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Article Excerpt
Many social work scholars and researchers have reported cultural tensions, which indicates that social workers are neither living in harmony with cultures nor living culturally free (for example, Goldberg, 2000). However, the systematic study of cultural tension, particularly in cross-cultural social work literature, is scant. In particular, little is known from the practitioners' perspective about how they experience cultural tensions as an integral part of their daily practice. As part of a grounded theory study on how social workers interact with their own cultures in a cross-cultural practice environment, this article reports, from the experience of 30 culturally diverse frontline social workers, what kinds of cultural tensions they encounter in their daily work, and how they experience them. As found in this study, social workers' experience of cultural tension may also be intimately influenced by their racial and ethnic identity.
CULTURAL TENSION IN SOCIAL WORK LITERATURE: A BRIEF SUMMARY
Culture, as a set of values and beliefs, has become a constitutive component of effective social work practice in a multicultural reality (Lure, 1999; Yan, 2008). As inspired by cultural studies, social work literature has gradually recognized the multicultural nature of individuals; each person not only carries many sets of culture, but also is situated in different social locations, the culture of which may not be coherent to the cultures that she or he carries (Park, 2005; Yan, 2005; Yan & Wong, 2005). Instead, tension between cultures may be an everyday experience of many social workers. In the following paragraphs, I summarize four distinctive tensions related to culture in the social work literature.
First, because social work is a Western construct, many values of social work are conditioned by the profession's historical roots in an Anglo-American culture (for example, Hugman, 1996; Midgley, 1981). It is clear that most social work literature, theories, and skills were developed under these cultural and historical conditions. For instance, after having reviewed a collection of codes of ethics from various countries, Banks (1995) noted that the social work profession tends to emphasize that clients are autonomous individuals with intrinsic worth (Bowpitt, 2000), and have "consciousness, reason, will and freedom of choice and action" (Biehal & Sainsbury, 1991, p. 249). Because of these emphases, most codes of ethics accept "respect for the individual person as a self determining being" as the foremost ethical principle of social work (Banks, 1995, p. 27). These liberal humanistic values are believed to be incompatible with many cultures that emphasize collectivism (Midgley, 1981).
The nature of Western social work values that have been transmitted through social work literature and education would inevitably lead to tension with the culture of practitioners who are from non-Western countries. Conflicts and dilemmas between professional and ethnic cultures are even more likely to occur during training. The nature of Western social work culture may impose tremendous pressure on students coming from non-Western cultures (Ryan, 1981). Haj-Yahia (1997) documented the case of Arabic students who have difficulty in adapting to Western social work cultural values. Huang's (1978) own experience as a Chinese social work student in the United States illustrates how blind the social work culture can be to non-Western cultures.
Second, sociologists have noticed conflicts between organizational and professional cultures (Johnson, 1972; Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1965). Although organizational culture has become a major topic in the management science (Schein, 1984, 1986), in social work administration literature, organizational culture has received little attention. Organizational culture, manifested through different types of artifacts, rituals, textual to physical, has an integrative function (Schein, 1991). However, it is also argued that organizational culture is a means of control (Alvesson, 1993). Because social service organizations always exist within a certain social environment (Mulroy, 2004; Schmid, 2004), through various linkages, including funding policies, laws, and other forms of social ideology, the missions and policies of most social service organizations are connected to the dominant culture (Smith, 1984; Yan, 2003).
For instance, Landau's (1999) study shows that when making ethical decisions, social workers have to balance their views with organizational demands that are responses to the greater society. The prevalence of neo-liberalism in the past few decades has led to the emergence of managed care (Aldgate et al., 2007; Strom-Gottfried, 1997). The professional service of social work has come to be measured by outcome. Standardization dominates the mood of most social service organizations. The autonomy of professional social workers, which is a significant feature of a professional culture, is shrinking, particularly in child welfare organizations. They are increasingly subject to the control of the organizational culture in child welfare organizations (Holosko, 2006), which is manifested through monitoring by electronic devices (Parada, 1998) and additional textual requirements (de Montigny, 1995). The requirement of standardization in most social service organizations also diminishes their cultural sensitivity. In turn, through bureaucratic and standard procedures, they may further suppress the workers' own ethno-culture (Fong & Gibbs, 1995).
Third, the cultural values of social work itself are often at odds with the values of other professionals with whom social workers interact. This is particularly critical to the social work profession, the professional status of which is always in doubt, even within the professional community (Gibelman, 1999; Haynes &White, 1999; Toren, 1969; Wenocur & Reisch, 1989). Many social workers working in secondary settings, such as hospitals and schools, have to struggle with an organizational culture that may favor the primary professionals of the setting, such as medical practitioners in hospitals (Bloor & Dawson, 1994; Huntington, 1981; Meyerson, 1991; Yip, 2004). Nevertheless, Bloor and Dawson's (1994) study of a home-care service showed that with support from professional associations, and practices such as collegial decision making and peer regulation, "professional culture [of social work] is rarely replaced or totally absorbed into the wider organizational culture" (p. 287). Instead, some sociologists of organization (for example, Fine, 1984) suggested that all professional groups negotiate with others to maintain their status and so modify the organizational culture, as in the case of a nursing home reported by Meyers (2006) in which the social work profession has transformed a medicalized practice into a person-oriented care service. Negotiation among all professional groups working in a team also helps to define the practice identity of the social work profession, for instance, in a hospice care unit in England (Payne, 2004).
Fourth, in a cross-cultural social work setting the tensions between the cultural values of the social work profession and those of non-Western cultures are usually manifested in direct practice with clients from non-Western cultures. The nature of social work knowledge categorizes human growth and development as normal or deviant and develops treatment techniques according to Western models. These categorizations and techniques often can be ethnocentric and culturally blind (Huang, 1978), and may cause difficulties in direct practice. For instance, as a social worker in an Arabic community, Al-Krenawl (1999) experienced a struggle between two sets of values--from his Arabic culture that disallows abortion and from his professional culture that emphasizes self-determination--when helping an unmarried woman to give birth in an Arabic community. It is not rare to see the dilemma between professional cultural values and the client's culture during the intervention process. The social worker's professional culture may contradict the cultural values of clients who are from non-Western cultures and, in turn, hinder the effectiveness of the intervention process (for example, Cabaniss, Oquendo, & Singer,...
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