Assessment as a Site of Anti/Oppressive Social Work Practice: Negotiating with Power and the De/Professionalisation of Social Work

Abstract Social work practice starts with an effort to understand clients-in-context, a task which involves a process of assessment. Whilst social workers often assess clients-in-systems, rarely do they consider the social worker-in-systems as part of the client’s context. Guided by Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary and biopolitical power and related constructs of ‘Panopticism’ and ‘homo oeconomicus’, this article interrogates how the social worker’s observational gaze in assessment has become veiled in practice. Using a critical review method, the author examines how Foucault’s notion of a ‘faceless gaze’ has been increasingly intensified by the use of information technology in ‘common assessment’, thereby transforming the fundamentals of assessment from understanding the client for ‘care’ to ‘managing risk’ in neoliberal governance. This article historicises and politicises temporal discourses of social work assessment and illustrates how the worker’s embodied knowledge of assessment as a governing apparatus may solidify and/or endanger the social work profession. Locating assessment as a site of social in/justice, this critical review on the inevitable workings of power in assessment invites social workers to re-think the boundaries of de/professionalisation and to critically reflect on and re-imagine everyday institutional practices in social work assessment.