The duty of social workers

This article argues that social work’s knowledge base on adversity, inequality, and structural harm generates role-based professional duties, specifically to generate knowledge, situate it structurally, and resist its containment. Drawing on Chomsky, Macdonald, and the radical social work tradition, it foregrounds a tension the profession has inadequately confronted: that managerialism, proceduralism, and market forces have systematically depoliticized professional identity, suppressing the very engagement that professional duty requires.