Western social work must stop saying that non-Western social work has nothing to teach us

Anish Alex's occasional brief articles on various issues in critical social work this month connects with Western models of social work in non-Western countries. He is commenting on what I have called the 'internationalist' view of the development of social work. In my book The Origins of Social Work: Continuity and Change (2005, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), I argue that the internationalist view (that there is one stream of the development of social work, deriving from the Western 19th century industrialisation, of which models of practice such as social development are variations) is a historically incorrect analysis. Later, Gurid Aga Askland and I argued that the internationalist view is an aspect of postcolonial globalisation: a cultural domination of less powerful cultural ideas by Western thought. (Payne, M. and Askeland, G. A. (2008) Globalization and International Social Work: Postmodern Change and Challenge. Aldershot: Ashgate). I have recently written an article for a journal which has not yet appeared arguing that forms of macro social work such as social development and social pedagogy clearly emerge from their source cultures, and are developed in differing welfare regimes according to cultural and policy thinking in different nations. I will post a citation to this article if it is accepted and appears.

It is now widely accepted that it is inappropriate to attempt simply to transfer Western social work to other cultural and policy settings, and Anish Alex proposes that each country needs to be aware of the cultural and policy sources of its own social work, and make appropriate adaptations to incoming ideas. Askeland and I argue that this is not just a responsibility of non-Western countries. Western educators and writers must go further than acknowledging this, but have a duty to prepare resources that are capable of adaptation to alternative cultures.

Western social work also has a duty to learn about those adaptations and new ideas and change Western social work to reflect knowledge and understanding emerging from non-Western cultures. Otherwise, we are just saying that non-Western cultures have nothing to teach us.


Link to Anish Alex's brief article