Tankefigurer i socialt arbete : Operationalisering och reflektion

The dissertation is a case study, the topic of which was a participant-oriented research project in which a development programme for support to parents and care of young people was to be implemented in the organization and the concrete social work was developed and changed through researcher-supported intervention. The project was part of a large-scale effort for change and development carried out by the Norrköping social services administration. It was implemented at one of the municipality’s local social welfare offices in 1987–1990. As a theoretical platform for the project, Habermas’s theory of communicative action was chosen. The task was to operationalize the typology to bring Habermas’s abstract theories of the rationality of various actions down to such a concrete level that they could guide the practitioners in their search for their own attitudes and hence to a new self-understanding. The contribution made by the dissertation to the subject of social work can be summed up in the following points. With examples from a concrete development project, it contributes to the development of the case study as a scientific method. By operationalizing the theory of communicative action, it contributes to the scientific development of the subject of social work and thus to the self-understanding of the profession, and hence also to a better understanding of the conditions for work for social change. By means of the synchronic analysis of the relation between action and context; between actor and organization; between discourse, figure of thought, and structure; between power and counter-power, it contributes to an understanding of the dialectical interaction between the practice of social work and deeper, problem-generating mechanisms