Social Workers as 'Strong Evaluators': rethinking moral sources and professional identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that adherence to an ethical stance in is one of the defining strengths of social work and something that makes it both distinctive and progressive. Social work refuses to drop the notion that society can be a vehicle for the translation of private troubles into public concerns and the democratically generated search for community, solidarity and the good life. Against the tide of neoliberal political rule with its pursuit of self-interested individualism it is argued that social work retains a strong conception of an ethical good as part of its professional identity. It is against this drift of hardening neo liberal politics that this paper situates the significance of social work in terms of the ¡°practice of value¡±. To pose questions of ethical practice for social work is the first step towards reawakening them. This can contribute to the enrichment of ethical social work by activating moral sources. The starting point for this analysis derives from the writings of the Canadian communitarian philosopher Charles Taylor, and especially his idea that human beings lead their lives and assess themselves in light of broad ethical standards. The paper asks why social workers are committed to ethical practice through an examination of Taylor¡¯s conception of ¡°strong¡± versus ¡°weak¡± evaluators. It looks at the way we can bring theory and practice together in accounting for aspects of professional identity and how this provides a basis for resisting the malaise of neoliberal capitalism. Starting from an actor oriented perspective, which holds to the view that human beings are essentially embodied agents who actively encounter things that concern them, the paper broadens this framework to examine the moral sources of social 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 | 0.058 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.138 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| 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".