Precarisation, Exclusion and Social
Work
conference paper
by
Jörg Zeller
The Seventh SUPI Conference, April 4 – 6, 2013
FH Joanneum , Graz
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Precarisation and social ethics
I understand the concept of precarisation as designating social changes that
deteriorate the work and life conditions of an increasing number of society
members.
Such deterioration may in the individual case have accidental causes but it has – as
an epidemic social disease - obviously systematic reasons in social systems that exist
and develop by periodic precarisation of work and life conditions for the socially
weakest part of the population. I will say that social systems of this kind operate with
an integrated precarisation logic.
In addition - if there exist such society forms working on the basis of periodic
precarisation - I will call them unethical; or more precise: societies with an unethical
moral or mentality.
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Conceptualizing social work as practice
field
I understand social work as a profession in which a social community practices
its ethics.
By ‘social ethics’ I understand the ethics of a social community. I presuppose: a
community can be understood as an actor, i.e. a subject of action/practice.
By ‘ethics’ I understand the way of thinking (logic) of an actor to base
actions/practices on intentions. I call it also: practice logics.
‘Intentions’ I take as ‘wishes to realize desirable/valuable ends’. Intentions are
thus conceptually connected to values. They are members of the same
concept-family (Wittgenstein 1963) enfolding what people consider as
valuable.
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Action
I understand actions as constituted by
• Actors or subjects of action – a subject understood as a conscious human
being.
• Conscious human beings are able to experience, feel, imagine, remember,
percept, conceptualize, predicate, infer, and act.
• Action organs – an actor’s body and optionally objective action instruments
• An actor acts by activating or forbear to activate sensorimotor organs of
his/her body; an actor’s body is according to Merleau-Ponty 1945/2006 to
be understood as living body, i.e. an incorporated mind.
• Performance – the actor’s making his/her/their intention real.
• Result of the action – the by performance of the action realized state, event or
process.
• Consequences of the action – effects of the action on the actor and/or other
actors or living beings and their existence conditions.
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Practice and its logic
By ‘practice’ I understand a spatio-temporal extended and coordinated system of actions,
performed in order to reach a manifold of mutually connected ends.
Practices can be professional or leisure activities – to cure sick people, to teach students, to
sell or repair cars, to breed pigeons, to play football …
Practices can be executed by a system of actions of single actors or by a system of
interactions of a plurality of different actors.
Interactions of humans are steered by the different intentions of the interacting actors. By
socially interacting, humans try to make their intentions real – i.e. to make the world
meaningful or to construct (Nørreklit 2004, 2012) a meaningful and valuable reality. I call
the way how a community of actors constructs a meaningful and valuable reality the logic of
practice or ethics of this community.
I understand meaning and value realizing social interactions on the basis of Wittgenstein’s
1963 concept of language games as practice games. Practice games are on the background
of my above considerations also ethic games.
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Language games as logic experiments
You can look at Wittgenstein’s 1963 seminal concept of language game either with
theoretical or methodological eyes. Theoretically a language game can be taken as an
explanation of language learning of human actors by creating a conjunction between
signs (sounds, gestures, facial expressions, postures) and other kinds of social actions.
You can, however, also look at language games as an experimental way to make human
existence and activities meaningful. Thus language games become a laboratory for the
building (constructing) and testing of communication and cooperation forms. The logic
of such forms is created and/or learned by doing. So here we have to do with a – to
express it in a Kantian way – aposteriori logic or – as I prefer to call it – a practical logic.
It is a logic of communication and action that emerges by the attempts or experiments
of actors to communicate and interact with each other.
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Practice games as ethic games
By practice human actors try to make their life meaningful and valuable. By ‘practice
game’ I understand therefore an extended variant of Wittgensteinian language games.
It is the experimental logic of making human existence not only semantically
meaningful but also in different other ways valuable. Besides meaning understood as
semantic or cognitive value I differ between
• aesthetic or experiential
• instrumental or utile
• ethic or way-of-life or existential
values.
Practice games can thus be taken as the at the same time experiential, experimental
and constructive endeavours of human actors to make their existence meaningful and
valuable.
By practicing their ideas of a good life, human actors show their understanding and
(aesthetically, instrumentally and morally) appreciating of reality. They perform the
practicing of their existence within what Bourdieu 1980 called practice fields.
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Practice field
A practice field is a dynamic system of different practices, consisting in
• Subjective action potentials, i.e. habitus forms (Bourdieu)
• An actor’s habitus consists in his/her bodily and mental abilities to act in
different ways, i.e. in his/her experiential, theoretical, and practical
knowledge.
• Objective action potentials, i.e. capital forms (Bourdieu)
• An actor’s different forms of capital consist in all those objective or
institutional instruments and resources, he/she disposes of in trying to
realize his/her intentions.
Thus practice fields consist (normally) of a plurality of actors, instruments and
resources interacting with each other and thereby changing the quality and
quantity of those habitus and capital forms, which make up the power structure of
the field.
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Ethics and morals
The function of ethics is to find out how an actor has to act to reach desirable ends (realize
something valuable). Thus it is a way of practical thinking, a logic (or “grammar”,
Wittgenstein) of practice.
By ‘morals’ I understand the “realized semantics” of an ethics – i.e. the way an (individual or
social) actor connects (maps) his/her/their way of thinking with a system of different types
values.
Morality is thus the realized ethics (way of practical thinking) of en actor. I call it also the
mentality of this actor.
The mentality of actors consists in their attitudes, customs, conventions, world views,
etiquettes, etc., i.e. how they in customary circumstances react on, understand, evaluate,
and judge what they experience.
The difference between ethics and morals can be described as the difference between how
an actor thinks he/she should act under certain circumstances, and how he/she actually
does act. Ethics and morals are, however, members of the same conceptual family.
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Social Work as welfare or charity
practice
SW as a profession and practice field is ruled by a social community’s intention to help
citizens in social need. This can be done on the basis of different attitudes (mentality): as
either a welfare support or a charity practice.
In both variants SW realizes the social ethics of a community assessing it as a desirable good
to help people being in need.
You could say SW is a community’s political and legal expression of either an understanding of
social responsibility or a principle of charity.
The understanding of social responsibility could be formulated as follows:
Help people in need to empower them to realize a good life.
It could be based on a backing good-community principle: helping people in need to become
able to realize a good life contributes to realizing a good community (good conditions for
realizing a good life for all community members). In contrast: charity doesn’t help people
really but just accidentally – just making them survive under precarizing existence conditions.
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Basis of ethics
Ethics is based on two conceptual pillars of practical wisdom:
• Free will of the actor
• The actor’s valuation ability – i.e. a disposition to discover values among what
there is and takes place:
• to motivate an actor to act presupposes, that he/she is able to
differentiate between good and bad things/states/events , and to desire
the good ones and to decline the bad ones
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Rationality and desire
The free will of an actor is a consequence of his/her ability to reason, i.e. to think
and behave as a rational being. Free will presupposes experience, emotionality
(ability to become motivated), imagination, and rationality (ability to form
concepts and propositions and to infer conclusions from premises). It would
notably be impossible voluntarily to choose between different possibilities to act
without being able to imagine possible states, events or processes that actually
don’t exist or take place but can (by action) possibly be made to exist or take
place.
An actor losing his/her ability to appreciate being alive, i.e. a person or community
restricted, hurt or bereft of his/ her “optative” abilities (desiring, wanting, wishing,
intending), will be heavily be handicapped in his/her abilities to realize a good life.
– There exists overwhelming evidence that this not least holds for the victims of
precarious work and life conditions.
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The actors of SW
Social Work (SW) as professional activity takes place as an interaction between
two social actors
• social worker – a person professionally trained to help people in social need;
in this function the social worker acts as an individual representative (civil
servant) of the social ethics of her society
• person in social need – a person not being able autonomously to create the
basics of a liveable or much less a good life; he can in physical, mental and/or
social respect be needy because of
• either by birth or by accident being physically or mentally handicapped
• or “made redundant” because of working place “economisation” (being
fired)
• or depression because of death of or separation from a loved
• etc.
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Ethical reductionism
The “bipedal” basis of ethical thinking can give reason to two forms of ethical
reductionism, i.e. two ways to amputate ethics either
• to liberalism (will to power, power is law) – all human beings are free by nature
and can get what they want by really willing it; everyone is responsible of his
own prosperity or breakdown – a person in social need is an actor with reduced
will power and for this reason rightly a Social Work client* or
• to economism - reduction of value-diversity to economic values (all capital is
based on economic capital, all goods are commodities, the utmost end of human
practice is to get rich)
*a client is according its Latin etymology a socially weak person seeking protection of
a socially powerful patron. In countries with a weak state and a powerful mafia it is
often the mafia with its patronage system that takes over SW functions.
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SW in ethically reductionist societies
Present day western style societies try to combine a freedom-welfare based
(utilitarian) ethics with a liberalist-economistic reduced moral.
The ethics of this kind of society requests that the community helps people in
social need. Social work is in charge to do this – to help people with reduced action
power (habitus) to (re)constitute their “will power”*.
However, because of the reduced moral of this kind of society, SW gains
paradoxical traits.
*Liberalist minded politicians usually believe that people in social need just lack
will power to turn their need into prosperity. Therefore their eagerness for
shortening unemployment aid and forced activation arrangements for unemployed
persons.
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The paradox of social work
Reducing the actor-side of ethics to “free”* (pure) will power and the valueside to economy SW shall free the “social client” – a person handicapped in the
execution of his/her will – by economistically reducing his/her social dignity to
a minimum income needed to exist. A human person gets so reduced to a
economic quantity (economic man).
In consequence, SW is in charge to free a “social client”, i.e. a person dependent
of social mercy, by holding him economically imprisoned in a mere subsistence
“capital”, i.e. in accurately that form of society that has made him a person in
social need.
*The liberalist freedom concept is abstract insofar as it assumes a human being itself (by
nature) free; i.e. free from all qualifying (subjective and objective) conditions enabling a
person to choose between different action possibilities. The liberalist concept of freedom
reduces Bourdieuan habitus to pure (“unpersonal”) agency, and Bourdieuan capital to
pure economic action means. A concept of real freedom should instead define freedom
by the subjective (habitus) and objective (capital) conditions (potentials) for intentional
acting/practicing.
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Conclusion – sketching a possible
solution of the SW paradox
If social ethics is about how a human community enables its members to realize a
good life then it seems impossible to help people in social need without changing
the social conditions making people socially needy.
Helping people to realize a good social life requests a good society – i.e. a society
that doesn’t enable the good life of some citizens at the cost of the needy life of
other citizens.
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References
Bourdieu, P. 1993, Sozialer Sinn, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Nørreklit, L. 2004, Hvad er virkelighed?, in: Christensen, J. 2004, Vidensgrundlag for
handlen, Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, p. 25-59.
Nørreklit, L. 2012, Filosofi i praksis, in: Reinbacher, G. S. and Zeller, J. 2012, Filosofiens
anvendelighed, Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, p. 9-48.
Merleau-Ponty , M. 1945/2006, Phenomenology of perception, London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, L. 1963, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in: Wittgenstein, L. 1963,
Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Tagebücher 1914-1916, Philosophische Untersuchungen,
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, p. 279-544.
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