Abstract:
This chapter explores social work identity in health settings, a significant field of practice in many parts of the world, including North America and Australasia. The influence of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s philosophical framework is explored in a consideration of professional identity. His concepts, ‘field’ and ‘capital’ are used to analyse the influence of power relations, utilising an additional concept of ‘professional capital’. Social work may be perceived as successful in health contexts as it is not as subject to media and critical public scrutiny as children’s social work is, but health social workers still often express feelings of marginalisation (Beddoe, 2013a). In Bourdieu’s terms, social work may be viewed as a collective of ‘agents’ occupying a field, playing out their roles in a “structured social space, a field of forces” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 40). In such fields there may be palpable competition between actors for the accumulation of different kinds of capital and it is here perhaps that social work identity is less secure.