Service Users and Practitioners Reunited: The Key Component for Social Work Reform

This article explores the pressures towards both regulatory and liberatory social work. It identifies a range of factors operating to push social work in each direction. It discusses the key significance for more liberatory social work of the roles and engagement of social work practitioners and service users. Highlighting four key characteristics in the current political and policy context of social work: ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity and contradiction, it argues that social work is unlikely to develop a more emancipatory role, unless social work practitioners gain more support to play a central role in its construction and develop much closer links and alliances with service users and their organizations and movements.