Post-Theories for Practice: Challenging the Dogmas

This chapter develops the notion of constructive social work as providing a positive framework while not simply critiquing the contemporary dominant dogmas associated with socio-technical emphasis and narrow emphasis on ‘evidence-based practice’. It begins by outlining the way the nature of social work developed from the late nineteenth century onwards through to the late twentieth century. The chapter then discusses in some detail the situation in which social work finds itself in England and Wales at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and how this seems to be increasingly characterized by more intense systems of surveillance and rationalization. It provides a positive contribution for creatively taking forward the notions of theory and practice in and of social work. The chapter also discusses the nature of evidence-based practice (EBP), but concludes by trying to demonstrate that such a narrow and circumscribed version of EBP is neither appropriate nor helpful.