Social Work Education and Global Social Change in the United Kingdom, Mainland Europe, and the United States

This chapter focuses on the results from two linked anonymous online surveys, the first focusing on experiences of 51 international participants working in social work education across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland. It replicates a larger online survey looking at a total of 400 academics working in multiple institutions in higher education in the United Kingdom. Both surveys examine the impact of workload and organizational stress on the participants in a time of global social change. They included the opportunity for participants to make qualitative comments to explain and expand upon their quantitative answers. This allowed for a critical examination of the experiences of academics/educators in social work departments (with a specific commitment to equalities and empowerment-based practices). These practices are located both internationally (via the Global Agenda of the International Federation of Social Workers) and nationally, related to governmental guidance published by Social Work England and other regulators. The main research question was: Do modern marketized universities produce an academic working environment which reflects or contradicts social work philosophies? The initial findings appear to indicate that the location of social work academics/educators within market-led departments in universities (dominated by the need to produce metrics in a competitive league-table environment) play a much larger role than any implicit commitment to distinct social work values and ethics.