Reading Foucault for Social Work. By Adrienne Chambon, Allan Irving, and Laura Epstein, eds. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. 292. $49.50 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).
Finally, for the profession of social work, for academicians and practitioners, for those
already familiar with the work of Michel Foucault, and for those who want an introduction, there is
an insightful and comprehensive new collection of essays compiled by Adrienne Chambon, Allan
Irving, and the late Laura Epstein. Indeed, it might be argued that we have for too long allowed
others to train their gaze on our practice, knowledge production, and theories, using the ideas of
Michel Foucault, without ourselves critically engaging those same ideas. Historians,
anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural theorists take on virtually every aspect of our
practice-therapy, child, maternal, and family welfare, emergency psychiatry, and public
welfare-using Foucault and his heirs. Though some might argue that we are now too late to enter the
debate, Foucault's ideas remain so pervasive that we can now, with the help of this tightly edited
volume, seriously engage our critics and reflect on our knowledge production and practice. The
contributors to this volume will help, using Foucault, enrich our understandings of social work
research, theory and practice. In summarizing the book, Reading Foucault for Social Work, I discuss
the several important contributions of this volume, and briefly, I consider the unanswered
questions and silences produced by this work.
Though edited volumes often produce discontinuity and tedious redundancy between articles and
sections, the editors of
Reading Foucault for Social Work have assembled a collection that is coherent, new, and
comprehensive. And where there is repetition, it is most often in the service of reaching for
clarity and understanding. For example, in Part I (Social Work in Perspective) the central ideas in
Foucault's thought are introduced , while in Part II (Social Work Practices and Knowledge
Reconsidered), they are used to analyze social work practice: child welfare, youth sexuality, grief
counseling, gerontology, public welfare, and education. Thus, though each of the two sections
consider the conceptual scheme, the second examines how the theory applies to concrete, historical
cases; in short, this makes for a seamlessness rarely found in edited volumes. Coherency between
chapters is also accomplished by the common use of Foucault's concepts, and a clear summary
(including a helpful glossary of terms). This results in a lucid presentation of Foucault's often
complex and entangled ideas. And because the authors frequently reference Foucault, readers may
feel confident that they make serious efforts to adequately represent the depth and complexity of
his work. In Chapter Four, we are treated to an important new translation of the famous 1972
roundtable convened by Foucault and his colleagues to discuss specifically the role of social work
in modern society. In her translation, Chambon, a social worker sensitive to questions relevant to
practice, adds important discussions of social work not found in the only other English
version.
As one might expect from a volume influenced by Foucault, this one,
Reading Foucault for Social Work, has a conspicuous and recurring theme: "…social work and
social welfare literature and practice are far from being socially neutral or limited to technical
interventions; they are deeply implicated in the construction of power relations…" (p. 151). Though
this is not new to the criticism of social work, we learn new methods for keeping the discussion
alive through Foucault's contribution to interrelated debates about knowledge, power, domination,
normalization, and social practice.
Foucault's signature term, bio-power, encapsulates his thought and provides a point of departure
for most of the volume. Modern governments, for example, use bio-power to control, regulate, and
routinize everyday social relations; typically, however, this is not accomplished through
techniques, knowledge, and classificatory schemes that give emphasis to the heavy-handed and
power-over. Bio-power refers, instead, to the myriad ways that dominant discourses on gender,
sexuality, ethnicity, and work, become taken-for-granted, normalized, and internalized, so that the
individual desires to be the kind of subject dictated by the dominant discourse. The chief
technique of bio-power is a group of practices called "dividing practices" that work to place
social work clients either inside a normal circle of behavior, or outside, within a circle of
abnormal behavior.
The common tools of social work bio-power are the examination, the intake, or assessment; the
making of a "case"; surveillance and follow-up (see Chapter Nine by Ken Moffat); and, of course,
therapy (see Chapter Seven by Catherine E. Foote and Arthur W. Frank). The hoped-for effect of
deploying bio-power in social work is the production and reproduction of normalized client
subjectivities. For example, we learn from Carol-Anne O'Brien (Chapter Six) that gay and lesbian
youth often feel marginalized by heteronormative practices in social service agencies. Moreover,
most social work literature on youth sexuality contributes to the reproduction of a heterosexual
marriage discourse. Foucault argues that modern social institutions set the political, legal, and
social conditions (called governmentality) for creating subject positions like the married,
heteronormative male (see Chapter Three by Adrienne S. Chambon). When such discourses are
effectively reproduced, the "male" comes to desire or want to become the masculine, married man;
here, bio-power is internalized.
Reading Foucault for Social Work problematizes social work as an instrument of state
governmentality, an agent that reproduces dominant discourses on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
old age (for old age in particular, see Chapter Eight, by Frank T. Y. Wang). Ken Moffat argues that
the power relations in the welfare office produce clients as customers of a "financial institution"
(p. 240). In using this language of the "customer," new welfare policies attempt to replace the
"welfare" subject position with that of "consumer." And, the later is made normal through "dividing
practices" that valorize work over welfare.
Because Chambon et al. use Foucault to analyze policy and practice, they skillfully demonstrate
Foucault's conceptual versatility at dissolving the boundaries differentiating social work policy
from practice. While macro policies are inextricably tied to dominant discourses, so are the micro
practices of bio-power (see, for example, Chapter Five on child welfare practices, by Nigel
Parton).
Reading Foucault for Social Work is silent, however, about the relationship of Foucault's
ideas to other prominent voices (inside and outside social work) that have warned us of the
potential dangers of social work; thus, unfortunately, some readers may dismiss Foucault as just
more "postmodern anti-science" and neglect significant insights. Chambon et al. could have averted
this misconception if they had compared Foucault to other critiques of social work, and then argued
for his novelty. Perhaps, then, readers could have seen where Foucault goes that others have not;
that is, with the concept bio-power, he destabilizes policies and practices that conventionally
reproduce normative projects of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other substantive subject
position formations.
I found the second silence in the volume more troubling than the first. Foucault's ideas have a
tendency to undo themselves, caught up as they are in unresolved paradoxes. For example, even
though his idea of a "dividing practice" seems very real and significant, it cannot become
practically meaningful unless the theory also explains the undivided practice. Foucault was a
master of reversal, that is, he cleverly deconstructed social categories by reversing our everyday
use of language. Thus, as would Foucault, I will reverse his thought and examine silences produced
in this book. Yes, surely practices can divide (e.g., utilization of the Diagnostic Statistical
Manual); but clearly, so do theories (e.g., psychopathology). What is an undivided theory? In other
words, one of the ethical implications of
Reading Foucault for Social Work is that social workers should be conscious of their
dividing practices (e.g., dividing the heterosexual from the homosexual, the male from the female,
the normal and healthy from the abnormal and unhealthy). Let us consider the following possible
reversal: where there is a divided practice, must there not also be undivided theory and practice?
This conundrum, not addressed by Chambon et al., produces a paradox and silence on what an
undivided theory and practice could possibly mean. Does it, for example, mean that social workers
have access to a theory and practice that could unite, under one social category, a common circle
of humanity where no one is excluded? And should social work abandon all divided theory and
practice?
For example, to bring the mentally ill out of hospitals and into the community was undivided
theory put into practice. The theory asserted that all people, severely mentally ill or not, should
live together in the community. But in normalizing severe mental illness, community support service
practice made the long-term mentally ill different. They did this to make claims upon social
services; otherwise, they would be unnecessarily abandoned-as many are-to the streets, homeless
shelters, and jails. Consequently, as we seem practically incapable of placing all our clients in
the same social category, then why should social work expect itself to abandon divided practice?
Moreover, under what political or other conditions might the promotion or dissolution of dividing
practices become appropriate? Are there no social, political, and psychological boundaries to be
respected and even promoted? And how do bio-power techniques actually produce their effects? These
questions point to Foucault's own theoretical limitations not discussed by the authors or editors
of this volume and frequently found in the Foucauldian critiques of social work.(1)
If Foucault is going to have relevance for social work practice, then we must study how
bio-power-divided and undivided practice-actually produces effects. Alone, it is insufficient to
merely theorize those effects. On this point, John Devine's essay (Chapter Ten) offers important
criticism. Devine describes an urban school where teachers fail to regulate and discipline bodies.
He shows how an alternative school program reintroduces bio-power techniques to recreate the
discipline of learning. Devine demonstrates that dividing practices do not necessarily result in
docile, disempowered bodies. Though effective in raising provocative social work questions, Devine
shows that the concept bio-power becomes problematic when studying failed attempts to regulate
bodies. Thus, his essay raises the spectre for Foucauldians to theorize "good" and "bad"
(dividing?) bio-power techniques.
Reading Foucault for Social Work is a groundbreaking work. I think it will become a
standard reference for those interested in incorporating Foucauldian thought into social work
curricula. When it comes to practice, however, I think the collection uncritically duplicates
serious fault lines in the way Foucauldian ideas might be practiced. Though authors point to the
concept of resistance (see Chapter Seven and Eight) as a solution to normalizing judgements,
practitioners will need more. When should I resist? When is resistance counter-normalizing? How do
traditional psychotherapy concepts of resistance overlap, or not, with Foucaults use of the term?
Thus, when it comes to practicing Foucault, much more than reading Foucault will be necessary.
Jerry Floersch
Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University
Notes
1) For a critical review of Foucault see, David Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader,
(Oxford Blackwell, 1986). See also a critical book review (by Jerry Floersch) of another Foucault
inspired study of social work: Leslie Margolin, Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of
Social Work, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), in the American Journal of
Sociology, 104, No. 4 (1999), pp. 1216-1218.
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