Social work epistemology in political contexts — historical reflections and future perspectives

This paper highlights the particular challenges faced by academics when providing social work practice a scientific foundation. This discipline and profession deals with the nature and problems of social relations which are complex, context and culture specific and yet relate to universal regularities. By tracing key historical developments in social work theory, it can be shown that the political context in which theories emerge and to which they take position matters considerably so that principles like self-help or attention to diversity and personal identity can be interpreted quite differently. The paper focuses on the tension between objectivity and subjectivity as constitutive of social work epistemology, a theme that finds increasingly echoes in other disciplines, and concludes from latest ‘post-humanist’ theorising that in view of current global crises this tension needs to be maintained constructively in the interest of seeing individual social needs in comprehensive interactive perspectives.