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Ethics and Social Welfare
ISSN: 1749-6535 (Print) 1749-6543 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/resw20
Everyday ethics in professional life: social work as
ethics work
Sarah Banks
To cite this article: Sarah Banks (2016) Everyday ethics in professional life: social work as
ethics work, Ethics and Social Welfare, 10:1, 35-52, DOI: 10.1080/17496535.2015.1126623
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2015.1126623
Published online: 14 Jan 2016.
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Everyday ethics in professional life: social work as ethics work
Sarah Banks
School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University, Durham, UK
ABSTRACT
This article outlines and develops the concept of ‘ethics work’ in
social work practice. It takes as its starting point a situated
account of ethics as embedded in everyday practice: ‘everyday
ethics’. This is contrasted with ‘textbook ethics’, which focuses on
outlining general ethical principles, presenting ethical dilemmas
and offering normative ethical frameworks (including decisionmaking models). ‘Ethics work’ is a more descriptive account of
ethics that refers to the effort people put into seeing ethically
salient aspects of situations, developing themselves as good
practitioners, working out the right course of action and justifying
who they are and what they have done. After identifying seven
features of ethics work, including work on framing, roles, emotion,
identity, reason, relationships and performance, each element is
illustrated with reference to two case examples from social work
practice. It is argued that the concept of ethics work, with its
focus on the practitioners as moral agents in context, is an
important antidote to the rules-based managerialism of much
contemporary practice.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 2 October 2015
Revised 26 October 2015
Accepted 11 November 2015
KEYWORDS
Professional ethics; social
work; ethics work
Situating ethics: from professional ethics to ethics in professional life
In the field of social work ethics and professional ethics more generally, there is a growing
body of literature that identifies the dominance of principle-based approaches (often
linked with the work of Beauchamp and Childress (2009) in bioethics) and argues for a
broadening of the scope of ethics to include virtues, emotions and relationships (e.g.
Oakley and Cocking 2001; McBeath and Webb 2002; Hugman 2005; Banks 2008, 2009;
Banks and Gallagher 2009; Koggel and Orme 2010; Tascón 2010; Weinberg 2010; Barnes
2011; Keinemans 2014; Keinemans and Kanne 2013). This is influenced by the resurgence
of interest in virtue ethics in moral philosophy, alongside the ethics of care and other more
‘situated’ and particularist approaches, especially feminist ethics (e.g. Tronto 1993, 2012;
Swanton 2003; Walker 2007). It is also influenced by the growth of empirical studies of
how people talk, think and act in the ethical domain, ranging from studies in moral psychology and ‘neuroethics’ to sociological and anthropological accounts (e.g. Hauser 2006;
Levy 2008; Richland 2010; Haidt 2013).
These trends represent attempts to broaden the domain of professional ethics beyond
dilemmas and decision-making requiring rational judgement (ethics as individual
decision-making) and beyond conformity to codes of ethics and rules of ethical conduct
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
CONTACT Sarah Banks [email protected]
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE, 2016
VOL. 10, NO. 1, 35–52
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17496535.2015.1126623
(ethics as external regulation). Instead, a situated ethics is proposed, that places dilemmas
and decisions in a broader social, political and cultural context and sees responsibility in a
wider, more relational sense, beyond the isolated individual decision-maker. There is also
an interest in acknowledging and accounting for the internal motivations and emotions of
moral agents, seeing these not as characteristics belonging to individuals, but rather as
part of a relational dynamic between people and contexts (including professional communities of practice).
I have characterised this general trend as a move from professional ethics to ethics in
professional life (Banks 2009). By this, I mean a move from traditional textbook professional
ethics where the focus is on outlining general principles, presenting ethical dilemmas/problems and offering decision-making models, to a view of ethics as embedded and embodied in everyday practice. Of course, to talk about the ‘ethical dimensions of practice’
requires us to identify, analyse and artificially dis-embed what are regarded as the
ethical dimensions. However, this approach, ‘ethics in professional life’ or ‘everyday
ethics’, attempts to keep in mind the context of the ethical issues identified—acknowledging that in pulling out features of an event, situation or problem that relate to ethics, we
recognise the process of abstraction, framing and focussing. In other words, ethical theorists, and professional practitioners talking and thinking about ethics, need to be reflexively
aware of what they are doing in the process of constructing an ethical issue, problem or
dilemma (Banks and Williams 2005).
In this article, I wish to stretch the concept of ‘ethics’ to acknowledge the embeddedness of ethical issues, as well as expanding the account of the work practitioners do in
being and acting ethically beyond rational decision-making and following rules. I will do
this by exploring the concept of ‘ethics work’. I have introduced the idea of ‘ethics
work’ briefly elsewhere (Banks 2009, 2012, 2013), but this article expands on what it
means in theory and practice –illustrated by accounts given by social workers. ‘Ethics
work’ encompasses reasoning, but also includes work on emotion, identity, roles and
responsibilities, for example. All these elements are inter-connected in the complex
world of practice, which can be analysed in many different ways to highlight the work
practitioners do in the ethical sphere. By ‘ethical sphere’, I mean aspects of everyday life
(conversations, interactions, actions, demeanours, arguments and so on) that can be construed as relevant to matters of rights, responsibilities, harms and benefits.
Ethics work
I am using the term ‘ethics work’ to refer to the effort people (in this case professionals) put
into seeing ethically salient aspects of situations, developing themselves as good practitioners, working out the right course of action and justifying who they are and what
they have done. Broadly speaking, ‘ethics’ relates to matters of harm and benefit, rights
and responsibilities and good and bad qualities of character. I am using the term ‘work’
in this context to cover the psychological and bodily processes of noticing, attending,
thinking, interacting and performing. This use of ‘work’ is influenced by social interactionist and social constructionist accounts of social life, including the thinking of Goffman
(1969, 1974), who studied people’s everyday interactions and performances; Foucault
(2000b, 2000a), whose later work explored the making of the ethical self; and discourse
and conversational analysts, who study complex conversational moves (Sacks 1992;
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Wooffitt 2005), including discourse analytic accounts of social work interactions (e.g. Hall,
Sarangi, and Slembrouck 1997; Hall, Sarangi, and Slembrouck 2006; Kirsi and Suvi 2010;
Hall et al. 2014) . This meaning of the term ‘work’ is analogous to its use by sociologists
and social psychologists in relation to the concepts of ‘emotion work’ or ‘identity work’,
where it relates to how people construct and perform identities or engender, manage and
perform emotions. Often associated with social interactionism or social constructionism, it
includes the moves people make psychologically, conversationally and bodily to perform
or achieve a particular persona or state of mind for themselves or others. In a similar vein,
‘ethics work’ is about the effort that people put into becoming and being certain kinds of
people in ethical terms and accomplishing various responsibilities and actions of ethical
import—for example, being a trustworthy person or making an ethical decision.
Ethics work is not the same as ’moral fluency’ (Sellman 1996; Hugman 2005, 23) or
‘ethical literacy’ (Kline and Preston-Shoot 2012, 65). These latter two concepts refer to
capacities (understandings, skills, abilities) that enable people to discern ethical issues
and act ethically—that is, they are required for and enacted in ethics work. Ethics work
is a much broader concept that focuses around the ‘doing’ of ethics. I developed the
concept of ‘ethics work’ in the course of analysing social workers’ accounts of the
ethical dimensions of their practice. Having conducted interviews and collected first
person written cases over many years (see Banks 2004; Banks and Nøhr 2012), I began
to look at what social workers were doing when they were giving an account of their practice in ethical terms. I identified initially six (Banks 2013) and later seven features that
might be useful for conceptualising ethics work. This account of ethics work is not
intended to provide a normative ethical framework (an alternative to existing sets of principles and virtues) to guide/prescribe practice. It is an analytical description of the ethical
dimensions of some of the sense-making work social workers do in practice, as follows:
(1) Framing work—identifying and focusing on the ethically salient features of a situation; placing oneself and the situations encountered in political and social contexts;
negotiating/co-constructing frames with others (including service users and
colleagues);
(2) Role work—playing a role in relation to others (advocate, carer, critic); taking a position (partial/impartial; close/distant); negotiating roles; responding to role
expectations.
(3) Emotion work—being caring, compassionate and empathic; managing emotions;
building trust; responding to emotions of others.
(4) Identity work—working on one’s ethical self; creating an identity as an ethically good
professional; negotiating professional identity; maintaining professional integrity.
(5) Reason work—making and justifying moral judgements and decisions; deliberation
with others on ethical evaluations and tactics; working out strategies for ethical action.
(6) Relationship work—engaging in dialogue with others; working on relationships
through emotion, identity and reason work (dialogue work)
(7) Performance work—making visible aspects of this work to others; demonstrating
oneself at work (accountability work).
I will now expand on each of these features of ‘ethics work’, illustrating with reference
to two written case examples that draw on written accounts given by social workers that
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 37
focus on the ethical dimensions of their work. The cases were collected for two books on
ethics in response to requests for accounts describing important features of real situations.
The first case was published in Banks and Nøhr (2012, 161–164) and a shortened version of
the second in Banks (2012, 25). These are obviously retrospective and selective accounts,
in which the writer performs for the reader. The data the reader is presented with are very
different from those that would be captured by observation or video recording of actual
face-to-face interactions in social work practice, or indeed by interviews. The ‘cases’ are
essentially narratives, written from a particular perspective (the narrator) and for a particular purpose (ethics cases for a book). Nevertheless, giving an account of a situation of
ethical significance is an important element of ethics work itself. It is how work on reframing and processes of justification takes place. The full cases are in the Appendix. In order to
introduce the reader to the cases, I offer brief summaries here.
Case 1—Deciding on the right to healthcare insurance: a case from Peru
A female social worker worked in a government health insurance office in Peru. The office
dealt with standards and difficult cases regarding health insurance claims. Only those in
poverty and not covered by any other healthcare insurance were eligible for assistance.
The social worker was faced with a claim from a woman whose sick child needed nonurgent medical care. However, her estranged husband had healthcare insurance, so the
child had already been refused treatment at the Child Health Institute as staff judged
he was ineligible. The social worker gives an account of her reasoning, decision and
actions as she made a case to her boss for this woman to be given assistance for her
child’s health care. The worker presents herself as working to improve and change policies
and practices that affect many families adversely and as acting in accordance with social
work values and principles (particularly a child’s right to health).
This case is presented as a ‘dilemma’, where a decision had to be made. In that sense, it
is a classic ethics case, with emphasis on reasoning rather than emotion or relationshipbuilding. But the way it is told is very contextualised: the role, character and professional
identity of the social worker are important and relevant.
Case 2—‘Giving the impression of being a family friend’: working with an
asylum-seeking family in the UK
A female student social worker was undertaking her fieldwork practice in a voluntary sector
agency (non-governmental organisation) working with families with pre-school children. An
asylum-seeking woman (A) and her young daughter and son were referred to the agency as
they had recently re-located to the area and were isolated. The student visited fortnightly over
three months. Initially, A and her seven-year-old daughter seemed very depressed and the
daughter was unhappy at school. The student supported the family through several incidents
that required police intervention. Over time, the situation improved and the family seemed
happier. But the student was aware that A viewed her as a friend, and A became upset
when the student told her that the placement would be ending soon. A asked the student
to come back for her son’s birthday party in four months’ time. The student reflects that
she did not handle this situation well, and that she blurred professional boundaries as she
did not want to tell A that she was a ‘service user’ rather than a friend.
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This case is presented as an account of an ethically problematic situation, where the
student feels she should have acted differently. It is much shorter than the first case,
with less contextual detail, but emotions are highlighted.
(1) Framing work
I am using the concept of ‘framing’ to refer to the ways in which people make sense of
events and experiences. In his classic text, Goffman (1974, 8) sees the work of frame
analysis as attending to the question: ‘What is it that’s going on here?’ The concept
of the ‘frame’ has been developed and used in a variety of different and related
ways. Schön and Rein (1994, 23) consider frames in relation to policy positions as ‘underlying structures of belief, perception, and appreciation’. They are usually tacit and hence
exempt from conscious attention and reasoning; they determine what counts as a fact
and what arguments are regarded as relevant. In the work of Schön and Rein on frame
reflection, their aim is to encourage conscious reflection on the frames being used in
order to help people resolve what appear to be intractable policy controversies by
reframing them. In the field of social movements the concept of frames and framing
processes has also been applied to studying the way meanings are constructed collectively and function, for example, to diagnose issues (identifying victims of an injustice)
and mobilise people into action (by constructing vocabularies of motive) (Benford and
Snow 2000).
In moral psychology and experimental philosophy, the idea of a ‘framing effect’ has
been applied to explain the results of experiments showing that different ways of presenting a problematic situation about which a decision has to be made result in people giving
different answers about what they would do or what is right in the situation (Kahneman
and Tversky 1981; Haidt 2001; Hauser 2006; Appiah 2008; Kahneman 2011). One wellrehearsed set of experiments focuses on the presentation of variants of the ‘trolley
problem’ to participants. This involves a situation where a runaway train (trolley) is
heading towards five people on a railway track who are unable to get out of the way. Participants are given various options, all of which involve a choice about whether to take an
action that would result in the five people being saved, while another person would die.
Different responses emerge according to how the problem is framed—for example,
whether participants would pull a lever to divert the runaway train onto a side-track,
which leads to the death of one person, or whether they would push a ‘fat man’ off a
bridge in front of the train (fewer people say they would do this) (Edmonds 2014).
The term ‘frame’ brings to mind a picture frame enclosing the work of an artist or
photographer. Certain features of the landscape and figures are foregrounded, others
are in the background, while others are not in the picture at all. The work of ‘ethical
framing’ (framing work in the sphere of ethics) involves us making sense of what is
going on specifically in relation to matters of harm, benefit, rights and responsibilities.
This entails seeing situations in particular ways—being alert to what may be important
but is not in the picture we first see or are given by others,1 and being aware of the
1Kahneman comments that he and Tversky used the term ‘framing’ both to refer to the formulation to which decisionmakers are exposed and the interpretation they construct for themselves (Kahneman and Tversky 1981, p. xiv). So the
term ‘frame’ blurs the distinction between the activities of editing and mental accounting and susceptibility to
framing effects. However, I do not see this as a problem: we are given frames and we contribute to frames.
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 39
background contexts that give the picture its shape and meaning. This involves
‘moral perception’ (Blum 1994; Vetlesen 1994; Audi 2013), that is, identifying and
attending to ethically salient features of situations—for example, seeing a particular
incident as a case of racism. It also entails critical reflexivity (Taylor 2006), for
example, seeing the bigger picture of social inequality of which a particular incident
is part and recognising one’s own role both in framing the picture and featuring in it.
Being conscious of one’s own framing work and aware of that of others also entails a
willingness and ability to re-frame—to see a situation in a different light, to see new
features as significant.
I will now consider framing in relation to the two case examples summarised earlier
(full versions are in the Appendix). Case 1 begins with a brief outline of the organisational and legal context in which the social worker operates in Peru, indicating the criteria for allocation of government funds for health care to people in poverty, with no
other health insurance. Brief details of a woman and her three-year-old son (who
needs medical care) are given, along with their family circumstances (the boy’s father
is covered by insurance but is estranged). The case is framed as a dilemma, which
the social worker then resolved, justifying her actions with reference to the child’s
rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. Hence the case is
given an organisational framing, in terms of laws and policies, with a focus on a dilemmatic choice with reference to universal human rights. In this sense, it is a recognisable
‘ethics case’ of the kind often found in professional ethics textbooks. Another interesting
feature of the case is that the social worker focuses on the rights and needs of the child
as her primary object of concern. It could be said that she foregrounds the child, and
relegates the father to the background, or perhaps even locates him out of the
picture (as he is not present nor is he a part of the child’s life). She sees the case as
one of paternal abandonment. This links to the expected role of social workers in
putting the rights and interests of children first. It contrasts, we might surmise, with
the frame of reference of the healthcare administrators, for whom the existence of a
father with insurance was central in their decision to refuse treatment. This highlights
the way that different framings of a situation can change participants’ understandings
of what is ethically right or just.
Case 2 is located in the context of UK government policy towards asylum seekers.
Little background is given, but enough to paint a picture of a family suffering from isolation and discrimination in an unfamiliar place. The story in the first paragraph is one of
‘success’—with the family moving from depression and isolation to a state of appearing
happier and having some friends. The implication is that this happened with the student’s support (she mentions assisting the family with incidents involving the police).
However, a negative twist is recounted in the final paragraph, which focuses on the
relationship between the student and the mother. It is here that the ethical issue is highlighted: the woman regarded the student as a friend, and the student did not clearly
explain her role as a social worker. So the student has ‘re-framed’ the story from one
about a social worker supporting a vulnerable family towards an improved life to one
that also includes an ethical transgression relating to ‘blurring professional boundaries’.
But the woman cannot (or will not) see the professional frame (with herself as service
user and the student as professional). The work that is needed at this point is a
shared exercise of reframing.
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(2) Role work
Social workers have available a wide repertoire of professional roles that can legitimately
be assumed in particular circumstances—for example, as advocates for the rights of particular service users or carers; impartial assessors of families’ needs; critics of unfair policies;
campaigners for social justice; informal educators; carers; or supporters. ‘Role work’
involves judging what roles to take with particular people in particular circumstances,
how and when to shift between roles, when a degree of professional closeness or
greater distance is right and negotiating roles with service users and others (see Hall, Slembrouck, and Sarangi 2006, 71–88). In some situations, a social worker must be impartial, not
showing favouritism to any particular person. In other situations, the proper role of the
worker is to take a partial position in defending or upholding one person’s or group’s
rights or interests. All role work has ethical dimensions—as social work roles are taken
up, negotiated and lived out in relationships and in connection with responsibilities for
other people, and have the potential to cause harm or benefit. Ethical dimensions are
highlighted when conscious dilemmas and choices over role positions arise—for
example, between carer and controller; educator or advisor; ‘friend’ or professional.
In Case 1, the worker says that this situation ‘challenged my actual, effective role as a
social worker’. She takes on the role of advocate for a particular woman and her son.
But this entails that she makes an argument on the basis of the family’s circumstances,
which are similar to those of many others. The social worker does not present herself as
standing up for a particular person on the basis of a sense of responsibility attached to
that relationship. Rather, it is something she and her colleagues have done before for
people in similar circumstances, will no doubt have to do again, and for this reason
they want to get the policies and practices changed.
In Case 2, we are not given precise details of what the student did with the family, but
since it involved fortnightly visits for three months, we assume the student supported the
family psychologically and practically. She mentions that she ‘assisted’ the mother through
various incidents. But this regular assistance was misrecognised by the mother as friendship, which suggests the student developed a close and caring relationship with the
family. The student knew she should have done some more work clarifying her role and
maintaining boundaries. But it seems she was unsure how to do this boundary work.
The student ‘did not deal with this effectively’. This implies she needed to do some conscious and careful ‘role work’.
(3) Emotion work
‘Emotion work’ refers to the effort people make both to feel certain emotions (e.g. compassion or empathy) and to handle emotions that may develop (sadness, guilt or fear).
Hochschild (1983, 7) developed the concept of ‘emotional labour’ to refer to the management of emotions in work contexts, describing this process as ‘the induction or suppression of feeling in order to sustain an outward appearance that produces in others a sense
of being cared for in a convivial safe place.’ Although she uses the term ‘emotion work’ to
refer to the management of emotions in private contexts (Hochschild 2003), I am using it
more broadly as a generic term covering emotional labour in professional life (see, e.g.
Leeson 2010; Smith 2012). In one sense, all emotion work has ethical significance, as
emotions are about relationships with others or ourselves and our characters. But
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 41
‘ethical emotion work’ in a professional context would focus particularly on emotions
linked to respecting, not harming, caring for and about others and being ethically good
people—for example, the emotions of compassion, guilt or shame. It is useful to make
a distinction between emotions and feelings. According to Vetlesen (1994, 78) emotions
(such as empathy or shame) combine affectivity and cognition, involving a stepping
back and an element of reflection (see also Goldie 2000; Nussbaum 2001). Feelings
(such as pain or affection) are ‘rawer’ and can involve the person who is experiencing
the feeling being almost engrossed in it.
Emotion is often not foregrounded in written accounts given as ethics cases, even if
invited when cases are requested. Emotion work goes on all the time in social work,
and may not be noticed and/or not regarded as relevant in the construction of an
ethics case. It is also more exposing if a worker dwells on, for example, her fight to suppress
her anger or his work on compassion towards a disrespectful service user behaving disrespectfully. The dominant discourse in social work encourages practitioners to keep
emotions out of the equation.
In Case 1, emotion does not feature greatly. The mother is described as ‘angry’ but the
social worker does not describe any of her own emotions either in relation to the mother
and child or the efforts she had to make to argue their case. She is clearly committed to her
job and no doubt must have believed the woman’s account and may even have been
moved by it. But she does not speak of this. Any ‘emotion work’ is not made visible.
When speaking of her professional identity, she does however refer to the ‘heart’ of her
professional identity—which indicates its embodiment and hints at emotion.
In Case 2, emotion features more. The life situation for the family is presented as
emotionally fraught. The woman cried at the first meeting. She and her daughter were
both initially ‘depressed’ and the daughter was ‘unhappy’ at school. Later, they became
‘happier’. The woman found the incidents involving the police ‘upsetting’, reminding
her of previous police ‘brutality’. The woman was also ‘upset’ at the thought of the
student finishing her placement. The student, however, does not recount her own
emotions until the very end. And this is just in relation to the issue of her being regarded
as a family friend. She says she felt ‘guilty’ for giving the impression of being a family friend,
but nevertheless she felt it would be ‘extremely harsh’ to tell the women that she was not a
friend. In trying to be kind (one type of emotion work), the student engendered in herself
feelings of guilt, which she had to manage (another type of emotion work).
(4) Identity work
‘Identity work’ is the work people do through talk, interaction and demeanour to construct
and negotiate who they are—their personal and social identities. According to Sveningsson and Alvesson (2003, 1165), identity work is a conceptualisation of the ways people
engage in ‘forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising the constructions
that are productive of a sense of coherence and distinctiveness’. In the context of professional work, this is mainly focused on social and professional identities, such as
‘social worker’ or ‘competent professional’ (see Taylor and White 2000, 100–106). These
identities are partly constructed through available social and employer discourses, while
particular identities offered by dominant discourses (e.g. entrepreneur or technocrat)
may be resisted (Halford and Leonard 1999; Watson 2007). ‘Ethical identity work’ (identity
42 S. BANKS
work in the ethical sphere) involves practitioners working specifically on their ethical
selves—for example, as morally good social workers, caring professionals, committed
practitioners or fair-minded people (see, e.g. the account given in Weinberg 2014). It
can be understood in Foucauldian terms as ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 2000a) and is
clearly related to constructions of moral character, and how people develop and
present themselves in terms of ‘virtues and vices’ (Banks and Gallagher 2009).
In many ethics cases, the accounts as a whole tell stories of ‘good social workers’. In
Case 1, this is linked to fighting for someone’s rights and working for policy change.
The Peruvian social worker says that the case ‘struck at the heart of my professional identity as a social worker’. It is clear that she thinks she has a duty as a social worker to act in
accordance with ‘the most important principles’ (including the child’s right to health) and
not to ‘betray our principles and values as caring professionals’. Here she is highlighting
the importance of professional integrity—acting in accordance with the values of the profession. The case presents her as knowing what kind of person a social worker should be
and living up to this in practice.
Case 2 is written by a student, who does not present herself as a ‘good social worker’.
She acknowledges that she did not deal effectively with a core social work issue—professional boundaries. However, she gives an account that fits with what we might
expect from a certain type of ‘good student’. She notices and reflects on her mistakes.
She is honest and is able to learn from her experiences. In giving the account, she is
doing some work on her professional identity as a social worker, and highlighting the
need for further work in order to handle such situations more effectively in the future.
(5) Reason work
The work of making ethical judgements, deciding the right course of action when faced
with an ethical dilemma and justifying judgements and actions through use of reasoned
argument are all part of traditional conceptions of ethics as about rational deduction from
ethical principles. Although I argue there is more to the work of ethics than this, nevertheless reasoning is a very important element, especially for professionals. Professionals deal
with many different people with a range of demands and needs, and it is important that
they can justify their decisions regarding to whom to give time and resources—for
example, why a particular child should be removed or a punishment recommended for
a young offender. But the work of ‘ethical reasoning’ as conceived of here is less about
abstract rational processes following principles of logic, and more about practical reasoning based on particular situations and cases and dialogue with others—what Toulmin
(2001) calls ‘reasonableness’ as opposed to rationality. This might involve giving a coherent explanation and justification that fits with someone’s character or desires, rather than
one based on what any generalised person should do. Aristotle’s (350 BCE/1954) concept
of ‘practical reason’ is relevant, although as presented in Aristotle’s work and developed in
relation to professional life (as ‘professional wisdom’) it is a broad holistic concept that
encompasses aspects of the other elements of ‘ethics work’ identified here (Banks and Gallagher 2009, 72–95; Bondi et al. 2011). ‘Moral case deliberation’ and ethical reflection are
examples of specific exercises or processes that are used to engage professionals in
analytical exploration of particular situations that raise ethical challenges or dilemmas
(Molewijk et al. 2008; Weidema et al. 2012).
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 43
The social worker in Case 1 first presents the situation as a conflict for her (upholding
institutional standards versus taking account of the real situation of the child who could
not enjoy his right to health care); she then restates it as a dilemma (if she decided to
offer support, it would go against the rules; if she did not, it would go against the most
important principle of the child’s right to health). She then tells us how she resolved
the dilemma by critiquing the eligibility rules (which do not take into account cases of parental abandonment) and stating that many other families were similarly affected. Finally,
she gives an account of how she presented the case to her boss, adding a further line of
argument based on lack of compliance of national legislation with international legislation
and the danger of legal action by families. She invokes principles based on rights as well as
utilitarian arguments based on consequences and shows herself going through a process
of careful, logical reasoning.
Arguing a case on behalf of service users does not feature in Case 2. However, reasoning
is present in the final part of the case. Here the student makes a judgment about her own
handling of the mother’s expectation of friendship. She says she thinks she did not deal
with this effectively. She justifies this negative judgment about her own practice by
saying she used an excuse (living in another city) for not maintaining contact. She also
explains why she did not clearly tell the woman that she was not a friend: because this
would be extremely harsh. This account from the student is very helpful in that it highlights the importance of reason work, and the need for critical ethical reflection in and
on action, which may be aided by a supervisor, colleague or fellow student.
(6) Relationship work
I am using the term ‘relationship work’ to cover the work of engaging with others, building
relationships of trust, getting to know people and caring for and about them over time.
The relationships may be with service users, colleagues, officials or members of the
public. Clearly, all the other elements of ethics work are accomplished in relationship
with others. Even the work of reasoning by oneself only makes sense in a context of
public accountability. So in one sense, relationship work is an over-arching concept, and
overlaps with role work and identity work. In my earlier accounts of ethics work, I did
not separate this out. However, including relationship work helps to distinguish ethics
work in professional life from the narrower concept of ethical work on the self (Foucault
2000a). Relationship work is a key feature of the ethics of care, which highlights the importance of attentiveness (noticing the need for care), responsibility (taking care of others)
and responsiveness (of others to the care given) (Tronto 1993; Held 2006).
In Case 1, little is written about the nature of the relationship between the social worker
and the woman and child. As mentioned earlier, the situation is presented as an example
of a type of issue that the social worker and her colleagues have to deal with from time to
time. No particular features of this woman or child are given and the responsibility enacted
by the social worker is not towards this woman with whom she has a relationship of trust,
care or empathy. Rather it is a general responsibility to challenge all injustices. So in that
sense, the case is framed in terms of the ‘ethics of justice’ (Gilligan 1982)—drawing on universal principles (human rights) and rational argument.
The moral message in Case 2, on the other hand, is all about relationship. Although the
student does not give us a story of how she developed trust, how she cared for and about
44 S. BANKS
the family or how they cared for her, the fact that the woman regarded and wanted her as
a ‘friend’ tells us something of the degree of closeness, familiarity and trust that must have
developed over the three months. The fact that the understandings of the student and the
woman about the nature of the relationship were different indicates some difficulties in
communication and the challenges of relationship work in a professional context.
(7) Performance work
This last component of ethics work is implicit in all the others and, rather like relationship
work, perhaps hardly needs a separate heading. For the term ‘work’ implies the performance of some kind of activity. Yet it may be helpful to discuss the ways in which ethics work
is about performance. Whilst doing role work or identity work usually involves interaction
with others and a presentation of oneself in a certain way, doing emotion work or framing
work may not always be visible to others. Sometimes it is not intended to be. Indeed, if
emotion work involves cultivating an empathy that is scarcely felt, the performance
may not be about making the work itself visible, but about impression management
(Goffman 1969). However, regardless of whether the empathy is ‘forced’ or ‘natural’, it is
important that the professional can ‘bring off’ an empathic performance. Similarly,
being trustworthy entails not only acting reliably and ensuring one does not let people
down, but also giving plausible performances as a trustworthy person (Banks and Gallagher 2009, 146).
In all ethics cases, the authors are performing ethics work in constructing their
accounts. The Peruvian worker makes visible to readers the efforts she had to make
(and has to make all the time) to ensure fair treatment and the work she does to
change unfair policies and practices. In giving the account, she performs as an ethical
social worker. Similarly, in Case 2, the student social worker reflects at the end on her shortcomings and in so-doing is performing as an ethically-aware and reflective student.
Concluding comments
The illustrations of ‘ethics work’ are drawn from written accounts of their practice given by
social workers in response to requests for ethics cases. The giving of an account is in itself a
form of ‘ethics work’—a presentation in writing of oneself as ‘doing ethics’. Illustrations
based on recorded interviews, group discussions and observations of actual practice (particularly video recordings) would make visible other aspects of ethics work in situ. The
embodied nature of the work would be more visible (ranging from tones of voice to gestures and movements) as well as relational performances based on communicative interaction between participants. In particular, ethnographic studies, including recordings of
team meetings, case reviews or other encounters between social workers and service
users, would provide different data for analysis and interpretation on the work of
framing, role, emotion, identity, reason, relationship and performance undertaken by a
range of participants-in-interaction. We would see the identity work of the service user
as well as the social worker, for example. It would be possible to look at the use of
power in the interactions and relationships, as service users, families and other professionals and stakeholders would all be actors in real-time scenes (as opposed to
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 45
characters depicted by the narrator of a story). Additional analytic categories might be
required—particularly to take account of power relationships.
How much of this work would be visible would depend on the situation. For example,
reasoning work on the part of a social worker might be more overt in a case review
meeting than an encounter between a social worker and service user at home. These
would be other avenues for exploring and testing the value and relevance of the
concept of ethics work and its dimensions. In written cases, interviews or focus group discussions that have a specific focus on ethics, it is easier to construct significant aspects of
what is going on as ethics work, since the researcher/facilitator has already framed the
focus as relating to ‘the ethical’. In observing everyday professional life as it unfolds, the
researcher has a bigger challenge. In one sense the whole of everyday life is about
ethics (ethics is everywhere), in another sense none of it is (ethics is nowhere in particular).
The significance of the concept of ‘ethics work’ for practice is that it highlights the work
practitioners do to see the wider political (macro) context of their practice and take
responsibility for being ethical and acting ethically. It encourages greater reflexivity and
a move beyond simple models of ethics as individual decision-making or external regulation. This is especially important in the context of the continuing prevalence of managerialist approaches to professional work and austerity measures that entail the growth of
technical, outcome-focussed, targeted practice (Banks 2011, 2014). Such approaches
entail a framing that highlights features that ‘fit’ the assessment forms and protocols,
reduce space for the moral agency of social workers and diminish the role of personal
and emotional engagement. ‘Ethics work’ re-asserts the role of professional social
workers as active moral agents in a political context of challengeable framings, norms,
rules and policies about social justice, social responsibility and societal compassion.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two social workers who contributed the cases and to Routledge and Palgrave
Macmillan for giving permission to reproduce them in this article. I am also grateful to participants
in several conferences where I presented the concept of ‘ethics work’ for their helpful feedback, particularly Frans Vosman, Harry Kunneman and Ed de Jonge. I am also very grateful to Merlinda Weinberg for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sarah Banks is Professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University, UK. She
teaches and researches in the fields of social, community and youth work, with a particular interest
in professional ethics and community-based participatory research.
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Appendix. The cases
Case 1—Deciding on the right to health care insurance: a case from Peru
(from Banks and Nøhr 2012, 161–164, with abridged introductory section)
This case is narrated by a Peruvian postgraduate student social worker, with eight years
post-qualifying experience. She worked in the administrative offices of the SIS (Seguro Integral
de Salud, or integrated health insurance), a decentralised public body responsible for administering government health care funds for people who are extremely poor with no other health
insurance. Social workers are employed in the operations management section of the SIS, in
the ‘affiliations area’ (area de afiliaciones), which is responsible for formulating and implementing standards in relation to the identification and affiliation of SIS users. Among its
tasks, this area coordinates staff of national health establishments to ensure standards allowing access to health insurance are fulfilled, as well as resolving as a last resort those cases that
are not clearly defined by the legislation due to their specific characteristics.
I was working in the affiliations area of the management of operations section of the SIS
in a town in Peru. Three social workers work in this area. One of them is in charge of coordination, with administrative support staff. Being a technical area, according to the institutional internal regulation, the staff should not engage with the public directly.
However, since this area of work was created and due to the demand from members of
the public to solve their problems, the affiliations area has developed an internal policy
of dealing directly with individuals and undertaking problem solving, which is now part
of its function.
One day, a woman came to the operations management of the SIS with her three-yearold son. The child was not in an emergency situation, but needed specialized outpatient
care. The woman was really angry because she had taken her son to the Child Health Institute and the staff had refused to take care of him. The reason given was that the admissions staff of that Institute had found that the boy’s father was covered by social security
insurance. The mother told the admissions officer that the father had never recognized his
children and that she had not had any contact with him for several years. She had not
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 49
initiated a process in order to claim for maintenance of their children, nor for social security
insurance, if he had a permanent job.
It should be noted at this point that the insurance provided by the SIS is intended for
people who are in poverty and do not have any other health insurance, private or public.
These requirements are included in a Supreme Decree as well as in several Ministry Resolutions. The Law on Social Security also states that all fathers or mothers entitled to
this insurance may also include their children under 18 years old in the coverage. This
is the reason why admissions staff in health centres, before agreeing to take care of a
child in the framework of the SIS, check whether either of the parents holds another
kind of health insurance. As in many countries, abandonment by fathers is quite frequent,
mainly in the poorest social layers; in those cases, the mothers take all responsibility for
their children. As a result, children have to cope with their fathers’ lack of responsibility.
In this case, a conflict arose for me: I had to decide whether the three-year-old child was
entitled to the SIS. On the one hand, there were institutional standards and regulations
establishing the requirements needed to access to this system, which indicated that
this child was not eligible. On the other hand, I was faced with the real situation of this
child: his father had not recognized him, so, even though he might be entitled to the coverage provided by his father’s social security, he could not enjoy this right because of this
lack of recognition.
This dilemma particularly challenged my actual, effective role as a social worker, my
ethical performance, as well as my assessment of the case. It struck at the heart of my professional identity as a social worker, and raised issues about the relationship between professional and public responsibilities. If I decided that the child was entitled to the SIS, this
would be against the institutional rules and against the establishment. If I decided otherwise, I would go against the most important principles according to my analysis as a social
worker, including the child’s right to health.
However, if we examine the institutional rule for eligibility for SIS, it does not actually
take into account a number of social situations, such as parental abandonment, as was
the case with this family. This is detrimental not only to this child, but to many others
as well, according to the statistics about cases similar to this that I and other colleagues
have been collecting.
So, faced with this dilemma, my decision, and that of my colleagues, was to give priority
to the child’s right to health, and also the ‘best interests of the child’ as defined in the International Convention for the Rights of the Child, which Peru has signed and ratified. The
country’s Code for Children and Teenagers also includes this protection measure.
Taking these factors into account, we felt we had to take the decision of granting the
SIS to this child.
The SIS is a public entity with different hierarchy levels. Therefore, although we had
decision-making power in some social cases, we also had to ask for and obtain the manager’s consent. There is a high turnover rate in this position, so every time we found ourselves facing a similar case, we had to explain the problem again to a new person. In this
case, we had to explain to the manager the link between national and international legislation and the potential legal action that these families could file with the Ministry of
Health due to the lack of care for their children. Finally, the manager supported our
decision and we got his permission.
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But we also wanted to grant the SIS to all other children with a similar problem. Social
workers in the affiliations area had to coordinate the affiliations policy with all the staff in
the health centres from the Ministry of Health. Thus, we had to coordinate with other social
workers who did not belong to the SIS staff, but who work in other health-related institutions, so they could advise the mothers to start legal proceedings in order to achieve
recognition and maintenance, since this was also their children’s right.
My final comments on this case are as follows. While working with and for people as
social workers, especially in such a vital field as health, the practical lesson is that we
will have to confront many dilemmas. However, the richest aspect is to know how to confront them, including the fact that we can use many tools without breaking the professional code of ethics. Above all, a fundamental principle is that of human solidarity,
which is an important reference for me and has helped me a lot in my job: ‘treat the
others as you would like them to treat you’.
Taking decisions is not an easy task, and this is even more true in the field of social work,
where day after day we (the professionals) have to identify human and social problems of
great complexity. So I consider it is important to have a series of theoretical and practical
tools such as the ones we have learned throughout our ethics in social work course, that
help us to improve our interventions and, above all, to act without betraying our principles
and values as caring professionals.
Case 2—‘Giving the impression of being a family friend’: working with an asylumseeking family in the UK
(a longer version of a case in Banks 2012, 25)
This case comes from the UK and is narrated by a student social worker. She was undertaking her second period of fieldwork practice in a voluntary sector agency working with
families with pre-school children in a large city. The case is about her work with a particular
asylum-seeking family. At the time, several areas of the city were ‘dispersal areas’ for asylum
seekers, who would be moved there from other parts of the country to live in low quality
accommodation in poor neighbourhoods. Government policy in the UK entails that asylum
seekers have minimal welfare benefits and no right to work. In dispersal areas, they are
often isolated and experience racism and poor living conditions.
This case is about an asylum-seeking woman, A, and her two children—a seven-yearold daughter, B, and a two-month-old son, C. My initial contact was just before Christmas.
The family had been referred to my agency as they had recently been relocated to the area
and were extremely isolated. The referrer felt that A was very depressed and required
support. During my initial visit, all three family members were present. A cried for most
of the visit and B also appeared very depressed. A reported that B was unhappy in her
school and that she had become very withdrawn since moving into the area. I spoke
with B and she said she didn’t have any friends in the area and she missed their previous
home, where they had been living for three years.
Over the next three months, I visited the family at least once a fortnight and also
assisted A through a couple of incidents which had required police intervention and
which A had found to be extremely upsetting due to her past experiences of police brutality in her home country. The situation improved significantly, with A and B both appearing
much happier and making friends in the local area.
ETHICS AND SOCIAL WELFARE 51
However, I was aware that A viewed me as a friend, and although she was aware that I
was a worker, when I told her that I would be finishing the placement soon she became
upset. A made a number of comments on numerous occasions asking me to visit her
whenever I was in the area and invited me to C’s birthday party in four months’ time. I
felt that I did not deal with this effectively, as I tended to use the fact that I did not live
in the same city as an excuse for not being able to maintain contact, and I felt that this
blurred the professional boundaries. I found it extremely difficult to maintain these boundaries and although I felt guilty for giving the impression of being a family friend, I also felt
that it would be extremely harsh to tell A that she was a ‘service user’ rather than a friend.
52 S. BANKS