Social Workers’ Professional Failures as Perceived by Welfare Bureau Managers within Arab Society in Israel

Abstract

Social workers’ professional failures are considered inevitable occurrences. However, virtually all research on professional failure management relates to the healthcare field. The scant literature on professional failure does not give much weight to the profound implications of context on professional functioning. This pioneer study illustrates how important it is to consider the context to understand the daily workplace occurrence of social workers’ professional failures. The research traced social workers’ professional failures as perceived by welfare bureaus managers. A phenomenological approach elicited data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty Arab welfare bureaus managers in Israel. Findings indicated that the managers encountered a lot of ‘minor’ individual and collective failures in different dimensions, and understood failure as a transient episode, mostly trivial and understandable. The main criterion for failure was damage attributed to a particular intervention. Responsibility for failure was not usually seen as stemming from the social workers’ faulty professional-ethical considerations, rather it was attributed to factors associated with the establishment: lack of appropriate resources and non-culture-sensitive policies. Managers coped creatively with what they defined as failures, preserving their profession’s inalienable assets with a ‘non-confrontational’ policy while ensuring individual learning from the failure, to prevent future repetition.