Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and its potential for aligning social work with social justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concerns Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and its application to social work. It contends that recognition theory allows social work to situate its values in a direct and practical relationship to social justice. Honneth holds that identities are socially acquired and thus identity is a matter of justice because the acquisition of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem is the foundation of autonomy and agency. Honneth is particularly useful for social work because he rejects the liberal conception of human subjects as independent and self-determining, arguing that the inevitable dependence on others for identity formation renders people vulnerable to recognition. This vulnerability of identity substantiates Honneth’s claim that justice must be concerned with the social conditions of identity formation. An under-theorised aspect of recognition theory is the power dynamics of identity and difference in relation to recognition demands. William Connolly’s work on identity and difference describes the struggle for recognition as the perpetuation of domination and oppression through the power relations of identity formation. Two social work examples illustrate recognition theory’s potential contribution to theorising social work as justice work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".