Critical social work

Critical social work is the application of social work from a critical theory perspective. Critical social work seeks to address social injustices, as opposed to focusing on individual people's problems. Critical theories explain social problems as arising from various forms of oppression and injustice in globalised capitalist societies. This theory is like all social work theories, in that it is made up of a polyglot of theories from across the humanities and sciences, borrowing from many different schools of thought, including marxism, social democracy and anarchism.

Social workers have an ethical commitment to working to overcome inequality and oppression. For radical social workers this implies working towards the transformation of capitalist society towards building social arrangements which are more compatible with these commitments. Mullaly & Keating (1991) suggest three schools of radical thought corresponding to three versions of socialist analysis; social democracy, revolutionary Marxism and evolutionary Marxism. However they work in institutional contexts which paradoxically implicates them in maintaining capitalist functions. Social work theories have three possible aims, as identified by Rojek et al. (1986). These are:

Critical social work is heavily influenced by Marxism, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and by the earlier approach of Radical social work, which was focused on class oppression. Critical social work evolved from this to oppose all forms of oppression. Several writers helped codify radical social work, such as Jeffry Galper (1975), Mike Brake (1975) and Harold Throssell (1975). They were building on the views expounded by earlier social workers such as Octavia Hill, Jane Addams & Bertha Reynolds, who had at various points over the previous 200 years sought to make social work & charity more focused on structural forces. More recently writers such as Stephen A. Webb, Iain Ferguson, Susan White, Lena Dominelli, Paul Michael-Garrett and Stan Houston have further developed the paradigm by incorporating inter-disciplinary ideas from contemporary political philosophy, anthropology and social theory. These include the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu and Jurgen Habermas.

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