Social Work: Critical Theory and Practice.(Book review)

SOCIAL WORK: CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE Jan Fook London: Sage Publications 2002: 179 pp PB AUD142.20/GBP60.00/USD107.25 ISBN 0-7619-7251-X

Social work is a professional specialism which has a problem articulating its 'bag of tricks'. It seems innocuously enough to be one of 'the helping professions'. In reality social work is in the complicated business of linking individuals, families and communities with appropriate responses. It works on the capacity for policies and services to meet the expectations of citizenship. It aims to provide the appropriate service and still be fair and indeed emancipatory.

On the one hand, the social worker must respond to the individual's narrative about the factors which explain why they have a social worker in their lives. On the other, the social worker is obliged to note other narratives, possibly contesting, possibly in quite different terms and levels of authority, which are also bearing down on the environment the individual occupies. In this situation, 'warm fuzzy stuff' probably won't be adequate. Fook is keen to smarten up the imaginative and analytical acuity of the practitioner for this critical and invariably demanding context.

For readers in the allied health professions and for some sociologists, this book could be something of an assault. It applies postmodern theory to social work practice. For many, postmodernity is an acquired taste, but in Fook's approach it becomes a vein of ore which can be mined for its insight, its disciplinary processes and its intellectual heft as a way of working on behalf of clients in social settings where their access to civil and personal rights are at risk.

The book is divided into three sections. First, Fook usefully reviews the tradition of radical and critical social work theory and practice. The second section moves deeper into a sociology of knowledge and challenges the privileged narratives, that is, the practice narratives of other professions and their cultural forms. In one of the boxes inviting students to examine their own learning, Fook asks 'would you think differently about ideas ... if you read them in a book ... by Jacques Derrida, or they were told to you by your aging aunt?'(p.35) Social workers can often be in the unenviable position where the views of the ...