ABSTRACT
Social work practitioners and educators wishing to resist that ideology would be helped by increased awareness of language and its effects. This chapter begins with a consideration of the nature of language and the link between language and discourse. It then examines how ideology works invisibly within discourses to produce common sense. The chapter argues that educators and critical community old-timers must help students and new practitioners resist the transformation that unthinking participation in a discourse can cause. In fact, linguistic systems - grammar, syntax, semantics, and so on - only take shape within a discourse, and are regulated or legislated by the discourse community. In order to demonstrate the ways in which professional textual practices subtly implicate workers in oppressive relations, the chapter offers samples of social workers talking about recording. It concludes with suggestions about how social workers might resist the influence of these practices by becoming more conscious of their effects and by developing counter-practices.
