Social work,participation,and poverty

Abstract

Summary

Although participatory social work approaches have been considered as a fruitful strategy, critical questions are raised in relation to the social justice aspirations of participatory social work with people in poverty. Inspired by the work of Nancy Fraser, we provide an in-depth insight in the complexities of supporting participatory parity in ‘Associations where People in Poverty Raise their Voice’. Combining semi-structured interviews and focus groups with practitioners in these organisations, we shed light on the complexities of the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice that arise in such participatory practice.

Findings

Our findings suggest that even in practices that situate the principle of participatory parity at the heart of their fight for social justice, power asymmetries and social inequalities require attention. Exclusionary mechanisms become apparent in how practitioners try to support participatory parity of people in poverty in the different components in the organisation. When practitioners try to overcome these exclusionary effects, a sheer complexity and inescapable power struggles become visible. Moreover, the ambiguity of how practitioners attempt to empower people in poverty and enhance structural change leads to tensions between affirmative and transformative strategies in the fight against poverty.

Applications

Practitioners should be aware that they will never be able to resolve or escape inherent complexities in their attempts to work on a par with people in poverty. Nevertheless, it remains valuable to make continuous efforts to inform the public debate about the socially unjust nature of poverty and social inequality in our societies.

Keywords

Social work poverty power social justice participation

Introduction

Since the 1990s, the importance of the participation of people in poverty in research, policy, and social work has been emphasised (Beresford, 2002; Beresford & Croft, 2004; Krumer-Nevo, 2005, 2016; Lister, 2002, 2004; Mehta, 2008). According to De Bie, Roets, and Roose (2013), the essence of poverty implies that people in poverty are excluded from the process in which poverty and anti-poverty strategies are defined, and poverty should therefore be seen as a structural problem of non-participation. In that vein, Doom (in De Bie, Claeys, and Vanhee (2003)) approaches poverty as a problem of unequal power relationships, implying that people in poverty experience a lack of resources and institutional power and are granted only a passive position in the social system. Moreover, Freire (1972) argues aptly that non-poor people who actually have some power to bring about social justice and social change often, and quite unintentionally, also maintain the status quo. Premised on the idea that people in poverty are experts in poverty (Lister, 2004), the proponents of participatory approaches have claimed that engaging with people in poverty in democratic ways embodies a fruitful and valuable strategy for gaining an in-depth understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of poverty as a social problem. Furthermore, it is argued that listening to their life knowledge ‘offers a unique potential contribution to the overall corpus of knowledge because it reflects the point of view of people at the fringes of society concerning their own lives, as well as society and its primary institutions’ (Krumer-Nevo, 2005, p. 100) and enables a cross-fertilisation of the existing knowledge of poverty with the life knowledge of people in poverty. Also in the field of social work, it is increasingly acknowledged that social work can benefit from the knowledge of people in poverty as subjects or participants rather than mere objects of intervention (Krumer-Nevo, 2005). This focus on participation has led to a diversity of participatory approaches that have been implemented in practice, such as using testimonials from people in poverty to inspire social work practices and social policymakers, the participation of people in poverty in the planning of activities, and the formal participation of people in poverty in internal board meetings.

Nevertheless, these participatory principles and practices have also been scrutinised and viewed with scepticism. For instance, research shows that the formal participation of people in poverty in policymaking does not necessarily contribute to effective anti-poverty strategies (Davies, Gray, & Webb, 2014; Postle & Beresford, 2007), since it can be conceived as primarily instrumental (Roets, Roose, De Bie, Claes, & Van Hove, 2012), and participatory ventures may evolve as ‘little more than tokenism or a “box ticking” exercise rather than meaningful involvement’ (Beresford, 2010, p. 499). In that vein, Cornwall and Brock (2005) emphasise that participation may be no more than a buzzword, referring to the ambiguous finding that people in poverty are frequently granted political agency as a means of subtly exercising social control. Participation can evolve as a disciplinary and controlling approach when policy and practice are seeking to construct citizens who are committed to a personal responsibility based on the expectation that they make the desired social change on their own (Baistow, 2000; Suijs, 2012). Since ‘animating struggles for equality, rights and social justice’ (Cornwall & Brock, 2005, p. 1057) is of vital importance in the field of social work, such an instrumental and tokenistic approach runs the danger of eroding the critical meaning and significance of participatory principles and practices (see also IFSW, 2014). These questions and critiques are especially relevant since social work was recently sharply criticised for inappropriately seeking to advance contemporary social justice claims and social change and for depoliticising social issues (Garrett, 2002; Marston & McDonald, 2012; Postle & Beresford, 2007).

Therefore, in this article, we attempt to articulate how a more productive and political approach to participation in social work can also be constructed, combining both theoretical and empirical insights. In that sense, we rely on the theoretical work of Nancy Fraser and mainly explore the relevance of her promising concept of ‘parity of participation’, which has recently served as a source of inspiration for a diversity of scholars in the field of social work. We consequently formulate our research objectives and discuss the findings emerging from our qualitative research on ‘Associations where People in Poverty Raise their Voice’ (APRV) in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium).

Participating on a par: An exploration of the work of Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser (1995, 1997, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2010) coined the concept of ‘parity of participation’ in an inspiring social justice framework. She argues that a society is just only if there is parity of participation, since ‘justice requires social arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life’ (Fraser, 2005, p. 73). Fraser (2005) emphasises the necessity of reflexivity about how societies enable or disable parity of participation, in which overcoming injustice ‘means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction’ (p. 73). She identifies three domains of injustice: the cultural, the economic, and the political (Fraser, 1995, 2005). Since societies appear as complex fields that encompass not only cultural and economic forms of ordering, but also political social arrangements, Fraser (2005) argues that only by considering these distinct though inter-imbricated dimensions can one determine what is impeding parity of participation. As such, she claims that it is not merely the case that some participatory parity is impeded by a lack of resources or that the voices of people are misrecognised but also that the issues of social justice that are affecting them are misframed (Fraser, 2010). Participatory parity therefore requires, according to Fraser (2010), a radical politics of representation that is closely inter-imbricated with a politics of recognition and redistribution. By establishing participatory parity as a normative social justice orientation, this politics of representation submits claims for recognition and redistribution ‘to democratic processes of public justification’ (Fraser, 2000, p. 119). As such, ‘the political’ can be conceived as ‘the stage on which struggles’ in the different injustice domains can occur (Fraser, 2005, p. 75).

A politics of representation, however, also requires that questions on the substantive level of social justice are explored with reference to the who, the how, and the what of the fight for social justice. She argues that for a long time, the dominant focus was on ‘what should count as a just ordering of social relations within a society’ (Fraser, 2005, pp. 70–71). This substantive level addresses questions such as ‘what constitutes a just distribution of wealth and resources? What counts as reciprocal recognition or equal respect?’ (Fraser, 2008, p. 396). Political injustice on this level is called ‘ordinary-political misrepresentation’ and occurs when political decision rules ‘wrongly deny some of the included the chance to participate fully, as peers’ (Fraser, 2005, p. 76). Fraser not only emphasises that sufficient engagement in social justice demands first-order questions on the ‘what’ of social justice but also asserts that meta-level questions on the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of social justice are necessary. With reference to the ‘who’ issue, political misrepresentation occurs when the boundaries of the community are drawn in a way that wrongly excludes some people from the chance to participate at all in ‘its authorized contests over justice’ (Fraser, 2008, p. 408), which is referred to as ‘misframing’. Questions surrounding this issue address ‘who counts as a subject of justice in a given matter? Whose interests and needs deserve consideration? Who belongs to the circle of those entitled to equal concern?’ (Fraser, 2008, p. 399). Moreover, an adequate politics of representation should address another question, namely ‘the how’ (Fraser, 2008), since in a globalising world we should treat not only the boundaries of the ‘who’ of justice in critical ways, but also the ways in which the boundaries are drawn, and think about how we should determine the grammar to reflect on justice. As such, the politics of representation crucially addresses interrelated questions about ‘who’, the ‘how’, and the ‘what’ of social justice.

Fraser meets social work

Notwithstanding the rather philosophical nature of her work, Fraser has recently inspired numerous scholars in the field of social work, often concerned with the issue of poverty (Boone, Roets, & Roose, 2018; Davies et al., 2014; Dean, 2013; Garrett, 2010; Marston & McDonald, 2012; Webb, 2010). Owing to the lack of space we experience here to represent and discuss in detail all the diverse implications of how Fraser’s work has been received by scholars in the field of social work, we try to summarise how her ideas in relation to participatory parity have deeply inspired social work scholars. In line with the work of Fraser, Lister (2002) not only emphasises the need to think about representative democratic means but advocates for ‘the provision of public space in which voices of different groups can be heard’, and a participatory and deliberative democratic praxis can occur (p. 40). Social work could occupy a privileged position in striving for parity of participation and social justice through a politics of representation in which a so-called cultural forum can be created as a space where the private concerns of people who experience injustice in inter-imbricated cultural, economic, and political realms are translated into public issues. Krumer-Nevo (2016) has also recently emphasised the importance for poverty-aware social work of embracing, representing, and reframing the perspectives of people in poverty ‘on social structure, social institutions and social constructions of poverty to the society at large’ (p. 1803). Moreover, it is argued that for practitioners concerned with poverty issues it is vital that they are aware of how poverty relates to dimensions of structural inequality and ‘to accept that what Nancy Fraser terms “struggles for recognition” also need to be “integrated with struggles for redistribution, rather than displacing and undermining them”’ (Garrett, 2002, p. 200, quoting Fraser, 2000, p. 187). Such a politics of representation might engender transformative potential, since social work can reframe, project, and (re-)politicise the lifeworlds, experienced injustices, and concerns of people in poverty ‘from the private sphere of commodities and market relations, on the one hand, and family and personal relations, on the other, into the public forum of political debate’ (Dean, 2013, p. S42). As we have argued elsewhere (Boone et al., 2018), however, social practitioners may experience major tensions, bottlenecks, and complexities in their commitment to supporting and shaping such participatory ventures. A pertinent consideration in the development of anti-poverty strategies might therefore be to pose questions concerning which situations are defined as poverty, and on what grounds and with what arguments are they defined as such, and also consider what the contributions are of diverse actors in this process (De Bie et al., 2013). As Marston and McDonald (2012, p. 1028) accordingly argue, the depoliticisation of social issues such as poverty requires us to focus attention on how social practitioners act when the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice are all in dispute.

Research objectives

Our research focuses on gaining in-depth insight into how social practitioners attempt to support the participatory parity of people in poverty while dealing with the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice and social change in a specific social work practice, namely APRV. These organisations offer a highly relevant case study since the starting point of the work of social practitioners in these organisations is to support the participatory parity of people in poverty and to stimulate social justice and structural social change while engaging in a politics of representation (Network against Poverty, n.d.). While offering a rich description of the insightful explanations of practitioners regarding how they think and act when they shape a politics of representation in the APRV, we aim to produce a deep understanding of the tensions, bottlenecks, and complexities that social practitioners experience in their commitment to participatory principles and practices.

Research methodology

In Flanders, the ‘Poverty Decree’ (Flemish Government, 2003) stipulates that the participation of people in poverty in social policymaking and social work practices should be formally supported by the welfare state, and therefore acknowledges APRV. These organisations are mainly acknowledged as exercising important leverage in realising the participatory parity of people in poverty (De Bie et al., 2013). The Poverty Decree (2003) requires that APRV fulfil six diverse criteria to be subsidised, which entail activities that are supported by social practitioners: (1) enable people in poverty to form an organisation, (2) give a voice to people in poverty, (3) work towards their social emancipation, (4) change social structures, (5) create dialogue and training activities to enhance the solidarity of people in poverty and the non-poor, and (6) continue to seek out people in poverty. There are currently 59 APRV in Flanders, coordinated by one umbrella organisation, the Network Against Poverty (http://www.netwerktegenarmoede.be/). In almost all APRV, paid practitioners take on the overall responsibility of shaping daily practices. However, exceptionally, volunteers also take on this responsibility due to the choices of the organisation in dealing with their limited resources or their historical background. In this article, ‘practitioners’ therefore broadly refers to people who receive an organisational mandate to take on responsibility in actively shaping organisational policy and practice, be it paid or on a voluntary basis.

APRV argue that particularly the insider experiences of people in poverty should be revealed, while claiming that the welfare rights and well-being of people in poverty are not guaranteed and achieved in practice. As such, they pursue social justice and social change in close collaboration with people in poverty, with participatory principles and practices being central to their endeavours (De Bie et al., 2003). The Network against Poverty (n.d.) considers participation to be a guiding principle and goal, asserting that ‘in the fight against poverty, it is important that everybody can participate on an equal basis in society and that society is questioned when this equilibrium is imposed’ (own translation). The APRV therefore provide a highly relevant critical case study for deriving an in-depth understanding of social work practices and the practitioners attempting to pursue participatory parity and social justice while shaping a politics of representation in their real-world contexts. By creating space for critical engagement with the injustices in the economic, cultural, and political realms that are reflected in the individual as well as collective experiences of people in poverty, the APRV open up opportunities to create cultural fora where different lifeworlds and stories can be exchanged and made public (Boone et al., 2018).

To engage in empirical fieldwork, we adopted an interpretative research methodology (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003). Our research design consists of two clusters: interviews and focus groups. In total, practitioners of 38 of 59 of the APRV took part in the research. All research participants were invited to sign a written informed consent (for the interviews) or to give oral consent (for the focus groups). We requested permission to audio-record the conversations while explaining that all information would be treated anonymously and be used only for the purpose of a general analysis and not to reach conclusions about one organisation or respondent in particular. In the following paragraphs, the different clusters of research activities will be discussed in detail.

In the first clusters we conducted qualitative interviews with the objective of obtaining in-depth insight into the overall history, vision of the organisations, and complexities for practitioners in shaping their work. All 59 existing APRV were invited to demonstrate their interest in a qualitative semi-structured interview through an open call launched by the Network against Poverty. The researcher telephoned the interested APRV, informing them about the research objectives and explaining that it was crucial that the respondents were actively engaged in shaping the daily activities and had knowledge about the genesis, milestones, and complex practices of the organisation. While aiming to interview practitioners from a representative delegation of APRV in terms of differences in genesis, reach of people in poverty, number of employees, and main focus of activities, some organisations were also contacted directly to complete the research sample. In total, 24 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 32 practitioners from 24 APRV, since in some interviews, more than one practitioner took part. Twenty-eight of the respondents were paid employees, and four were voluntary practitioners without poverty experience. Five main topics were explored in the interviews: the history of the organisation, the perspectives of practitioners on their task in addressing the problem of poverty, the activities they develop, the way in which participation is shaped in the organisation, and the challenges they experience. Whilst the practitioners had varying educational and/or professional backgrounds (mostly in social work, but also in psychology, teaching, etc.), our motivation for interviewing these respondents was their broad knowledge of the organisation and their active engagement in shaping activities in the organisation. In four interviews, practitioners were accompanied by additional respondents to give even more insight in the organisation: two chairpersons of two APRV and five participants with experience of poverty of two APRV. The interviews ranged from 1.5 to 3 hours in length and were fully transcribed, as transcription is a very useful process of turning sound recordings into a text prior to subsequent qualitative data analysis of the research material (Howitt, 2010). The research insights were analysed systematically based on a directed approach to qualitative content analysis, which provides an appropriate method for validating and refining a conceptual framework or theory (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Important common patterns cutting across the diverse interviews were identified (Patton, 2002), and these were useful for analysing and refining the empirical research insights into how social practitioners act when the who, the how, and the what of social justice are in dispute, therefore enabling the construction of new theoretical insights (Mayring, 2000).

In the second cluster of research activities, focus groups were constructed with the objective of gaining more specific in-depth knowledge about the complexities in the commitment of practitioners to participatory principles and practices that were expressed during the interviews. These preliminary results were presented and discussed during five focus group meetings because the interaction between group members in focus groups ‘may produce information different in certain respects from that produced by a separate interview’ (Van Hove & Claes, 2011, p. 110). Again, an open call for participation was launched in collaboration with the Network against Poverty, explaining the goal of dialoguing in group about the complexities of shaping participatory activities and goals through APRV. While also aiming for a diverse and representative sample of APRV, the focus groups were organised in geographically spread places in an attempt to provide an accessible location. A diversity of organisations and practitioners took part, varying in individual and organisational background, type of activities, size of the organisation, and involvement of people in poverty. Practitioners of 24 organisations took part: 10 were already interviewed in the first cluster, whereas 14 organisations were not represented in the semi-structured interviews. In total, 25 practitioners (and eight participants with experience with poverty who joined a practitioner) participated in the focus groups. The focus groups ranged from 2.5 to 3 hours in length and were transcribed. These data were analysed systematically based on a directed approach to qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). As such, a ‘retroductive’ approach informed the research process, which implies a ‘moving back and forth between narratives and theory, modifying original theoretical statements to fit into the narratives part and using pieces of narratives relevant to the emergent theoretical concepts’ (Emerson, 2004, p. 458).

Tensions, bottlenecks, and complexities in shaping a politics of representation: The ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice

Our analysis of the empirical research insights allows a further deepening of the theoretical understanding of the question of how a politics of representation in which important aspects of justice are determined by citizens themselves is shaped (Fraser, 2005). Although commitment to the participatory parity of people in poverty stands strong as a vision in APRV, it is a highly contested issue in daily practice. Every practitioner regards parity of participation as a raison d’être for their work, while simultaneously questioning the meaning and implementation of this idea in practice. For that reason, we will discuss the most apparent bottlenecks faced by social practitioners in their attempt to engage in such a politics of representation, structuring these by using the three areas of investigation that Fraser uses (2005, 2010) in her general theory, namely the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice.

Shaping the ‘how’ of social justice

Let us begin by giving insight into how practitioners shape democratic processes of collective decision-making, by which reflection on issues of justice in APRV is stimulated. The need for an accessible place where people can encounter each other and form an association was emphasised by many of our respondents. Such a space was often conceived in the course of activities in which the individual concerns of people in poverty could be embraced and where opportunities were created to meet one another without obligation. Examples are the provision of a social grocery or a place where visitors can get individual support and drink a coffee while waiting. This was frequently supplemented with low-threshold activities, such as group gatherings and excursions. According to the respondents, such an accessible place was the foundation, making it possible to bring people together in a group and uncover individual, as well as collective, questions, concerns, and injustices that were being experienced by people in poverty.

The main strategy implies that dealing with those individual as well as collective experiences gradually enables a politics of representation, since this process-oriented work determines to a large extent the substantive thematic work that is conducted in the organisation. This approach is called the ‘dialogue method’, which is framed by the APRV as a more substantive and process-oriented participatory practice. The aim of this method is to uncover and reframe the injustices in individual stories and experiences of poverty as socially unjust and therefore deeply problematic in the collective, as well as render them as standpoints in a politics of representation that is coined as an anti-poverty strategy. In this respect, our respondents indicated that in almost all the APRV, those low-threshold places reached many people (from some dozens to hundreds) and that later these participants were able to make an active contribution to the substantive work and the representation of it in the public sphere. This substantive work mostly had a specific theme at its core (e.g. housing, education, having a worthwhile funeral, food waste) and derived from signals or concerns in the bigger group. It aimed at the creation of collective stories and public standpoints concerning this theme, by supplementing and deepening the questions, concerns, and injustices that practitioners collect or intercept during low threshold activities. These processes often resulted in a dialogue with actors without poverty experience, such as local policymakers or social workers in the outside world, in collaboration with a delegation of people in poverty.

Many respondents, however, considered that shaping such spaces for dialogue often resulted in paradoxical and exclusionary effects and recognised the danger of excluding those who were less articulate or empowered. A practitioner of an organisation working with ethnic minorities explained it as follows:

Eventually you do go further with the people who are the strongest. With us, it mostly had to do with language. For me, it seems very difficult to include somebody in a dialogue, because I want them to tell it, and not me. So I take somebody who is articulate and is able to tell it. (Practitioner ORG4)

The dialogue approach was also mentioned as a danger to the accessibility of the organisation. Some practitioners emphasised that it resulted in selectivity in reaching certain groups, such as ethnic minorities, people living in deep intergenerational poverty, or people in poverty who lacked communication skills.

Practitioners also asserted that some people in poverty were isolated or might have a sense of pride and therefore were not able or willing to make their private issues public, whether in an organisational or a societal context. Critical questions were also raised about the dialogue process, in which individual and collective injustices were taken into public debate as collective standpoints in close collaboration with people in poverty. A respondent summarised the issue of dialogue between participants and organisations that might be able to change something as follows: ‘It is often like a crazy bunch. The formulations, the manners of speaking, the totality of the two different groups, it doesn’t match at all. How can it then have influence?’ (Practitioner ORG5) For that reason, some organisations established what they called ‘good’ participatory practices, such as a social grocery, cooking workshops, a theatre play or political demonstrations, as an alternative to the ‘dialogue’ method. In that sense, these practitioners gave priority to the creation of spaces where people could encounter each other and/or express their capacities by, for example cooking or making art, without talking directly about their concerns and injustices. Here, the practitioners argued that their role consisted of publicly representing and reframing the issues, capacities, and concerns of people in poverty. Since practitioners make a selection of the concerns and injustices experienced by people in poverty and people in poverty do not represent their own story, these alternative strategies might also require continuing reflection on how such a conception of a politics of representation stands in relation to the principle of participatory parity and power (im)balances between practitioners and people in poverty.

Shaping the ‘who’ of social justice

Our analysis shows that the dialogue method that is used in the APRV (the ‘how’ of social justice in this case) implies that a variety of people in poverty participate in activities with differing aims, but only a minority of them directly participate in activities that are related to a politics of representation. For instance, in almost all APRV, there are many more people who participate in low-threshold activities where participants can encounter one another or obtain some basic advice on individual questions than in activities with a clearly substantive content aimed at collective dialogue about life situations or in activities aimed at initiating processes of social change. People in poverty often also participate in decision-making channels in the APRV (e.g. a board meeting, a participation channel), though these always comprise a select number of participants. Such a ‘funnel system’ raises questions as to whether the perspectives of all people in poverty are equally taken into account in all aspects of the APRV, particularly those in which their participation is not directly at stake. Some respondents did not necessarily struggle with this selectivity, as exemplified by an argument of a practitioner while discussing this subject in a focus group: ‘It’s not because the same people always raise their voice or want to, that is only applicable for those three people’ (Practitioner in Focus Group 3 – Respondent 1). Other respondents nevertheless stipulated that it was necessary to involve people from start to finish but emphasised the complexity and constant search to succeed in this mission.

Moreover, although some respondents considered critically what mandate some people might have in relation to the entire group, it appears as though practitioners often had the final say in who was fit for the task of formally representing the interests and voices of other people in poverty as spokespersons. A chairperson with broad knowledge of the daily work in different APRV articulated this very well:

The first question is who will you choose, what procedure you set in the organisation to select someone from the group, and whether their position is then to represent people in poverty. (. . .) And you come to the second question: does the person have enough substance? Yes, it is about managing the organisation. It demands some skills and qualities to come to a good and virtuous management. (Chairperson ORG1)

This observation discloses how the extent to which power is distributed between partners in participatory processes remains a tricky issue, since not all people in poverty are equally able and/or allowed to participate and exert influence. The idea that some people are suitable representatives might convey a sense that some people are the best embodiment of what it means to be poor, running the risk of losing the diversity and heterogeneity of experiences of living in poverty. This risk should not be taken lightly, since there seems to be only a handful of so-called proper representatives in the majority of organisations and they are very often the same people. Practitioners attributed this to choices that were made by the representatives themselves but also to their own choices, choosing people who articulate it well, have good communication skills, can stay calm and collected, etc.

However, there seem to be no easy solutions for dealing with this issue, which is exemplified by how a practitioner expressed the struggle over deciding who were suitable spokespersons:

I struggle with ways of dealing with the mandate people are given. You shape a process with a number of people, about ten, and then you represent their standpoints in the wider society with two people who defend a position on behalf of all the other people in poverty. I struggle with it . . . I don’t know how you should do it otherwise, but I would like to see it differently. (Practitioner ORG7)

Other practitioners explicitly objected to such a funnel system, warning that such an interpretation of participation and representation created a sort of window-dressing participation (Lister, 2002) and arguing that all people in poverty should be able to participate on a par but obviously lack the power to do so. Practitioners nevertheless remain somewhat puzzled about the rather invisible power relations between practitioners and people in poverty in the APRV. Some respondents reflected on how the pace and rules for participation were often set by practitioners where the participation of people in people consists of ‘tagging along to meetings’, in which they ‘can’t follow the discussion’ and ‘just sit around the table’. One practitioner summarises how this conflicts with the ability to fully participate: ‘If the purpose is to raise the voice of people in poverty and if that is how this principle is implemented, that is fooling yourself’ (Practitioner ORG5). These practitioners emphasised that participation should permeate the entire organisation on every level, in every participatory principle and practice. In that case, however, some practitioners experienced this expectation as a weight on their shoulders since they should be in touch with everyone: ‘When you have to engage in every question or in every field of interest from the group, then it doesn’t work. You still have the collective, which is chaotic to some extent’ (Practitioner ORG18). Our respondents mainly stressed that complexities would result if everybody could have their say in the organisation. They also stressed that they were supposed to work continuously to seek new alliances with people in poverty who had not yet joined the organisation, which required them, for example, to make home visits.

Shaping the ‘what’ of social justice

Since a central focus in the work of Fraser is on first-order questions about ‘what’ counts as a just ordering of social relations within society, insight is also needed into existing ideas about social justice and parity of participation and the way these ideas influence concrete practice. Interestingly, APRV have a double focus: they simultaneously strive towards the personal growth and empowerment of people in poverty while educating and uniting them and are mandated to work on changing social structures. Since parity of participation is not only a goal but also a premise in the APRV, empowerment is often stated to be necessary to be able to participate in processes aimed at achieving structural goals.

Deriving from this finding, however, a pertinent question might be whether oppressive and socially unjust relationships that are firmly rooted in social inequalities in society remain out of the picture when the responsibility for fighting poverty is projected onto people in poverty, both individually and collectively. In this regard, Fraser (1995, 2005) has stated that strategies to fight injustices can be formed on two distinct levels: affirmative strategies can be seen as purely compensating for the outcomes of injustices, whereas transformative strategies aim to change and restructure the very core of the way our society is organised.

Although Fraser (1995) emphasises that only a restructuring of the societal order will suffice to achieve the goal of social justice and thus parity of participation, practitioners indicate that it is precisely the premise of participation of people in poverty that stands in sharp contrast with this transformative goal in the APRV. This tension is noticeable when practitioners explain that many people in poverty primarily need support and to meet fellow sufferers and do not feel the need to engage in deliberative processes, theme groups, and public actions to facilitate structural change. In this case, practitioners feel stuck between providing participatory parity and working towards structural change.

On some occasions this leads to cutting the participatory dialogue loose from structural aims in the organisation, implying that practitioners make one-sided decisions about what strategies are used and what sort of structural change is aimed for:

So I understand that it was brought together, stating that structural change will happen because people in poverty raise their voice. That is correct, it can be like that, but imagine that they wait with structural changes until people in poverty raise their voice, then we are five to eight decades later. It has nothing to do with it, it really has nothing to do with it. We [practitioners in the APRV] can now already say what needs to change. (Practitioner ORG5)

On other occasions, it leads to giving priority to the premise of parity of participation, possibly running the danger of investing in rather affirmative strategies in dealing with the problem of poverty ‘aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them’ (Fraser, 1995, p. 82). This is, for instance, apparent in the struggle of practitioners to address the growing number of requests for individual help, in which practitioners express that they cannot ‘leave people in the cold’ although it is not their core task.

A growing part of the work in some APRV consists of relieving individual needs of people, though practitioners express the conviction that doing so affirms the idea in society that the regular services do not have to change their mode of work since the APRV can function as a safety net. The societal context also influences the scepticism of practitioners about social change, bringing a similar complexity to the question of whether APRV should not rather invest in integrating people into society. Such inevitable ambiguity was beautifully articulated by a practitioner:

Where there used to be a political discourse that might want to raise the minimum wage, nowadays I see that we should already be happy if we can keep what we have … I struggle with it, because on the one hand it might be better to prepare our people for the society in which they live. Since society is much more individualistic and selfish, shouldn’t we strengthen our people in such manner? We do that, for instance, by investing in group purchases (so it costs a little bit less for individuals). On the other hand, if we hadn’t resisted and combatted these societal logics all those years, then it might now be much worse. (Practitioner ORG11)

Limitations of the study and recommendations for future research

Starting from a broad interest in the relationship between participatory principles in social work practices and their aim to engage in the struggle against poverty, the first limitation is that we focus only on one specific social work practice in Flanders: Associations Where People in Poverty Raise their Voice. Whilst APRV offer a very relevant case study and our findings are believed to be inspirational for other social work practices, it is nevertheless important to put some reservations on the idea that our findings are validly generalisable to all participatory practices that want to engage in a politics of representation. It is therefore necessary to continuously contextualise every social work practice as a specific practice. A second limitation is that in the interviews and focus groups, practitioners were occasionally accompanied by people with an experience of poverty, but the latter were not the main addressed research correspondents since our focus was on the perspectives of practitioners. Further research on the perspectives of people in poverty might be very valuable since it might provide more in-depth insight on the complexity of participatory ventures in the struggle against poverty. In the same vein, more in-depth research on what happens in the concrete interactions of practitioners and people in poverty in practices that engage in a politics of representation might shed further light on this complexity.

Concluding reflections

As we have argued and illustrated, social work can provide ‘a mode for discursive struggle’ (Dean, 2004, p. 200) for different social justice claims and concerns, to the extent to which there can be resistance to social injustice as a solid basis for the substantive negotiation of collective concerns for recognition, redistribution, and representation (Boone et al., 2017). In this commitment, parity of participation is not only a goal but also a basic premise in participatory social work processes (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009).

Nevertheless, in this article, we have shed light on the complexities of the ‘how’, the ‘who’, and the ‘what’ of social justice that arise in daily practice while engaging in such a participatory politics of representation. In relation to the ‘how’ of social justice, the dominant dialogue method of shaping a politics of representation entails complexity and exclusionary effects in practice. Practitioners in the APRV acknowledge that this method enhances hierarchical mechanisms that exclude the most powerless, yet in their attempt to create alternative and indirect forms of representation, the individual and collective injustices experienced by people in poverty are sometimes interpreted, selected, and reframed for them rather than with them. According to Lister (2002), not addressing this powerlessness creates the danger of enhancing rather than removing differences in power to influence the debate around poverty. In relation to shaping the ‘who’ of social justice, practitioners in APRV seem to question the feasibility of participatory parity for all people in poverty in formal decision-making or consultative bodies and organise this politics of representation in a way that often results in a selection of who is able to participate. This hierarchy often remains invisible, yet might allow only a selective and privileged delegation of representatives to become the embodiment of what it implies to be living in poverty. Nevertheless, in attempting to overcome such hierarchies by making sure that everyone’s voice is influential in APRV, practitioners sometimes get lost in the sheer complexity of the task. In relation to the ‘what’ of social justice, the double focus of APRV on empowering people in poverty and enhancing structural change leads in practice to tensions between affirmative and transformative strategies. The premise of parity of participation can be in sharp contrast with the quest for structural change, leading to the danger of decoupling the participation of people in poverty in transformative strategies.

In that sense, nonetheless, our research shows that the struggles of social work for participatory parity may perpetuate the very hierarchies, exclusions, and injustices that they attempt to overcome. It is therefore vital to keep in mind that social work itself is also a producer and transmitter of power struggles that are associated with the different domains of social (in)justice (Webb, 2010). Our findings suggest that even in practices that situate the principle of parity of participation at the core of their fight for social justice, a vigorous debate should be held about power asymmetries and social inequalities while aiming to create such a politics of representation (Davies et al., 2014; Phillips, 2004; Webb, 2010). It is therefore necessary to be constantly aware that the choices made by organisations and practitioners have implications, and continuous efforts should be made to reflect openly on their assumptions and choices. Whatever the chosen pathways are, these will have downsides and will need constant re-evaluation. Perhaps practitioners should be aware that they will never be able to resolve or escape inherent tensions and complexities in their attempts to work on a par with people in poverty (Roose, Roets, & De Bie, 2012). They can only make continuous efforts to inform the public debate about the socially unjust nature of poverty and to frame poverty as a violation of human rights. Garrett (2010, p. 1525) provides an insightful criticism, arguing that it is tricky to ‘divert attention from the role of the powerful, of the misrecognizers (. . .) focusing on the consequences of suffering misrecognition rather than on the more fundamental question of what it means to commit it’. As such, a politics of representation might evolve as a form of identity politics, leaving the agenda to be set by people whose power has been so much taken for granted that they ‘threaten to reinforce the very patterns of domination they otherwise claim to challenge’ (Phillips, 2004, pp. 36–37). It might therefore make sense to imagine social practitioners as policy actors who start from a humble position rather than heroes who speak truth to power in the case of injustice and shape a politics of representation. While maintaining a politics of hope, social practitioners might ‘engage in understanding how different communities and interests understand a given social problem and, as such, the role of a policy activist in the political sphere is more about acting as an interpreter and mediator of competing worldviews’ (Marston & McDonald, 2012, p. 1029).

Footnotes

Ethics

We obtained formal approval of the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ghent University for our research design.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to all the research participants who discussed their ideas, perspectives, and concerns very openly.

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