During the 16-year civil war in Mozambique thousands of children were separated from their families as a direct or indirect result of conflict and displacement. International organizations lent support to a national family tracing and reunification programme coordinated by the government Department for Social Action. Drawing on the findings of an empirical study of the sustainability of substitute family care, this article describes the tensions associated with the involvement of international organizations during the emergency conditions of the war, in post-war (...) rehabilitation and in longer term development. It explores the ethical dimensions of social welfare interventions across borders and continents and concludes by arguing a case for international humanitarian agencies to base their interventions to ?help? separated children on deeper knowledges of the social and political history, and the values, beliefs and normative practices of the populations with whom they work. (shrink)

This article discusses the nature of interprofessional ethics and some of the ethical issues and challenges that arise when practitioners from different professions work closely together in the fields of health and social care. The article draws on materials from a conference on this theme, covering issues of confidentiality and information sharing in practice and research with vulnerable people; challenges for teaching and learning about ethics in interprofessional settings; the potential of virtue ethics and an ethic of care for understanding (...) and handling ethical issues in interprofessional practice; and the extent to which interprofessional working may be about surveillance and control. It concludes that the need to understand and handle ethical issues in interprofessional working is contributing to the revitalisation of professional ethics as a dynamic field of study. (shrink)

This article outlines and develops the concept of ‘ethics work’ in social work practice. It takes as its starting point a situated account of ethics as embedded in everyday practice: ‘everyday ethics’. This is contrasted with ‘textbook ethics’, which focuses on outlining general ethical principles, presenting ethical dilemmas and offering normative ethical frameworks (including decision-making models). ‘Ethics work’ is a more descriptive account of ethics that refers to the effort people put into seeing ethically salient aspects of situations, developing themselves (...) as good practitioners, working out the right course of action and justifying who they are and what they have done. After identifying seven features of ethics work, including work on framing, roles, emotion, identity, reason, relationships and performance, each element is illustrated with reference to two case examples from social work practice. It is argued that the concept of ethics work, with its focus on the practitioners as moral agents in context, is an important antidote to the rules-based managerialism of much contemporary practice. (shrink)

This short article explores the expanding and contested terrain of social work ethics, considering the form and content of future areas for development. It charts the broadening of the field beyond a focus on professional codes of ethics, principle-based theories, difficult cases and decision-making models towards more embedded and situated approaches to ethics in professional life. The potential for further empirical research into ethical issues in social work, including how practitioners conceptualize and handle ethical difficulties, is noted, alongside the scope (...) for focused studies and monographs drawing on moral, political and religious philosophy to examine particular theoretical approaches or to develop new ways of approaching ethics in social work, drawing on its radical, critical and transformatory traditions. (shrink)

Ethical decision making is a core part of the work of social work and human service practitioners, who confront with regularity dilemmas of duty of care; confidentiality, privacy and disclosure; choice and autonomy; and distribution of increasingly scarce resources. This article details the development and application of the Inclusive Model of Ethical Decision Making, created in response to growing awareness of the complexities of work in both public and private sectors. The model rests on four key platforms that are constructed (...) from important foundational values and principles. These platforms are: Accountability, Consultation, Cultural Sensitivity and Critical Reflection, and underlie the dynamic five-step process that uses a reflective yet pragmatic approach to identify and analyze all relevant aspects of an ethical dilemma. The article begins by exploring the anatomy of an ethical dilemma, including the identification of competing ethical principles. It then moves on to highlight the different points in a decision-making process where difficulties typically arise for practitioners who may confront problems of interpretation of ethical codes, lack of access to needed resources and supports, or who may find themselves bound by legal or organizational restrictions. It is argued that this model has useful application for both social work education and practice. (shrink)

Social work students in England now have to register with the General Social Care Council and ?sign up to? the codes of practice. These specify that social workers must not ?behave in a way, in work or outside work, which would call into question [their] suitability to work in social care services'. This paper describes a small and ongoing piece of doctoral research into social work students' perceptions of professional regulation. The policy context for social work regulation is outlined, including (...) the implications for social work educators and students. The paper discusses the ethical and methodological issues which arose when planning the study. In conclusion, regulation has benefits for service users and professionals, but its implementation involves difficult ethical decisions. When students' suitability is called into question, there are implications for their personal and professional identities: exploring these implications will be the focus of the next stage of the research. (shrink)

Current approaches to professional ethics emphasise the importance of upholding the ethical duties of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice in practice. All are prima facie duties, meaning that they must be respected on their own and, if the duties conflict, it is assumed that the dilemma can be resolved through rational decision making. There are, however, a number of limitations to this approach to professional ethics. This paper explores these limitations through an empirical study that examined the ethical dilemmas facing (...) 24 professionals in their work with older people who were self-neglecting or living in squalor in Sydney, Australia. The research uncovered that two groups of professionals interpreted autonomy in different ways. Furthermore, when faced with difficult ethical dilemmas, participants agreed that the most satisfactory responses involved strategies that closely mirrored elements of alternative approaches to ethics, particularly the ethics of care and virtue ethics. The findings point to the relevance of a pluralistic approach to ethics in professional practice. (shrink)

Care staff in Norway usually work in the private homes of people with intellectual disabilities. Staff experience ethical challenges daily in their interactions with their clients. The aim of this paper is to introduce a vignette validation procedure for selection of practice-close vignettes that can be used to elicit and explore staff reflections on ethical challenges in their work. Staff participants were recruited from different municipalities in one county of Norway. To develop vignettes with good internal validity, the validation process (...) consisted of (1) a field study to identify situations to be included as vignettes, (2) a six-step categorization process to select vignettes with good internal validity, (3) transforming the situations into vignettes, including removal of elements that were too leading or constricting, (4) testing the familiarity and relevance of the preliminary sample of vignettes (external validation), (5) final selection of four vignettes to be included in the investigation, and (6) a validation of the four vignettes? familiarity and practical relevance as ethical challenges by the final sample of interviewees. Our preliminary experience indicates that the validation procedure enhanced the selection of vignettes to elicit staff perceptions and reflections on daily ethical challenges. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of cross-border migration for social work's normative commitment to social justice. Specifically, it interrogates Nancy Fraser's conceptualisation of social justice in guiding social work practice with refugees. The paper is grounded in an ethnographic study conducted from 2008 to 2009 in a South African church which had provided shelter to a group of refugees following their displacement by an outbreak of xenophobic violence. The study's findings reveal that various kinds of misframing created multiple forms of (...) voicelessness amongst its foreign participants. These filtered out to justify, perpetuate and deepen other types of injustice, particularly misrecognition and maldistribution. There was some evidence of resistance, solidarity, recognition and small acts of redistribution. However, such positive practices proved difficult to sustain. The paper confirms the central importance of the notion of misframing for conceptualising and responding to social injustice in the absence of citizenship?as required of practitioners in the field of social work with refugees and indeed other groups rendered vulnerable within current economic, social, political and cultural constellations. In this regard, Fraser's contribution looks set to enrich social work's commitment to social justice both in normative and practical terms. (shrink)

Professional work is currently based on explicit knowledge and evidence to a greater degree than in the past. Standardising professional services in this way requires repetitive scenarios and might be seen as a challenge to professional autonomy. In the context of policing, officers perform a range of familiar tasks, but they may also encounter novel challenges at any moment. Moreover, police tasks are not well-defined. Therefore, many missions require police officers to rely on common sense, tacit knowledge or gut feeling. (...) In this article, I argue that a values-based methodology may serve as a tool to help evaluate decisions in unfamiliar situations, to learn from experience, as well as be a quality control for established routines. _Keywords:_ ethics, policing, decision-making, values, experiential learning routines. (shrink)

In the past decades, professions have increasingly been called to account. Several authors have reported that this increased public professional accountability, in the form of showing that professional conduct meets predefined standards or rules, has had severe negative consequences for professionals, their clients and society, and call for ‘intelligent’ forms of accountability; forms of accountability that may inform a wider public about professional conduct but do not harm it. In this paper, we propose a form of ‘intelligent’ public professional accountability. (...) Taking Freidson’s notion of institutional ethics as a point of departure, we develop a form of accountability that seeks to account for the conditions required for professional conduct. The paper first discusses the current ‘dilemma of professional accountability,’ describes ‘ideal-type professional conduct’ and goes into the conditions it requires. Next, it shows what accounting for these conditions entails and that this form of accountability fits the criteria for intelligent accountability, as set by O’Neill Capital failure: rebuilding trust in financial services, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014). (shrink)

This paper studies the construction of ethics in interactions between professionals in meetings, in relation to the rationing of resources. The research context is a supported housing unit targeted at clients with mental health and substance abuse problems. The service is provided for a municipality, which expects good progress of the clients. The research question is: how do the professionals produce implicit ethical justifications for setting limits to helping, even though the need for professional help is not called into question? (...) Five types of justification appear in the data covering 28 meetings. However, these types of justification do not solve the central ethical difficulty arising in the conversations. Limiting help would easily push people out of reach of all help. Thus, in spite of the talk about ethical justification, workers do not ultimately resort to limiting help in situations with no real alternatives for getting help. The ethical principle of following non-exclusionary practices is highly prioritized. (shrink)

In the social sciences, the iconic definition of privilege is that of unearned advantage. Consequently, professionals in the social services may devote less attention to the examination of their own professional privilege since it has been earned. This article addresses ethical concerns about the earned privilege that accrues to professionals in the caring fields and the potential effects on service users. This paper will focus particularly on some of the pedagogical dimensions. The inherent paradox in socializing students into professional roles, (...) which enhance privilege, while attempting to reduce the power differentials with service users, requires attention by teachers. How one might lessen the hierarchy that is created between the helper and service user as a result of that privilege will be explored. The paper will detail professional privilege and both constructive and problematic impacts on the helping relationship. The ‘uneven’ advantage of being able to set the standards of health and morality are also discussed. In the process, ethical trespass may result. We will explore this concept and its implications. Because, privilege contributes to social stratification between helpers and recipients, the final segment offers one educational strategy that can be used to potentially lessen the ‘we–they’ duality. (shrink)

This paper presents a profile of the welfare regime in Lebanon which is posited on the twin precepts of human ethics and welfare particularism. It highlights the key role that moral values play in the conceptualization and implementation of social policy, as well as in the measurement of welfare outcomes. This is marked by the dominance of duty, traditionalism and elitism in the ethics of religious welfare in Lebanon. The paper argues that the social welfare regime in Lebanon overlaps with (...) the debates on the ethics of care and on virtue ethics in Western moral philosophy. This is also linked in with contemporary conceptualizations of religious ethics in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The paper asserts that religious ethics is a valid endeavour in its own right and an ever more pertinent subject matter for the study of social welfare and social policy. This challenges the traditional dichotomy between reason and faith which has subdued the relevance of religion to public life. Indeed, religion, the nuclear family and clientelism networks are shown to play a critical role in Lebanese social welfare, such that, in spite of state incapacity, the welfare regime there cannot be considered rudimentary. The method adopted for this research was a large qualitative case study involving service providers and users at the Ministry of Social Affairs and five leading Christian and Muslim religious welfare organizations in Lebanon. (shrink)

Based on individual and focus-group interviews, this article describes how social workers in a variety of settings and geographical areas within Ontario approached ethical issues in their daily practices. Two primary approaches to professional ethics emerge from the data: principle based and virtue based, reflecting the orientation of groups we label believers and skeptics, respectively. The code of ethics appears to be the fulcrum from which our participants swing. The believers show faith in the code of ethics and the skeptics (...) are dubious that codes are necessarily in the best interests of clients. The article describes the thinking behind the actions of the believers and skeptics and explores possibilities for future practice and research with respect to decision-making regarding ethical issues in the social work profession. (shrink)

How ethics in human services is a political activity, shaping social relationships, is explored through the examination of two opposing discourses, a principle-based and a situated/relational narrative. Factors such as neo-liberalism, managerialism, and the risk-aversive society give a context for the reasons that the principle-based discourse has been the predominant influence, and what interests are served by this trope taking center stage. A delineation and critique of both perspectives are provided, including an explanation of the epistemological underpinnings of these discourses. (...) The piece ends with what needs to be done to strengthen ethics. (shrink)