The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
be liberating for clients because when definitional space exists it becomes possible to change meanings that may have been problematic. For example, the current trend in social work is to place the word ‘trauma’ on past challenging events. Using the word trauma may be totalizing in the sense that it blocks out alternative and possibly preferred meanings from being discovered or created. By approaching events without preconceived ideas of meaning, definitional space is created. Phrases that clients have used to free themselves from the idea of trauma include ‘a moment of growth’, ‘a rite of passage’, ‘forged by fire’, ‘a spiritual awaking’, or ‘an unwanted expansion of self’.
Meaning is Applied to Events, Objects, and Relationships
With the absence of the assumption of inherent and static meaning of events, objects, and relationships, alternative meanings can be explored and created relationally. Preferred meanings and exceptions to the problem as conceived are prominent ideas in social constructionist informed models of practice (Anderson and Gehart, 2012; DeJong and Berg, 2012; O'Hanlon and Weiner-Davis, 2003; White and Epston, 1989). From this position social workers might ask questions such as the following: How can we understand the problem? How did this problem come to be understood in this way? Are there other ways to understand it? Such questions naturally lead to an exploration of meaning and who participates in the construction of that meaning. Social construction emphasizes the contextual and relational creation of meaning, and perspectival questions are designed to emphasize, explore, and develop hoped-for futures by focusing on the perspective of the other: If your grandfather were here what ideas might he have about the problem? Would your favorite teacher agree about this conclusion? These are questions designed to explore the meaning brought to life events and identity conclusions. At the mezzo level a social worker might work with an impoverished community to recapture and make public its historical and current identity by organizing a public space where local artists can display their work; assisting the public sharing of neighborhood history and stories; facilitating a space for local poetry, music, and self-expression; and documenting and sharing the positive history and development of the community. Each of these examples is a definitional act in which preferred meanings and identity conclusions are offered publicly.
Meaning is Controlled by Language Relationships
For social constructionists, language constitutes what we take as real. Language is the vehicle by which cultures communicate and weave the fabric of our relational understandings of the world. How practitioners and clients name things matters. Collaborative language systems (Anderson, 1995) and open dialogue (Seikkula et al., 2006) are two examples of approaches that use the idea of language and word choice as the cornerstone of meaning-making and change. The constitutive influence of language encourages the social constructionist informed practitioner to explore, challenge, and expand word meaning. A practice example would be interrogating with a client the assumed negativity of a word choice such as ‘anxiety.’ Might there be positive aspects of anxiety? Additionally, is anxiety the only way to name what the client is experiencing? What would be the implications of naming the experience something else? This example illustrates a way to escape the limited understandings of language and expand word choice and meanings in ways that have the potential to collaboratively establish new meanings in the lives of clients and relationally transform them.
Language and Meaning are Created in Relationships
The premise of the negotiation of meaning is one that resonates strongly within the social justice history of social work. All forms of social work practice are built on the values of challenging oppression and empowering clients (NASW Code of ethics, 2017). From a social constructionist perspective, challenging meanings and how those meanings were constructed, including who may benefit and not benefit from the construction of those meanings may assist clients to free themselves from dogmatic and harmful ways of understanding and being (Hare-Mustin, 1994). For a discussion of social constructionism and the NASW Code of Ethics please see Witkin (2000). Oppression may be seen in this light as a co-opting of truth, a monopolizing of meaning that marginalizes alternatives to that truth, and a subsequent recruitment of others into this mono-truth. Common social justice areas from social work practice include gender, race, nationality, economic, and sexual discourses.
Social constructionist informed practice seeks to explore and make visible the ways in which significant meanings in clients’ lives have been constructed and maintained. Such dialogue may include who participates in the construction, the benefits and harms to the client and others, and the possibility of creating new meanings that would be more liberating. Often clients may not realize that they are living their lives by ideas that they have received and then internalized. By breaking these ideas down and making them visible there is an expansion of definitional space for clients to begin to collaboratively co-construct new ways of being. At the macro level social workers assist in organizing groups to challenge and change social discourse and policy that may be oppressive in the lives of clients. The discourse of failed parenting is one example in which client negative beliefs are often internalized and treated at the micro level. Macro social work unpacks the idea of parenting to include a recognition of oppressive social practices such as the unlivable minimum wage, lack of affordable childcare, discriminatory hiring practices, underfunded neighborhood schools, and other forms of oppression. Macro social workers advocate with their clients for policy and discourse change while also deconstructing internalized beliefs to create definitional space for the development of preferred identities.
With the recognition that language and meaning are negotiated, the social constructionist informed social worker may also view models of practice as cultural language constructions. Models of practice have specific theories that guide them (e.g., cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic) and these theories have language systems with words created specific to these approaches (e.g., automatic thoughts, conditioning, Id, Ego). With the realization that models of practice are constructed languages of meaning and that language and meaning are negotiated, social workers and clients can openly decide if they would like to collaboratively use a model of constructed language to understand problems and solutions, if they would like to combine them, change them, or not use them at all.
Concluding Thoughts
Social constructionist informed social work practice expands social workers’ use of the social beyond its typical parameters to include a foregrounding of relationships and a critical stance toward language and meaning. Social workers recognize that meanings are constructed in relationships and that meaning, identity, and the events that we privilege or marginalize in our lives and the cultures in which we exist forge the ways in which we experience the world. Because these meanings are not inherent or static, they can be explored, taken apart, modified, changed, abandoned, and re-envisioned; succinctly put, they could be otherwise. Through this relational, collaborative practice, clients as well as social workers can transform the way they see the world and themselves. Additionally, social construction's problematizing of dominant discourses and taken-for-granted beliefs generates the possibility of alternative understandings and practices. Social work practice assumes a revitalized use of the social, blending the stratification among macro, mezzo, and micro levels. For instance, social constructionist informed discussions bring to light the effects of privileged discourse in the lives of clients and invite social workers and clients to consider how they have been influenced by macro- and mezzo-level constructed values, and how these constructs manifest at the micro level. Empowerment, a key tenet of social work, occurs as clients let go of potentially unhelpful and oppressive ways of experiencing the world and co-construct new, more preferred ways-of-being. In this case, clients are not only individuals, but can include working with communities to create preferred community narratives (Irving, 1999), re-envisioning the child welfare system (Parton, 2014) and assisting in the development of new identity conclusions with trauma survivors and perpetrators (Hall, 2011; Keenan, 2012). The result is a stronger, more ‘social’ social work.
Notes
1 A similar question could be raised about social construction.
2 This section is adapted from Witkin (2012).