Introduction

As noted earlier in this volume, social work is practised mainly at the local level and is highly context-specific, despite increasingly global movements of capital and more privileged, ‘skilled’ labour forces. As Lyons (Chapter Two, this volume) asserts, in addition to the global mobility of ‘professionals’, including social workers, the forced migration of increasingly large groups of people is changing the face of many regions and impacting on local and international social work. As long-standing immigrant nations established during the height of European colonialism, Australia, Canada and New Zealand continue to struggle with the contradictions of wealthy, although increasingly polarised, societies, flourishing on land originally confiscated from local indigenous populations, who remain, for the most part, uncompensated, marginalised and struggling. As the major source of original waves of immigration to these three countries, the UK (then England) now faces its own crisis in relation to growing racism and xenophobia over immigration and asylum seeking.

Contemporary austerity policies in all four countries and the widespread adoption of New Public Management (NPM) models within social services do little to address long-standing inequities, racism and colonialism. Instead, evidence confirms a growing gap between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens (Vinson et al, 2015), and immigrants and non-immigrants (Dominelli, 2008; Ife, 2012; Robinson, 2014). NPM has been introduced into social service organisations across most of the industrialised world, meaning that most employers feel compelled to hire social workers who can ‘perform’ well within its high demand for documentation, heavy workloads, fast pace and work intensity (McDonald, 2006; Carey, 2008; Baines, 2017). Common across the countries studied in this collection, this performance of social work often restricts or removes possibilities for social justice practice.

Dovetailing with NPM's restrictiveness, questions have been raised as to whether transnational social work can be a social justice project or if it is predisposed to replicate global patterns of dominance and undermine local strengths and practices. Although presented as united and cohesive, social work is a highly contested field in which both the Left and the Right claim to do social justice. As Reynolds (1963) argued decades ago, unless social work is grounded in the struggles for justice of oppressed people, its purpose becomes corrupt and cannot advance its practice or theory.