The Strengths and Limitations of Social Work

The focus of this chapter is on describing the strengths of social work in order to present the case for building upon these strengths as social work continues to evolve and adapt in a world at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which has altered in so many ways due to such profound influences as advances in telecommunications and social media, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass migrations, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to name just a few. These strengths are explored. This is followed by discussion of some limitations of current social work theorising particularly in relation to ‘wicked problems’; social workers’ responses to risk and uncertainty; the weaknesses of current static or fixed depictions of social reality at micro, meso and macro ‘levels’; and the inability of person-in-environment formulations to explain how exactly person and environment intersect and mutually influence each other. This critique provides the springboard for a discussion of complexity theory, which will be more fully explored in subsequent chapters.