Ontological assumptions can be subsumed within two main strands of thought. The first is that there are objectivist theories where reality is considered outside of action or social phenomena. Alluding to the idea that there is a real world out there,
it is seen as apart from our subjective awareness (realism). In social work these ideas are understood as either radical structuralism, adopting objectivist ideas in understanding the world, and aligned at initiating change at the structural (macro) level; or as the Fixers, a functionalist paradigm which considers that re-establishing order and equilibrium is the way to fix people’s problems, and aligned at initiating change at the meso (cultural) level (Howe, 1987). These ideas can be aligned to positivism, an objectivist paradigm concerned with how things work and how things really are (Kuhn, 1970; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983). This tradition influenced many social scientists during the 1920s and 30s. Statistical methods and survey research dominated this branch of theories, viewing these as sufficient ways with which to prove truth, reality or knowledge (Kuhn, 1970; Guba, 1990; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). Associated with notions of physical science, outcomes, universal laws and neutral observation, positivism and empiricism (quantitative research) were embraced throughout the history of social work, justifying the need for the profession to have scientific principles in the endeavour to work with the poor. During the 1930s in casework, these traditions led to presenting human experience through the use of numerical categories and the language of outcomes which is still prevalent today.
The second main strand views ontology as something that is essentially grounded in the person we really are. These kinds of theory assume that there is no external reality outside our thoughts, actions and practices, and that reality is social (relativism). Understood as the constructivist/interpretivist paradigm, this set of theories sees the world from a subjectivist viewpoint. In the reaction against positivism and empiricism, constructivist/interpretivist paradigms provided opportunities for social work to problematise modernist assumptions that underpin practice and research (Parton, 2000; Pease and Fook, 1999; Healy, 2005; Fook, 2012). These ideas pinpointed how relativities were no longer marginalised but were central to social work practice and research (Parton and O’Byrne, 2000; Milner, 2001). Within research, these types of complexity are analysed within epistemology against their consistency with the paradigm adopted for the scientific enquiry.
Epistemology, a term used in philosophy, investigates the different kinds of knowledge and how we have come to acquire and understand that knowledge. It considers the scope and justification of knowledge alongside the origins, limitations, methods, and validity (truth) of a particular knowledge (Delanty and Strydom, 2003; Sarantakos, 2005). This includes exploring the relationship between subjective and objective components of reality, as well as the definitive problems of defining what is true or real and how this is investigated. As Audi (1998) points out, philosophers have given a great deal of thought to these matters, the nature of perceiving a social reality and how we have come to know what we know. This is because theories about how individuals construct and come to understand or know reality (subjectivity) can take a variety of forms.
Constructivist/interpretivist paradigms replace the subject-object dualism in epistemology with the idea of interactionism, which is primarily concerned with understanding and interpreting reality and the subject in a social context (Howe, 1987; Guba, 1990). This reflects the interpretive turn in social science having implications for what we know about the world, as there was a persistent claim that science alone was good enough to measure reality/truth. These ideas argued that any reality or knowledge can only be understood to be socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Aligned with the symbolic interactionism paradigm in sociology, this range of theories is concerned with studying human group life and human conduct (Blumer 1969). Social psychologists Mead (1934) and Dewey ([1922]1983), the key theorists here, investigated social life by focusing on symbolic means of communication.
Here, the individual mind and self is constructed within social processes. Mead (1934) drew on ideas of Kant ([1787] 2003), who conceived that the basic forms of the world are produced in the mind. Kant argued that we can obtain knowledge about the world, but argued it was only ever subjective knowledge in the sense that it is filtered through human consciousness5. The world can be experienced not in
5 This thesis adopts Descartes’ ([1641] 1984) understanding of consciousness which is considered as states of thinking. It is used by Descartes as a thinking process which includes aspects such as doubt, affirmation, will and imagination.
itself, but is understood only as an appearance that has been structured by our cognitive processes/schema. Schema is the function of processes of imagination, through which concepts, theories and ideas are combined. These consist of a pattern imposed on a reality or experience to assist the person in explaining it (Harrison-Barbet, 2001). Yet in the context of language, Mead (1943) argued that it is the on-going social interaction that constitutes the contents of mind.
Mead (1943), through the distinction ‘me’ and ‘I’, highlighted how the self as ‘me’ is a cognitive object, based on an accumulation of interpretations derived from a process of reflection on oneself. This reflection is drawn upon in the context of social norms, values and beliefs of a given society/social order. ‘I’ on the other hand is understood as the spontaneous self that consists of and reflects our values, creativity and innate characteristics (Mead, 1934). In contrast to constructivists, who approach human experience in terms of individual psychology solely, for Mead (1943) any reality is intelligible only in terms of social processes; and so human experience is seen as predominately social which inform constructions of the self and self-consciousness. This is because the social is understood to precede any human experience and mental representation of reality, so Mead’s approach represents a dialectical view of interaction and subjectivity (Mead, 1934).
So when we talk of experience, it has both objective and subjective components: it is objective because we have an idea outside of ourselves that allows something to be categorised, and there are subjective components to experiences that allow us to describe and evaluate the experience. Kant ([1787]2003) argued that there was a real world, but that it can only be known from a particular perspective, and from a particular conceptual schema or cultural view coloured by environment and context (Harrison-Barbet, 2001). Mead’s concepts showed how, through conversation, members are socialised or made to conform to a social system. In essence, individuals will alternate between the concepts ‘I’ and ‘me’ in playing a particular role or game during multiple (inter-) actions. What Mead was alluding to was that each person can have multiple social selves, drawing on a range of cultural and social symbols depending upon which game or role is being played (through the enactment of personal/social identities). In the context of this study, the self as
social worker is social because the social actor is born into an existing society, but the self is bound by language (shared symbolic meanings) and interaction. Roles, then, in social work are tentative because they arise as products of social interaction. This draws attention to the performativity of language in a social context and the management of the presentation of self.
Goffman (1963) and Geertz’s (1973) work is aligned with those which study the structure, functions and meanings behind language (Sarantakos, 2005). Here, language is viewed as a precondition for thought, whereas the cognitivists argued that reality is constituted in thought. Burr (1995) contends that the way people think, the very categories and concepts which are formed are provided by the individual’s language use. Rather than seeing reality solely as based on cognitive processes (attitudes), emphasis is placed on the social construction of attitudes, social groups and identities through the deployment of language (Delanty and Strydom, 2003).
This is because ways of understanding the world do not stem from objective reality here, but from other people, both past and present (Burr, 1995). Based on social truths, norms and beliefs, cultures and societies have a range of conceptual systems with which to understand reality, and so no reality can outweigh the others in this tradition (Lamnek, 1995; Luhnmann, 1997; Lueger, 2000). Here an account or explanation of any one thing is not privileged over any other, but is grounded in its historical and cultural context. This epistemic position assumes that events and accounts of any ‘thing’ or object are dependent upon the context in which they arise (Garfinkel, 1984).
The social order of social work pre-dates the mental representations (schemas/ ideas) of social workers. In their socialisation with adult services, individuals will deploy significant symbols (forms of communication) in their understanding of what constitutes practice. This schema or cultural view is inextricably linked to environment and context influencing the sense of self (personal and social identities), as derived from reflection and interaction. These schemas not only influence practice, but can hinder the social worker in adopting alternative symbols
or schemas that might represent alternative realities of social work. This illustrates the interpretivist/constructivist rationale for this research at the epistemological level, where social workers’ reality is primarily understood as social in origin, but contains within it significant symbols and schemas (discourses) inextricably linked to the historical and ideological contexts of social work per se.