Knowledge for Practice

The rhetoric of social work often seeks its legitimacy and authority on the idea that knowledge can be translated into skills. Knowledge is made in universities in the form of timeless, objective, context-free truths about people and social institutions. Such knowledge rationalizes and justifies the professional practices of social work. It is not clear, however, that the knowledge-into-skills story fully explains social work practices. Practice is often ineffective and tends to throw social workers into moral quandaries, leaving them to practice in a context of faith and doubt. In addition to skills, social workers share values, purposes, the wielding of and submission to power, and mythic stories. Timely, value-expressive, contextual knowledge helps social work to create and maintain social solidarity and to shift its dispositions of skills, purposes, power, and myth to keep up with the pace of social change.