This chapter highlights contradictions within social work and deals with the question of how research and teaching can address these. The point of departure is an account of the author’s feeling of unrest, stemming from clashes between professional social work experiences and ideas of how the social world functioned. Applying critical theories of power, discipline and political economy helped the author to redirect the analytical gaze towards the historical and political nature of social work. In the chapter, two ways of researching contradictions within social work is accounted for: (1) the interconnectedness between social work and capitalism, exemplified by how contemporary workfare policies in Swedish early twenty-first century draws on and refines arguments and assumptions that guided problematisations of Swedish poor relief in the period 1847–1875, and (2) the concept of social exclusion, exemplified by a number of research studies where the political conceptualisation of exclusion is critically scrutinised and another study that proposes an alternative analytical framework, where social exclusion is conceptualised as dynamic actor-oriented processes, initiated and carried out by specific actors acting out of certain motives. The chapter ends with a reflection of how the paradoxes of social work can be communicated to students in order to help future social workers to incorporate these in order to work with them.
Tackling the Contradictory Nature of Social Work