Social Work as Art: Making Sense for Good Practice (Routledge Revivals)

What is good social work? What decisions and actions are best for clients? What reply can social workers give to criticism that their practice is haphazard and lacks a proper basis in knowledge and expertise?First published in 1986, Social Work as Art examines the ways in which the subjective character of social work consistently poses problems in the organisation and education of social workers and, above all, in the evaluation of their work.Yet the quality of the social worker’s intuition, imagination and experience, the author argues, are the only real basis of good practice and, in consequence, social work’s subjectivity can never be sidestepped.The need is to make it clearer and more manageable. The real nature of social work, Hugh England shows, has been obscured by attempts to define social work within the terms of the social sciences.The author explains that the problems posed by the social worker’s necessary dependence upon intuition are already very familiar in the critical a