Next-generation modelling of community work and structural social work in Finland

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Next-generation modelling of community work and structural social work in Finland © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published version Matthies, Aila-Leena Matthies, A.-L. (2022). Next-generation modelling of community work and structural social work in Finland. Nordic Social Work Research, 12(2), 229-242. https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857x.2021.1968474 2022 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rnsw20 Nordic Social Work Research ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnsw20 Next-generation modelling of community work and structural social work in Finland Aila-Leena Matthies To cite this article: Aila-Leena Matthies (2021): Next-generation modelling of community work and structural social work in Finland, Nordic Social Work Research, DOI: 10.1080/2156857X.2021.1968474 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2021.1968474 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 23 Aug 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Next-generation modelling of community work and structural social work in Finland Aila-Leena Matthies University Of Jyväskylä, Jyvaskyla Finland ABSTRACT The recently reformed Finnish Social Welfare Act obligates public social work to enact structural social work, and to address the communityand structural-level social problems behind individual cases. This article examines how community work and structural social work are conceived by early career social workers. The empirical data consists of 26 project plans by social work Master’s students studying in a working life-based parttime programme. The data includes designs for community work or structural social work to be applied in practice to address a real social problem or issue identified by the students in their working environment. The designs are analysed by content analysis and related to the theoretical categorizations of community strategies by Rothman, the community work models by Popple, and the task fields of structural social work by Pohjola. However, the strong evidence of mixed models in the results allows to suggest that categorizations as theoretical-conceptual frames are rather useful for identifying rich diversities and combinations, instead of clear-cut categories of community work and structural social work. The designs reflect the challenges created by the managerialist service systems themselves. They seek more cooperative structures to meet the reallife needs of local communities. It can be concluded that structural social work can become a powerful approach when taken as a legal mandate in the hands of early career social workers, enacting community and political perspectives in Finnish social work at all levels. This requires that they will not be prohibited or tamed in its applications. Introduction A profound discrepancy regarding the position of community work and further macro-social work approaches is present in social work practices in many western societies. Political discourses and programmes (such as the LEADER, URBAN, and EQUAL programmes of the European Commission 2014) broadly recommend the strengthening of local communities as the most promising strategy to use against the polarization and individualization of societies. In reality, except for short-term project applications with various public and third-sector agencies, community work appears to be a marginal approach in the daily practice of mainstream social work, which is forced to focus mainly on the managerialistic governance of individual caseloads (Stepney and Popple 2008; Turunen 2020; Roivainen 2016). Therefore, reflection is needed on what concrete steps social work practice could take to more intensively utilize its position, close to local communities and rich traditions of community-oriented and macro-level approaches, in order to have a more powerful impact on the social problems that are identified behind the individual cases in local communities and society. CONTACT Aila-Leena Matthies [email protected] NORDIC SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2021.1968474 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Social work research provides a broad offering of conceptual, theoretical, and practical reflections on the different contents and understandings of community work (Opačić 2021; Popple 2015; Roivainen 2016; Rothman 2007; Turunen 2020) and further forms of macro-social work (Applewhite, Kao, and Pritzker 2018; Tice, Long, and Cox 2020). The aim of this article is to contribute to the international conceptual debates about community work by involving the concept of structural social work (Weinberg 2019; Pohjola 2011; Närhi and Matthies 2018) and provide knowledge about its potential in practice. The article is contextualized in the new opportunity of Finnish social work that includes community-oriented and macro-level interventions in mainstream social work. This application has been called for by the professional and scientific community for long time, and has now been legislated by the reformed Finnish Social Welfare Act of 2015. The Act emphasizes that public social work has a duty and a right to enact structural social work and address communityand structural-level social issues beyond individual cases. Social work practice, education, and research are now challenged to provide evidence of how to utilize this unique mandate. In this study, I ask 1) what types of social problems do Finnish early career social workers identify, and what kinds of structural social and community work interventions do they suggest for these issues, and 2) how do these designs relate to international theoretical-conceptual categorizations and models. The data used in this study consists of written academic assignments of early-career social workers in their Master’s studies. Their designs for structural social work or community work are analysed by content analysis and related to the core conceptual debates, i.e. to the categorizations of community strategies by Rothman (2007) and the community work models by Popple (2015). Furthermore, I analyse how the task fields of structural social work proposed by Pohjola (2011) appear in the data, since Pohjola’s conceptual work has held a core position in the Finnish debate, while applying this strategy in practice. Theoretical-conceptual frameworks of community work and structural social work In the international research literature on community work, one of the key issues discussed focuses on the theoretical-conceptual categorization and typology of the strategies and models of community work. However, in this article based on empirical analysis, it is neither possible nor necessary to present an overview of the entire international theoretical-conceptual debate, which has already been comprehensively done, including a focus on the Nordic context (Turunen 2004, 2009; Sjöberg and Turunen 2018; Roivainen 2016). Thus, those works that provide a framework for the empirical analysis are introduced and only briefly discussed. The work most frequently used internationally, which is also highly relevant to the Finnish context, is the conceptualization by Rothman (; Rothman 2001, 2007) that includes the three basic strategies of distinct community work. Rothman (; Rothman 2001) categorized these as: 1) social planning, 2) community development, and 3) social action. All the strategies have the needs of the local community as a starting point but differ in the direction of their efforts: social planning mainly addresses policy-making based on knowledge from local communities, while community development involves working horizontally and networking among NGOs, and public and private agencies. Finally, social action is a – up strategy and usually includes advocacy and participatory actions with local people. In his later publication, Rothman (2007) changed the wording of the three strategies to planning/policy, community capacity development, and social advocacy, and enlarged their variations with a triple cross-tabulation, leading to nine new models that mix strategies. For instance, the combination of social advocacy and community capacity development leads to capacity development with social advocacy. This is not only a conceptual-technical exercise but brings up Rothman’s argument that in most cases a mixture of strategies are needed, including rationalistic planning in formal organizations and participatory/grassroots forms of problem solving (Rothman 2007, 36). 2A.-L. MATTHIES AND A.-L. MATTHIES For instance, in our cross-European action research of local policies and social work (Matthies, Järvelä, and Ward 2000; Matthies, Närhi & Ward 2001; Turunen et al. 2001; Stepney & Popple 2008), we identified three corresponding models as target directions of action: addressing policymakers with a social-impact assessment of city planning in Finland, improving urban development with cross-sectoral networking in a suburb in Eastern Germany, and social action with local residents in England. However, at the end of the three-year project, each local community approach had changed its strategy by applying models learned from the European partners. Finally, we could determine that a mixture of the three basic models was most successful in achieving improvements in the respective communities. Thus, we realized that it is not contrasting but merging of all the three levels that has the strongest positive impact (see also Rothman and Mitzrahi 2014). Interestingly, in a classic German textbook for community work published in 1976, the author Seippel (1976) applies Rothman’s concepts but concludes that the applicability of these Americanbased concepts in the German context has to be regarded with awareness of the core differences between these societies. In the Nordic welfare states in the 2020s, we can still agree with Seippel, who stated that the most relevant differences, which need to be considered from the European perspective concern the scope of the socioeconomic and cultural-spatial polarization of the population, the degree of marginalization and building of slums, the responsibility of the public sector regarding people’s welfare and education, and the role of charity organizations (Seippel 1976, 34– 35). These differences also explain the scepticism towards state institutions and the radical tenor of the citizen movements in the American context of community work. It is assumed that, in spite of the clarity of Rothman’s three basic strategies, their understanding and application essentially vary in different cultural contexts. Another conceptual research line, which is involved in my analysis identifies variety of concepts and models. It demonstrates, how community merges into professional social work and applies concepts like community social work, community-oriented or community-based social work, and includes community-orientation in further relevant service segments, such as healthcare elderly care, and education. (Popple 2015; Stepney and Popple 2008; Turunen 2009, 2020; Roivainen 2016; Sjöberg and Turunen 2018). However, although being aware of the differentiation between community work and community social work, for clarity I prefer to use the concept of community work only in a general and elastic manner in this paper, in line with Sjöberg and Turunen (2018; see also Žganec and Opačić 2021), which reflects the professional landscape in the country context of this paper. In a similar way, Popple (2015) uses community work as a generic term, which includes several differentiated community work models. The value of Popple’s conceptualization is that it analyses the impact of core societal developments on community work. He speaks of the influence of globalization, neoliberal welfare policies, technology, increased economic inequality, and urgent environmental issues and the need for transition towards a sustainable future (Popple 2015, 2). Consequently, he introduces nine different models of community work that differ based on strategy and the role of practitioners. They will not be described in detail here but are worth mentioning as conceptual tools that are also used in the empirical analysis:1) Community care develops professional and volunteer care provision for people in need, 2) community organizing improves the coordination between various welfare agencies, 3) community development supports the skills of local groups to improve their the life in the community, 4) community education brings education closer to the community, 5) community action applies conflict-focused direct actions, 6) community economic development establishes local not-for-profit businesses, 7) feminist community work addresses women’s well-being, 8) ethnic minority and anti-racist community work supports groups working for the needs of minorities, and 9) environmentalism and the green movement critique supports groups working for sustainability transition and environmental justice. Popple argues that although these models overlap in their techniques and the skills used, they essentially follow the different traditions NORDIC SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH 3 and ideologies of the movements behind them. This also strengthens Rothman’s argument that the conceptualizations of community work are – besides the global perspective – very tightly bound to the cultural contexts in which they have developed (see also Gamble and Weil 2010). In the Finnish literature, categorizations do not receive a similar broad interest; the theoretical debates on community work have focused rather on the agency of community work in relation to the welfare state, neoliberal management, civil society, and social work with clients (Roivainen et al. 2008; Roivainen 2016). While preparing the Social Welfare Act including structural social work in Finland, international literature was used for its definition and content description. Embedding structural social work in the legal frame of Finnish social welfare policy was also a chance for long-term domestic efforts to encourage the idea that social workers receive important knowledge about social issues in their daily work with clients, and they can therefore give valuable insight for policy-making (Pohjola, Laitinen, and Seppänen 2014). In the wording of the Social Welfare Act (Finlex 2014), structural social work is seen as a preventive measure for promoting social well-being and health. It requests that society (especially at a municipal level) makes use of the knowledge and expertise of social workers who can provide front-line information on social problems and suggestions for their improvement. The Act defines three tasks of structural social work: a) to produce knowledge about service users’ needs and their structural background, b) to act and make suggestions to prevent social problems and develop a better living environment in local communities, and c) to contribute to the planning of further public actions in local communities and collaborate with private and third-sector organizations in developing local social services. Pohjola (2011) defined the task fields of structural social work in a broadly used definition, which includes all methodical levels of social work – from individual to macro-political. First, it implies knowledge work (i.e. knowledge production about social issues for those in charge of decisionmaking). This includes intensive analytical examinations of people’s living circumstances and their changes, as well as proactive reporting of this knowledge to policymakers, media, and public arenas. Secondly, structural social work is strategic work, i.e. it promotes the development of welfare services and social issues in the local community and society, and advances dialogue between service users, decision-makers, and further relevant stakeholders. Social workers should be part of any groups developing strategies for well-being in the community. The third task field is inclusion work, i.e. advocating for the participation and involvement of citizens in society, and developing measurements in the local community that enable co-creation with service users, such as community meeting points, citizen forums, and service users acting as experts by experience. Finally, structural social work means justice work; the promotion of social justice, a rights-based movement to inform people of their rights and safeguard their realization. This understanding establishes a broad mandate for structural social work; however, it does not include something, which would be fundamentally new for the ideal self-understanding of social work in Finland based on social sciences. In other words, the Social Welfare Act legitimized the dream of progressive social work to consequently further enact all dimensions of community work, but especially the political dimension. It also underlines what Weinberg (2019) indicates as a vital component in structural social work: it provides a measure of certainty in the paradoxical area of ethics in the practice of social work (see also Tiitinen 2019). Furthermore, structural social work theoretically and conceptually exists in connection with the dynamic development of the ecosocial and environmental approaches in social work (Närhi & Matthies 2016; Närhi and Matthies 2018). Närhi and Matthies (2018) argue that the ecosocial approach strengthens structural social work with new conceptual and practical impulses. The localglobal interconnectivity of structural social work (Gamble and Weil 2010) is extended by the environmental perspective and the involvement of social work in the transition to sustainability (Närhi and Matthies 2018; Matthies and Närhi 2017; Matthies, Krings, and Stamm 2020). The ecosocial approach can help practitioners to understand that structural social work is not something 4A.-L. MATTHIES AND A.-L. MATTHIES totally outside of case work and individual issues. Then, the broadest interpretation of the classic ‘person-in-environment’ concept in social case work re-establishes interlinkages to the environment in a way that proves the need for group and community work, structuraland macro-level strategies, and analysis of the bio-physical and built environment, including work in and prevention of disaster situations (Dominelli 2012). The ecosocial perspective also strengthens the cross-sectoral transformative collaboration needed in structural social work and highlights the core role of structural social work in promoting social justice, which includes environmental justice (Närhi and Matthies 2018). The concept of macro-social work often used in this conceptual debate (Applewhite, Kao, and Pritzker 2018; Rothman and Mitzrahi 2014; Tice, Long, and Cox 2020) partly overlaps with both community work and structural social work, but tends to focus more on community organization and social administration. I do not use this concept in the analysis, however, it is worth mentioning as a useful meta-level categorization. Tice, Long, and Cox (2020) state that macro-social work practice has the ability to see and intervene in the big picture. It addresses larger systems of the socioecological environment and collaborates with service users to improve their opportunities at organizational, community, and societal levels. The authors also see a similarity with the historical concept of indirect social work, which has been used when involving the environment and the social welfare system, and replying to the need for policy analysis, income distribution, community building, and political organizing. It ‘changes conditions in environments and addresses community issues through the empowerment of consumers’ (Tice, Long, and Cox 2020, 21). In a similar way, Applewhite, Kao, and Pritzker (2018) argue for a stronger macro-social work approach and request that social work students should be prepared for critical roles ‘in human service organizations, community-based organizations, and social welfare policy settings’ (2018: 1170). However, their investigation of social work education discovered that competences for macro approaches are not trained. Thus, as stated at the beginning of this paper, in reality the concrete professional picture of both community work and structural social work seems to be more ambiguous than their normative goal-setting and ideal-conceptual definitions. Current context of community work and structural social work in the Finnish welfare state As long as Finnish social work has been a part of the academic environment of social sciences, since the mid-1970s, there has been an ideal goal of social work as a profession that makes changes in society and works beyond individual issues. Community work has even been regarded as ‘the real social work’ (Karjalainen and Kivipelto 2014). Besides the critical social sciences environment, this goal-setting has surely been influenced by the Swedish social work professor Harald Swedner, who also had readers in Finland, and who formulated the slogan ‘Socialt arbete är samhälleligt förändringsarbete’ (‘social work is work for changing society’. Swedner 1981; Roivainen 2016, 113). A corresponding progressive picture of social work was incorporated in the way community work and structural social work have been conceptualized in Finland as tightly interconnected yet not totally overlapping approaches (Viirkorpi 1990; Heinonen 2014). In reality, however, most social work services in Finland are provided as individual case work by public agencies in local communities, and distinct community work is not often enacted by social work practitioners. As Roivainen (2016, 120), instead there has been a shift from the models of traditional community work as part of social work methods in the contexts of a modern welfare state, towards post-modern community orientations and strategies. This shift also applies to the demands of neoliberal managerialism and the centralized organization of social work practice. It means that mainstream public social work practices are increasingly directed to the processing of case management and selected target groups. In a similar way, Turunen analysed a shift in Nordic community work (Turunen 2020, 121), and Roivainen identified that Finnish social work has become distanced from the traditional community work. Traditionally, community work focused NORDIC SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH 5 on entire local communities and their disadvantages by mobilizing collective change, and is now rather searching for the support of individuals with community resources (Roivainen 2016, 118– 119). However, the need to strengthen local communities and civil society is still there, and it is broadly recognized also in the neoliberal political discourses and programmes. According to neoliberal thinking, not only the public social work agencies but third-sector organizations and short-term multi-agency projects are expected to provide preventive activities and especially identify the needs of the most vulnerable groups. Roivainen also highlights the differentiated emergence of urban and rural social work in enacting community work strategies. Compared with the broad traditions of international community work since the birth of the settlement movement at the end of the 19 th century, community work in the Nordic countries has developed differently due to the context of the welfare states. However, the main difference is that in the Nordic countries, municipal social work practitioners are expected to be key actors who maintain community work approaches together with citizens and practitioners from third-sector organizations. Consequently, community work is not something outside of local public institutions but rather is applied by various collaborative networks across sectors. Surprisingly, as Turunen also states (Turunen 2020), certain strains of methods have survived over more than a hundred years of the history of community work, and appear still – such as community houses, self-help groups, and cooperative forms of social economy (Matthies et al. 2020) – however, not appearing solely as social work methods. For instance, neighbourhood centres as low-threshold meeting points comprise one of the main strategies in the metropolitan area of Helsinki to promote inclusion of the most vulnerable groups and poor living areas (Seppälä, Grönlund, and Kemppainen 2020). Village houses and meeting points in rural areas with multiple social and cultural functions are also likely to be important (Rantamäki and Kattilakoski 2019). The professional and academic communities of Finnish social work have been requesting reforms in the direction of structural social work, arguing for its preventive benefits for society. According to international (Payne 2005; Mullaly 2007; Fook 2015) and national debates (Pohjola 2011; Närhi and Matthies 2018; Tiitinen 2019), structural social work is expected to be emancipatory, political, and collaborative with citizen movements in addressing structural inequalities and other reasons for social problems. In particular, the ecosocial approach in social work (that connects Finland to global debates on critical environmentalism) emphasizes community strategies and structural dimensions, and requires social work to contribute to a transition towards a more sustainable society (Närhi and Matthies 2018; Matthies and Närhi 2017). Consequently, the new Welfare Act of 2015 (Finlex 1301/2014) provided a mandate to enact structural social work as a core task of public social work. This opportunity requires and enables Finnish social work to develop a wide range of types of macro-level social work. In parallel with the Act, a new two-year part-time specialization programme of further education for social workers has been offered since 2016 in a nationwide collaboration with the University of Jyväskylä, led by Professor Kati Närhi (SosNet 2020). The main contents of its curriculum include public communication and media work, empowerment and social justice work, the development of services and an environment for action, as well as evaluation and impact research. As Heinonen states (Heinonen 2014), structural social work may not be able to solve poverty, inclusion, and power issues alone; however, it can make a significant contribution as an agency that brings these issues to public arenas and suggests models of how to solve them, including networking with various agencies. Despite this optimism, a solid legal framework, and a theoretical base for structural social work, powerful resistance against such a change also seems to be emerging in the self-understanding and practice position of public social work. Bringing to public debate such topics as social problems in the local community, the unserved needs of people, or the deficiency of services is not welcomed by political elites in charge of local policies, independent of the importance of structural social work for 6A.-L. MATTHIES AND A.-L. MATTHIES preventing further social harm and costs. Silencing of social workers is even taking place, as Tiitinen discovered (Tiitinen 2020). It seems that those in power have not yet realized the benefits of structural social work but rather see it as a threat. Obviously, new tensions are emerging around structural social work in Finland. In fact, the practitioners on the front line face a dilemma to find their way between the right to maintain structural social work, according to the law, together with their own ethical preferences regarding the needs of people, and the real potential of entering into conflict with the persons in power, which would have an impact on their working conditions. Research data and methods This study approaches the exciting new opportunity for change in social work from the perspective of early-career practitioners. The cohorts of social work students included in this study were enrolled in a working life-based part-time study programme, meaning that they had already obtained working life experiences and were partly engaged in practice while completing their academic qualifications. Being in the fourth or fifth year of their Master’s studies in social work after the new Social Welfare Act came to force, they were asked to design their own plans to enact structural and community social work as an intervention in a real-life social problem or issue that they had identified in their practice experiences. The data for this article was collected in two different five ECTS-points courses that I offered in 2016 and 2019 on community work and structural social work. The courses applied blended learning methods typical of the part-time programme. The practical application segment of the course required the students to analyse a concrete issue, problem, or challenge in their working or living environment to which community or structural work could be applied, and to design a project plan to apply such a methodical approach. The course in 2016 also included a field visit to a neighbourhood centre, and, in both years, a guest lecture from an international visitor could be included. The data consists of 26 students’ written project plans of community or structural social work, each having a length of 3000–4000 words and formulated as an application for funding. Through a letter of informed consent and a written agreement, all of the 13 students from 2016 and 13 of the 20 students in 2019 gave permission to use their project plan in this research. Regarding research ethics and data protection, each student’s work is anonymized and safeguarded according to the GDPR. Denying or allowing the use of the assignment in this research did not have any impact on the grade given in the course. The students’ assignments enabled them to apply their interspaces of learning as unique part-time student opportunities, as they divided their time between work and study, theory and practice. Several students have later applied their plans in practice and have also connected it to their Master’s theses. Most of the students in this programme are aged between 30 and 60, and several of them already have a Master’s degree in another discipline, factors, which give a certain established adulthood as their background, compared with the majority of 20 to 25 year old university students. Although comprising just two relatively small groups of social work students from one university and two cohorts, the data can be regarded as giving a qualitatively broad slice of the current stage of development of social work in Finland. Since this is the only part-time programme, students come from across the country and reflect social work perspectives from various regions between metropolitan Helsinki, small rural municipalities, and various organizations. Their status as early-career practitioners with simultaneous study and work participation legitimates the assumption that they also present views from their practice. Regarding the point of time of the new legal duty and option for structural social work, these students were one of the first cohorts who were expected to learn structural social work as part of mainstream social work. The research questions were built upon the students’ assignments, i.e. their project plans. The data was analysed by qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2013; Tuomi and Sarajärvi 2018) in a theory-led manner, applying the research questions and the theoretical-conceptual models of NORDIC SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH 7 Tuomi, J., and A. Sarajärvi. 2018. Laadullinen Tutkimus Ja Sisällönanalyysi. Qualitative research and content analysis. Helsinki: Tammi. E-book. Turunen, P., A.-L. Matthies, K. Närhi, B. Th., and S. Albers. 2001. “Practical Models and Theoretical Findings in Combating Social Exclusion. 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