Asian Social Work: Professional Work in National Contexts

281 Pages·2019·4.666 MB·English

by  Ian Shaw, Rosaleen Ow

Asian Social Work
The countries of East and Southeast Asia, taken as a whole, display a laboratory
of social and political conditions, with individual countries presenting a variety
of political, cultural and social characteristics, some with one-party state sys-
tems, others with stable liberal democracies and yet others with more fragile
democratic systems. As such, the region presents a unique opportunity to ex-
amine the relationship between diverse national environments and social work
education regimes.
In this book, social work educators and theorists from around East and South-
east Asia provide accounts of the social work programs within the higher edu-
cation systems of their respective countries and compare them to those of their
neighbors. This is the first book to offer a structured account of how social
work and social work education have emerged and finds their present place in
the historical, economic, political, urban/rural and higher education contexts
of Southeast Asia and East Asia. Experts from the region assess the extent to
which these countries’ systems possess a collective coherence, while examining
the diversity among them.
Ian Shaw undertook work on this book while S R Nathan Professor of Social
Work at the National University of Singapore. He also is Professor Emeritus at
the University of York, England. He was the initiator of the European Con-
ference for Social Work Research, the first chair of the European Social Work
Research Association (ESWRA) and a founder editor of the journal Qualitative
Social Work. He has authored almost 100 peer reviewed papers, over 20 books,
approximately 60 book chapters and various research reports.
Rosaleen Ow is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Work,
National University of Singapore with an MSc from University College, Cardiff,
Wales, and a PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS). She was
a social work practitioner, working mainly with children and families with very
low income in Singapore and Wales, before becoming an academic at the Na-
tional University of Singapore. Her research interests and writing are focused on
family and child welfare and the broader theme of social work in cross cultural
contexts.
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Edited by Joe Duffy, Jim Campbell and Carol Tosone
Asian Social Work
Professional Work in National Contexts
Edited by Ian Shaw and Rosaleen Ow
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Social-Work/book-series/
RASW
Asian Social Work
Professional Work in
National Contexts
Edited by
Ian Shaw and Rosaleen Ow
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Ian Shaw and Rosaleen Ow;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Ian Shaw and Rosaleen Ow to be identified as the authors of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978-1-138-61179-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46522-2 (ebk)
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Contents
Contributors vii
Introduction: point of entry 1
IAN SHAW
1 Social work within governmental, social
and cultural regimes 15
IAN SHAW AND PATRICIA O’NEILL
2 Social work metamorphoses: practice, education
and research 35
ROSALEEN OW
3 Professional practices in national contexts 54
IAN SHAW
PART I
Soft authoritarian governments 69
4 Hong Kong: ruling principles of the government and
responses of social work education and practice 71
SAM W.K. YU AND RUBY C.M. CHAU
5 A new horizon for institutionalizing the
social work profession: is there a new hope for Malaysia? 86
AZLINDA AZMAN AND PARAMJIT SINGH JAMIR SINGH
6 Social work education in soft-authoritarian
Singapore 100
YEN KIAT CHONG AND IRENE Y.H. NG
vi Contents
7 Socio-economic development in the context of social
work and social welfare in Thailand 114
DECHA SUNGKAWAN AND DAVID ENGSTROM
PART II
Liberal democracies 131
8 Professional uncertainty among
Japanese social workers 133
TAKAHIRO ASANO AND MICHIHIKO TOKORO
9 Social work education in the making of a
welfare state: South Korea’s experience 149
OK KYUNG YANG, BONG JOO LEE AND KYO-SEONG KIM
10 Social work in Taiwan: State programming
and the search for an empowered profession 166
YEUN-WEN KU
PART III
Fragile democracy 183
11 Programming of social work in Indonesia 185
ADI FAHRUDIN
PART IV
State socialism 197
12 The governmental technology of social
work in China 199
LEUNG TSE FONG TERRY, LUK TAK CHUEN AND XIANG RONG
13 Social work education in Vietnam 213
RICHARD HUGMAN AND NGUYEN THI THAI LAN
Notes 227
References 233
Index 259
Contributors
Editors
Ian Shaw undertook work on this book while S R Nathan Professor of Social
Work at the National University of Singapore. He also is Professor Emeritus
at the University of York, England. He was the initiator of the European Con-
ference for Social Work Research, the first chair of the European Social Work
Research Association (ESWRA) and a founder editor of the journal Qualita-
tive Social Work. He has authored almost 100 peer reviewed papers, over 20
books, approximately 60 book chapters and various research reports. In the
last decade he has written extensively in the journals on issues arising from
the relationship between social work and sociology over the last century. His
work has been translated into several languages including Chinese, Dutch,
Finnish, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Welsh. He has jointly edited
the ESWRA sponsored book series ‘Research in Social Work’ for Policy Press.
His present research is an archival project on the role of women in the devel-
opment of social work with children and families in postwar Singapore. He
is pursuing a graduate program in creative writing, which sits alongside his
interests in gardening, his local church, volunteering in a village shop, playing
badminton (badly) and Bob Dylan. His recent books include Private Troubles
or Public Issues? Challenges for Social Work Research (2019, Routledge, with
Walter Lorenz), Research and the Social Work Picture (2018, Bristol: Policy
Press) and Social Work Science (2016, New York: Columbia UP).
Rosaleen Ow is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Work, Na-
tional University of Singapore with an MSc from University College, Cardiff,
Wales, and a PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS). She was
a social work practitioner, working mainly with children and families with
very low income in Singapore and Wales, before becoming an academic at the
National University of Singapore. Her administrative role at NUS included
being the Head of Department from 2008 to 2015 before stepping down to
go on sabbatical leave in 2016. Apart from teaching, she has been and is still
an active volunteer with government and non-government agencies serving
children with cancer and chronic illnesses, and with families in need of formal
social service support. Collaborating closely with NGOs and formal govern-
ment bodies, her research and writing are focused on examining the social
viii Contributors
and cultural factors that are interlinked with the needs and challenges of
different types of families and the service provisions available to support such
families. She was a founder member of the Singapore Social Work Accredita-
tion and Advisory Board and a member of the steering committee involved in
establishing the National Social Work Competency Framework in Singapore.
Her recent publications include co-authoring of ‘Quality of Life, Self-Esteem,
and Future Expectations of Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Survivors’
(Health and Social Work, 2017); ‘Death of a child: Perspective of Chinese
mothers in Singapore’ (Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: So-
cial Thought, 2017); ‘The Hong Kong Statement on Practice Research 2017:
Contexts and Challenges of the Far East’ (Research on Social Work Practice,
2018). Recent book chapters include ‘End of life issues: perspectives in multi-
cultural societies’ in Ling, Martin & Ow (eds.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014);
‘Towards a Resilience-Focused Approach for Advancing Children and Youth
Services in Singapore’ in Ow & Khng (eds.) (Pearson, 2016); ‘Cross-Cultural
Social Work’ in Munford & O’Donoghue (eds.) (Jessica Kingsley Publishers,
2019); ‘Introduction to theories in mental health, illness and intervention’
in Ow & Poon (eds.) (Springer Nature, forthcoming). Currently, she is the
editor of an online research brief ‘Snippet’ for the Social Service Research
Centre at NUS. Alongside family commitments, she also volunteers at her lo-
cal church, serving in the Rock Kidz ministry and watches historical dramas
and takes long walks in her neighbourhood to ‘space-out.’
Contributors
China
LEUNG Tse Fong, Terry PhD is Associate Professor at the Department of Social
Work, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was a social worker and
social service manager in non-governmental welfare organizations in Hong
Kong for nearly 20 years before starting her academic career. Terry had sev-
eral research projects on social work in Mainland China, exploring the rele-
vance of social work in the socio-political context of socialist China and its
significance to the development of civil society in Mainland China. She also
researched on social work education, with particular emphasis on reflexivity
of social work students at times of risk and uncertainty. Findings of her re-
search works have been published in international academic journals.
Dr Tak Chuen LUK is currently Project Coordinator in the Yunus Social Busi-
ness Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. First trained in social
work and later earning his doctorate of Sociology from the University of Chi-
cago, Dr Luk has previously been Associate Professor in the Department of
Sociology in Hong Kong Baptist University, Head of Research in Oxfam
Hong Kong, Chair of the Hong Kong Zigen Foundation, member of the
boards of East Asia Greenpeace and Taiwan Greenpeace and has established
the Centre of Research and Development in Beijing. He is committed to
Contributors ix
researching about NGO and social work practices on the issues of poverty
and sustainable development. Currently, he is working on the development
of Developmental Social Work in the areas of rural-urban migration, circu-
lar migration and indigenous communities in rural development and disaster
affected regions.
Dr XIANG Rong is Associate Professor and Director of the Social Work In-
stitute at the School of Ethnology and Sociology (Social Work), Yunnan
University. Dr Xiang obtained her PhD from the Department of Applied
Social Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She founded the
Yunnan Heart to Heart Community Service Centre, through which she and
her team have been exploring and advocating for developmental social work
through service learning, action research and on-the-job training. Dr Xiang
and her team have completed research on ‘Rural-Urban Circular Migration
and Developmental Social Work theories and practice models’ funded by the
National Social Science Foundation. The team has also collaborated with var-
ious governmental and non-governmental bodies in China to develop service
mechanisms and practice models for social work in China. In the last two
years, Dr Xiang and her team have been developing the social work eco-
system in Yunnan and assisted in establishing more than 20 social work agen-
cies through incubators for social work agencies. They also participated in
developing policy advocacy and research in the areas of poverty reduction,
community governance and equitable access to social services.
Hong Kong
Sam W.K. Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at the
Hong Kong Baptist University. He has taught social work and social policy for
more than 20 years. His major research interests are welfare regimes, social
exclusion of Chinese people in the UK and defamilisation/familisation. He
is the programme director of a top-up Bachelor’s degree programme in social
policy. He was the external examiner of social work education programmes
in three higher education institutes in Hong Kong. He has authored and
co-authored 53 articles published in academic journals in the fields of social
work and social policy.
Dr Ruby C.M. Chau is an Assistant Professor in Public and Social Policy in
the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.
She has conducted national and comparative research on issues concerning
women and family care, welfare for disabled people and health and social care
for older people in several European and Asian countries. Her latest project,
‘Social Investment Perspective in Work-family Reconciliation Measures in
Europe and East Asia’ (SIPEA), was funded by the European Union’s Hori-
zon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant no. 708305). She has
published widely in international journals and refereed books. In the 2017
Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions Awards, she was selected as one of the top