Experience, objectivity, professional expertise and discretion
Tricky issues for social workers when they speak for others
Last week’s Thursday Social work bites post looked at research on children’s participation in family courts. The children wanted to have their own voice in proceedings, or at least to be sure that professionals adequately represented their views. And where social workers were acting as professional advocates, there were obviously conflicting concerns. Should social work advocacy, in some circumstances, be ‘instructed advocacy’, where the practitioner takes instructions from a client and acts according to them, or is using professional discretion necessary or useful?
But some of the early writing on social work advocacy was very much about the social worker picking up and running with what their client needed to say, or at least with their assessment of what they thought their client ought to need to say. Then, you brought it to the halls of power in internal meetings and resource allocation decisions; this is not speaking with the client’s voice, although it may be speaking in their interests. I suspect this is where the young people in last week’s research came adrift from their social workers. They couldn’t understand why the social worker would be deciding what should concern them and putting the professional judgement into the system, rather than the child’s voice.
More broadly, a lot of research and professional commentary has focused on consumers’ participation in decision-making in official social service decisions. Looking back at the history of social work, however, as Social work history bites posts do on Tuesdays, we can see that social workers in many countries have been drawn into professionalisation projects, to build the standing and public valuation of social work. If that’s what they are about, is what they’re doing solely in their interests? Or will they be perceived as always speaking in the professional interest, rather than the interests of the people theyr serve?
And this week’s Social work history in 20 books post yesterday, is an example. It brought this issue up in a different way. An influential 1970s text on systems theory in social work took for granted that social work actions would be assessed for, organised and managed throughout by the social worker. Respectful of clients, yes, but not really paying any attention to their voice. If that’s where social work comes from, it’s not surprising that people have their doubts about how they can advocate for clients.
I am reminded of an article nearly twenty years ago in Australian Social Work (Green et al., 2006), considering the unfashionable concept of professional distance.
They start from the premise in a quotation from the ‘reflective practice’ guru, Donald Schön:
So long as the conduct of society depends upon special knowledge and competence, there will be an essential place for the professions. And so long as the professions are shaped by traditional models of knowledge and practice, neither the ideology not the institutional reforms of the radical critics will eliminate the evils of expertise (Schön, 1983).
It’s interesting to see both the value of expertise and its evils acknowledged in one short passage. Having expertise, knowledge and skill allows you to do things that perhaps the ordinary person could not, and clients often value their social workers for their ability to find a way on their behalf through the thickets of society. But obviously many clients also experience social workers as a thorny part of the thickets.
Expertise connects with objectivity, because both characteristics distance social workers from subjective feelings, attitudes and beliefs affecting clients’ lives. They can observe these subjectivities, analyse them, but can they feel them adequately to represent them? In creating that professional distance, an expert may become personally distant. And this may lead them to fail to represent a true voice of the client.
And it’s not only expertise and distance that may distort what you’re saying on behalf of a client. A recent article on research ethics (von Köppen, et al., 2025; it’s pre-publication so to read it, search for the DoI number in the reference at the end of this post) goes through the complexities of a situation in which the role of a participative researcher led her to be concerned about how well a participant was managing to put her ideas across in a meeting. But working to try to deal with this issue had caused her to miss important aspects of what the client was saying. This only came to light later. Part of the problem was, in my interpretation of a very complex situation, that the client had a ‘give an informative lecture’ model of speaking in a meeting, while the researcher was thinking about her with a ‘having a voice’ model in mind.
Part of the complexity, my interpretation again, was that the content of the discussion was partly about some artistic products, pottery sculptures, that were being shared. My experience in a hospice of working with music therapists and community artists is that artistic work has just to be experienced. You can interpret and explain it, but you also have to allow space just to be in touch with the art. The art allows someone to have a voice, but the voice is not the verbal explanation, it is the art itself and people’s experience of it. Just in the same way as the voice of a child in court proceedings needs to be experienced to allow it to have the chance of opening your mind to their view of the world.
Going back to Green et al.’s (2006) thoughtful article, it is often the case that an expert role is inappropriate in dealing with many social work clients who are people who have been devalued in the way they are treated by people with power. Consequently, valid experience and understanding may be ignored, rejected as members of the public encounter all sorts of public services. Feminist approaches to practice seek to achieve more equal, non-authoritarian styles of ‘dialogue’ with clients (Green et al, p. 455), with practitioners being open to clients’ understandings and interpretations of what is going on in the situations that they are dealing with.
It may be an age in which deference to authority and to expertise has been disallowed in social work, and in many public services. Well and good, but provided you are open to challenge, it’s not unreasonable to expect social workers to contribute understanding and knowledge to a situation they are involved with. We’re paying them from the client’s (and everyone else’s) taxes for them to make this contribution after all. Green’s personal expertise was in rural practice, and an aspect of this article makes it clear that dealing with people in rural settings requires an awareness and understanding of making your life in the particular ways required by the place you live.
Green and her colleagues argue that giving a voice, arguing a case, situations need to include professional expertise, but in the context of a more flexible openness to the organisational and professional boundaries that are inevitable when an official from an organisation deals with human life experience. Officialdom is not really about human life experience, it’s often more about the fair application of rules and effective and accountable use of resources.
In reality, it's obvious that social workers, especially those who are public officials, but also where they have professional helping and therapeutic roles, will have distance from the clients they work with because of their official or therapeutic social positions. At times they speak for their clients, but they can’t have full experience of the lives of their clients. They will nevertheless know more about the lives of their clients than the magistrates or psychiatrists that are the audience for their court reports or social histories. Or the resource commissioners who allocate the care home places or care worker hours. That’s also what we pay social workers for.
The evidence of these articles is that connected life experience, artistic experiences, and expertise are all worthwhile as add-ins to the human interaction that forms the basis of the social work that speaks for the needs and wishes of clients. And sits alongside openness to participation and facilitation of clients’ own self-advocacy for their interests. Objectivity and professional distance raises the impact that social workers can have with deciaion-makers. And they also allow for not being on the side of the oppressors and couldn’t-care-less brigade. You can care very much and still use expertise to be objective.
Green, R., Gregory, R. & Mason, R. (2006). Professional distance and social work: stretching the elastic? Australian Social Work. 59(4), 449-61.
Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.
von Köppen, M., Banks, S., Brear, M., Drinkwater, J., Higgins, M. & Shabangu, P. (2025): Under the microscope: shifting perspectives on an ethics case in participatory health research in a German care home. Ethics and Social Welfare, DOI: 10.1080/17496535.2025.2460112.