Introduction

The relevance of social policy for social workers hardly needs to be emphasised or reiterated. It has been the subject of much discussion within the profession, it is a topic integral to the education process of social workers and the relevance of social policy for social workers has been the focus of ample scholarly attention across the world (Dickens, 2010; Simpson and Connor, 2011; Colby et al, 2013; Jaswal and Kshetrimayum, 2020). Suffice it to say at this point that social policy has an enormous impact on: the people with whom social workers work; the problems of individuals, families and communities that they seek to prevent, mitigate or solve; the circumstances of their work environment; and the resources available for them to undertake their tasks and duties effectively and ethically. Moreover, social workers are often the key professionals in many of the various welfare state institutions and affiliates that create and implement these policies.

In the past, an implicit assumption that emerged from much of the academic literature concerning the interface between social policy (and social policymakers) and social workers was that the primary role of social workers is to implement policies decided upon by others (Denney, 1998; Adams, 2002). In this still-prevalent, top-down model of the policy process, social workers are obviously required to understand the nature of social policies and the context in which they operate, but they have little impact or say with regard to which problems policies should address or the forms that policies adopted actually take. While the work of Michael Lipsky (2010) and others on the role of street-level bureaucrats introduced a crucial caveat to this assumption, the focus of attention in this body of work has generally been on the ways in which individual social workers seek to impact the implementation of policies (Gofen, 2014; Evans, 2016a) and, in some cases, to resist their negative implications (Greenslade et al, 2015; Schiettecat et al, 2018; Trappenburg et al, 2020). However, regardless of the success or originality of these acts of resistance to policies, from this perspective, social workers are still generally perceived less as participants in the formal policy formulation process and more as irreverent policy implementers, seeking to undermine policies that they judge to be inappropriate or unjust and are unwilling to adopt as is.