ABSTRACT
Interpretivism stresses that there is no one single view of the world, and that individuals and groups can interpret the world in widely different fashions. For one group of conservatively minded people, a strike may be seen as a disruptive action, undermining economic productivity, having a deleterious effect on both workers and owners of a firm. The social worker as artist is one who draws, in a major way, on their ‘intuitive faculties’. The special characteristics of social work as art are apparent when compared with the notion of science: ‘the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena’. England suggested that social work was a matter of common sense. All this is, of course, consistent with reflection and reflective learning which has become so influential in social work and social work education in recent years. Indeed, the ideas may now be regarded as ‘subsets’ of the ideas on reflection.
