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Postmodernity In Social Work

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Modernism
“Modern” or “modernism” can imply at least three similar meanings. On the most general level, it can mean an innovation, novelty, that is something, which is in contrast to the old, and thus it expresses a certain belief in progress. The other, more particular meaning refers to the modern period understood, from the philosophical perspective, as connected with Enlightenment thinking, rationality and the period since the 18th century that started to emphasize reason as the means of “objective” exploration of reality that is closely connected with empiricism in philosophy (John Locke, Rene Descartes, David Hume), Nesbit describes those philosophers as the “early utopian writers” as they obligated revelations about political and social …show more content…

It is valuable to articulate what these premises are however, particularly as it appears that social work is, in many respects, a fundamentally modernist enterprise. Modernism broadly reflects the key values of the Enlightenment era, and a belief in progress and order. Social work consequently reflects modernist ideas as it is concerned with interventions to address social problems and support people, and thus, to work towards progress and social order. Social work knowledge seems to operate on modernist foundations, therefore in that it is concerned with improving the ideas, systems and practices of social work to make interventions or services better, and to move them closer to achieving their stated aims. It is progress, and developing knowledge to develop practices, alongside the contribution of ideas and methods to improving understandings about practices, that is the key theme of modernist frameworks. This is regularly taken to mean ensuring that standards of methodological or analytic rigor are met to show the reliability of ideas and approaches, and that there is clarity in establishing the significance of knowledge, and its significance to practice. Whereas, postmodernist frameworks contain a critique of modernist ideas for …show more content…

The modernist concern with cohesive and efficacious knowledge, and the postmodernist concern with plurality and uncertainty both offer ways of developing thinking about ideas and methods in practice. This process of making frameworks explicit also begins to illustrate how we do not seem to neatly divide thinking into modernist or postmodernist frameworks, but switch between them. While there is a clear sense in which the modernist and postmodernist frameworks are antagonistic, it also seems that we intuitively consider good practice in relation to notions of good practice and effective social work interventions, whereas also questioning the veracity and appropriateness of the notions in relations to other ideas. Indeed we quite naturally seem to recognize diversity in social work knowledge, whilst still working towards conceptions of good practice, and developing knowledge that adheres to standards linked to these

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