Prying open the space for social work in the new millennium

Social work in the United Kingdom faces all manner of woes. Critical public inquiries, disgruntled users of the service, the bureaucratisation of practice, problems with recruitment, and the overhaul of training, all continue to reinforce a culture of pessimism. It has been suggested that social work in the United Kingdom stands at the crossroads where a decision must be made either to accept these depressing conditions as they are, or to challenge them by asserting a new future for a reinvigorated profession. The latter option is supported by the authors of this article because we share the view that as social workers we have available to us discursive freedom with which to analyse the profession’s contemporary ailments and to find a way through them based on a discourse of social justice. The idea and practice of discursive freedom can be captured in the heuristic notion of ‘space’ which the authors use here as a shared focus for analysing contemporary social work from four different critical perspectives. In this way a dialogue is promoted between theory and practice and within critical theory. In its method and its results this inquiry is still very much work-in-progress. This provisional quality sits comfortably with the notion of ‘space’ and gives rein to its recursive qualities. These qualities, it is argued, must lie at the heart of transformative social work