Introduction

Social policies seek to address human needs. Although there is wide debate over how this can best be achieved, the prime stated objective of these policies is to improve the social welfare of individuals, families, groups and communities, and to tackle the social problems that affect them. Social policies are comprised of relatively identifiable ideas, assumptions, rules and procedures that determine the role of relevant authorities in the distribution of social resources intended to promote social welfare (Midgely and Livermore, 2009; Reisch, 2014; Green and Clarke, 2016). Obviously, these policies can provide very diverse types of resources, ranging from cash benefits, through different forms of services, to symbolic resources of the type that Nancy Fraser (1995) alluded to when she wrote about ‘recognition’. This chapter explores various aspects of the interface between social policies and social work, and, in doing so, creates a conceptual infrastructure for the following chapters, which deal with the factors that impact social workers’ engagement with the social policy formulation process.

The nexus between social policies and social workers lies, of course, at the very heart of the discussion in this book. Social policies impact nearly every aspect of the ‘social work’ that social workers engage in as agents of the welfare state, whether they are employed directly by it or indirectly by non-profits and for-profit enterprises, or even if they are self-employed. Policies have a crucial impact on the social problems that adversely affect the well-being of the people that social workers are committed to, as well as the severity, scope and intensity of these problems. Moreover, to a large extent, social policies determine not only whom social workers can serve, but also what they can do for these people, the time they can devote to them and the resources that they have at their disposal to engage in practice. Indeed, in modern welfare states, it is difficult to imagine social work without social policies.

A useful starting point for a discussion on the engagement of social workers in the social policy formulation process is to think, more generally, about the interface between social policy and social work. Clearly, as alluded to in Chapter 1, this interface is broader and more complex than the traditional perception that social workers are little more than the foot soldiers of the welfare state that seek to implement, in full and unconditionally, policies that were formulated by a small group of decision-makers and are intended to alleviate the suffering of their service users. Rather, it is a two-way process that is influenced by diverse factors, can take a variety of forms and can develop in different ways over time.