Beyond the Letter of the Law: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Rights Take-up in Social Work

Background: Social work is widely regarded as a human rights-based profession. One of the key domains through which social workers advance human rights is social-rights advocacy (also known as "take-up of social rights")—efforts aimed at ensuring the realization of social rights of underprivileged service users. This task, however, has become ever-more challenging in recent decades, as the idea of social rights has come under attack by ideologies that emphasize the individual over the collective and the market over the state. While considerable scholarly attention has been given to social work’s role in ensuring clients’ social rights, we know relatively little about how this critical intervention is interpreted and used in everyday practice. Against this backdrop, our study seeks to examine how social workers enact the discourse of social rights take-up in their advocacy efforts on behalf of marginalized clients.

Methods: This study employs a critical discourse analysis approach (CDA), which investigates patterns of language use in relation to structures of power. The analysis is based on 30 rights take-up letters written by social workers in departments of social services in Israel, primarily concerning users’ rights to housing, adequate standard of living, and health care. Letters were collected using convenience and snowball sampling. Most letters were written by female practitioners, including six by Arab and 24 Jewish social workers. The majority were family caseworkers, with professional experience ranging from 1.5 to 32 years.

Results: Findings show that in their efforts to secure the rights of service users, social workers primarily employed three discursive moves: the discourse of individual responsibility, the discourse of charity, and clinical discourse. Many letters drew on a discourse of individual responsibility, which positions subjects as proactive, committed to self-improving, and non-dependent on the state. Some letters used a discourse of charity, constituting service-users as victims of circumstances and using emotive language to draw attention to their hardship and justify assistance on moral grounds. Letters also drew on a clinical discourse, incorporating medical and psychological terminology. Notably, very few letters used a human rights discourse that emphasized service users' right to social assistance.

Conclusions and implications: The findings reveal that participants rely on discourses that depoliticize both the idea and practice of securing social rights of marginalized populations. This tendency seems to undermine the social work ethos as a human rights-based profession. While social workers strive to uphold an ethical and professional commitment to human rights, a conservative discourse that denies clients’ rights persists in shaping what is politically possible within the field. Social workers’ efforts are, therefore, mediated by a hegemonic discourse embedded in the the institutions and systems in which they operate. Rather than placing blame on practitioners, we argue for greater attention to the structural conditions that constrain the realization of clients’ rights. These findings offer an opportunity not only for professional and ethical dialogue within the profession's institutions, but also for service administrators to foster organizational learning and policy practice that can benefit both practitioners and service users.