Becoming a Complexity Thinker: Towards an Epistemology of Social Work Practice

In this chapter, we argue that complexity theory (CT) and understanding of complex adaptive systems (CAS) further the foundational perspective of social work’s multileveled view of social and physical reality. We describe how social work’s foundational beliefs, derived from general systems theory, are articulated through conceptualising the social and physical world as occurring at micro, meso and macro ‘levels’. However, this foundational understanding reduces comprehension to concepts that seem fixed and semi-permeable, suggesting that the social worker act on rather than with them. In contrast, CT characterised by CAS ‘animates’ the real world by proposing the constant fluidity, intersecting and fuzziness of boundaries amongst systems, at once both separating and joining phenomena. What emerges from systemic intersections is always unpredictable and uncertain, offering a glimpse not of causes so much as of consequences. It is these consequences that matter and are the focus of the social worker’s strategies and decisions. We then introduce pragmatism as providing social work with an epistemological and ontological understanding of social work action, central to our proposition that social workers must ‘think complexity and act pragmatically’.