What does social work in Vietnam and the UK have in common?
Social media is fraught with difficulties – the sharing of information and ideas can descend into derogatory or misleading territory.
But there are certainly positives to be gained, as highlighted in our communications via Facebook.
We became friends there some years ago through our involvement in social work and have subsequently written collaboratively about the development of the profession in our respective countries.
Here, we share our mutual understanding of how our profession has progressed over the decades in the UK and Vietnam.
Social work in the UK
Professional social work became established in the UK at the height of the social democratic consensus of the initial post-war years.
State intervention was seen as the way forward, this included nationalisation of major industries and eliminating the causes of social inequities by creating the welfare state. Importantly, there was the creation of local authority social services departments staffed by social workers in 1971.
However, the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in 1979 changed things as the belief in less state intervention and encouraging free markets came to dominate, even though this led to vast increases in inequality and insecurity in the lives of many.
During 1980s neoliberalism, the belief in the supremacy of free markets in achieving human wellbeing came to the fore.
Notions of self-help, individual responsibility, ‘choice’ and freedom came to dominate. This in turn led to the dismantling of the welfare state with what remains of it often being controlling and punitive.
As for social work, new public management was introduced to control what practitioners do. This resulted in the focus on completing bureaucracy speedily to ration resources and assess or manage risk.
Social work in Vietnam
Vietnam has also been affected by what became the global neoliberal turn.
In 1986 the government introduced Doi Moi, an economic and political renewal campaign to facilitate the transition from a centralised and planned economy to a more market-orientated one, albeit with socialist characteristics.
The establishment of private businesses and foreign investment was encouraged but the government continued to have a say over major state sectors.
As for social work, there is a long history in Vietnam of community development and in the 1940s French missionaries developed casework in care institutions for orphans and hospices for the elderly and people with disabilities.
Thereafter the welfare system largely focused on the victims of the Vietnam/American War (1954-75) and their families. This included government insurance programmes providing for old age, invalidity, work injury, sickness, maternity and death.
Professional social work only began serious development at the turn of the 21st century with a new national curriculum for universities to teach degrees in social work introduced in 2004. The government approved a national programme incorporating social work into formal health, social and educational settings in 2010.
More recently, new national programmes have sought to integrate social work in other sectors such as prisons, reformatory schools, and the judicial system.
As professional social work continues to develop, the comments about managerialism in the UK equally apply in Vietnam. Practice often entails completing bureaucracy and lengthy discussions with managers before action is taken to address client or service user’s concerns.
The future
It is little surprise that in both countries there is ever more need for critical social work – practice, policy and research which draws on critical theory and involves understanding, critiquing and transforming the profession of social work and the unjust nature of society.
This type of social work can be traced back to the 1970s and the emergence of a progressive political stance, particularly in relation to radical social work, which sees oppression in terms of social and economic structures rather than blaming social problems on afflicted individuals.
And while critical social work includes a range of approaches, they all challenge the assumptions upon which societies and welfare practices have been organised over subsequent decades, namely the global neoliberal consensus and the belief that the free market is the best way to achieve humankind’s wellbeing.
To counter all this, there is the need for structural change addressing issues such as class, gender and ‘race’, as well as all forms of oppression and intersectional issues more generally.
Although we live thousands of miles apart and come from different cultures and societies, we have much in common when it comes to our professional roles, lives and experience of social work.
Dr Steve Rogowski is an independent scholar and author who practised as a social worker, mainly with children and families, across five decades in the UK
Dr Nhung Le Thi is a senior social work lecturer and researcher at the University of Labour and Social Affairs, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam who focuses on children in special circumstances and people with disabilities