Introduction

Efforts by social workers to influence policies, regardless of the stage, arena, level, mode and route that is taken to engage in this activity, or the type of policy sought (see Chapter 2), will take place in a specific context. Given that the contexts in which social workers practise differ, it is reasonable to expect that the degree to which they engage in policy-related activities, and the forms that this will take, will also diverge. These contexts can differ between countries, within countries and over time. An initial way of thinking about these contexts is to focus on the environments within which the social problems exist and in which efforts to address them through the adoption of social policies take place. In other words, there is a need to observe the structural, social and professional environments that have a potential impact on decisions by social workers to engage (or not) in the diverse policy routes and the forms that this will take.

In this chapter, we discuss four distinctive environments that have an impact on the policy engagement of social workers. While a cross-national comparative perspective is arguably the best way to understand the impact of environments, the difficulties entailed in employing this type of approach in studying social work and social work practice (Meeuwisse and Sward, 2007), and, consequently, its limited use in studies (Hamalainen, 2014), require us to draw upon national case studies as well.

The four environments are: the welfare regime; policies and problems; the profession; and people. The notion advanced here will be that a strong case can be made for claiming that all of these environments have an impact on the six different routes of policy engagement of social workers (see Figure 3.1). This impact is indirect and mediated by way of the three categories of factors described in the following chapters of the book: opportunity, facilitation and motivation. The direction of this impact is not unidirectional, and there is often much overlap between the environments themselves and between other factors that impact social workers’ policy involvement. Indeed, given the state of the existing research, it is exceedingly difficult to unravel all their impacts. Nevertheless, the environments clearly contribute to a better understanding of the level and form of the policy engagement of social workers, and each of them offers a crucial context within which this policy engagement emerges.