.

Part of that post looked at resources on the slave trade, which affected two cities I have lived in during my life. The history of slavery involves everyone, it seems irrelevant and of the past. But it is still relevant in the lives and thoughts of so many people. You meet that relevance all the time.

I met it two decades ago at a Harvard graduation that I happened to go to. A PhD graduand (someone who is coming up for the graduation) was slated to give a speech in Latin. Her grandmother had been a slave. And here she was making a contribution to a really important day in people’s lives at one of the most prestigious of the world’s universities.

I met it again visiting to speak at a conference and do some teaching in Curacao, in the Caribbean. This was previously a Dutch colony, the Dutch Antilles, and it had slavery just like the British colonies in the region. The capital city, Willemstad, had a museum (Kura Hulander) allowing us to relate to that history.

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I don’t want to try to summarise Jan Dobbernack’s (2025) recent paper on neoliberalism in the British Journal of Sociology – I don’t think I easily could. It’s available on the Internet, pre-publication, so you can read it by clicking on the reference in this paragraph, or the citation at the end of this post.

But it causes me to reflect on the ‘social’ in ‘social work’.

What the paper says, at length and broadly, is that the critics of neoliberal trends in politics claim that it aims to devalue ‘society’ as a way of thinking about…society. In other words, we should not value ideas such as community or cohesion as a way of thinking about how human beings live. Instead, we should value things like economic growth or individual resilience.

Dobbernack’s point is that the critics of neoliberals who say this sort of thing are mythologising a particular way of thinking about ‘society’, when there are many ways of articulating what a society is about, and might be many more than we use. Yes, the neoliberals seem keen on rugged economic individualism as a way of running the country. But the critics of it only allow for cohesion, collectivity and communality as a way of articulating our understanding of what a society should be about. And they are also nostalgic for a particular administrative practice (you might call it a welfare state) as the only way of thinking about society.

What does this mean for social work? It suggests that neoliberalism wants to get rid of things that value ‘social’ ways of living. Social work is clearly in the gunsights here.

But hang on a minute: Dobbernack is saying that all kinds of social should be part of our thinking. So is social work thinking about society aiming for a cohesive, collective, communal sort of society? And is it thinking nostalgically about a particular way of organising society that comes from the period when the welfare state seemed to have priority as the most progressive, worthwhile way of doing society?

Does the mere fact of having a thing called ‘social work’ mean that people think we should help each other, and societies should have a profession committed to helping people with social needs? It seems to assume that human beings do that as a matter of course. While there have been hermits, and some people are anti-social, the general line of thinking and action in most societies has been forming things like cooperation, families, organisations, social institutions. Human beings are naturally social animals, we assume. Being social has usually been seen as a good thing.

But no, says Dobbernack, actually these things are always in tension. Human beings are also competitive, aggressive, unsocial.

Recent posts in my Social work history in 20 books series has been looking at Saul Alinsky’s radical community organisation ideas. He says it’s the conflicts, the converses in human relationships that are stimulating to human beings. They cause us to become aware of things in the way we live that are not going right. Social progress comes out of things that are not right, and if we don’t experience them, and specify them, we don’t make progress. The job is, partly, to aggravate the issues to motivate us to deal with them, not to mollify and smooth.

And we see this in social work thinking. Social work is about the cohesive collective, but it’s also individualistic. It wants people to be self-determining, self-directing. And practices like groupwork think that putting people together with others will stimulate them to see alternatives, or battle in their groups about priorities or ways of living. And isn’t this true of family work, too? People are stimulated by difference. You do family sculpting to understand the tensions, to see when clinging together is not working.

And community work wants people to gain a consciousness of conflict, division and oppression in their lives and relationships. Social work is never effective if it’s just emollient. When I was involved in end-of-life care it never worked for people to ignore their imminent death or the sickness of their lived ones, they needed to confront and change as a result of death’s approach.

Neoliberalism might be saying to us that society can be lots of things; it’s not only one way of thinking about humanity. Human beings in society are cohesive, collective and communal, yes, but also anti-cohesive, anti-collective, anti-community. Neoliberalism recognises the truth that you can accept and articulate an understanding of lots of different ways of being social. Perhaps neoliberalism’s failing, therefore, is that it assumes that only the opposite of the collective is worthwhile. - that’s just as limited as thinking that we should only value an emollient society.

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Dobbernack, J. (2025). Why neoliberalism doesn’t spell the death of society: commonality, regulation, and the politics of social cohesion. British Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70031.

A specialised Substack and a ‘thank you’

My Substack is specialised, and here I’m reporting back on its first year. I call it Social work bites because it’s shortish commentary in what interests me rather than offering a coherent argument, ideology or programme.

Most of the Substacks I read, or that I see in ‘Notes’, are journalism on mainstream politics and cultural or social issues; I can see why the successful ones have thousands of subscribers. They’re about fairly deep dives into the up-to-date, which I value for adding to my understanding of what’s going in the world. Or arts, literature and personal thinking which I happen to find interesting. I’m trying to see if something different will work.

Social work bites is specialised in dealing with social work’s small corner of the professions and the social sciences. I’m keen to see if it might spark non-social workers.

I also wanted to use some of the materials my garage has accumulated about social work history. I thought this might be interesting to non-social workers as a not-very-obvious area of the past to explore (so I connect it to the other Substacks concerned with history). Also, although I know most social workers are not interested in their professional history, I thought some might become hooked.

I didn’t expect a massive number of subscribers, or general interest, then, but I wanted to see if there was a response.

I was also interested in Substack’s financial model. I wondered if readers would pay for posts on such a specialism, and if what they are prepared to pay compares with the royalties on books. My academic and professional books (30 or so) and articles (400 or so) are not massively income-generating, compared with the effort involved. But they’ve contributed to social work education and the profession it serves. Would Substack’s financial model be an equivalent?

It’s a year since I started writing Social work bites: posts in the three parts of it come out most weeks:

Social work bites is the least of it, and always intended to be. It’s a now-elderly social worker commenting on issues affecting older people and helping them, coming from the last period of my career based in end-of-life care. And picking up other social commentary and research that interests me from my academic career. It’s been eclectic.

Social work history bites is the main priority. Although my text on social work history (Payne, 2005) is well-regarded and still used and cited, particularly for its international content, rather than just mainstreaming American and British lines of social work history, I have accumulated a lot of unused materials. I wanted to make some of them available. Mainly, I write commentaries on information about ‘social care services’ in pre-social work days and pick up the sidelines of published materials like memoirs, old articles and radical magazines.

Social work history in 20 books is a series of commentaries on books published up until 2000 (when history ends, as far as the bites are concerned) that have been influential in social work thinking. I shift backwards and forwards between different periods. When I’ve got to the end of the 20 books, I’ll think about turning it into a book, if anyone will publish it. There is a pay wall for this because this is my test of the Substack financial model.

Numbers and outcomes so far:

Subscribers are in the hundreds, and keep coming in at 2 or 3 a week; this is about the same as blogs I wrote in the past for my employer, or for academic or professional interest.

More people respond where I design little graphics about the contents. Or where they’re blasted from the past by one or more of the 20 books.

Paid subscribers are about 1%, but it’s the equivalent in income to specialised academic book and article royalties.

Some people in social work have been interested because they want to see its history ‘foregrounded’. And I’ve had responses from the media about particular aspects that I have covered that connect with their agenda. So, it’s being noticed and useful.

So, I’ll carry on at least until the 20 books are finished, and then think again.

Thank you all for your interest and responses.

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Payne, M. (2005). The origins of social work: Continuity and change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

I couldn’t resist it: a sociological article on nothing (Scott & Lockwood, 2025). Actually, it’s one of a series which one of the authors, Scott, has been pursuing for some time; citations in the article. She has a research grant for it (see below from the Leverhulme Trust research project website).

But this particular research product is not what you might think. The social worker in me got excited. It’s more about how we say to others ‘there’s nothing to see here (in my life)’, about how people think, and react to, and how their lives are changed by, things that didn’t happen to them (or that they want to claim didn’t happen to them). And if you’re a social worker, you’ve inevitably come across situations like this.

The example which is around at the moment is unmarried mothers who gave their babies up for adoption up until the 1970s, when to have a child while unmarried was still unacceptable to a lot of people. I wrote about it before, quite early on in this Substack. It’s clear from the television programmes in which people search for the birth mother they never knew, or for the child that they handed over to adoptive parents. In some cases this took place under a fair amount of social and, again in some cases, moral and official pressure. At the time of the event, something happened, oppression, a heart-wrenching event. There is a campaign in England for a government apology, and similar concerns have been raised in Australia over in particular ‘forced adoptions’ of aboriginal children into white families. It’s there in other countries and circumstances, too.

But now, it’s….nothing. The mother was encouraged to forget: it didn’t happen, get on with your life. Sometimes, with foundlings, where the child was abandoned by the mother to be found by a random passer-by, the intention was that it should be nothing.

Of course, you don’t forget, it’s a part of your life, so how do you account for it in your personal history?

Scott and Lockwood contrast this with the creation of our personal identity and social identity through the events in our lives, and through how we understand ourselves as women, as men, as social workers, human beings. Much biography in general, they say, and aspects of life that form our identity as we present it to the world, is positive; it illustrates our achievements, our progress, our strengths. But our identity is created also by the things that didn’t happen to us. So this is a study of non-identity: how do we include it in our… selves when it didn’t happen, or wasn’t supposed to happen.

Their work focuses on ‘reverse marking’ (p. 1122) bringing into the foreground previously latent, unnoticed ‘forms’ of ourselves so that they may be experienced, by ourselves and perhaps others. Most ‘identity claims’ (p. 1123) that people ‘construct and perform’ are the way people show how they are engaged with, conform with, the norms of social groups they are part of or that they want to be part of.

We may also want to create ‘stories’ of the life we haven’t lived, rejecting a label that we don’t like through re-storying our lives, ‘presentifying’ or making them present (p. 1124).

‘Nothing’, therefore, ‘covers many forms of absence’:

objects that are missing, lost, unrealised, rejected or disengaged from, intentional orientations that are omissive or commissive, and thematic dimensions of silence, invisibility, emptiness, stillness and lost opportunities (p. 1124).

They studied this by using the Mass Observation Archive of written and other accounts by people about their lives. They issued a ‘directive’, suggesting that present volunteers should write about ‘nothing and the road not taken’ (p. 1126).

One approach by the writers was to create or identify a ‘personal myth’ or central theme of their lives. Ideas had been rehearsed to become a permanent, fixed or stable truth about themselves that they could present when required by social circumstances.

The two most common ‘tales of nothing’ were about romantic relationships and employment histories (p. 1127); here are some examples. Some stories were generalised:

The thing that is missing from my life is love . . . it would be so nice to have someone to share those goals with to share dreams and to just do stuff with.

By not going on to the next stage of my Art Education (equivalent to a BA degree today) I lost the momentum of my working life . . . if I had not taken a break from further art education when I was younger I might be a more established artist than I now am.

Sometimes there was a turning point:

I had been accepted as a cadet into the Metropolitan Police [but] when Mum died I could no longer face doing that, I lost all confidence in being able to go and was simply not capable, so my career path changed with immediate effect . . . [I] ended up just feeling stupid and life spiralled.

…and sometimes that affected events later in life, producing a ‘long plot-line’ (p 1129):

When I was a child, my Dad, eldest half-brother, and Grandad all died within a short space of time and all died very suddenly with no warning. I held their losses within me and have carried that mourning with me ever since . . . When I lost my hearing in that partial way, so suddenly overnight, I felt it was a physical manifestation of the losses I had been carrying for so many years . . . Grief had found a way to physically represent itself within my body.

Another thing that people did was to create a sequence, making connections between events in their life-course. This is an attempt at ‘meaning-making’:

I held back from pushing myself forward for further promotion as I never felt quite good enough. I’m convinced this is because of my upbringing and my Catholic secondary modern school, where we were made to feel that we ended up there because we failed, for whatever reason, to gain a place at a grammar school…(p. 1130).

My father left my mother when I was a toddler . . . My mother wasn’t able to show a lot of love and also felt inferior to those around us. As a consequence of this, I’ve always felt there was a ‘hole’ that the love of a father figure would fill. . . counselling identified the lack of a father as being key to the otherwise inexplicable anxiety and fear (p. 1130).

Many of the accounts showed that the people saw their accounts of life in the context of cultural norms. A gay man said:

It is the loss of life milestones that you may never fulfil – marriage and having kids chief among them . . . This perceived failure to hit the socially acceptable markers [means I have] a complete lack of identifiable anchors to grip on to which measures one’s worth . . . To me, I live a fulfilling and very rich life, but to others, I am a black hole hanging in space, and just as unfathomable… (p.1132).

A single woman expresses some of the judgements made about her that she rejects:

I often feel like a third wheel when I am around [my married friends], and I am constantly asked about my love life or my desire for a partner. I also feel that there is a social hierarchy in which married people are seen to be one step further on the path of life . . .(p. 1133)

They often had feelings about these aspects of their lives, generating ‘affective [emotional] scripts’ (p. 1133); a common part of this was regret:

I still regret listening to my sister, by being naive, losing the chance to join the Wrens . . . I had hoped to train as an officer. I may have travelled to many far-flung countries, I would have met many new people. Perhaps even ended up living overseas (p. 1133).

A man with no sexual experience:

It hurts quite a lot for a number of reasons, mainly because it feels like an experience I should’ve had . . . having sex especially is a really scary thing and something I’d need a lot of preparation for. It feels like something big to overcome and until I do, I feel pretty immature, young and insignificant because having sex and a relationship is the crux of life, right?…(p.1134).

Sometimes, alternatively, they thought ‘counterfactually’ (p. 1134) imagining a life not lived, a road not taken:

I know now that it would have been a terrible decision and a terrible marriage. I was so naïve and I honestly can’t believe that I am the same person I was then. It turned out to be such a lucky escape for me…

There were also ambivalences:

It was something when I was growing up I always assumed I would do . . . The problem was I didn’t really like children and wasn’t interested in raising them . . . Occasionally I would feel lured by the fantasy of the romantic side of it, wondering what they would look like and what names we would choose. Then the practical side would take over and I would think of disturbed nights, dirty nappies, childhood illnesses and throwing up… (pp. 1134-5)

There are many more examples in an interesting article.

All of which makes me wonder whether the strengths-based, forward-looking approach of much contemporary social work required by agency policies is just inadequate to allow people to explore and understand some of the nothings in their lives.

And I think about my own life: the people I didn’t marry, the wife I left, the jobs I didn’t get, the ones I didn’t do so well (that I prefer to forget about). Are you the same?

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Scott, S., & Lockwood, N. (2024). Non-identity accounts: personal myths, cultural scripts and narrative alignment. Sociological Review, 73(5), 1122–39.

Timms’s study of early London COS records

We return to the London Charity Organisation Society (COS), but this time to consider a detailed study of how its visitors and committees did its work. Early in his distinguished academic career, Noel Timms carried out a study of the records of COS workers over an extended period of 50 years (1887-1937). He used some of the material again later in life, for example in the ‘historical observations (pp. 7-42)’ in his book (Timms, 1972) on social work recording. Unlike a lot of the commentary on the COS, this study, conducted in the later 1950s and published in 1961, does not rely on general opinions from people opposed to or supportive of the COS and its policies or concerned with social and political change. Instead, his study looks at what they said at the time that they actually did.

The results were published in two major articles in Case Conference in April and May 1961 (Timms, 1961a, b) and therefore reflect a casework era judgement of the early days of social work from an extremely well-qualified and experienced social work perspective. Timms took into account both the attitudes of the visitors and workers (sometimes he slips into calling them ‘caseworker’, not a term in use at the beginning of this period) and the organisational policies and social attitudes revealed. He sometimes comments specifically how a caseworker of the 1960s might have done the job differently.

He starts from an understanding that much of the work, particularly in the early decades, were primarily about dealing with poverty and financial distress. This was the focus of much of the activity and services. Concern for people’s emotional and mental health only emerges from the 1920s and, more strongly, later in the 1930s. This is from his conclusion:

For most of the period, caseworkers work on a foundation of practical theorems; they expect reasonable behaviour and the maintenance of moral standards and they show faith in the plasticity of human nature [that people can change or, perhaps, be helped to change]. They collect information with varying degree of care, judge it according to the view of the ordinary practical moralising citizen and administer with varying degrees of warmth and success routine procedures which have the authority of time and the support of cumulative but unrefined tradition. There is, however, a slow but discernible change after 1920. This change is in the direction of increasing helpfulness to applicants and a growing flexibility of method…Caseworkers become less God-like (1961b, p. 10).

Let’s unpack the information he gives to understand this.

The ‘casework procedure’

The application

In the 1880s and for much of the period, the COS procedure was

• …to ascertain the nature and cause of the difficulty [by obtaining]

• the necessary particulars…given by the applicant,

• relevant enquiry is made and

• a visit is paid to the home (1961a, p. 259).

The applicant is ‘sent’

Usually the applicant was ‘sent by’ someone in authority. In modern parlance, this means ‘referred’, but this term was not used because the workers got ‘references’ about the applicants, meaning written comments from employers, landlords and others. Examples of initial referrers were an MP, a relieving officer, the ‘Waifs and Strays’ (a child protection agency, which later became the Church of England Children’s Society), the Church and the ‘Guild of Brave Poor Things’ (a charity for children with disabilities)’. I’ll write another post on the Guild of Brave Poor Things, since historical material exists on the Internet.

Note the term ‘applicant’. To the Victorian philanthropist, a client (which became the conventional - if often disliked - term in social work for the person who received help) was someone who gave donations to a charity. Applicants either came to the COS office with a letter, or having been passed to the COS directly, were sent a letter from the COS asking them to call at the office, sometimes with a request to bring particular documents. Often the applicant did not know who had ‘sent’ them to the COS or why.

The statement

From this contact, the worker wrote the applicant’s statement, which showed:

1. The cause of distress

2. Present means of livelihood

3. Applicant’s plans for the future.

Most records focused on point 2. Although some of the literature of the time discussed achieving ‘permanent benefit’ [sustained improvement in situation or behaviour] with the help given, this was rarely discussed with the applicant. Most cases were a disconnected series of contacts and isolated decisions.

The home visit

Next came the home visit. The aim here was to ‘assess the quality of the home, verify the address and see the rent book. The rent book was relied on to evaluate the present position, rather than looking back through the applicant’s record. Judgements on the home were mainly about gaining overall impressions. Some examples:

1887: Very clean, tidy home and well furnished. Should say they are very respectable people.

1896: Very untidy, in fact I might say dirty, and very poorly furnished.

Often articles of furniture are listed, particularly during the 1920s.

Timms identifies elements of the picture that workers sought to draw:

• Frankness

1887:…I am favourably impressed with Mr Z’s outspoken manner.

1900: She was not quite straightforward about it, making excuses…Eventually, she acknowledged her fault.

1916: Mrs L. would contradict herself…but I don’t think it was done with the idea of deceiving.

1920: I told Mrs D. that it would have been better to mention these facts as it looked like concealment.

Although critical commentators saw the COS as taking a tone of suspicion that all applicants were frauds, Timms saw little evidence of this. He felt that applicants’ descriptions were the only evidence available, and workers were reasonable in testing them out.

• Good managers, industrious and thrifty

1896:…called on butcher who stated he…has always found the husband very steady and respectable and industrious.

1905: …she is I fear best described as a muddler…

1940: Begged him to tell me if he thought (his) wife was a bad manager.

• Superior

1920: He is a very superior man of the policeman type.

1928: he looks different from the ordinary type of labourer. He seems to regard us quite as friends.

References

The worker wrote to present and past employers, relations and others given by the applicant as references; often they were visited. Permission to do this was asked of the head of the household. Other social workers, such as Poor Law Relieving officers and public officials, were consulted without permission. Relatives were asked about the character of applicants and also if they had suggestions for actions or were prepared to help. Landlords, the clergy, hospitals and schools were also consulted. Timms notes that from about 1910, schools were more often contacts than the clergy.

Enquiries

Enquiries were made not only to verify what applicants said and collect judgements about their character, but also to get advice about ways to help.

1887: We are anxious if possible to help this man and wish to learn the most desirable way.

This letter was to a doctor, and medical advice was always treated with respect, as in the case of the German pioneer social worker, Amelia Sieveking, whose work was covered last year in Social work history in 20 books.

Decisions and plans

All these investigations were fed into a decision by the district committee. As with Sieveking, the decision was always collective, but the impression Timms gives is that the COS district committees were sources of authority, rather than with Sieveking, a source of collective consideration and support for the workers. The committees often sought an overall ‘vital fact’ (Timms, 19761b, p. 2) that illuminated the situations, rather than dealing in complexity. The main actions were as follows:

• Pensions were a favoured outcome,

These had to be raised from various charities (for an area, a guild or forces charity) or sometimes by getting the family to work together to contribute a livelihood for a disabled or elderly family member.

• Convalescence and ancillary health services

We have seen in previous Social work history bites how important convalescence was in recovery for long-term infections or disabilities, particularly in the 1920s and ‘30s when efforts at prevention and rehabilitation were more in use. A month’s applications for one COS district office:

5 applications for artificial teeth, 2 for surgical belts, one for special boots, and eight for convalescent holidays…and 8 persons asked for general financial help, mostly to tide them over a period of illness (p. 3).

While these provided essential services, however, Timms thinks they did not adjust the provision for the complex lives of the whole family. He cites a lengthy case study (1961b, pp. 4-5) where convalescent arrangements for a mother, easily made, did not adequately provide for a baby, bearing in mind the mother’s fears if they were separated, because a neighbour’s infant had died. The mother’s anxieties in the convalescent home made it difficult to care for her, various changes were made, and the husband had to be helped with financial management because he could not pay the home’s costs. Because of these stresses, the wife left her convalescence before the period ended, had to be found elsewhere and persuaded to stay.

Timms’s comment is that fluctuating and temporary arrangements were forced in the situation because adequate attention was not paid to the mother’s reasonable fears. But he is loath to criticise: ‘COS workers are sometimes only as moralising and judgmental as the doctors and psychiatrists on whose opinions they rely so heavily (1961b: p. 5)’. He cites one case where distressing family relationships lead a psychiatrist to say that the daughter of the family is ‘a thorough bad lot’ and the mother should find a job and not bother with her, leading the decision-making COS Committee to refuse to help the family at all.

• Help for children

Much time is spent arranging to place and supervisepayment for children in care homes or apprenticeships, with little consultation with them. In one 1924 case, three children were placed in a care home on the death of their mother after enquiry at their school, mainly because of prejudice about the father’s past behaviour - no attempt to help the father or other relatives cope. In another case, three older children were sent to a home free of charge, with a baby being kept with the mother for the first year of its life, after which the baby would be old enough to be placed with the others so that the mother could go out to work and pay for them all. Timms comments (and this quotation provides the introductory illustration for this post):

In COS work with children it is difficult to see who the client really is and where the casework is being focused. Help for the children is given after an appraisal of the child’s parents and evaluated largely by its effects on the adults…Children do not seem to be treated as persons in their own right and their own childish needs are not met with graciousness (1961b, p.6).

• Relationship

Most of the work was concerned with the provision of concrete services. In the early period, if the applicant could not use those services, the application was considered withdrawn. As time went on, arrangements were more flexible, and alternatives might be offered. But Timms only found one instance, and that during the 1930s, ‘in which a persistent attempt is made to influence and help an obviously disturbed person [using]…a personal relationship (1961b, p. 6).’ What he is saying, then, is that much of this work was not what a 1950s practitioner would have seen as ‘social work’. We are seeing here the long trail of social work’s origins in ‘relief’.

General attitudes

Timms assesses the general attitudes betrayed in the records he studied by the practice of the COS during this period. He makes three points:

Compassion and control

He suggests that in the early philosophy of the COS was that society was expressing through its existence compassion for and control of certain forms of behaviour. However, reading the records:

Often it is the anger, and disappointment, with an applicant that is recorded and the compassion of social work seems sometimes to be exhausted by the bare existence of a social work institution; it does not often inform the actual work of the institution.

Decisions of the Committee reward people ‘doing their duty’ and being a ‘good applicant’. The main contra-indications for providing services were drink and immorality ‘the rumours of their presence is often as effective as reality (p. 8)’. There was also adverse reference of a controlling response:

1911 (of a deaf-mute): …from an Eugenic point of view it was not desirable to assist this couple to continue to live together, more especially as they have…made inadequate provision for their already large family.

1920: ‘I told him how very silly it seemed to have married when he must have known his work was uncertain (p. 8).’

Professional relationship

Reliance on others’ opinions resulted from the workers’ lack of professional knowledge and standing. Mary Richmond, the American pioneer of this period, would have said that this should be combatted by effective training. Relationships with applicants were one-sided (p. 9) and applicants were often unaware of why the worker was making the specific enquiries. Because of the reliance on the Committee to make the final decisions, the COS failed to develop workers’ capacity for judgement and decision-making.

Continuous or supportive work

The COS did not claim to provide continuous support. Its workers, with limited psychological knowledge in the early years, were not able to provide support over a continuous period. By the end of the 1930s, however, there was a willingness to try to be helpful over a wider area of living. Hence, Timms’s conclusion, which is where I started from.

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Timms, N. (1961a). Social work in action - a historical study (1887-1937). Case Conference, 7(10), 259-63.

Timms, N. (1961b). Social work in action - a historical study (1887-1937). Case Conference, 8(1), 2-10.

Timms, N. (1972). Recording in scial work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

How do people know how to deal with the practicalities, faced with the death of a close relative? The sociological answer, according to a recent article, is that people use their cultural and social capital to do ‘death administration’ (Towers & Reed, 2025; it’s pre-publication, so click on the doi number in the citation at the end of this post, or or this reference to view it).

This all seems to be news to sociologists, but my answer would be ‘ask a palliative care social worker’. Although the authors have now written several articles, presumably drawing on the same piece of research, their analysis is detailed in a discussion of Bourdieu’s theories of using your cultural and social capital. Everything is labelled according to different types of ‘capital’ (they’re mostly not talking about economics) that people use in different ways.

But there is value for social work and other professional education of devising organised categorisations of community and social resources that people might use in dealing with bereavement. Another part of the value of this paper is the information it gives about the experiences of people dealing with bereavement, through their own quotations.

As Alison, a bereaved daughter aged 42, said:

There seemed to be quite a lot of onus on us to figure out what we needed to do, and remember to do things… nobody teaches you how to do this, you only know because you experience it, and then you’re in the most horrible situation and you’ve got to deal with it (p. 5).

And this is about ‘death administration’; the psychotherapists long been concerned about the emotional consequences of bereavement. The vast majority of people deal with such consequences perfectly well on their own ‘with a little help from their friends’ (as the song has it) and relatives. According to the article, sociology has mainly concentrated on what individuals have to do in administering the family affairs when someone dies, and it has not previously occurred to them to look at how people use their family and social networks to help them. The writers claim that this is one of the things that they are contributing to the literature. Another thing that social workers are ace at.

Bourdieu’s original research was done in formal and informal education, and one of the things that the article claims to contribute is introducing the concept of ‘death administration’ as an example of real life into the constellation of theories he produced.

Cultural capital helps

Cultural capital has three different forms:

1. Embodied capital is the disposition of a person (knowing how to organise things for example);

2. Objectified capital is in the form of cultural goods, such as guidelines or information leaflets;

3. Institutional capital is structured into the organisation of services.

An example of institutional capital is Karen, a bereaved wife of 59 years:

I've worked in the bereavement field for many years. I worked running a children's bereavement charity. So I knew much more than most people about what to do (p.5).

You don’t have to have the specialised knowledge of institutional capital. Embodied capital comes with you through all the thing you’ve done in life, as the example of Lauren, 47, a bereaved daughter, shows:

I do admin for a living so, in some ways, I, kind of, just…that was one of the things that I got stuck into, contacting people and making lists of things to do (p. 5).

You know that the institutional capital system is failing when you read about Ian, 73, a bereaved husband:

Somebody who’d been in the same position said, oh, did you ever get that bereavement grant? What grant is that? Oh, I got £1,500 or something. I said, no. Who was this from? (p. 6)

He didn’t know he was entitled to a non-means-tested Bereavement Support Payment following the death of a partner. Nearly 20 years ago, some colleagues and I ran a series of two-hour training courses for everyone who was about to bereaved in the district of our hospice, and researched the experiences of those we trained (Bechelet et al, 2008). This was providing them with objectified capital. As you see, we published the results, but even now most areas do not offer such options for helping people in an organised way. So you get people like Ian who has not been helped with the practical information he needs and lost out on a substantial cache of cash.

He applied too late, after the deadline, but my view is that a government service like the Department of Work and Pensions should have a duty to inform everyone who is bereaved of their services, and should be forced to pay up if their information doesn’t work. As the article says, it’s only too easy not to know something when you only rarely have to deal with a particular social occurrence. It is the government that’s failing if they haven’t made sure that people do know about what their entitlement is.

The study, however, shows that palliative care systems, such as district or specialised nurses, often provide the institutional capital from their experience of dealing with dying people regularly.

What the Bourdiousean analysis tells the avearge social worker, then, is where to look in people’s lives to find possible ways of helping. And that means digging around in people’s networks and relatioships to find people they can join up with, to use their capital as well. In this sense, capital is the experience, knowledge and social contacts we all build up during our lives to help us when we come up against something new.

Relationality and transmitting capital

Going on from different types of capital, the article talks about how people use their social networks, quoting Bourdieu:

The existence of a network of connections is not a natural or even a social given (p. 52)

Not everyone has a network of connections they can call on, but social workers routinely realise that most people will have such connections, can help them to find contacts, and work out how to use them best. This includes the person who has died, as Teresa, 46, a bereaved daughter shows:

Dad realised he was going to have to come and live with us and that was it, so he wanted to make it easier for me as his only child, I’ve got no siblings, and so he did his own house clearance with me. So the death admin actually started while he was still alive, because he instigated that process… I remember being in the hospice with him and he was dictating an email to the solicitor and I was typing and doing all this sort of stuff (p. 6).

It was the same for Veronica, another bereaved daughter:

We knew what to do. My mum was a very practical person, so she’d constantly told us about where everything was, all the documents were. Everything was packaged up and ready to go. She’d paid for her own funeral so there was very little to do really other than going through her personal effects (p. 7).

People also found (or social workers could have found for them and facilitated) suitable people in their wider networks, like Mark, a bereaved son:

All the other financial matters were handled by my ex‐wife who was the executor of the will… she works as a Clerk of a Court, so she’s quite good with legal stuff.

When in trouble, pull everyone in that you can think of. The sociological evidence is that such networks cannot be assumed, and are fluid, depending on previous relationships and social expectations. That’s why you need social workers sometimes to find the way through your social links. ‘Who do you know who might be able to…?’

So death administration, like many of the occasional bureaucratic tasks that we all have to deal with, requires knowledge and skill. People need to be able to find their way and be helped to use the resources bound up in their own, their family and social networks and the official systems. Social workers are often good at facilitating that and this article puts some organising thinking into the processes that they can use in ‘death administration’.

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Bechelet, L., Heal, R., Leam, C. & Payne, M. (2008) Empowering carers to reconstruct their finances. Practice, 20(4): 223-34.

Bourdieu, P. (1997). The forms of capital. In A. M. Halsey, H. Lauder & A. Stuart Nells (Eds): Education: Culture, Economy, Society (pp. 46–58). Oxford University Press.

Towers, L. & Reed, K. (2025). Capital of Life in Death: How bereaved individuals mobilise cultural and social capital in UK death administration. British Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70024.

China is becoming such an important nation that almost everything you hear about raises curiosity. A recent paper by Angela Man Xu (2025) connects with lots of things we hear about China, and perhaps shows us some of the complexities that may lie behind the press reports about Muslim minority ethnic groups in China. It’s pre-publication, so to view it, click here.

The message is that even people who are treated as devalued minorities can react in complex ways, maintaining transnational links and cultural affinities, while still valuing a national identity.

One of the things we read about in the press is that China is anxious to ensure that all its vast population has a shared Chinese cultural identity. As the paper says:

scholars argue that the state produces a national identity rooted in Han ethnic superiority, which in turn devalues the social and cultural practices of ethnic minorities (p.3).

At least, it tries to produce such a uniform Chinese identity. And we hear about minority ethnic groups, particularly if they have a Muslim identity, that are being re-educated, oppressed to devalue their ethnic traditions. The ‘Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Han Chinese [are presented as] agents of progress to legitimize state governance (p. 3)’. There’s been publicity recently about the succession to the exiled Dalai Lama, with Chinese government concern to control the succession, to maintain Chinese rather than Tibetan national cultural identity.

When I was last there, a quarter of a century ago, I was taken to a pleasure park in Beijing where minority ethnic cultures were presented as interesting oddities of the past to be viewed as entertainment. The paper says: ‘The ethnic tourism industry is said to…capitaliz[e] on exoticized and stigmatized images of ethnic minorities to attract Han tourists’ (and others if my experience of being taken there is anything to go by).

…this body of research emphasizes how nationalist politics and ethnic hierarchies in China generate state discourses that stigmatize minoritized identities.

The consequence of this is that people from minority ethnic groups have to negotiate their identities, engaging with discourses promoted by the state, following one or more of three strategies:

1. Internalising the state discourse that their minority identity is a negative factor in their lives, using Han ‘cultural capital’ to gain economic advantages.

2. Use patriotism and ethnic unity to challenge Han cultural hegemony.

3. Using minority cultural resources and ethnic connections to resist state discourses, for example privately among themselves.

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Critiques of this kind of research and analysis suggest that minorities may gain from China’s increasing global ‘entanglements’ (p. 4). Because Chinese goods and people cross national boundaries in the course of activities in their lives such as tourism or work, there may be challenges to maintaining a composite national identity. This may be at odds with promoting international economic success to the population at home, potentially changing attitudes. Minority ethnic groups ‘leverage their bilingual skills, cultural networks and transnational networks to become competitive market actors and contribute to national economic growth and global prestige (p. 5)’. But the nationalist policy still shapes how far this works. For example, many East Asian countries balance minorities’ marketable skills by focusing on assimilationist policies to integrate immigrants into the dominant national culture.

How does all this work? This paper reports a study of a particular minority group, Hui Muslims. They managed to develop multiculturalism in the context of a phase of China’s development when there were geopolitical moves to mobilise their minority skills to support Chinese global economic development. Xu calls this ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, using engagement in accepted business development to make their multiculturalism more acceptable to the Chinese state. But policy to give local Islam Chinese characteristics meant that their freedoms were reined in. Nevertheless, the paper shows, the valuation of Hui Muslims’ business success facilitated some contestation but constraints remained to be dealt with.

In particular, there are limits: developing an ‘entrepreneurial self (p. 6)’, people develop traits such as adaptability, risk-taking and self-responsibility. But this, while enhancing life prospects, actually legitimises state power and associated structural inequalities in status. Ethnic and religious discrimination in China means that cultural capital gained through minority links and skills cannot be used to become upwardly mobile or contest national class hierarchies. And you can’t mobilise business success to achieve social inclusion or broad racial and economic class hierarchies in society.

The study analysed policy and media, information about state discourses on Islam, documentation and online information about discourses on Islamic education and on Chinese and Chinese-Arabic schools. There were interviews in three areas that had large Hui communities (some quotations below).

The Hui are descendants of Central Asian Muslims who settled in China from the 13^th century and maintained connections with global Islam, using Mosque-based language education in Arabic and Persian since the 16^th century. This influenced their dialect and way of speaking. Longtime citizens of China, then. They maintained religious rituals, such as fasting, and symbolic connections with global Islam. Many people left state education early, to continue in Islamic schools. In the early 21^st century, their ties made possible some of China’s economic and political ties to the Middle East, and areas with strong Hui populations became centres for Arabic language education.

Since 2018, however, Chinese policy became more assimilationist and emphasised the Sinicisation of Islam, using a state-sanctioned version of Islam. For example there have been training sessions for community representatives, many private Islamic schools have been closed down. Arabic-language instruction has been separated from religious education, so that it becomes a technical skill, rather than carrying ethnic and religious culture. The extent of this change varied across China, with an area that generated trade relations with the Middle East experiencing less strong ‘Sinicisation’.

Ethnic institutions generally, and schools in particular, have played a role in raising Hui Muslims’ awareness of the global market potential of their links and language skills. For example, people learned of in school and through work links the demand for Arabic and Persian language interpreters and translators. This work also increased their global ties and allowed access to overseas education, which in turn reinforced the value of these links and skills. Many people experiencing adult education in other countries, however, chose to return to China to continue in business and education there.

As a result, some Hui Muslims, while internalising the stigmatisation of their ethnic culture, accepting that they were inferior in Chinese society, still used the discourse of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ to challenge this inferior position. This enabled them to improve their income and also continue participation in culturally relevant consumption and education. Education, then, allowed for middle-class status but also allowed Muslims to differentiate their cultural identities.

An example of the conflicts people faced is a young woman who resented her parents’ wish for her to continue Mosque-based further education post-school, when she saw Chinese children gaining higher status by gaining graduate and post-graduate qualifications. But others from more working-class backgrounds could use their language skills through on-the-job training and connections to develop real-world skills useful in the global market. Hui people in business also blended Islamic and Chinese art in decorating their homes and offices, demonstrating their cultural uniqueness in the market ‘an objectified form of cosmopolitan capital (p. 12)’. Cross-border travel and business partnerships also enhanced status.

People like this used the reality that their ethnic identity conferred business success to challenge nationalist stereotypes.

It’s easier for us to establish trust relationships with Muslims when doing business. It takes a long time for you to build relationships with clients…They will trust me more (p. 13; emphasis original).

It also enabled them to make links by demonstrating valuing Arabic music and cultural artefacts. Another quotation:

I find Arabic music beautiful. I particularly enjoy listening to the Qur’an…Occasionally, my clients send me Arabic songs…(p. 13)

These are ways in which Hui Muslims could legitimise their ethnicity within the assimilationalist Chinese policies and social expectations.

While the authority saw the religious education as a potential threat to social stability, Mr Bai emphasised that the school cultivated patriotic and cosmopolitan talents. His example illustrates how minority actors strategically invoked state ideologies of patriotism and economic development to articulate autonomous reflections of state ethnic governance.

Another example is a translator who also ran an e-commerce business selling hijab brands in China. ‘Fashion is not about nudity,’ she said. A hijab-wearing Malaysian singer had become popular and the translator had found locally produced headscarves which could be adapted for hijabs to follow her example and ‘…became such a hit in the market (p. 14)’.

Hui business people were using their sense of cosmopolitan affinity with global Muslims, but compared conditions in some African and middle eastern countries with China’s modern cities and advanced technology, depicting national pride and their choice to return to China. In some cases, they saw China’s position in the global order as making them culturally or economically superior to other nations.

The relationship in their perceptions between the global, the national and the transnational cultural and ethnic differences was complex. As we often find in social work, there is never just one way and one reaction. All of our life experiences contribute to who we are, despite nationalism and oppression.

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Xu, A. M. (2025). Neoliberal multiculturalism and ethnic entrepreneurial self: A transnational perspective on ethnicity in China. The Sociological Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261251353352

The media are saying again how the present government is a failure at least partly because of its inability to present a ‘overall narrative’ that it can serve up to the voters justify its actions and aims. This means that both members of parliament and people in general have lost their mojo to carry on with carrying on, let alone believing in the worth of what the government is trying to do, and the part we have to play in it.

This stimulates me to think in these Social work bites about loss again, because a recent article (Yerushalmi, 2025) connects being unable to find meaning in practiceis experienced like an important loss in life. It discusses how you deal with losing your mojo to carry on with caring-type work. We’re into professional issues of some sophistication here. But I recognised similarities in what’s being discussed with some of the times over the decades when I’ve been in tears about not being able to do my job as a social worker or as a manager of social work and social care services. That’s familiar to people in lots of jobs and social roles, not just social workers and psychotherapists.

Partly, this has sometimes been about too much work. I constantly see commentary in social work Internet posts about how hard people are working, how there is too much to do and not enough time to do it in, not enough support or resources. This is not new: I lived through the Seebohm reorganisation in 1971 when services were totally reorganised and massively expanded in ways that most people thought was right and wanted to see.But there weren’t enough people or training available to do the job that needed to be done. Of course, it’s never only about whether there’s enough pay or enough services, but that’s often part of it.

I’m talking about being familiar with the feeling that ‘I can’t do this job any more – I don’t have [what people nowadays call] the bandwidth in my life – I don’t have the personal strength to take any more of this’.

Yerushalmi discusses supervising psychotherapists. This is a bit like social work supervision and indeed managers supporting people to do their jobs in lots of situations. He sees his supervising job as helping people:

to develop an inner set of generalisations and abstractions that organise and make sense of complex unpredictable and ambiguous therapeutic clinical situations (p. 416; I’ve anglicized some of the spelling).

Translate that to what journalists are saying about our politicians: ‘they have to have a narrative’. Both caring people and politicians (perhaps some politicians are caring people – hope so) have to make sense of what Yerushalmi describes ‘repetitive failures to make sense of ambiguous and chaotic therapeutic experiences (p. 417)’. Think in two lines here:

1. The bright-eyed and bushy-tailed social worker or therapist sets out trying to help with really very complicated situations in which people have found themselves.

2. The politically committed government minister or supporter tries to follow their principles and political beliefs to deal with…well, think about the news today and how impossible and difficult it all seems.

The social worker/therapist and the minister/supporter have their picture of what they are trying to do and how to do it. They’re trying to follow their training/values, but it’s so complicated that everything seems impossible. And if this happens all the time so that they can’t seem to achieve anything, ‘…such failures might create a persistent experiential state of incomprehension, meaninglessness and helplessness that threatens the therapist’s [or read: social worker/politician/supporter] wellbeing and professional self-experience (p. 417).

I get this picture from what some young social workers say (in Internet posts as only one example) about trying to carry out what they were trained to do within the daily pressures of the job. Again, this is not new. Young social workers have been saying for decades that their education does not prepare them for the sheer complexity of the situations they’re asked to deal with (if it was an easy situation, it wouldn’t have come the way of a social worker). And this has often been picked up. There have been constant complaints from agencies over the years of how social work education does not prepare new social workers for the sheer grind and chaos of real life that they are asked to make thoughtful judgements about. The answer from unthinking agency managers has been just to increase the extent and complexity of the procedures so that, rather than using their educated professional skills, at least they have clearer agency expectations to follow.

But clear sets of procedures do not facilitate a social worker in dealing with complexity. Yerushalmi similarly says that psychotherapists (or social workers - just people really) ‘…construct consistent frameworks or systems of meaning that shape our adaptational and developmental struggles and enliven our dialogues with others (p. 418)’. We are able to adapt and develop in a lively way if our framework of meaning leads us into dialogues with the complexities and the diverse people we are interacting with. This gives us ‘joy’ as we participate in therapeutic encounters, and grow and learn in living (p. 417). Without it we feel lethargy, the walking through stinky glue experience.

Complete predictability and understanding is impossible, but we can relish the ‘absurdity’ of what we are dealing with by:

• Metaphoric language; trying to feel and put into ideas that picture what’s happening;

• The movement and constant change of the ‘narrated therapeutic reality (p. 418)’; how the picture that we can describe of what is going on constantly changes;

• The ‘embodied experiences’ that occur in our dialogues (how they might make us feel liberated, anxious, hopeful, despairing) (p. 418). And those feelings affect our bodies: the lethargy comes from the meaninglessness of what we’re saying and doing.

People therefore have to search for meaning and purpose in what they’re doing if they are to maintain their ‘cohesive and durable sense of worth’ in their job or responsibility. This gives us an appetite for clarity and a need to fill gaps in our understanding and how we are acting. We look to make some sort of complete response that we and the people we work with can undestand as worthwhile. Our sense of meaning needs to help us understand and connect with how others interpret and react to what is going on in any situation they are involved with. Without belief that there is meaning in what we are doing, in what is happening, that we or other people can perceive and work with, we just see our work as absurd and pointless.

Consequently, without being able to see meaning in our actions and in the situation we are helping we only maintain a façade of normal life, superficially meeting what it required of us. Clients, the people, we serve can see behind the superficial show, so we are not real to them either. We turn up to the meetings, write the records, are cheerful around the office. We cling to conventional abstractions and statements about what we’re achieving in the same way that the ‘spin’ of political processes states that what is being done is worthwhile, but hides ‘indifference, alienated cynicism or reflexive nihilism (p. 419)’. ‘It’s nothing’, we say, because it feels like nothing.

In psychotherapy, as in social work, practice theories often create a language for shared understanding of experiences. But social workers and therapists both find they cannot connect those formulations of meaning with the reality of what is happening in the situations they work with. They can’t eplain it. If this becomes so, they cannot then help the people involved to understand and learn from what’s happening to them. What does this mean to you? If what the worker says seems disconnected and absurd, the work cannot be helpful. But where the people they are working with share this experience of disconnection, they are transferring to each other the chaos in their own understanding.

Better to explore the detail of events in real life, make the connection, rather than continually spout about the theory. Better to make sure the theory connects with the detail, rather than continue with a narrative that does not connect with reality.

In politics and the daily news too.

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Yerushalmi, H. (2025). Meaning and loss of meaning in supervision. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 41(3), pp. 416–31.

Doubts and hopes in reading research on a specific culture

Intimate partner violence is the technical name for what is sometimes called ‘domestic abuse’, violence of various kinds between couples, other family members, in an intimate relationship. The fact that it has a jargon abbreviation (IPV) tells you that there is a technical literature about what is a very personal and very social issue among people and in organisations.

In a search for more information about what’s going on in this field to make me feel more able to think through the worries that my local church has about the issue in our area and possibly affecting our congregations, I’m looking at a highly technical article that recently came my way (Harani & Ben-Porat, 2025). It’s pre-publication, so you click on the underlined citation here or the doi number in the reference at the end of the article to view it.

I had my doubts about this article, because it’s written by Israeli academics, presumably psychologists, about the Israeli population (and it makes clear that it doesn’t cover the Arab population which it says might well have different patterns of behaviour; obviously so, hence my caution about reading and using it; more on this right at the end of the post). This is true, of course about any single-country piece of research, but you think less about it if it refers to your own country, without thinking about the diversity of cultures that many articles on specific countries fail to cover. Reading something about an unfamiliar society forces you to keep the doubt in your mind.

And the psychological world often writes as though it is a technology and psychological behaviours are universal, and any social worker has to be a bit cautious about that too. Social workers meet psychological understanding in a complicated world of local and regional cultural contexts when they come to interpret relationships and feelings.

But that assumption of behavioural universality in writings from an unfamiliar context helps you to think about your own assumptions. So, trying to keep my wits about me, I plunge into and try to keep up with the technicalities. Because it’s a worldwide, crosscultural issue, as they start by saying.

Intimate partner violence: the ideas

The authors’ starting point is a definition of IPV:

Physical violence is probably the most hazardous form of IPV. It includes the threat of physical or sexual violence via the use of words, gestures, or weapons to communicate the intent to cause death, disability, injury, or physical harm. Psychological or emotional abuse, for its part, involves trauma to the victim caused by acts, threats of acts, or coercive tactics (e.g., humiliating, controlling, taking advantage of the victim).

You can doubt the ‘most hazardous’ point: it depends what you’re hazarding since the personal, psychological and social consequences may be just as hazardous for an individual as the physical: is death the ultimate hazard?

They note that a lot of the literature on IPV supports ‘family-of-origin’ theories of IPV diagnosis and prevention. What this means is that IPV behaviour comes from our experiences in our families of origin, and not from other factors (such as poverty in the present family and its community or relationship factors in the present relationship). So most research seems to assume that IPV comes from things like our attachment patterns, intergenerational factors and social and cognitive experiences. Wits still about me: is this really true, or mainly a result of being stuck in traditional psychological thinking? I’ll bear that in mind.

They want to study the idea of self-differentiation. This is how we see ourselves as separate from the parents, brothers, sisters and others in our families; how we differentiate ourselves from these intimate others. The idea is that if we haven’t developed the capacity to see ourselves as a clearly differentiated individual from people who are close to us, while still maintaining that closeness, we’re not going to be able to work out our relationships with others very well. Self-differentiation gives us confidence in ourselves as people who can offer emotional and personal things to others, make a useful contribution to a marriage relationship. Deviating from the subject a little, it would also affect how we operated in work relationships or leisure activities with other participants. Interesting t think about, but we’re not talking about these wider contexts here.

The source of the idea that this is important in dealing with IPV is a family therapist, Bowen (1990), who sees self-differentiation as having the emotional maturity to exercise control over your impulses as you deal with other people and in particular to maintain a balance between proximity and separateness in intimate relationships. If you do this, you maintain separateness appropriately so that you don’t see yourself as fused into the relationship with, say your spouse, or anyone you are in an intimate relationship with, so you avoid being too clingy. For example, you can be close to them (proximity) without being totally bound up in interacting only with them, you can feel good about being with them without this being the only way you can feel good. If you’re not good at self-differentiation, you feel you have to cut off from other people, avoiding emotionally charged situations. You might get into a pattern of becoming violent if you don’t have other ways of cutting off from the other person; or into a pattern of being excessively caring and controlling to stay close to them, when some distance might be appropriate.

The study, its findings and implications

The study that Harani and Ben-Porat describe used a battery of psychological tests to compare heterosexual couples who sought help from violence prevention or couple and family helping agencies with other couples from the general population. The results are presented and analysed in great detail. Their idea was that men and women who had achieved good self-differentiation in their lives would be good at offering caregiving to their spouses and accepting caregiving from them and this would reduce their violence or aggression in spousal relationships.

Broadly, the findings showed these assumptions to be right. Husbands’ high self-differentiation led to more ‘responsive caregiving’ behaviours and lower aggression towards their wives. Higher levels of responsive caregiving by the wives led to fewer physical assaults by themselves or their husbands, and lower psychological aggression by both partners. Husbands’ higher self-differentiation led to more responsive caregiving and less aggression by their wives to them. Also, their wives showed more responsive caregiving, less physical assault towards them and less physical assault by the husbands to their wives. More responsive caregiving shown by the wives also meant less psychological aggression by both husbands and wives.

Note, however, that the wives’ self-differentiation was apparently less of a factor. Harani and Ben-Porat surmise that women may be socialised into responsive caregiving anyway, but they also think that the husband’s ability to be cared for and supported in a difficult situation helps this pattern of behaviour to reduce IPV.

The study also found, as many others have, that husbands and wives are equally likely to perpetrate psychological violence or physical assault.

They suggest some ‘clinical implications’ (this psychological jargon means what people such as social workers might do when working with IPV). Broadly this adds up to trying to understand how much capacity of self-differentiation, coping with being close and being separate, the individuals in the couple have. I interpret this as trying to help them use all their experience of relationships to be responsive in offering and receiving care from their partner, but work out how not to be too clingy or too separate in their intimate relationships.

Useful to remember, because this is an issue that comes up a lot for people in any society. I’m left wondering, however, about a culture that was more comfortable with, felt it was more OK to be feeling separation in relationships. Such a culture might well look for a different balance in how people should offer and receive caring and otherwise develop intimacy in relationships. Working on this might need to be different if you were dealing with IPV as a social worker, so you still have to think about the culture of the people you’re working with.

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Bowen, M. (1990). Family therapy in clinical practice. New York: Jason Aronson.

Harani, I. & Ben-Porat, A. (2025). Intimate partner violence: a dyadic examination of self- differentiation and responsive caregiving. Journal of Marriage and Family, 2025; 0:1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.13120.