Local orders and global chaos in social work

We live supposedly, in a runaway global world that is permeated with risk, disaster and uncertainty. Social work, at least at the level of policy and research, has been seen to be responding to the globalization discourse. Its tendency is to try and deepen its own institutional reflexivity with a growing awareness of its own place within the new information age and neo liberal moral order. In this paper it’s suggested that social work has at best a minimal role to play with any new global order, should such an order exist. There are developments within social work that could have global significance, for instance, the spread of actuarial technologies and risk management. However, information networks and the universalization of expert systems hardly support claims for a ‘global social work’. This paper attempts to clear the logjam of the increasingly unproductive debates about globalization and social work. These debates both set an allegedly beneficial ethical welfarism against the impersonal forces of globalization and thereby wish to enlarge the ethical purchase of social work; or present globalization as an inevitable phenomenon that