Situated Knowledge-Making in Dynamic Collaboration: A Reflexive Case Study of Social Work Practice Research in Mainland China

Background/Purpose: The relationship between practice and research has been a central concern since the birth of the social work profession. In recent decades, scholars have explored “practice research” frameworks and approaches, aiming to generate social work knowledge more directly from, by, and for practice. Despite the vibrant scholarly efforts in Western contexts, little is known about the status of practice research in places where social work is a foreign import. Our study responds to calls for diversifying perspectives on practice research through attending to the various pathways of social work development in international contexts. We aim to examine ongoing experimental practice research efforts in mainland China as shaped by, and shaping, local enactments of social work.

Methods: We employed the case study approach, allowing us to holistically examine the emerging phenomenon without limiting ourselves to a predefined set of variables or factors. The case was a 5-year practice research project (2017-2022) located in a coastal city in Southeastern China. This project involved a partnership between a local nonprofit social work organization (SWO) and a team of researchers led by a senior social work faculty at a university in the same city. One of the authors was a member of the research team and followed the entirety of the project. Data collection methods included participant observation of the project’s daily operations, semi-structured interviews with key participants, and collection of project-related documents. We employed a noncoding iterative and reflexive thematic analysis approach involving repeated individual reading and annotation of fieldnotes, transcripts, and documents, complemented by weekly analytical discussions among all three authors.

Results: Firstly, the practice research project was profoundly shaped by local conditions of social work development, where research and practice were not two sides of a binary but different types of actions along one continuum. Researchers could not simply treat the processes and conditions of practice as their objects of inquiry. Instead, they were pulled into, constrained by, and became a part of, the sociopolitical ecology that shaped the practices they intended to study. Secondly, the interactions between the research and practice teams unveiled dynamics of divergent dominance: the research team openly steered the collaboration, drawing upon their professional expertise to set its course, whereas the practice team subtly influenced the actual focus and pace of the collaboration, leveraging their ownership of the service project. In this context, ironically, the ideal of “equal partnership” introduced by researchers was dismissed by practitioners, who strategically utilized researchers’ superior status to gain more governmental recognition and support for the organization. At the same time, internal power hierarchies within each team resulted in varying levels of involvement and gains for different participants in this joint endeavor. Lastly, given these characteristics, knowledge-making was a pragmatic trial-and-error process, bringing together the distinct strengths of each team and resulting in various products holding different significance for the involved participants.

Conclusions/Implications: This study provides implications for future practice research endeavors in contexts of global social work, and for promoting more social structurally-informed inquiries on practice research.