Global frontiers of social development in theory and practice climate, economy, and justice

By the same authorKafka’s Cave: An Academic Memoir forthcoming Global Frontiers of Social Development Theory and Practice: Economy, Climate, and Justice 2015 Reconstruction of Social Psy

Global Frontiers of Social Development in Theory and Practice

By the same author

Kafka’s Cave: An Academic Memoir (forthcoming)

Global Frontiers of Social Development Theory and Practice: Economy, Climate, and Justice (2015)

Reconstruction of Social Psychology (editor, 2015)

Death of an Elephant (debut novella, 2013)

Society and Social Justice: A Nexus in Review (2012)

Development, Poverty of Culture and Social Policy (2011)

Fallacies of Development: Crises of Human and Social Development

(2007)

Reinventing Social Work: Reflections on the Metaphysics of Social Practice (2005)

The Practice of Hope (2003)

Social Work Revisited (2002)

Unification of Social Work: Rethinking Social Transformation (1999) Democracies of Unfreedom: The United States of America and India

(1996)

Eclipse of Freedom: The World of Oppression (1993)

Global Development: Post-Material Values and Social Praxis (1992) Glimpses of International and Comparative Social Welfare (editor,

1989)

The Logic of Social Welfare: Conjectures and Formulations (1988) Denial of Existence: Essays on the Human Condition (1987)

Toward Comparative Social Welfare (editor, 1985)

New Horizons of Social Welfare and Policy (editor, 1985)

Social Psychiatry in India: A Treatise on the Mentally Ill (1972) India’s Social Problems: Analyzing Basic Issues (1972)

Global Frontiers of Social Development in Theory and

Practice

Climate, Economy, and Justice

Authored and Edited by

B r i j M o h a n

GLOBAL FRONTIERS OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Copyright © Brij Mohan 2015.

All rights reserved.

States—a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,

of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mohan, Brij, 1939–

Global frontiers of social development in theory and practice : climate, economy, and justice / Brij Mohan.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-349-68985-9 1 Social policy

2 Social planning 3 Social change I Title

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-46070-7

ISBN 978-1-349-68985-9 ISBN 978-1-137-46071-4 (eBook) DOI 10.10 7/9781137460714 5

For Gujri and Anupama

Contributors xiAcknowledgments xv

Part 1 Social Practice: Frontiers of Human and

4 Economic Growth as Social Problem: The Case of

5 Dialectics of Development: How Social Sciences Fail People 73Shweta Singh and David G Embrick

6 Environmental Justice: Experiments in Democratic

Brij Mohan

Part 2 Toward Comparative Social Development

Brij Mohan

viii C o n t e n t s

Brij Mohan

9 China as a Mirror and a Testing Ground for

Sander Chan and Matthias Stepan

10 Indigenous Communities’ Informal Care and Welfare

Systems for Local-Level Social Development in India 189 Manohar Pawar and Bipin Jojo

11 Outsourcing of Corruption: India’s Counterdevelopment 209 Vijay P Singh

12 On the Madness of Caste: Dalits, Muslims, and

Suryakant Waghmore and Qudsiya Contractor

13 Mission Lost: What Does Evidence Base and

Standardization Mean for International Social Work? 241 Nairruti Jani

Brij Mohan

List of Figures and Tables

Figures2.1 “Social Hope” and “Quality” of Life (Sustainability) 332.2 Frontiers of Social Development: Climate, Economy,

2.3 Unification of the Structural Dimnesions of

Sustainability 404.1 Standardization, Societal Problems, and Social

Transformation 65

6.1 Toward Environmental Justice: Democracies of

Unfreedom 106

6.2 A Tale of Two Democracies: Confronting

6.3 Dialectics of Public Policy and Democratic

Environmentalism 107

8.2 A Three Dimensional View of Poverty of Culture 154

8.4 Targets of Policy Innovation and Intervention:

Tables

6.1 Exemplars of Proactive Public-Policy Practice and

Democratic Environmentalism: A Comparative Study 9110.1 Village/Community Problems and Needs Identified

10.2 Participants Responses to the Five Questions

10.3 Needs and Problems That Can Be Addressed

10.4 Some Skills and Strategies to Enable Communities

Sander Chan (sander.chan@die-gdi.de) is a researcher at the German

Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)

He completed his PhD at VU University Amsterdam on partnerships for sustainable development, in which he explored the emergence, adaptation, and impacts of public-private partnerships in global and domestic (particularly Chinese) governance contexts He was a research fellow under the EU China Science and Technology Fellowship Programme (EU-STF) at the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) and Renmin University of China (RUC) His ongoing research is on public-private partnerships in sus- tainability and climate governance Currently Sander is involved in several research initiatives to assess the effectiveness of nonstate and subnational climate actions, and to advance a framework for such climate actions in the post-2015 climate governance architecture.

Qudsiya Contractor (qudsiya.contractor@tiss.edu) is assistant professor at the

Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences She was a Max Planck Institute fellow at the School of Develop- ment Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai Her doctoral research explored everyday processes of exclusion and instances of political violence that construct Muslim localities and communal identities within urban contexts Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and in Laurent Gayer and

Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.), Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of

Margin-alization, Delhi.

David G Embrick is an associate professor in the Sociology Department at

Loyola University–Chicago He received his PhD from Texas A&M University

in 2006 He is a former American Sociological Association Minority fellow and the past chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Race and Ethnic Minorities Currently, he is the president of the Southwestern Soci- ological Association In addition, Dr Embrick serves as the current editor

in chief for Humanity & Society (the official journal of the Association for

C o n t r i b u t o r s xii

Humanist Society) and founding coeditor of Sociology of Race and

Ethnic-ity, the newest ASA-sponsored journal of the Section on Racial and Ethnic

Minorities.

Nairruti Jani (njani@fgcu.edu) is an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast

University She teaches Introduction to Social Work, Macro Social Work Practice, Social Work Research, and Social Policy in BSW and MSW pro- grams She completed her master’s in social work from TISS, India, a master’s degree in law from Warwick University (United Kingdom), and a doctorate degree from University of Texas at Arlington She has been serving as an assistant professor of social work at Florida Gulf Coast University for the past five years Dr Jani’s work is primarily in the area of human rights and human trafficking She has published several peer-reviewed articles on human traf- ficking and developed curriculum in this area Her current research interests include international and comparative social work.

Bipin Jojo, PhD, (bipinj@tiss.edu) is professor and chairperson at the Centre

for Social Justice and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India Professor Jojo was a JRF, 1988, University Grants Commission, GOI, and a Commonwealth fellow 2008–09 at SOAS, London His areas of inter- est include indigenous/tribal studies and empowerment, local/traditional self governance, resettlement and rehabilitation of internally displaced people, communities’ informal care and welfare systems, management of voluntary organizations/NGOs/community-based organizations, and participatory development Dr Jojo has conducted several research projects funded by both government and nongovernment organizations and published articles in journals and books.

Max Koch (max.koch@soch.lu.se) is a professor in social policy at Lund

Uni-versity Max Koch completed both his PhD and habilitation in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin An ongoing topic of his research has been the ways in which political and economic restructuring are reflected in the social structure, with an emphasis on welfare and employment relations and in com- parative perspective More recently, he has started to combine these research interests with political ecology Currently, he carries out research on synergies

in climate change and social policies and on minimum income schemes in comparative perspective.

Robert Kowalski (bandb.kowalski@btopenworld.com), of the Instituto

Socioambiental e dos Recursos Hídricos, Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia, Brazil, is visiting professor in development Bob completed his DPhil a long time ago at Oxford Originally with a technical background

in natural sciences, Bob has subsequently specialized in various aspects of international development and change management In this context he has contributed to projects in SME development, conflict management, and insti- tutional strengthening Although he has worked in Africa, Asia, and South America, his main focus has been countries in economic transition: Poland,

C o n t r i b u t o r s xiii Czech Republic, former Soviet Union (including Central Asia), Bulgaria, Romania, and the states of former Yugoslavia Now retired from full-time employment, he occasionally teaches as a visitor at the Instituto Socioam- biental e dos Recursos Hídricos, Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia and the Department of Economics and Organization of Enterprises, Warsaw University of Life Sciences.

Manohar Pawar (MPawar@csu.edu.au) is professor of social work at the

School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University (NSW Australia) and is the president of the Asia-Pacific branch of the International Consortium for Social Development Professor Pawar has received a number

of awards, including the citation award for outstanding contributions to student learning (2008, from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council) and Quality of Life Award (2001, from the Association of Commonwealth

Universities) His publications include Reflective Social Work Practice:

Think-ing, Doing and Being (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Water and Social Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Social and Community Development Prac- tice (Sage, 2014), International Social Work (second edition, Sage, 2013), Sage Handbook of International Social Work (editor, Sage, 2012), Social Development; Critical Themes and Perspectives (editor, Routledge, 2010), and Community Development in Asia and the Pacific (Routledge, 2010).

Brij Mohan (brijmohan128@gmail.com), Louisiana State University, Dean/

Professor Emeritus Chief Editor, Scholar’s Publications, Toronto, Canada

Founding Editor-in-Chief, Environment and Social Psychology and Journal of

Comparative Social Welfare.

Shweta Singh (MSW, The Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India;

PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is associate professor of social work at Loyola University Chicago and an associate faculty member of the Women and Gender Studies Department, Asian Studies, and Center for Urban Research and Learning Her research area is empowerment and issues

of South Asian developing countries (i.e., work, education, and well-being

and identity in women and girls) She has recently edited Social Work and

Social Development: Perspectives from India and the United States, by Lyceum

She is the editor of Ewomen Indian Magazine and the radio show host of

Global Desi World on Loyola Radio.

Vijay P Singh is a university distinguished professor and the Caroline and

William N Lehrer distinguished chair in water engineering at Texas A&M University Dr Singh completed his PhD in civil engineering at Colorado State University and his DSc in environmental and water resources engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand One of his ongoing researches has been the water-food-energy-environment nexus under global warming and climate change Currently he is investigating the social dimension of this nexus and how engineering and mathematical modeling can be brought to bear on protecting

xiv C o n t r i b u t o r s

and managing our ecosystem He carries out research in stochastic and ematical modeling of hydrologic systems, entropy theory, and copula theory.

math-Matthias Stepan (m.stepan@vu.nl) is a doctoral researcher in the Department

of Political Science at VU University Amsterdam In his research Mr Stepan engages with comparative public policy, especially through the field of social policy and welfare governance.

Suryakant Waghmore (suryakant@tiss.edu) is associate professor and

chairperson at the Centre for Environmental Equity and Justice, Tata Institute

of Social Sciences He completed his PhD as a Commonwealth scholar from University of Edinburgh (2010) He has been a visiting scholar at the Centre

for South Asia, Stanford University, and is author of Civility against Caste

(Sage, 2013).

This book is a collaborative success of many people who joined me in deliberative endeavors on many forums on different occasions I am especially grateful to Professor Ka Lin, Zhejiang University, who gave

me a unique opportunity to interact with an international community against the backdrop of the world’s most dramatic-constructive social transformation, which is underway in China I visited Hangzhou three times (2010, 2013, 2014) to participate, present, and deliver lectures and papers The last two visits, sponsored by the European Union and China, were particularly helpful for improving my understanding of the dynam-ics and dialectics of development as reflected by the contents of this book

In 2013 I was commissioned to write and edit a book on comparative social welfare by a very reputable international publication house I agreed in principle Subsequently, I declined the invitation because of the lack of academic freedom that I needed to undertake such a proj-ect Palgrave Macmillan offered me the opportunity that I needed

In order to accomplish ambitious objectives, I made an honest effort

to attain most results with humility and patience This involved the transformation of a solo monograph into this collaborative anthology with a near encyclopedic scope I am painfully aware of the limits and potentials of this volume I do hope the issues raised here will help the advancement of global justice and socioeconomic diversities that bridge the current inequality that is of staggering magnitude

I am profoundly indebted to all of our contributions Bob ski’s foreword is an asset to this volume His eloquence and clarity are most gratefully acknowledged

Kowal-The book is lovingly dedicated to five-year-old Gujri and her mother (my granddaughter and daughter), and their future They inspired me

to revisit human-social-development processes afresh Welcome home Gujri and Neelu Deficiencies of the book are solely on account of my own limitations and imperfections

Brij MohanBaton Rouge, Louisiana

April 2, 2015

Let us take stock of where we find ourselves

In 2008 the world’s financial system suffered a proverbial tsunami

of at least the same magnitude as the Great Depression some quarters of a century earlier Indeed it has been a crisis so severe that six years later we are still not sure whether the worst is yet behind

three-us (White, 2013) Since it was based upon selling indebtedness to vulnerable people and then packaging those subprime lendings to unsuspecting institutions whose sources of funds were the savings and pensions of almost equally vulnerable people, the direct consequences involved considerable human suffering The potential damage rippling out from the set of dominoes persuaded senior politicians the world over to put their respective finance sectors on unashamed welfare, the scale of which was mind boggling.1

In 2001, following the aerial assault on the World Trade Center

in New York, a war was declared on terrorism, which soon became

an actual war against the Taliban and then a first-strike war against Saddam Hussein Today the list of countries that are experiencing hot war is growing, and to the violent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Syria, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Southern Sudan, the Ukraine and Yemen, we can add the civil unrest in Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Libya, and Pakistan and growing social disturbances in Egypt, China, Thailand, and Greece Such lists are by no means exhaustive.Furthermore, the 2005 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment recorded that

nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to humankind are found to be in decline worldwide In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down nat- ural capital assets In many cases, it is literally a matter of living on bor- rowed time By using up supplies of fresh groundwater faster than they can be recharged, for example, we are depleting assets at the expense of our children The cost is already being felt, but often by people far away from those enjoying the benefits of natural services (MEA, 2005: 5)

F o r e w o r d xviii

Following on the heels of this, the Royal Society, in 2012, noted that

the per capita material consumption of the richest parts of the world

is far above a level that can be sustained for seven billion or more, and, most recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2014: 6) recognized that “people who are socially, economically, cul-turally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalized are espe-cially vulnerable to climate change.” Therefore, as I have reported elsewhere (Kowalski, 2013), in the degradation of the environment, the loss of species, encroachment of deserts, the continuing defores-tation of the tropics and global warming, with its attendant climate change, signify an imbalance between humanity and the planet that is already the source of considerable human misery

On the back of these problems, there is increased internal and external displacement of people and even whole communities and the accompanying scourges of slavery and people trafficking We see the rise of torture, sexual violence, pedophilia, and substance abuse, even

in the most affluent of so-called developed countries.2

In light of such evidence, I, for one, am in no doubt that our social system, as currently constructed, is both undesirable and unsustain-able, and if we are not to be the first species to fully document our own demise, then we must take serious measures to restore balance.What is more, Richard Beckhard (1969), in a now famous expres-sion, argued that change will only occur when

D × V × F > R

Where D is dissatisfaction with the current situation (avoidance

motivation) 3

V is a vision of what is possible as an alternative (attraction motivation)

F is the perceived feasibility of the first steps necessary to move toward

that alternative

R is resistance to change

This implies that there is a threshold of human will that must be exceeded for anything much to be possible in changing the status quo, and that a significant determinant of whether it will be exceeded

is the level of aggregate dissatisfaction with the current situation And therein lies a paradox

Regarding the current situation, as set out above, the most dissatisfied concomitantly have the smallest voice and so are least able to demand change Since

D=∑idi pi and pi~1/di

F o r e w o r d xix

Where D is the total, population-wide level of dissatisfaction with

the current situation

d is individual dissatisfaction with their circumstances

p is the power that any individual is able to bring to bear to influence

that change happens

Furthermore, it is noteworthy that, regarding Beckhard’s expression, Edgar Schein (1996: 28) spoke of “disconfirmation,” which is the psychological tension manifested by dissatisfaction, which generates

“survival anxiety”: “the feeling that if we do not change, we will fail

to meet our needs or fail to achieve some goals or ideals that we have set for ourselves.” When that goal is life itself, when individuals are denied any ability to register dissatisfaction with their circumstance because they have lost that life—by being bombed or shot or step-ping on an antipersonnel mine, by being drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean, by starving, by contracting dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, or Ebola, by being denied access to medicines or hospital treatment, by exposure to the elements through lack of shel-ter, by hypothermia due to an inability to afford winter heating, by suicide through the despair of having your land expropriated to pay debts—then individual dissatisfaction (di), we may infer, would clearly

be at its maximum value (∞), but (pi), the voice of such an ual, is clearly zero Thus at the most extreme cases, which are many,

individ-di = ∞ × 0, which equals zero

In addition, those who do survive bouts of the terrible crises of our social system will almost certainly look back upon them with a certain sense of “It was bad, but I survived and have rebuilt” or take a fatalis-tic approach that blames providence or believe that things have always been this way and that we are simply being told more about them by the ubiquitous media, and will also register a lower level of dissatisfac-tion as time and geography lend distance, before the next crisis hits Finally, the function cannot take into account the dissatisfactions of future generations concerning the state of the world that they will have inherited from us—even if they are the descendants of celebrities, sports stars, Wall Street bankers, jihadists, or Russian oligarchs.Thus the paradox is sustained that those who would have the most

to gain by changing the system are those who are least able to have

their voice heard, and those who are most comfortable with the status

quo tend to have the greatest influence in utilizing the inertia of the system, even if they take a shortsighted view of their own interests It

is in this very circumstance that the marginalized, the forgotten, the victimized, the future generations, and the collateral damage need to

F o r e w o r d xx

find “advocates” to campaign for justice, for reason, for humanity’s greater potential

Brij Mohan is one such person Born in Mursan, in dence India, he first studied at Agra University before completing his doctorate in 1964 at Lucknow University under the supervision

preindepen-of Prpreindepen-ofessor S Zafar Hasan He subsequently joined the faculty in

1964 For his work at Lucknow he became known as the “Father

of Indian Social Psychiatry.” Then in 1975 he moved to the United States, where he joined, briefly, the University of Wisconsin (1975) and the faculty of the Louisiana State University, eventually becoming dean of the School of Social Work During four decades of service, despite horrendous challenges, he rose to an unrivaled status, being accorded the epithet of the “Sartre of Social Work.” He has published many books and articles and become an international speaker in great

demand He founded and became editor of the Journal of

Compara-tive Social Welfare He retired from LSU at the end of 2009 but

con-tinues to be an active writer and international speaker

Of all of his professional contributions, Professor Mohan will ably be most closely associated with three concepts: (1) the poverty

prob-of culture, (2) Enlightenment II, and (3) comparative social

devel-opment Poverty of Culture is a withering analysis of the reasons

for dissatisfaction with the current social system, together with an indictment of those most responsible, whose inability to rise to the challenge, whose shoulder-shrugging indifference, and whose sole-seeming response of simply throwing money at the problem is an encapsulation of their cultural impoverishment

However, analysis and indictment are not enough In Beckhard’s

expression the second term is vision—and Brij’s second concept,

Enlightenment II, provides a clear exposition of an alternative future

to the one toward which we are seemingly hell-bent Enlightenment

II is a call to return to the values of humanity’s highest aspirations, underpinned and buttressed by reason In contrast to free-market cap-italism’s summoning of the dark, appetitive side of human nature with all its pernicious vices, the call is toward the virtues that alone offer the prospect of freedom and well-being for everyone In many ways, and

in contradiction of the fatalism expressed as “The great fear we have of becoming fully aware of our powerlessness in situations when nothing can be done” (Rahnema, 1997: 392), Enlightenment II is a message

of hope and optimism

Of course and inevitably, he has been accused of utopianism by

those who oppose his views, and his ideas have been pooh-poohed as a consequence Yet his true brilliance has shone through in his response

F o r e w o r d xxi

to Beckhard’s final term, feasibility, manifested in the third concept—

comparative social development This is the idea that all societies have

something to contribute to our understanding and promotion of social development, and that it is through the study of social practice in a vari-ety of settings that what is feasible can be promulgated As Brij himself maintained: “International social work should be redefined as a profes-sional transnational knowledge, studies, and experiences to foster equal-ity and justice as vehicles of international understanding, collaboration, and collective human-social development” (Mohan, 2012: 139).Throughout his career Professor Mohan has devoted himself to truthfulness and integrity, which has by no means smoothed his way but which has always guided him to provide us with works that both provoke and challenge At this point I have to declare a bias toward his ideas and arguments, since I have been independently maintaining many of them over the same decades.4 Indeed my experiences as an academic seem also to coincide with those of Professor Mohan, giving

me some of the unease that Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis captured when they wrote, “How will we form the next generation

of European intellectuals and politicians if young people will never have an opportunity to experience what a non-vulgar, non-pragmatic, non-instrumentalized university is like? Where will they learn to recognize and respect freedom of thought and intellectual integrity?” ( 2013: 139) As Stafford Beer (2004: 802) advocated: “Let us get up and do something in our own shameful mess of a world It is better than to make excuses; better than to sit on your tenure for 30 years, and hang your hat on a pension.”

Thus when I was offered the opportunity to provide a chapter for

a book edited and written by Brij, and the distinguished team of tributors that he has assembled, I naturally jumped at the chance When I was invited to write this foreword, I must confess to feeling both honored and privileged I commend this work to you

con-Robert Kowalski

Notes

1 As Nicholas Kristof (2009) noted: “Oxfam has calculated that financial firms around the world have already received or been promised $8.4 tril- lion in bailouts Just a week’s worth of interest on that sum while it’s waiting to be deployed would be enough to save most of the half-million women who die in childbirth each year in poor countries.”

2 Indeed, the European Court of Human Rights has recently found my fatherland of Poland to have been complicit in the extraordinary rendition

F o r e w o r d xxii

and interrogation of suspects on their way to Guantanamo Bay (http:// www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28460628 [accessed July 22, 2014]).

3 Which Edgar Schein (1996) refers to as Disconfirmation.

4 For example, see Kowalski (2005).

References

Bauman, Z., and Donskis, L 2013 Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in

Liquid Modernity Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beckhard, R 1969 Organization Development: Strategies and Models Reading,

MA: Addison-Wesley.

Beer, S 2004 “World in Torment: A Time Whose Idea Must Come.” Kybernetes

33 (3/4): 774–803.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014 “Summary for

Policymak-ers.” In C B Field, V R Barros, D J Dokken, K J Mach, M D

Mastran-drea, T E Bilir, M Chatterjee, K L Ebi, Y O Estrada, R C Genova, B Girma, E S Kissel, A N Levy, S MacCracken, P R Mastrandrea, and L L

White (eds.), 1–32, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and

Vulner-ability Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects Contribution of Working Group

II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Kowalski, R 2005 “On Terrorism and the Politics of Compulsion.” World

Mohan, B 2012 Society and Social Justice: A Nexus in Review Bloomington,

IN: iUniverse.

RaÚema, M 1997 “Towards Post-Development: Searching for Signposts,

a New Language and New Paradigms.” In M RaÚema with V Bawtree

(eds.), 377–403, The Post-Development Reader (London: Zed Books) The Royal Society 2012 People and the Planet The Royal Society Science

Policy Centre Report 134 London: The Royal Society.

Schein, E H 1996 “Kurt Lewin’s Change Theory in the Field and in the

Class-room: Notes Towards a Model of Managed Learning.” Systems Practice 9 (1):

27–47.

White, William R 2013 “Ultra Easy Monetary Policy and the Law of Unintended

Consequences.” Real-World Economics Review 63:19–56

Brij Mohan

I am a new American The creed of this great nation has been a source

of inspiration to millions of people from all over the world Yet, the American Dream can morph into a nightmare if you are related to Michael Brown or Eric Garner, Akai Gurley or Tamir Rice.1 A tragic commonality among these people is that they are all black and were mostly young children when they were killed by the police, usually white men A civil society is stained when poor and marginalized groups are victims of monstrous atrocities

Economy, climate, and justice are interdependent aspects of global well-being In a material world, economy is the king Maynard Keynes

“is just the economist we need to get the world’s economy humming again,” Peter Coy concludes (2014: 52) “If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero Seriously He took money from people who were saving it, and gave

it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it,” wrote John Cochrane.2 Three billion people in “the world survive on $2.50 a day

or less.”3 A world on the cusp of a “new Cold War”4 is vulnerable to antidevelopmental projects It’s thus imperative to analyze develop-

mental economy, climate, and justice in light of its global politics Else,

each realm of discussion tends to atrophy

Thomas Piketty’s controversial view on the skewed distribution

of wealth in the twenty-first century aside, the truth remains in the United States at least that “inequality in wealth is approaching record

levels” (The Economist, November 8, 2014: 79).5 It’s difficult to underrate Picketty’s argument about “patrimonial capitalism.”

Transience is the only enduring feature of human reality This existential duality of life is a formidable challenge to human-social devel-

opment Developmentality is a psychosocial urge to enhance oneself as an

individual, group, or community As a manifestation of human trappings for growth, varied outcomes—functional and dysfunctional—appear on the developmental horizons of a society’s transformation The processes

P r o l o g u e xxiv

involve politico-ideological transmutations of social and economic institutions that are deemed crucial for the augmentation of new structures of growth and development

On September 11, 2001, I was conducting a doctoral seminar in room 326 when a student noted on his tiny electronic device a news item beyond belief: the World Trade Center had been attacked After half an hour of nervous news watching, I had one clear thought: It’s the end of a free society We are all naked in our locker rooms The same is true of all neo-Darwinian templates of varied hues The Arabian Spring has morphed into a chaos Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seeks to establish a caliphate—a single, transnational Islamic state that will replace all modern and traditional institutions that characterize civility Social development, as usually theorized and practiced, loses its meaning in the fog of hybrid ideologies signifying unprincipled expedi-ence that runs against our avowed creed A Senate Intelligence Report details abhorrent use of brutalities that CIA unleashed on detainees.6

The years and events that followed brought one single most crucial

change: mass murder became universal terror There is nothing more

insulting than being nearly strip-searched when going through port security We have traded dignity for security In order to ensure common protection from ubiquitous sources of mayhem, the state has assumed unprecedented power, with perceptual and real dangers Paradoxically, amid the state’s unprecedented authority, anarchist nihilism is on the rise From religious fundamentalism to corporate despotism, antistate forces are shaking the foundations of governmental power Illegitimacy, legalized corruption, people’s alienation, and the rise of the others are a new normal

air-Rebellion against the free state is actually a negation of the eral moralism that defines Western decency Ambiguities of hope and despair abound From institutional breakdowns to social meltdowns,

lib-we experience pervasive evidence of a contrapuntal existence, a notion hard to describe

Democracy, capitalism, and authoritarianism have complex tionships Capitalism and inequality are inseparable So are authori-tarianism and capitalism In other words, a global free market and equality cannot go together The rise of yawning inequality in the Age

rela-of Terror—if you will—is bound to inflame, socially and politically

I hope I am wrong

Piketty’s book, which bluntly rejects Milton Friedman’s homilies

of free market capitalism, explodes the myth of social science and warrants the unification of knowledge that sits at the heart of this

P r o l o g u e xxvbook’s rational The ideal of a free and democratic society is worth dying for It’s equally obligatory on a citizenry as a whole to strive for civility.

The Constitution of America was the first written document that institutionalized democracy as a preferred governmental instru-ment to serve the people The ideals of liberty, equality, and jus-tice, which established democracies, constitutions, and parliaments, actually ended fiefdoms, serfdom, and kingdoms of oppression, but modernity’s postindustrial evolution could not eschew its own evils: slavery continues unabated in the twenty-first-century civilized world

We live in a hopelessly divided world; its polarities abound in all sectors of life Forces of social atavism thwart intended endeavors and enterprises (public and private) that seek progressive directions

on the evolutionary track Despite constitutional, moral, and ethical principles enshrined in all societal structures of governance, peace and prosperity remain confined to privileged peoples A metaphorical black hole devours precious resources, policy measures, and devel-opmental projects Technological and scientific advancements, while tremendously helpful, remain constrained by governmentality’s power games and corporate greed, not to mention local, regional, and cross-national strivings heightened by violence, terror, and public corruption The unintended—or intended?—consequence is perva-

sive inequality Pikettymania7 is a collective confession of our failure

to achieve a semblance of equality in this era of singularities Thomas Piketty (2014) has not invented a wheel But it takes a French phi-losopher to remind the West of our decadence in terms of morality

and practice In my Logic of Social Welfare (Mohan, 1988), I offered

a conceptual notion of social praxeology—to subsume social work and its cognate offshoots—as the basis for achieving a civil society anchored in axiological principles

Human-social evolution is a work in progress Societal creatures and their survivalist adaptability tend to become amoral under the force of environmental necessities No one even closely parallels

Friedrich Nietzsche when it comes to morality and its genealogy The

Western paradigms of existing moralism have failed What we need

is an unorthodox style of ethical existence Philosopher Bernard Williams may be right: “The only serious enterprise is living” (Free-man, 2014: 50) He “argues that different societies at different times

in history require different political arrangements to make their kind

of social life possible How a society should be structured and ruled

P r o l o g u e xxvi

depends on the social practices that constitute its ‘form of life,’ as well

as on its history, social arrangements, and ethical concepts” (Freeman, 2014: 51)

Western moral imperialism has not exactly failed While its rivals have succeeded in exposing Western imperfections, they have hypocritically emulated models of development that do not apply in non-Western societies and cultures Social work as a profession is an example This book is a modest attempt in search of critically innovative issues of our times

It’s a paradoxical social climate Our basic social institutions are faltering: Teachers don’t teach—thanks to online programs, funded research, and the so-called faith-based freedoms.8 Medical professionals have become profiteers Social workers regulate, manage, and manip-ulate rather than serve their “clients.” Bankers and Wall Street thugs enjoy unbridled wealth at the expense of common people’s savings Definitions of family, marriage, and community have changed, and religion has become a refuge for the scoundrels and child molesters

“Hobby Lobby is only the beginning”9 and the foundation of a tesque ISIS is the end of civilization.10 It’s an irony that the cradle of civilization should morph into a “rouge state.”11 Any good newspaper would testify to the essence of these observations Wars, both cultural and geoterritorial (military), annihilate the human spirit While the United States of America is the world capital of gun violence, terrorism

gro-is globalgro-ism’s scourge

A glimpse of social meltdown is not hard to conjure up; it’s what

I once called de-development Counterdevelopment, not unlike

devel-opment, begins at home It’s not the apocalyptical rhetoric of a pessimist; it’s a diagnostic formulation of a belated Hobbesian realist

At the core, we confront a basic question Is it the culture of poverty or poverty of culture that accounts for social misery and malaise? For about half a century, social scientists have been blaming the victims They say people are poor because they are “lazy,” “inferior,” and “backward.”

I dissent The crisis of human-social development is embedded in systemic dysfunctionality that affects individual-societal relationships (Mohan, 2007; 2011)

Counterdevelopmentality, if you will, is a negation of civility and

progress To date it has never been addressed as a public policy issue It’s both predatory and self-destructive—a perfect metaphor for the contemporary morass On a complex continuum, nations of the world can be positioned along an axis of development About a quarter of a century ago, I formulated a “comparative-analytical” model (Mohan, 1986) If you revisit this and employ it in the context, it validates the

P r o l o g u e xxviifoundation of comparative social development This approach logically refutes the dichotomy of developing and developed countries All societies, I contend, have positive and negative elements of develop-ment One can find pockets of “Third World” in the United States Likewise, it’s not difficult to find oases of affluence in the darkness of the so-called Third World Freedom and oppression are codependents

in a perverse and progressive equation (Mohan, 1986)

Archeology of social practice, as initially conceptualized, evolved into

the present structure encompassing a wider range of issues within the arc

of what is proffered here as comparative social development I view

arche-ology of social practice as the basis for both unifying and transforming the current state of art, methodology, and knowledge that fall within the realm of social welfare, social work, social policy, social develop-ment, and other disciplinarities Since the human condition and society’s responses to address these social problems remain a shared concern, I

venture to comprehend a sounder construct—that is, social practice—as

a step toward a unification of theory and practice In sum, social practice embodies the art and science of transformative power that the unification

of knowledge offers The book is an omnibus of the author’s musings supported by a phalanx of internationally renowned scholars

Since we are approaching a postglobalized state of interconnected existence, our common ground partakes of a comparative-developmental stance that, transcending spatiotemporal boundaries, enables us to share a common ground In view of this, I extended invitations to some important scholars to contribute their own perspectives with the objectives of the book We have made a modest attempt to

● explore the frontiers of social development as a global issue in terms

of climate, economy, and justice (CEJ);

● conceptualize comparative social development as a fulcrum of transformative theories and practices;

● explore the possibility of a unified science of social practice replacing social welfare, social policy, and social work education;

● identify causes and remedies that account for developmentality

which may account for social meltdowns, shattering societal relationships;

individual-● formulate conjectures relative to the future of higher education to achieving a civil society;

● signify human and social development as a core formulation for systemic transformation; and

● initiate the foundation of social praxeology as a discipline on social practice

P r o l o g u e xxviii

The quest for a paradigm shift in the social sciences is overdue This book embodies a search for transformational theory and practice

in human and social development encompassing historicocultural dimensions that affect social, economic, and political realities

The main body of the book includes two main parts, each partaking

of aspects and issues that demystify the contemporary kitsch of social welfare and development The two parts, respectively and broadly, represent conceptual and applied aspects of social development Part 1 posits social practice as an anti-essentialist professional disciplinarity to replace antiquated vocabularies of social welfare Foucauldian “arche-

ology” is used as a guiding framework to delineate and define the

con-tours of transformative practice that employs knowledge, values, and

hope as a vehicle of new enlightenment.

Part 2 contains almost an equal number of contributions primarily substantiating core attributes of what might constitute foundational

comparative-social development (CSD) This thrust is neither a

substi-tute nor an alternative of social practice; one complements the other

as theoretical and applied methodological aspects inclusive of but not limited to all social sciences and public policy domains This has been accomplished to reach both graduate and undergraduate students and faculty beyond disciplinary and national borders

The complexity of contemporary developmental social problems and issues warrants a new perspective The new gospel of global greed, which has reinforced a culture of dysfunctionality as a norm, warrants a dispassionate comparative analysis of social institutions that have failed humanity This book is an exposé of the author’s view

of human-social development (HSD) validated through the lens and method of cross-cultural comparative analyses Comparative-social development (CSD) is a nascent field that has been thwarted by the dominance of dated theories of social welfare, and inanity of hege-monic social practices

Notes

1 Reverend Al Sharpton’s call for “justice for all”; See http://news.yahoo com/rev—al-sharpton—families-of-victims-seek—justice-for-all— at-washington—d-c—march-201158074.html.

2 University of Chicago Booth School of Business (quoted by Peter Coy, 2015: 52–56).

3 Cited in www.FINA.org (November 13, 14).

4 “The world is on the brink of a new Cold War,” Mikhail Gorbachev says,

accusing the West of “triumphalism” (Time, November 24, 2014: 10).

P r o l o g u e xxix

5 See also www.economist.com/ineqality14.

6 http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2014/dec/09/cia-tor ture-report-released-senate (accessed December 11, 2014).

7 This is an obvious reference to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the

Twenty-First Century (2014).

8 The American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU) is fighting “to keep religion out of classroom” in Louisiana, where I have lived since 1976 In the Sabine Parish School District, the school’s prayer officially proslytizes

“One sixth-grade science test posited, ‘Isn’t it amazing what the has made!’ When a young Buddhist student missed the ‘correct’ answer (‘Lord’), the teacher belittled him in front of the class and agreed aloud when one classmate declared, ‘People are stupid if they think God is not

real’” (ACLU, Stand 1, 2 [Summer 2014]: 20).

9 See The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/02/

opinion/for-the-supreme-court-hobby-lobby-is-only-the-beginning html?emc=edit_th_20140702&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=42503955 (accessed July 2, 2014).

10 A radical fundamentalist Sunni sect declared the foundation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which encompasses from Lahore to Lisbon (July

1, 2014) The new caliphate is a negation of international law, diversity, democracy, and reason.

11 The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/03/

world/middleeast/syria-iraq-isis-rogue-state-along-two-rivers h t m l ? e m c = e d i t _ t h _ 2 0 1 4 0 7 0 4 & n l = t o d a y s h e a d l i n e s & n l i d

Kaufmann, Walter 1967 On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo by

Friedrich Nietzsche New York: Vintage Books.

Mohan, Brij 2011 Development, Poverty of Culture, and Social Policy New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

——— 2012 Society and Social Justice: A Nexus in Review Bloomington, IN:

iUniverse.

——— 2007 Fallacies of Development: Crises of Human and Social Development

New Delhi: The Atlantic Books.

——— 1988 The Logic of Social Welfare: Conjectures and Formulations New

4 P a r t 1

Social Practice: Frontiers of Human and Social DevelopmentThe archeology of knowledge partakes of the history of ideas that shape people’s responses to address issues and problems concerning human-social development Part 1, inclusive of six chapters, offers new insights in search of a better world

C h a p t e r 1

On Social Practice: Archeology

of Science and Hope

Brij Mohan

This chapter posits social practice as an anti-essentialist professional

disciplinarity—within the social-scientific realm—to replace antiquated vocabularies of social welfare, social work, and social policy Foucaul-dian “archeology” is used as a guiding framework to delineate and

define the contours of transformative science that are embedded in

knowledge, values, and social practices “The science of man,” David Hume wrote, “is the only solid foundation for the other sciences” ([1739] 1961: xiii) The search for method has yielded interventions and practices to relate to the mysteries of human nature and its vicis-situdes The Enlightenment “laid the basis for nothing less than a fully

‘secular’ theodicy: a program for analyzing and remedying the evils that befall man in society” (Becker, 1968: 31)

Humanity continues to be plagued by societal evils Our social tices and their corresponding scientific disciplines have evolved over time

prac-as different modes of interventions in response to various issues that call for attention Evaluative standards—hallmarks of Western political philosophy—are, in Foucault’s interpretation, first principles that we apply to validate social conditions I intend to examine how some of these standards help us validate the authenticity of social work within social welfare

If the Kantian critique flourished in the Enlightenment, the

lat-ter “is the age of critique” (Rabinow, 1984: 38) Kant saw two uses

B r i j M o h a n 4

of reason: private and public Humans are cogs in the machine when reason is used for private use Soldiers, servants, CEOs, and scientists and engineers who follow a top-down order populate techno-industrial society Their hubris and its societal impact are incalculable When reason

is put to public use, it becomes a servant of humanity and a champion

of freedom In other words, public and private uses of reason correspond

to freedom and oppression (Mohan, 1985; 1986) “There is enment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another” (Rabinow, 1984: 37)

Enlight-I have invested more than a quarter of a century—my entire postdean life—abstractly, and in reality, using reason for professional freedom It saddens me deeply to see how my calling, professionally, has become a victim of its own success Only a madman would write five trilogies of books to express this existential angst The charade of “professional” reviews under the command of a coterie of people on boards, councils, commissions, and other decision-making bodies for desired exclusions and inclusions marks the lowest ebb of ethical conduct—standards nonetheless—which I really find “offensive” and obscene The use of

“personal” reason or bias for individual-institutional aggrandizement

is the most unfortunate form of narcissism Its destructive impact on society is incalculable

Degrees of inequalities and the viability of the American Dream are

incompatible Suzanne Mettler (2014) implicates higher education

as a saboteur Her “important book documents the destructive forces

in higher education, forces fostered and nurtured by a Congress that has abdicated responsibility to ensure the strengths of this country’s most important engine of social mobility” (Edsall, 20141) Now that higher education is in a mess, disciplines outside the mission ring will either be cannibalized or eliminated Social work programs found

a safe haven on campuses due to their market value and low-cost investment Now that technical, digital, business, and growth-ori-ented pursuits are attracting endowments and grants, soft disciplines will pay the price for their “softness.” The information revolution has changed the way of life Social work never could establish what its own contribution—and value—was to society Others would do even better without a feckless license This devolution did not hap-pen because of societal rejection; it’s social work that failed society

as a whole

The focus of this chapter is threefold: (1) the archeology of altruism (that is, help), (2) science and/or social science, and (3)

“social hope.”

O n S o c i a l P r a c t i c e 5The Archeology of Help

Who is required to have a social work credential issued by the Board? Any individual with a degree in social work either at the undergraduate or graduate level that is practicing social work in Louisiana Social work practice is the professional application of social work values, theories, and interventions to one or more of the following: enhancing the devel- opment, problem-solving, and coping capacities of people; promoting the effective and humane operations of systems that provide resources and services to people; linking people with systems that provide them with resources, services, and opportunities; developing and improving so- cial policy; and engaging in research related to the professional activities The practice of social work includes but is not limited to clinical social work, planning and community organization, policy and admin- istration, research, and social work education 2

The notion of “help” is based on the mythologies of altruistic latter-day folklores Ira Colby, a prominent social work educator and demonstrator, writes on “challenging social work education’s urban

legends” in the current issue of the Journal of Social Work Education

(2014: 2016–219) Myths and critical reasoning are hostile to each other Our notion of “help”—the hallmark of social work—is based

on the mythologies of altruistic latter-day folklores With reference to Ira Colby’s take on “urban legends” (2014: 2016–219), scientificity, ideological conundrums, and legitimacy issues of social work as a profession call for a few critical observations:

1 It’s a fallacious contention that philosophical-ideological tions are scientifically unsound Social work itself is founded on the tenets of Judeo-Christian belief systems

orienta-2 Critical thinking is a quintessential element of postmodern philosophical tradition largely owed to Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud Colby’s attempt to dichotomize philosophy and science

is misguided

3 Social work’s irrelevancy is self-deserved We all became class citizens due to our own “institutional-individual narcissism.” Our raw careerism and unprincipled, unsubstantiated rhetoric of diversity and social justice simply fast-tracked this process

second-4 “Evidence-based driven” methodology as postulated amounts

to a delusion in a field that remains parasitic at best Evaluative processes—including program reviews, reaffirmation of accredita-tion, scholarly peer reviews, and promotion-tenure standards—are

B r i j M o h a n 6

fraught with questionable policies, practices, and procedures Self-renewal is in fact self-preservation

The truth is self-evident Having worked tirelessly over half a century in the field, I feel social work has become its own nemesis Urban legend?3

Gary Becker was a “real-world economist.” Lawrence Summers writes: “If economics is an imperial social science, Gary Becker was

its emperor” (Time, May 19, 2014: 21) There has never been a Gary

Becker in social welfare and/or social work Social work’s alleged imperialism is a subconscious self-glorification that some international scholars have disingenuously invoked to cash off

There have been feckless debates about whether social work needs

a theory or not In a way social work is a hand-on amalgamation of theories that need validation or refutation As William Epstein would say: “It’s all a romance.” As examined in the pages that follow, “political and social development” got embedded in the social system as a func-tional expedience Norman Birnbaum sums this up rather brilliantly:

Above all, the world’s difficulties were attributed to the unequal rate

of a process termed “modernization,” which, when completed, would complete its pacification Behind much of this lay, of course, two convictions One was that the American model of political and social development was canonical, especially the model provided by the New Deal and Keynesian welfare state The second was that domination, relationships of power, could be domesticated—no—nullified This was

a projection onto the globe of what was current in academia, a atic denial of the structure of power in the United States (Birnbaum, 1988: 333)

system-Parsonsian social system and action go beyond nullification; it amounts to justification so that a possible state of imbalances is never reached His theory of social action, as examined later, is a cornerstone

of a welfare state that simplifies inequality as a systemic karma “In a way, every social theory is a discreet obituary or celebration for some social system,” wrote Alvin Gouldner (1970: 47) The demise of social theory is understandably attributable to systemic meltdowns despite elaborate theoretical “infrastructure.” As a self-taught social theorist,

I confront this reality amid institutional meltdowns without a reasonable explanation There is a phalanx of Nobel laureates in economics, and none can account for the rise of 1 percent of the population in a country based on the premise of liberty, equality, and justice Indi-vidual, family, community, society, and culture are going through a

O n S o c i a l P r a c t i c e 7crisis of conscience that belies any theoretical basis Anomie? Anarchy? Systemic failures cannot be theorized without deeper, deconstructive analytics of historico-cultural forces In a current movie based on

Lois Lowery’s best seller, The Giver, one cannot escape cultural

self-destruction in the name of progress Is the culture of contemporary social work really progressive? Expedient liberalism is a negation of principled progress

Archeology—a historiographical method as developed by Michel

Foucault in his groundbreaking studies Madness and Civilization (1965 [1988]), The Birth of the Clinic, (1973 [1994), The Order

of Things (1970 [1994]), and Archaeology of Knowledge (1969

[1972])—refers to a discursive consciousness involving discourses

on ideas (episteme) that go beyond rules, domains, structures, and language “Social work is a helping profession” is a benign, hollow statement without much substance and discursive relevance There is hardly a significant human enterprise that is not “helping.”

The archeology of a profession would involve a meaningful organization of formulations of “help” that qualifies a particular set of

attributes of “social work.” Social practice is thus a more dynamic realm

of archaeological exploration when it comes to analyzing human-social interactions relative to each other’s issues and problems while attempting

a meaningful discourse

The reduction of social work from a helping, altruistic profession to

a self-serving, marketplace career apparently amounts to a derivation of what Ernest Nagel called a “deductive-nomological model” (1961: 361), where one scientific theory from another is unified in terms of basic laws Since social work as such remains unsupported by any rigorous scientific basis, Nagel’s reasoning cannot be applied here In other words, it’s neither derivation, nor evolution; it’s devolution that is at work

Foucauldian discourse on social work—to use Giles Delueze’s words—thus involves a “theory-practice of multiplicties” that meaning-fully employs theories and constructs involving power, language, and relationships, including various worldviews, ideologies, values, and their politics, as illustrated later by Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and critical theory Social work, as I reflect, is a poorly baptized professional identity

Social practice, historiographically, is an educated application of benevolence toward the annihilation of dehumanizing forces that thwart human-social development and promote alienation, exclusion, and oppression

To substantiate my contention, a critical appraisal of important Foucauldian formulations will be helpful at the outset His “history

B r i j M o h a n 8

of ideas” involves linear perspectives on history and “epistemes.” His emphasis has been on power structures that unravel madness, civili-zation, clinic, human sexuality, and sciences Social work’s proclivities are inversely related to his discursive, deconstructive, and emancipatory emphases

From its antiquity, philanthropic altruism and humanitarian cerns have propelled individuals and communities to use charity as the principal mode of service to the poor and the needy Such impulses have served as a cover to hide societal-institutional injustices that breed human misery Western interventions used Judeo-Christian values to offer the same protection, ensuring the dominance of

con-organized religion in the lives of oppressed people What karma

and dharma achieved in the Vedic (Hindu) culture—institutionalized inequality without any recourse to justice in the current life—Western orthodoxies, beginning in the eighteenth century, practiced more formally under the shadows of commandments, subsequently, recast

as Enlightenment.

With the “birth of clinic,” clients came into the realm of “practice.”

The twentieth century’s postwar effects changed the mode of “practice.”

Clientization in social work practice is an outcome of modeling medical

and legal practices A therapeutic society needs caretakers, especially when primary institutions and bonds fall apart

Professionally delivered—publicly or privately—services to individuals, families, groups, and communities fall within the realm of social work However, the focus has shifted from community to individuals This may be attributable to many factors: change in ideology, availability of funds, and regression of public and social policies

Social practice per se does not exist in the profession’s parlance and

literature Excepting a book on research (Diesing, 1991), I have not come across it as a worthwhile construct, though continental social

theory is replete with numerous references I see social practice as a

transformative exercise of existential hope—that is, a persistent search for freedom (Mohan, 2003) This outlook is qualitatively different than contemporary theories and practices of social work The ‘theory

of social work’ is essentially a cocktail of selected social and logical perspectives on human functions Social practice, however, is mainly focused on the archeology of (1) dehumanization and (2) the educated transformation of the human condition The problem of social work is fundamentally of legitimization and authenticity Sheer organizational power and market value are poor substitutes for professional authenticity

psycho-O n S o c i a l P r a c t i c e 9Science, Social Sciences, and Hope

Critical social theorists, Habermas included, have “recognized a tive relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’” (Keats, 1981: 133; see also Mohan, 2003)

distinc-Nearly half a century ago, John M Romanyshyn edited a book for the Council on Social Work Education (1974) The learned editor commissioned Ernest Becker to write a leading chapter on “the discov-ery of the science of man” (Becker, 1974: 7–32) This was a tailored but exceptionally brilliant and passionate essay to educate scientists who have been focused on society as a subject Based on his earlier masterpiece—and the most underrated yet one of the most erudite

books ever written for working social scientists—Becker unraveled The

Structure of Evil as “an essay on the unification of science of man”

(1968) I have seldom seen a reference to this book in a social-work text Archeologically, I find the following excerpt, crucially relevant:

The science of man, then, was gradually abandoned in favor of scientists

of man The science of man was a passionate problem put forth by

committed and hopeful men It was the big discovery of the enment, incubating to its full size in the post-revolutionary world It had to be approached cautiously and reverently, but it had to be plied into service for man—for man in society—for mankind as a whole (Becker, 1974: 10)

Enlight-Postwar era served as an institutional incubator for assistance needed by individuals and families in crisis Social services evolved as

a response to the anxieties triggered by the ghosts of an egalitarian philosophy that called for universal rights, equality, and justice for all However, to preempt any change in the industrial-military-corporate complex, a counter-nexus of social welfare agencies emerged

The American social welfare system in general, consciously and consciously, has served as a vehicle of counterrevolutionary force It has become a byword for parasitism and perpetual dependence This

sub-is an irony of the Enlightenment ethos Professionalized social work

is thus a tool of postindustrial society that thrives on its tic impulses—controlling, disciplining, and punishing the people it

therapeu-seeks to serve Masquerading in myriads of venerated attires, equipped

with diplomas and licenses, these practitioners basically thrive on their

“client’s” helplessness An elephant became a subject of specialized inquiry in a big social lab by a multitude of experts who studied the creature piecemeal without understanding each other, defiling rather

B r i j M o h a n 10

than healing the subject Becker (1974) succinctly summed up the problem of human behavior that scientists study from their own orien-tations Becker writes:

Now, having reminded the disciplines of their central problems, a new and striking fact emerges—a fact which anyone reasonably conversant with the

data of any one discipline cannot deny, namely, that all the disciplines

deal with aspects of one and the same question: “What makes people act

the way they do?”—Interpersonally (social psychology), individually (psychology), in a society as a whole (sociology), between different so- cieties (anthropology), and oddly in any society (psychiatry) [No] discipline can answer the question satisfactorily, without knowing what all the other disciplines know about it And the reason is, simply, that man lives in all these dimensions at the same time: individual, inter-personal, social, and social-deviant (1974: 14; in Romanyshyn, 1974)

It seems social work, though embedded in an interdisciplinary culture, has chosen to confine its approach to “social deviants” as a feckless attempt to justify itself in a therapeutic society

Ethan Watters, in a thoughtfully provocative book, Crazy Like Us

(2010), writes: “To travel internationally is to become increasingly unnerved by the way American culture pervades the world We have the uneasy feeling that our influence over the rest of the world is coming

at a great cost: loss of the world’s diversity and complexity We are engaged in the grand project of Americanization the world’s understand-ing of the human mind.” (2010: 1) Nothing is more globally contagious than “the virus in us,” writes Watters:

There is no doubt that the Western mental health profession has had a remarkable global influence over the meaning and treatment of mental illness Mental health professionals trained in the West, and in the United States in particular, create the official categories of mental diseases The

American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual

of Mental Disorders, the DSM (the “bible” of the profession, as it is

sometimes called), has become the worldwide standard In addition American researchers and organizations run the premier scholarly jour- nals and host top conferences in the field of psychology and psychiatry Western universities train the world’s most influential clinicians and academics Western drug companies dole out the funds for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses Western- oriented traumatologists rush in wherever war or natural disasters strike

to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their tions about how the mind becomes broken and how it is best healed (2010: 3–4)

assump-O n S o c i a l P r a c t i c e 11The new normal in social work is absurdly clinical From child welfare

to “military social work,” from curriculum designs to fieldwork, from student evaluations to assignments and reviews, one cannot escape a perverse judgmentalism that pervades the entire culture One is per-ceived and treated as an abnormal unless certified by a “supervisor”

as acceptable Once, a colleague of Asian origin chided a nạve dean

in a faculty meeting The furious authorities referred the poor guy to the university’s mental health center, where a “licensed” psychologist diagnosed him as “hypo-manic.” An otherwise objective occupation conflicted by its contradictions has hypocritically become a judgmental vocation specialized in the politics of exclusion I will publicly humili-ate myself by letting the world know what it means to be marginalized

in one’s own home A few examples are shared below

It was not an easy task to develop a doctoral program in a primarily vocational school Since 2005, I have not been able to teach a doctoral class, in the program that I founded, because in the eyes of

my successor(s) I am neither a clinical researcher nor an empiricist (In both cases, these unexplained, stupid characterizations were foolishly personal and patently racist.) Sociology of social work is revealing and disturbing.4

I have taught social policy my entire career But now I am ified” to teach in social work as I do not have a license to “practice” from the Louisiana Social Work Education Licensing Board of Examiners Practice? Yes, teaching is “practice.” Does it mean field work supervisors, mostly fresh MSWs, should have PhDs and three hundred research papers and books as essential credentials to qualify

“unqual-as “teachers”? The application of multiple standards with immunity

is social work’s new strategy to censor and exclude people who seem

“different” (“deviant”?) or threatening to the DSM congregation.

Bill Gates predicts the end of poverty by 2035 Bill and Melinda Gates, in their foundation’s annual letter, debunk commonly held beliefs in development economics.5 The richest man’s view is almost diametrically opposed to the holiest person on this planet Nancy Gibbs sums up Pope Francis’s view on capitalism: “The Pope wants

a Church that listens to the poor and values their contribution He cautions against trickle-down economics and a ‘crude and nạve’ trust

in the free-market of economic system, not as a matter of economic theory but because they too often let the powerful feed on the power-less and leave the poor without possibilities” (2013: 72)

While President Obama mourned three soldiers killed in a page that left 16 other troops wounded in Fort Hook, Texas, he invoked the power of patriotism and love: “In our lives, in our joys