This article addresses the experiences of Finnish frontline social workers during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Two questions are addressed. First, ‘what types of challenges social work professionals faced’ in their everyday, ‘glocal’ pandemic setting and, second, what types of solutions they developed to meet these challenges. The data consist of 33 personal diaries that social work professionals created from mid-March to the end of May 2020. The diaries are analysed by a thematic content analysis and placed within the framework of a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. The results suggest that the pandemic challenged social work at all levels, from face-to-face interactions to its global relations. The pandemic revealed not only the number of existing problems of social work, but also created new types of challenges. It demanded ultimate resilience from social workers and a new type of adaptive governance from social welfare institutions.
The article analyses mobility and belonging to a place among young people living in rural areas in Finnish Lapland. Our focus is on the meanings of locality when young people make decisions concerning education, work and their living environment. The data consist of 24 interviews of persons in the transition stage to adulthood and in need of support in finding educational or training opportunities. The article highlights the diversity of young people's aspirations as regards leaving, staying in or returning to their home region. We challenge the cultural discourse urging young people to move to growth centres from sparsely populated areas. Locality was found to play an important role in their lives and transitions. The key factors identified in the decisions of young people were embeddedness in one's home region and local, social relations and the prospects of meaningful life choices in either the rural or urban context.
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe. The viral outbreak was followed by rapid changes in people’s everyday and working lives. Because of the wide-scale societal restrictions that took place to prevent the pandemic, social work was forced to take a digital leap. In this article, we examine Finnish social workers’ experiences of extending the use of digitally mediated social work (DMSW) in working with clients during the first wave of the pandemic, the spring of 2020. The data consist of 33 social workers’ personal diaries, which are analysed using a qualitative theory-based content analysis. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial triad will be utilised in theorising how social workers represent DMSW through three dimensions of space, that is, how they perceive, conceive and live digital spaces when encountering their clients and how physical, mental and social spaces are embodied in the representations. The results suggest that the three dimensions of space 1) basis of, 2) conceived and 3) lived DMSW intertwine closely together. The results reveal how the physical space, including IT infrastructure, its functionality and applicability, along with the organisational contexts, form a bedrock for the social workers’ DMSW practice and had a decisive impact on their experiences. Second, the conceived space consists of workers’ cognitive and emotional elements, such as competencies, preconceptions and attitudes towards ICT. Finally, the third dimension of spatiality concludes with the social and relational aspects of the user experiences and encounters between clients and social workers.
This article examines culturally and locally relevant social work. Social work knowledge and practices are usually constructed on the basis of values and norms of the dominant culture. Our aim is to examine social work that is sensitive to local traditions by studying social work being carried out in Finland’s Sámi region. Our focus is on the meanings produced by social workers working with Sámi people. Sámi social work was found to be multidimensional. It was special, yet shared common features with mainstream social work. Cultural sensitivity is constructed in each encounter between a Sámi client and a social worker.
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