Exploring social workers’ ‘deep structural’ policy practice in Norwegian third sector organizations

• In Event: Advocacy and Structural Social Work

Abstract

While the public sector remains the dominant employer of Norwegian social workers, a significant portion of them find employment in third sector organizations. The conditions for practicing social work in these organizations differ in some respects from those in the public sector. The existing literature indicates that the third sector provides more space for autonomy, activism and pursuing personal passions. Moreover, relationships with service users are often more based on trust. This paper seeks to investigate whether these conditions enable social workers in third sector organizations to expand their policy practice and engage with the ‘deep structure’ of society surrounding the individual cases.
Drawing from the expanding body of literature on social workers’ policy practice, the paper examines their opportunities for advocacy, policy influence, and activism within and beyond the organizations in which they are embedded. It combines this perspective with Houston’s (2005) concept of retroduction as a tool for social workers to comprehend and address citizens’ life circumstances connected to broader and deeply rooted societal structures and processes – power, inequality, exclusion, social closure, bureaucratic dispossession, and more. In this context, retroduction refers to the process of comprehending complex issues facing vulnerable citizens, which requires insights into social mechanisms and dynamics that extend beyond what can be immediately gleaned from a client interview or a case file. The paper is based on six qualitative interviews with social workers in third sector organizations, analyzed and compared with a larger material of 26 interviews with social workers employed in various public sector organizations.

References

Houston, S. (2005). Philosophy, Theory and Method in Social Work: Challenging Empiricism’s Claim on Evidence-based Practice. Journal of Social Work, 5(1).

Author

• Ivan Harsløf, Oslo Metropolitan University