Towards Glocal Social Work in the Era of Compressed Modernity by Timo Harrikari Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala

Author:Timo Harrikari, Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala [Timo Harrikari, Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367587604
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

The later phase of first modernity of social work: after the Second World War to the end of the Cold War

Political development in Europe between the First and Second World Wars has received much attention, yet the question remains how it was possible that several European democratic societies turned to strictly authoritarian, even racist, regimes and turned a massive industrial system and its technologies towards repressive policies and warfare (Bauman 1989). In the aftermath of the disaster of the Holocaust and the Second World War, there were both moral opportunities and the political will to develop functioning European democracies as well as humanistic approaches towards the people who had suffered in the war. The Western European states adopted the aim of rebuilding the societies ruined in war and compensating people for the opportunities they had lost during oppression and wartime (Titmuss 1968). The acceleration of industrial development increased in the aftermath of war and offered new chances to advance prosperity in Western societies.

Subsequently, there was a reasonable demand for the social state as well as for the rule-of-law state, which could protect the people against dictatorship and repression. The constitution of West Germany in 1949 enacted the state as a social market-economy state, and this idea was applied in many other European countries as well. After the Second World War, Western European societies started to combine and advance three principles: the welfare system, democratic governance and the market economy. From the viewpoint of social work development, the early ideas of civic society as a platform for social workers had to be reconsidered, while public social service systems began to develop based on the welfare state and what could be the mandate of social work in the service system. We have chosen to introduce the Beveridge Report as a single but representative document regarding the social policy ideas launched after the war and as a background for welfare state politics; social justice, equality and the universalism of social services were the principles which Western European states adopted as guidelines for developing social policy and social services.

In Great Britain, during wartime in 1942, William Beveridge (1879–1963) had already published his programme for a new type of social service system focusing not only on material but also on immaterial needs. Beveridge wrote in his report, Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge 1942, para. 31), ‘The scheme proposed here is in some ways a revolution, but in more important ways it is a natural development from the past. It is a British revolution.’ Beveridge did not interpret poor social conditions as directly combined with material shortages, but he listed ‘giant evils’ to be combatted by social services, including squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease; hence, his programme also had a moral political emphasis. Anthony Forder (1983, 7) argued that in the British revolution, as claimed by Beveridge, the state had to take full responsibility for social policy, and social development could no longer be left as an occasional by-product or a function of the economy but must be developed on a planned and intentional basis.

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