ABSTRACT
The operation and analysis of social work would, on the surface, appear to reflect certain important assumptions or facets of social work. Postmodern society is characterised by fragmentation, by a pervasive sense of doubt, by an absence of any certain knowledge, objectivity or universal truths. Knowledge, or ‘truths’, are ‘local’, and relativism summarises the position of both knowledge and values. This chapter examines three discrete, but crucial, areas. These are: fragmentation, knowledge and doubt, and values and relativism. The consequence is that monitoring, assessment and analysis of risk become central to social work. The position, which is inherent in social work itself necessarily precludes the moral relativism of postmodernism. To the extent that social work is feminist, therefore, it follows that postmodernism represents an inappropriate – contradictory in fact – set of ideas. The very idea of a ‘legitimate case’ put forward by feminists is alien to postmodernism.
