Reinventing Critical Social Work :: Challenges from Practice, Context and Postmodernism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although a critical tradition has existed in the social work profession since its inception more than a century ago, a distinct and internally diverse critical social work canon emerged only in the 1960s and 1970s. Substantial structural changes over the past four decades, including the rise of globalisation and market driven approaches to the management of human services, already threaten the continuation of critical practice traditions in social work. Indeed, some critical social workers have declared the halcyon days of activist practice have now passed. The paper reviews contemporary contests from within the critical tradition to the core assumptions of critical practice theory. These challenges arise from practice, from critical analyses of the changing environment of public administration and from postmodern analyses. It is argued that these contests provide sites for the reinvention of critical practice theory towards more collaborative and open ended approaches to activism in social work. By recognising the challenges from within, critical social workers can strengthen and diversify their capacity to forge critical approaches relevant to social work in the 21st century.
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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 | 0.074 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.202 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.040 | 0.038 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".