Title: Human Agency and Social Work Research: A Systematic Search and Synthesis of Social Work Literature | The British Journal of Social Work | Oxford Academic
Headings: Human Agency and Social Work Research: A Systematic Search and Synthesis of Social Work Literature
Human Agency and Social Work Research: A Systematic Search and Synthesis of Social Work Literature
Published:
Abstract
Issue Section:
Introduction
Social work and systematic reviews
Conceptualising human agency
Research design
Results
Human agency
Agency: human action
Agency: meaning making and identities
Normative claims for, and barriers to, agency
Discussion and conclusion
Limitations
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References

Content: Garrett (2015) argues that, through political rhetoric and the training of social workers, the state directs social work towards an individual analysis of social problems, whereby social work is pressured to intervene with individuals to change their actions and behaviour as the solution to the problems they experience. Central to Garrett's thesis is that social work in contemporary British society is too heavily directed, and being further pushed, towards the human agency of social work clients. The casting of social problems as matters of individual behaviour—a focus on the individual—implicitly and explicitly brings questions of human agency to the fore. In a similar analysis from the USA, Levin et al. ( 2013) argue that social work has overlooked systems and ecological frameworks. With Olson (2007), they argue that organisational pressures and a desire to achieve a professional status mean that social work focuses on micro-based interventions directed at individual behaviour. Indeed, Reisch and Jani (2012) suggest that contemporary social work in the USA has moved away from its critical narrative of resistance and challenging the status quo. Instead, and consistently with the characterisation of neo-liberalism in the UK, they argue that social work has moved towards dominant cultural ideas of the primacy of the individual. Others have outlined contrasting views. Rather than the individual as the unit of analysis, Parsell, Tomaszewski and Phillips (2014) claim that, for political and ideological reasons, social work has deliberately overlooked human agency of social work clients.