To the complex mixture of ideas and questions about social work coming from social workers and others that I identified in Chapter 1, I wanted to add some of my own experiences and reflections as anthropological and auto-ethnographic elements throughout the book; these will include material from specific research projects that I have conducted myself or with colleagues. I hope that these more personal aspects will inject some sense of trajectory (As well as indicating frustration and, on occasions, humour!) as I have gradually worked towards trying to understand social work and social workers. I hope that, in doing so, this may engage others who have tried to do the same. These initial ideas set me thinking about my own journey into the world of social work, which goes back more than 25 years. In the following, I describe what first happened to me in the early 1990s.

Encountering social work: a surprising discovery

One day in July 1991, I walked up the hill from the high street in a London neighbourhood to attend a job interview. I had seen a newspaper advertisement for a research post and, being a part-time PhD student in anthropology with two young children, I decided to apply, mainly in order to broaden my research experience and earn some money. The post concerned research into social work, organisations and what was termed ‘inter-professional working’.

At that time, I knew next to nothing about social work, although my anthropological research concerned families in England with young children. This might seem surprising but my (fairly narrow) PhD research focus was on family networks and social support between mothers, and the (mainly middle-class) families that I had been working with were largely involved in voluntary groups such as playgroups and nurseries run by organisations such as the Pre-School Playgroups Association (PPA). These organisations mainly had contacts with health staff, particularly health visitors and general practitioners (GPs) (what, with hindsight, we might term ‘universal services’). Nobody had ever mentioned social work or social workers to me during the earlier part of my research, which, I now realise, must have been either an omission (Because I was not looking?) or more likely the potentially stigmatising ‘elephant in the room’ that no one else wanted to talk about (this was also the reaction of a social work academic whom I interviewed much more recently).