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How social work values are essential to practice

Malcolm Payne

Emeritus Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University,

Honorary Professor, Kingston University London

Paper presented to the 14th National Social Work Congress and

2nd IberoAmerican Social Work Congress
May 2022, in Ciudad Real, Spain.
The essentials of social work
Consejo General del Trabajo Social
Published 2022 in Spanish by Consejo General del Trabajo Social, Madrid

Cite as: Payne, M. (2022). Por qué los valores del trabajo social son esensiales para la
practica. In Consejo General del Trabajo Social (Eds.). Este libro recoge las ponencias marco
y las conclusiones del IV Congreso Estatal y II Iberoamericano del Trabajo Social (pp 81-
99). Madrid: Consejo General del Trabajo Social.
https://www.cgtrabajosocial.es/files/63b2bf3765fe7/libro_ponencias_final.pdf.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 2

How social work values are essential to practice

Abstract

Social work values are thought to be important in practice, but practitioners often find
them hard to express and use. Recent debate proposes that occasions when ‘ethical
stress’ arises for practitioners pinpoint where difficult relationship and social justice
issues arise. This paper argues that exploring the prescriptions offered by different
practice theories may clarify and express these values in helpful ways. Five different
streams of social work thinking are identified: problem-based interventions to achieve
social cohesion in US and European practice, social pedagogy in mainland Europe, social
development in countries of the Global South and indigenist practice in countries where
colonisation displaced the values of pre-settler and pre-colonial populations. Analysis of
practice theories identifies practice issues that arise in several different theories that
locate value conflicts. These include issues around relationship; alliance, collectivity and
solidarity; interpretations of change; significant learning, personal and social
development opportunities and strengths. Less obvious value issues often arise around
mental energy; activity and experience; confrontation and challenge; clarification
interpretation and insight; and patterns and consistencies. Case examples suggest how
focusing on these issues and practice value concerns can clarify and express key values
conflicts in a practical way.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 3

How social work values are essential to practice

Introduction

Social work sees itself as a values-based profession, but many practitioners find it hard to see
what these values are and how social work expresses them. They find difficulty in
incorporating them consistently into their practice. Traditional professional values such as
confidentiality and enabling clients’ self-direction are appreciated, but do not seem to strike
at the really crucial tasks that social workers must undertake. Formulations of social work
ethics and values seem to express broad social objectives, respecting people for example,
rather than explain exactly how to implement them in the reality that faces social workers in
everyday practice in their agencies.

In this paper, I propose that analysis of the main theories of social work practice clarifies the
important social work values expressed in what social workers do. In this way, each theory
expresses in a practical way the range of possibilities open to social work, and identifies in its
practice guidance, the ethical requirements of the methods that social workers use. This gives
us a realistic account of the values that are expressed as we practise social work. If we
identify and explore values expressed in practice, we can understand values relevant to what
we do every day, while values formulated as ideals or codes of practice of guidance can seem
idealistic, ideological or distant from what is important to the people we work with.

Social work ethics and values and ethical stress

A profession’s values are often seen as foundational, that is, basic to that profession’s
practice and, therefore, universal and enduring. But it is more helpful to see values as
pointing to issues that are difficult, and possibly unresolvable. Fenton (2015, 2016) recently
identified ‘ethical stress’ in a study of social workers’ practice, where practitioners felt unable
to practice in ways that they felt were ethical. This was either because there was a disjuncture
between the expectations of their agency and what is formally expressed social work values,
or because they were unable to base their practice in what they felt was ‘right’ because ideas
about what is right, such as equality or justice, are hard to put into practice (Fenton, 2016:
p12).

It has been traditional to base social work in sets of established ethical principles of what is
right and wrong, in deontological or principles-based systems of ethics, which are often
expressed in ethical codes (Banks, 2021: 42-74; Reamer, 2018: 78-80. An example is the
International Federation of Social Workers’ (IFSW) (2018) Global social work statement of
ethical principles, mirrored in many similar national, regional and specialised codes. There
has been criticism that these are too generalised to give guidance in practice (Watson, 1985).
In an era of social uncertainty and flux, there has been increasing interest in other ways of
exploring values issues, including character or virtues-based ethics (Banks, 2021: 75-113;
Banks & Gallagher, 2009), relationship ethics or the ethics of care (Banks, 2021: 75-113;
Barnes, Brannelly, Ward & Ward, 2015). These connect well with ideas of social justice
(Watts & Hodgson, 2019). Fenton (2016: 138), though, argues that ethical understanding
through exploring issues that raise ethical stress also helpfully identifies where relationship
and social justice issues arise.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 4

Those issues are constantly in flux; they may seem to change according to the social issues
that particular societies face. Therefore, although some value issues express long-lasting
concerns, the issues that they throw up re-emerge in new ways. We can see this in the
particular concerns of social work in any historical period and national political issues. For
example, in the 1950s, Western societies were often concerned with re-establishing, for that
era, patterns of domestic and family life and childcare after the disruption of two world wars,
revolutions and social disruptions. So, social work theoretical development focused on family
work and child development as a way of maintaining social order (Iacovetta, 1998). In the
1990s and early 2000s, central Europe picked up social work after a hiatus during the period
of communist political control, and the focus here became the adoption of interpersonal social
work interventions within new welfare provision (Labath & Ondrušková, 2019). Similar
significant issues facing social work practice currently might include indigenist social work
practice (Hart, 2019), eco or green social work and the impact of climate change and other
ecological disasters (Dominelli, 2012; Matthies & Närhi, 2017; McKinnon & Alston, 2016)
and recently the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic (Fronek & Rotabi-Casares, 2022). This
latter issue connects with a growing concern about social work engagement in responses to
global disaster situations (Alston, Haseleger & Hargreaves, 2019).

Identifying a value issue as we practice may alert us to the need to work carefully through a
conundrum, rather than directing us to a code of ethics that will provide guidance on
resolving our problem. If we take this view, it becomes clear that expressing social work’s
professional values is foundational in the sense that they identify for us the primary
difficulties with values that affect the issues that social work has to grapple with, but they do
not tell us what to do about those difficulties. Social work values say what is important in our
practice, and in particular what is importantly difficult.

Values weaknesses in globally applicable values statements

Current definitions and values statements offer examples of the weaknesses of broad,
ideological values statements that set hard-to-apply principles. The current formulation of the
Global Definition of Social Work (International Federation of Social Workers, 2014) outlines
three objectives, what its website describes as ‘core mandates’:

• social change and development

• social cohesion
• the empowerment and liberation of people.

Because these are expressed as broad social objectives, they do not tell us much about values
that social work implements through its practice. They do not say what kind of change,
cohesion and development social work wants to achieve, or what form empowerment and
liberation should take. Therefore, these objectives cannot provide the essence, the features
that social work that achieve these objectives.

The Global definition also expresses four social work values, which it describes as ‘central
principles’:

• social justice
• human rights
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 5

• collective responsibility
• respect for diversities.

These again describe very broad characteristics of a society that social work seeks to achieve,
but they do not explain what kind of justice, what areas of human rights, how collective
responsibility can be implemented or what forms of respect for what aspects of diversities
social work tries to achieve.

I show in the following two sections that it is possible and valuable for social workers to gain
greater clarity on values issues that point to the difficult practice in our practice by extracting
the values implications from different conceptualisations of practice. The next section
explores five historic streams of social work thinking for the underlying values issues
relevant to practice and the following section identifies values implications from theoretical
accounts of social work practice. In the final section, I use some brief case examples to
illustrate how tying these values issues to practice conceptualisations allows us to identify the
values implications of social work practice decisions.

Five historic streams of social work practice thinking

Social work is not a unified body of knowledge and theory with universal application. A
range of social works have emerged from the needs of practitioners, which form the basis for
identifiably different social professions responding to the needs and issues that are raised for
social workers to tackle in different parts of the world (Payne, 2012). Each of these different
social professions, social work (the Western formulation), social assistance (a welfare-
services-based formulation), social pedagogy (a European variant of social work), social
development (a community formulation strong in Asian, African and Latin American
countries) and indigenist practice (in former colonial societies) has created connected but
clearly different conceptualisations of social work.

I identify five main streams of thinking in social work theory derived from these different
traditions and cultural expectations); these provide the frameworks within which we practise.
They make connections in different ways between the social with the personal. They are:

• Problem-based practice to achieve social cohesion aims in US and European practice

theory. There are two elements to this: one is seeing change in the social world as
producing problems for people, and the second is working with their need help to adapt,
psychologically and in their social relationships. I think we can better understand this
stream as endorsing collectivity and solidarity as social work objectives. It recognises,
first, that people value stability in their lives and relationships, on which social change
has an impact, and, second, that the best way of achieving that is through collective
endeavour and solidarity among social groups that are in contact with one another.
Practice debate in this stream of thinking mainly focuses on how people can become
resilient to change in themselves and in their social relationships. Part of this is ‘social
assistance’, the service-delivery approach to resolving the problems that people face,
usually based in developed economies on collective tax-raising powers.
• Social pedagogy (or social education) is a European conceptualisation that emerged from
the same period of social change, but responded to it differently. It does not see social
change as problematic, but as natural and continuing in everyone’s life and in every
society. Social change does not necessarily create problems for people, but engages them
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 6

in a process of shared learning. Social pedagogy claims that learning is not just a process
of acquiring knowledge and understanding. Instead, it needs to be fulfilled in a social
context so that our understanding of the world goes alongside a process of learning social
engagement. We achieve this through carrying out shared activities with other people.
The ‘heart’, our motivation to contribute to our own and others’ wellbeing and happiness,
goes alongside relationships, through people’s holistic learning that strengthens the ‘head’
(brainpower to take action in the world) and the ‘hands’ (skills to take that action).
• Critical social work takes up yet another aspect of social change, which emphasises the
structural nature of society. Social structures generate and sustain conflicts of interest
between different aspects of society, and this stream of thought sees these structural
conflicts as the source of social difficulties. While this formulation of social work is
present in Western social work, it has often been sidelined by psychological change
theory and service-delivery approaches to social work, but it is central particularly to
Latin-American formulations of critical social work emphasising collective community
action.

While the social cohesion stream of social work thought sees personal and social problems as
arising from disruptions in social stability caused by social change, critical social work
identifies as the issue conflicts of interest deriving from the structures. If we see social
structures in this way, it helps us to understand the role of critical and structural practice. One
of the criticisms of structural practice is that it tells us to change social structures by working
for social change, while social workers primarily work with individuals, communities,
families and small groups, and do not have access in their work to mechanisms of wide social
change. Critical and structural practice techniques, however, focus on empowering people to
understand and engage in structural conflicts as a way of dealing with the issues that they
face in their lives. These techniques direct social work practice at these conflicts of structure,
rather than seeing practice as working on people’s problems with social structures.

This distinction is important to how we practice and the techniques we use in practice. It says
that the distinction is not between micro, interpersonal work and macro work because both
are possible in both streams of thought. What it says is that both micro, interpersonal work
and macro work can be directed either at problems that are personalised or alternatively at
conflicts that are structural in their nature. Critical social work argues that directing our
perspective at conflicts that are structural is more useful. Ethically, it is also more respectful
of the importance of people’s personal and social identities, and that is why concern about
personal and social identity and anti-oppressive practice become increasingly important. The
difficulty is that Western formulations of social work focus on interpersonal change and
service delivery and this leads to the disjuncture identified in Fenton’s (2015) research that
many practitioners feel between their agency’s and broader social objectives compared with
their analysis of the issues faced by that their clients and the communities they work in.

• Social development is a stream of thought originally derived from welfare development

practice in British, French and Spanish colonial administrations, influenced also by the
thinking of Christian churches. It was taken up by the United Nations, influenced by US
political objectives during the Cold War. In that context, it was seen as contributing social
welfare objectives to economic and industrial development in globalising economies (for
example in Midgley’s, 1995, account). More recently, however, this perspective has been
taken on by African and Asian writers (Desai, 2014; Patel, 2015; Tan, Chan, Mehta, &
Androff, 2017) with a focus on participation in alleviating and eradicating poverty,
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 7

building environmental sustainability and food security, gender equality and women’s
economic liberation, and responding to health and education inequalities and needs. The
aim is to generate social entrepreneurship and political and economic capabilities as
community resources, rather than as contributions to global economic objectives.
• Indigenist theory (Hart, 2019) connects with social development; it has emerged
particularly where colonisation displaced pre-settler and pre-colonial populations. It seeks
to formalise the position of practitioners who see their profession as allied to culturally
and ethnically distinct, local social norms and structures. It seeks to draw into current
social work practice the cultural, environmental, knowledge, political and social identity
and understandings of the pre-colonial population. This stream of theory emphasises the
cultural and social identity as an important factor in social work practice.

These five streams of thinking, associated with differing social professions reflecting
different cultures and traditions around the world, establish the framework of issues that
social work practice theory seeks to grasp and respond to. Each tries to establish a way of
understanding and responding to social change, social structure and cultural and social
identity relevant to its local cultural traditions. All the development of social work thinking
proposes that these are the essential issues that all social work tackles and that must be
resolved.

From considering these streams of thinking, we can see the value that social work attaches to
defining and addressing personal and social problems, personal and social learning,
criticality, development, incorporating ideas of progress, progression, improvement,
expansion and, finally, indigenous cultural and structural norms.

Values issues underlying social work practice theories

In this section, I examine values issues that may be identified within social work practice
theories. The idea of practice theory is debated. Sibeon (1990) made a widely-adopted
distinction between theories of what social work is, theories of how to do social work, and
theories of the client world. This latter category refers to theory drawn from the social
sciences about the people social workers work with, such as children, older people and people
with learning or physical disabilities, or with mental illness. Some social work theorists
prefer to focus on theory about the nature and social role of social work, examining the kind
of issues I have been exploring in the broad streams of thought discussed earlier. Since
Sibeon’s distinction was developed within social work, sociological research has recognised a
category of ‘practice theory’, a kind of social theory that describes how a social group
conceives of and organises important aspects of its work (Hui, Schatzki & Shove, 2017;
Nicolini. 2012). Practice theories, in this conception, create social structures that provide
stability in the actions that a social group undertakes. They describe who acts in social
situations, what they want to accomplish, the outcomes of the actions and what relationships
those actions create. Also included in practice theory is the interests of the people who
participate, including (in the case of social workers) clients, relatives and communities
surrounding clients, managers and policy-makers in the field. So, practice theory shows who
manages and controls actions and who exercises power within relationships. By this means, it
allows us to examine what knowledges are used in actions and relationships, what
understandings and discourses re relevant to the people involved in the practice and the sense
they make of the processes they are engaged in.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 8

This conception of practice theory allows us to understand social work values better, because
we can look at social work’s practice theory to tell us what underlying value ideas occur in
practice. To do this, I have extracted some of the important ideas from a wide range of
practice theories covered in Payne (2021a). This book reviewed recent analyses of practice
theories and constructed a comprehensive critical overview of practice theories. In the
following table, I list the practice theories covered and extract a limited number of significant
ideas essential to the practice of each theory. In this account, I have included the broad
streams of thought as practice theories: social pedagogy, critical social work, social
development and indigenist theory.
Table Value implications of practice theories

Practice theory Value implications: what is empowering, facilitating?

Psychodynamic Behaviour management, mental energy
- relational Relationships
- attachment Relationships, personal identity, strengths
Crisis Emotional energy, behaviour management, learning, personal
development, strengths
Task-centred Activities, learning, strengths
Cognitive-behavioural Rational behaviour management
Motivational interviewing Emotional and behavioural management through preparation
Systems Social connections, social support
- environmental Social networks help overcome environmental stress
- complexity Complexity, adaptation, in social networks
- chaos Understanding patterns in complex systems
Macro Cooperative, entrepreneurship, activation, social solidarity
- social pedagogy Learning, positive experiences, activity
- social development Solidarity, alliance
Social construction Solidarity, experiences, social capital
- strengths Identities, strengths
- solutions Clarifying solutions
- narrative Clarifying narratives
Humanistic Self-actualisation, experiences, connectedness, participation
Social justice Challenge, inequalities, justice
- advocacy Identify, represent, interests, power, justice
- empowerment Construct alliances, personal development, barriers
Critical Structural barriers, understanding, action
Eco (green) Confront, environmental injustices, understanding, action,
environmental connections
Feminist Alliances, inequalities, justice, power
Anti-oppressive Address oppressive relations, barriers, personal development,
experience
- indigenist Self-actualisation, identity
Source: Payne (2021).

What do these elements of practice theory tell us about the values of social work? First, many
of the values do not contrast the aims of social change with individual and family help; they
are present in both. Second, exploring some of the important practice issues that are raised
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 9

repeatedly in different theoretical perspectives, it is possible to identify some of the aspects of

humanity that we value in people’s lives. If values point to the difficult places in social work,
it is not surprising that they recur frequently in its practice and therefore in its practice
theories.
Some such issues are repeatedly identified as important aspects of practice techniques, but we
do not often acknowledge their importance as values. Examples include:
• Relationship - Several theories of practice see relationships as important aspects of
clients’ lives that should be part of practitioners’ assessments, and as crucial in caring and
helping effectively, for example in working therapeutically, or in working on attachment,
bereavement and loss or connectedness in general. Others focus on the assessing or
building connections to help isolated people or improving support. This represents
relationship as an instrument or objective in caring and helping. But thinking about the
importance we give to relationship in social work also points out to us how social work
values relationship as a factor in human life. Social work sees relationship as a valuable
thing for all people to have, for all structures in society to promote. For social work,
relationship is a crucial part of enhancing the ‘social’, of the connectivity among humans
in society. This is a requirement of people understanding the responsibility to care for
others, the ‘ethics of care’ (Brugère, 2019) and of the availability of care in a society
being a matter of morality and justice (Sevenhuijsen, 1998). Indirectly, connectedness and
relationship of people is required for people to recognise the responsibility to deal with
inequalities, oppression and other structural issues that arise in societies.
• Alliance, collectivity and solidarity – Related to this, many social work practice theories
see alliance, working collectively, in solidarity and to promote solidarity as crucial to
practice. Social workers working with individuals are seen to require ‘therapeutic
alliance’ to achieve a client’s ends (Payne, 2020: 44) with a shared agenda and respect for
clients as people crucial to achieving it. These are also essential aspects of anti-
oppressive, community work, critical, feminist, macro and social development practices
(Payne, 2021b: 16), in ensuring respect for the empowerment and self-direction of the
people practitioners work with. The universality of these ideas in social work practice and
practice theory again points to their importance as values, because of the importance in
practice but the difficulty of understanding and implementing them.
• Change – Many social work practice theories focus on change, this includes those
emphasising behaviour change as well as those seeking social change. There are different
interpretations of change. For example, motivational interviewing (MI) (Miller &
Rollnick, 2013), based as it is in the transtheoretical model of change (Prochaska &
diClemente, 1984) suggests change is difficult and must be prepared for, while cognitive-
behaviour practice sees it as a matter of developing and researching structured procedures
for behavioural change. MI focuses on the importance of motivation to achieve it, and
critical practice theory, macro and social development practice aim to build alliances to
support it. Emerging from this difference in conception, however, we can see the
importance to social work of the struggle to achieve change of all kinds. Even though
social work’s aims in the Global Definition (International Federation of Social Workers,
2014) include working for social cohesion, and historically combating social disruption
and maintaining social order have been proposed as controversial aspects of social work
on behalf of governments and in the delivery of services, understanding change of all
kinds in society is clearly an important value of social work. The controversy and struggle
surrounding change in its theory, suggests that working for any change highlights a place
of difficulty for social work.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 10

• Learning, personal and social development – both psychological and socially critical
theories of practice focus on people’s learning and personal development as an important
outcome of practice, and social pedagogy incorporates a particular emphasis on both
personal and group educational processes in development. Humanistic ideas, which
underlie much interpersonal social work activity and also many counselling activities,
highlight achieving self-actualisation as a crucial process. Critical theories and social
development theories also place the idea of development in the foreground, placing
significance on values such as progress, improvement, expansion of personal and social
capacities.
• Strengths - A concern with developing strengths is present in psychodynamic attachment
theory, pragmatic task-centred practice as well as social constructionist strengths theory.
Critical and structural theories of practice and empowerment also aim to develop
strengths among individuals and disadvantaged and oppressed social groups to combat
inequalities. They also see strengths in pursuing and understanding a sense of personal
and social identity as a major factor in enabling personal and social change.
While well-established theoretical debate illustrates the value of these social practice
concepts, there are others which are equally important, but less apparent in social work’s
daily discourse. The following are some examples we may identify in the Table.
• Mental energy – Connected to the importance of strengths, social work practice theory
also points to the importance of energy as a value which points to some difficult issues in
practice. ‘Traditional social work’ (Payne, 2021b: 224), the social work casework practice
around problem-solving built on psychodynamic theory, sees the mind as the dynamo of
behaviour and social relations. Similarly, crisis theory emphasises the importance of an
early focus on the emotional energy released by crises in people’s lives. Social
development and the increasingly strong focus on disasters as an important part of social
work relies on releasing people’s psychic and social energy. Motivational interviewing
stresses clients’ motivation to change as giving the impetus to make changes in their
lives, task-centred, solutions and strengths practice theories all use the identifying and
pursuing self-identified goals as crucial to enabling people to move forward. Many
aspects of social development ideas give weight to entrepreneurship, what Burghardt
(2014: 99) calls ‘chutzpah’, the enthusiasm and self-confidence to motivate people in
community groups in community and macro practice, and reference to empowerment and
ability to overcome barriers arising from power relations in society that is present in anti-
oppressive and critical practice theory all speak to the value given in social work to
mental energy and the difficulty of engendering it.
• Activity and experience – Similarly, the focus on generating activity in task-centred
practice, ‘in vivo’ rehearsal of skills and social learning development in cognitive-
behavioural practice and of generating shared action in community work, macro and
social development practice theory all demonstrate the value given to positive action and
activity in social work. It is particularly central to social pedagogy (Charfe & Gardner,
2019; Marynovich-Hetka, 2019; Stephens, 2013). This emphasis on action and activity is
challenged by motivational interviewing, which suggests that change is not achieved by
completing tasks that move towards objectives, but only in a holistic, motivated
commitment to change (Payne, 2019: 145). Again, this theoretical debate suggests that
the value given to activity and gaining experience to achieve change is in reality difficult
to achieve in practice; hence the emphasis in motivational interviewing on helping people
to recover from relapse, when they have made but not sustained a change.
Psychodynamic theory, in the practice idea of sustainment in Hollis’s (Woods & Hollis,
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 11

1999) psychosocial practice theory, also suggests that achieving progress through activity
is not an easy aspect of social work. The value again points to the difficult area which
reveals important issues for resolution in social work practice and the social work
profession.
• Confrontation and challenge – Three types of social work practice theory emphasise the
importance of confrontation and challenge in social work practice, again pointing to their
value as part of social work. Many interpersonal and psychological theories of social
work require practitioners to assess discrepancies between observations and what people
say, between beliefs and apparent realities and confront difficulties that people cannot
face. Motivational interviewing, strengths and solutions practice all require practitioners
to challenge people’s existing way of looking at the issues they are working on. Anti-
oppressive, critical, eco and feminist practice theory also require challenge to social
structures creating barriers and inequalities affecting clients. In a more complex way,
many critical theories involve practitioners in bringing people together to use techniques
such as Freire’s (1970, 1972, 1974[1967]). critical pedagogy to share experience that
enables them to understand oppressive structures in society and find ways to deal with
them.
• Clarification, interpretation and insight – Similarly, many interpersonal and
psychological theories of practice require clarification of people’s thinking and
understanding, through exploration of experiences and gaining insight into the personal
and social influences on behaviour. Many practice theories, and many social workers’
practice experience, tells us that people want to understand why this crisis, this disaster,
this problem has been triggered and is happening to them. Equally, many social workers’
roles in agencies involves clarifying to decision-makers, in court reports and in social
histories the behavioural and social issues facing clients. Cognitive-behavioural practice
requires detailed analysis of the antecedents and consequences of specific behaviour and
how these interact, so that interventions can be successfully formulated. Clarifying
interactions and patterns in life, narratives and solutions and all part of newer forms of
interpersonal helping. Clarification and understanding of structural inequalities and
injustices and insight into their personal and social impacts is crucial to most critical
practices.
• Patterns and consistencies – Picking up issues of clarification, many psychological
theories look for consistencies and patterns in behaviours as part of assessment. Systems
theories, particularly complex adaptive systems theories and chaos theory, argue that
patterns are integral to the way in which social relations and structures affect people’s
lives. Critical and structural theories also want people to understand the consistency with
which injustice and oppression create barriers that affect people’s lives. Finding patterns,
therefore, becomes an important value in all social work, because it shows where the
focus of social work action should lie.
Some case examples

1 An elderly woman with mental health problems was being cared for by her son at
home, helped by a palliative care team providing the woman with end-of-life care.
The woman’s behaviour was difficult for her son to manage, and there was a
pattern of anger leading on occasion to his physically assaulting her. The domestic
elder abuse was referred for adult social work assistance. In the work, challenging
the mother’s behaviour, clarifying and helping them to understand the pressures in
the situation was an important starting point. To give them a different focus in
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 12

their relationship, they were encouraged to work together on the activity of

creating a memory box about their life together, a common process for helping
family members prepare for memorialising a significant death.
2 A large family of children are referred to children’s social care services by their
school because of evidence emotional stress arising from the social limitations of
the Covid-19 pandemic. Simply in making the referral and accepting it as a
legitimate focus for social work, we can see the value attached to mental energy.
Assessment revealed patterns of conflict between the parents and within issues
causing relationship difficulties in the school; the assessment and the concern was
around patterns and consistencies.
3 A community group responsible for managing a housing estate fell into conflict
because some wanted to improve facilities for disabled and older people in the
estate, while others did not want the increased costs this would involve, and
various possible inconveniences from the various changes that would occur. To
resolve this, the social worker set up a working party involving both interests to
plan various changes. By focusing on planning, various arrangements acceptable
to both sides were created, and the members worked together to identify people
living on the estate who had the skills to carry out the practical work required. In
this response, the focus on change, sharing experience, collective work, the use
and development of people’s skills and strengths are all typical of the social work
approach to interpersonal and social issues.

In all these case examples, the value attached to relationship is a notable feature of the
approach. Implementing the value of relationships would not be typical in the same way in,
for example, in a police enforcement reaction to domestic abuse in case 1. Similarly, a school
approach to behaviour in school would not focus family relationship in the way that social
workers did, and a housing management approach to case 3 would not have led
improvements in solidarity in the group achieved by the social worker.

I argue that the values expressed in social work are characteristic of social work practice
theory approaches which would not be achieved in the same way by different professionals.

Conclusion

In this paper, I argued that many accounts of social work values do not explain how and why
they are essential to practice. This is sometimes because they are expressed as principles at
too high a level of generality and sometimes because they pronounce ideals that engender
social workers’ commitment but unconnected with the requirements of social policy and
agency management requirements. So social workers experience a disjuncture between what
they believe and what they can implement in practice.

To respond to this, I propose that we should seek to extract the values that lie hidden in the
objectives of different forms of social work practice and social work professionalism that we
may identify in varying forms of social work across the world. We can also identify values
expressed in our practice, unseen in expression of professional values but clearly present and
directly relevant in accounts of our professional practice found in practice theory. Similar
values may be found in a wide range of theories of all kinds with wide applicability.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 13

I have suggested that we can distinguish in the five main streams of social work thinking
characteristic of different social professions across the world the values of addressing
problems, learning, criticality, development and indigenous culture. Exploring and debating
how these are important in our different practices may provide a fruitful approach to value
debate in social work.

Similarly, we can identify a number of important themes in practice theory that offer cogent
value issues that direct our attention to what is important but difficult in practice. I have
suggested that these include values identifiable up front as important in formulations of social
workers’ practice theories and in clients’ and broader social objectives such as relationship,
alliance and solidarity, change, learning and personal development and strengths. Others may
be found in issues that are often important but unspoken in practice, including the value of
mental energy, activity, challenge, clarification and pattern.

The implication of this argument is that it may be more constructive to explore these practice
values as the basis for seeing what is essential in social work than ideals that may be hard to
implement in practice. These practice values are what puts our ideals of freedom and justice
into action.
 Malcolm Payne: How social work values are essential to practice - 14

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