Making Consensus and Space Production:Research on the Dual Role of Social Work Policy Advocacy
Policy advocacy is a crucial aspect of social work,but in China,social work policy advocacy is fraught with challenges.Addressing these issues and promoting social work policy advocacy is vital for improving the theory and practice of social work.Western social work scholars,influ-enced by Jane Addams,emphasize the importance of policy advocacy research.However,the strat-egies they propose are not entirely suitable for China's context.For instance,the government is too combative in building a harmonious society and not effective given the bureaucratic structure of China's policy process.Moreover,these strategies require a high level of credibility that China's so-cial work sector has yet to attain.Thus,discussing China's social work policy advocacy in light of its unique policy process and development stage is necessary for advancing the field.One of the challenges in researching social work policy advocacy is the lack of successful ac-tion examples,which leads to many studies relying only on theoretical frameworks.As a result,it becomes difficult to extract key concepts from practice.However,the policy advocacy actions of juvenile justice social work provide an essential research sample for this study.After over a decade of efforts,social work has achieved deep coordination with the judicial protection of minors,and its participation in the judicial protection of minors has been recognized by many laws,regula-tions,and policy documents.This study is based on over ten years of social work policy advocacy actions in the field of juvenile judicial protection.It has been observed that there are two roles of social work policy advocacy,namely consen-sus manufacturing and space production.The concept of dual role comes from the study of the ba-sic properties of microscopic particles in natural science.In the humanities and social sciences,a dual role means that the same concept can take on different forms of expression in different situa-tions.The dual role of social work policy advocacy is as follows:in the policy field,social work policy advocacy is reflected as the production of policy consensus,while in the field of social work professionalization,this action is manifested as the production of social work action space.Specifically,the first role of social work policy advocacy in China is policy consensus manu-facturing.Policy consensus is made up of three main dimensions,namely value consensus,action consensus,and institutional consensus.Value consensus determines the direction of policy consen-sus,action consensus determines the specific goals and methods of policy consensus,and institu-tional consensus determines whether policy consensus can be ultimately transformed into policy documents to achieve long-term changes.To create a better living environment for service objects,social work promotes policy adjustment by creating value consensus,action consensus,and institu-tional consensus to achieve its policy advocacy goals.The second role of social work policy advocacy is the production of action space.In China,social work is still in the stage of rapid development,and the recognition level of social work by the authorities varies.In most areas,the recognition of social work by the authorities is still at the stage of formal recognition,and even at a low level.This means that social workers must first be recognized to take action.Therefore,in the process of policy advocacy,social work creates direct service space by creating action consensus and indirect service space by creating institutional con-sensus,thereby promoting the professional development of social work.During policy advocacy,opportunities for social work actions are created by the work needs of authoritative departments,and the cultural and symbolic capital of social work allows it to act.Social work carries out advocacy actions through lobbying and knowledge production,influenced by these factors.Lobbying involves extensive publicity,field research,and fixed-point lobbying,while knowledge production involves producing service content and system documents.The re-search shows that the consensus created in social work policy advocacy can reproduce and pro-mote the generation of a new consensus,which further expands the social work action space.The reproduction of consensus has its internal logic,and it follows the basic norms of China's policy formulation and implementation.The reproduction of consensus also has three main paths:repro-duction along the geographical location,reproduction along the work line,and reproduction along the policy process.The lack of policy advocacy has been hindering the development of social work in China.Re-search and practice have shown that the existing approach of policy advocacy in the West is not consistent with the basic conditions of our country.This study highlights the dual role of consensus building and space creation in social work policy advocacy in China,which lays a foundation for building a local knowledge system.However,the study also raises the important issue of how so-cial work can promote policy advocacy under these dual characteristics,which requires further at-tention in future research.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
