Foucault’s Impact: Butler, Performance and Social Work

Over the past 50 years, helping professions in Western culture have been variously seen as an economic and moral cornerstone of contemporary societies as citadels of elitism and monopoly power and, more recently, as a self-disciplinary form of governmentality. The latter perspective encapsulates a more ambivalent position towards professionalisation, insofar as the privileges and status accorded to professionals are dependent on a form of subjugation and reflexive monitoring. Reflecting on Judith Butler’s conception of ‘performativity’, we would argue that the notion has important implications for contemporary debates over agency, subjection and ‘resistance’. In light of technologies of surveillance and control in contemporary social work, performativity offers a framework towards analysing the production of a subjective space based on trust between social workers and service users.