Allan Brown - Groupwork

Third Edition

Allan Brown

First published 1986 by Ashgate Publishing
First published in paperback by Ashgate Publishing 1992
First published in hardback by Gower Publishing Company Limited

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Copyright Allan Brown, 1986, 1988, 1992, 1994

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-1-85742-087-6 (pbk)

I am indebted to numerous people who have shared with me their groupwork experience, feelings and ideas. They include many group members, social work students and teachers, social workers and probation officers in Britain and in Michigan, USA. In particular, Frank Maple of the University of Michigan, and Nano McCaughan, recently of the National Institute of Social Work, London, have stimulated and encouraged me in my interest in groupwork.

I would like to thank Christine Stones, Derek Lockhart, Phyllida Parsloe and Brian Caddick (of Bristol University) for reading draft chapters and offering support and critical comment.

I am grateful to Margaret Harris and Georgina Coleman for typing drafts, and to Pain Gallagher for typing the final manuscript. It is doubtful whether I could ever have completed the task without the loving support of my wife, Celia, who has given me encouragement when I most needed it.

I am again indebted to the many people from whom I have continued to learn about groupwork. A special thanks this time to Carol Keen for typing all the revised parts of the manuscript so helpfully and efficiently.

I would like to acknowledge the major contribution of my former colleague, Roger Clough, to many of the ideas in which we developed together in Groups and Groupings.

and offering many helpful comments for improving it.

Celia has once again been amazingly patient and supportive as I have spent numerous evenings and weekends banging away on my word processor and filling the house with the whirr of the noisy printer!

It is now thirteen years since the first edition of this book appeared, and what exciting developments there have been in groupwork in Britain, Europe and all over the world since that time! The hope I expressed in my introduction to the second edition that a specialist groupwork journal would be published in Britain/Europe before the third edition appeared has become a reality with the launch of the journal Groupwork in 1988. The large number of references in this edition to articles which have appeared in that journal are testimony to the contribution it has already made to the development of groupwork theory and practice. A further measure of this progress has been the launch of an annual European Groupwork Symposium in 1991. Whilst these are healthy indications of the growing independent strength of groupwork on this side of the Atlantic it is important to acknowledge our indebtedness to our friends and colleagues in North America for their inspiration and support in all these developments.

It is against this background that I have been preparing this third edition. I have been particularly conscious of the need to give much more detailed consideration to two topics not given adequate coverage in earlier editions, as well as to revising and expanding some other key sections.

The first of the two new chapters (5) addresses the issue of groupwork in day and residential centres. These are two settings where so much happens in groups of different kinds, yet the literature has barely recognised, much less actually addressed, the special features of these groups and 'groupings' (a term coined to describe the many different kinds of gathering that occur), it is essential to recognise that life and work in these group living settings require special kinds of group skills in addition to those already well established for fieldwork groups.

The second new chapter (6) is an attempt to understand the significance of race and gender in groups and groupwork practice, and to begin to develop a framework for anti-discriminatory practice. This chapter has been a considerable challenge for me, writing inescapably from the perspective of a white middle-class man. I hope that readers who have not as yet given very much thought to the issues I address will find it helpful and influential in their practice, and others, particularly those from oppressed groups, will be spurred on both to critique the level I have reached in my understanding, and to put their own perspective and understanding into writing new formulations which will take us all further forward as we seek to be genuinely anti-discriminatory in our work together in groups.

Other sections of the book which have been extended and revised include those on: group composition; open groups; aspects of co-working; and groupwork consultation.

Finally, I have updated the bibliography to include references for some of the important material that has been published in the last six years. The bibliography is now quite lengthy and should be a useful source of reference for more experienced groupworkers. To make it more manageable for those relatively new to groupwork I have asterisked (*) a range of publications which between them provide a good basis for groupwork practice and theory.

Groupwork has come a long way in Britain since the 1960s when it was a relatively scarce commodity. It was rarely included in social work training courses, carried an unhelpful mystique associated with sensitivity and encounter groups, and was often regarded as an idiosyncratic activity in those agencies where it was practised by innovative social workers. The available literature was North American, In the USA at that time groupwork was already well established as a social work method, going through a phase of being separated off as a distinct specialism. This changed subsequently in the 1970s when groupwork became reintegrated with mainstream practice, and it has moved forward with a whole new vigour and impetus since 1978 when the journal Social Work with Groups was launched, and 1979 when the first of the North American annual groupwork symposia was held. These symposia continue to flourish as a source of inspiration and knowledge building for groupwork theoreticians and practitioners.

The 1970s saw groupwork gradually being taken more seriously in Britain, perhaps partly due to the North American influence, but more likely due to the push for diversification and improvement of practice intervention methods. This arose in part from the discouraging research evaluations of the efficacy of traditional one-to-one casework methods. A British groupwork literature began to appear at this time and a number of introductory texts were published in the period 19751980 (Davies, 1975; Douglas, 1976; Douglas, 1978; McCaughan, 1978; Brown, 1979; Heap, 1979) offering a firmer basis for groupwork learning during training, and for groupwork practice in agencies. There was increasing evidence from social workers (see Stevenson, Parsloe et al., 1978) of a widespread wish to use groupwork methods being tempered by a lack of encouragement (if not active opposition) in some agencies. The picture in Social Service Departments was patchy with some appointing specialist groupwork consultants (see Laming and Sturton, 1978; McCaughan, 1985) and others treating groupwork as a marginal activity. The one sphere in which group methods were used very extensively was in Intermediate Treatment for adolescents (Jones and Kerslake, 1979). In many Probation Areas groupwork was achieving recognition as a mainstream method of working with offenders (see Brown and Seymour, 1983), and this trend has continued as a recent national survey of the amount and range of groupwork in the probation service has confirmed (Caddick, 1991). Some voluntary agencies like the Family Service Units were already using groups as a mainstream method of working.