Ethical Labor in Frontline Child Welfare Work: An Ethnographic Study of Social Work Skills and Expertise

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Child welfare scholars have long struggled to theorize the nature of expertise required for empathic and effective casework interventions and to identify the specific skill set, if any, that ought to guide frontline practice. Those concerned with the precipitous drop in MSW-educated practitioners since the 1950s have argued vehemently for reclaiming child welfare as social work’s domain of expertise (Dickinson & Perry, 2003; Ellett & Leighninger, 2007; Foster & Wilding, 2000). Yet, the content of social work expertise, and therefore the legitimacy of the profession’s claims on child welfare, has remained elusive. Frequently, the concrete knowledge base of social work and its ethical value system are counterposed with one another or conceptualized as separate but additive concepts, with some scholars valuing “evidence” as the cornerstone of social work’s legitimacy, and others according primacy to ethics as the linchpin of expertise. This ethnographic study of MSW-trained foster care caseworkers brings empirical evidence to bear on these largely theoretical debates about social work expertise, drawing upon extended observations of everyday practice to identify and analyze the skills actually used by frontline practitioners in concrete, day-to-day service encounters.

METHODS

This analysis is part of a larger ethnographic study of frontline child welfare workers in a concurrent planning adoption program in the Midwest. Over a 15-month period, the author completed more than 1,000 hours of participant observation with nine caseworkers as they interacted with clients, coordinated care with allied service providers, attended staff meetings, and met with other members of the child welfare team to discuss case trajectories and child permanency recommendations. To elucidate workers’ own situated understandings of the job, the author also conducted impromptu interviews with workers as they performed everyday casework tasks in real time. Themes identified through participant observation and in situ interviews were refined via semi-structured interviews with frontline workers and managers and content analysis of child welfare worker training materials.

RESULTS

Though the child welfare job frequently entails performing “non-expert” concrete and instrumental tasks, such as completing paperwork and following highly regimented service delivery protocols, participants in this study consistently reported that the way they performed the very same tasks changed subtly in response to the state child welfare system’s shifting ethical imperatives. Likewise, tasks that workers associated with formal social work training—identifying client’s emotions and using empathic understanding to guide service encounters—were mobilized in the service of child welfare’s preferred permanency outcomes, rather than a fixed and value-neutral end goal.

IMPLICATIONS

Observations in this study suggest that ethics are entwined with all aspects of frontline service provision, with workers relying on a complex amalgam of emotional, intellectual, and instrumental skills mobilized in the service of irreducibly ethical, rather than stable and concrete end goals. To this end, neither evidence-based nor morals-based accounts of social work expertise adequately describe the form of labor enacted by these workers. Drawing upon sociological work on affective labor, the author proposes “ethical labor” as an alternative theoretical concept to articulate social work expertise in child welfare.