- Title
- Evidence-based social work: the actuarial re-casting of social work
- Creator
- Webb, Stephen
- Relation
- Indian Journal of Social Work Vol. 69, Issue 1, p. 3-17
- Relation
- http://www.tiss.edu/ijsw.htm
- Publisher
- Tata Institute of Social Sciences
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2008
- Description
- The article draws together some preliminary observations that suggest social work is being re-cast in the form of an actuarial programme of low-level functional tasks. The overall effect of this may turn out to be a de-skilling of the social work task. Actuarialism attempts to predict where and who in society poses the greatest risk, such that they are targeted in advance and acted against. A distinctive re-territorialisation of social work is at work involving professional claims and contests of jurisdiction over new tasks, problems, treatments, interventions and academic research. This entails strategies seeking to provide legitimation by formal knowledge and is rooted in particular values about what counts as relevant in social work. It is projected that new forms of technical expertise such as actuarial science come to play a dominant role in defining social work, especially with the neo-liberal political context. In establishing a foundation for this argument, various 'technologies of care' - such as evidence-based practice - are identified as emerging via the tutelary complex in social work. The fantasy of actuarialism is that experts - in social work, mental health and criminal justice - can be like weather forecasters, predicting the risk of anything from the next outbreak of child molestation to organised community drug dealing in advance.
- Subject
- social work; actuarial science; actuarialism; evidence-based practice
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/35757
- Identifier
- uon:4130
- Identifier
- ISSN:0019-5634
- Language
- eng
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