Thinking Complexity and Acting Pragmatically

As we learned in the previous chapter, complexity theory and understanding the nature of complex adaptive systems can advance the foundational perspective of social work’s multileveled view of social and material reality. We asserted that this explanatory theory and meta perspective underpin a pragmatic epistemological and ontological understanding of social work action and that a context-bound understanding of social and material reality may better inform social work theory and practice. In this chapter, we discuss how a case may be analysed from a CT/CAS-informed approach. Following presentation of a case, we identify the nested CAS, highlighting the client’s and the social worker’s strengths and limitations, and describe the tasks as they emerge for a social worker ‘thinking complexity’ and ‘acting pragmatically’. What emerges from systemic intersections is always unpredictable and uncertain, offering a glimpse, not of causes so much as of consequences. As noted in Chap. 3 , it is these consequences that matter and that are the focus of the social worker’s strategies and decisions. The chapter concludes by providing some guidelines and questions to prompt the social worker in thinking complexity and acting pragmatically.