Yumi Oshita - Reconstructing Meaningful Life Worlds: A New Approach to Social Work Practice

Reconstructing Meaningful Life Worlds

A New Approach to
Social Work Practice

Yumi Oshita, PhD,
and
Kiyoshi Kamo, MSW

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Reconstructing Meaningful Life Worlds

A New Approach to Social Work Practice

Copyright 2011 by Yumi Oshita, PhD, and Kiyoshi Kamo, MSW

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-0617-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-0616-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-0615-1 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904380

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 09/23/2011

Contents

I am delighted to be able to write on behalf of Reconstructing Meaningful Life Worlds , by Yumi Oshita, PhD & Kiyoshi Kamo, MSW, in Japan. Dr. Oshita was an eager student of mine of family therapy in the graduate program at Fukuoka University of Education. Together we developed the Clay Sculpture Technique and Family Image Technique (FIT) which represents a new approach to family therapy. Dr. Oshita also courageously conducted a cross cultural study which compares the power structure of the families of China and Japan with FIT.

In conjunction with Prof. Kamo, Dr. Oshita began joint research to further develop social work theory so as to be able to explain the dynamics of family interaction, as well as the development of corresponding clinical techniques to use in the clients ecological situation. Reconstructing Meaningful Life Worlds is the fruitful product of their thoughtful research in social work theory and methodology. It will stimulate and inspire others in the field looking for a new and creative approach to social work practice.

Kenji Kameguchi, PhD, Professor, The University of Tokyo

President, International Academy of Family Psychology

Escape from the Stagnation of Theory and Practice in Social Work Today

Social work is roughly defined as the theoretical and practical system to intervene in mal-adaptive eco-systems, with the aim to improve the clients adaptation level. However, what really is social work theory? Furthermore, what is social work practice? If one browses through the journals of social work in Japan one will be disappointed, because the concept of the eco-system is obscure and skills are not clearly defined in these journals. To our regret, the theoretical level of the discussion about social work in these journals is basically no different from the guide book of the welfare administration of the Japanese central and local government.

To provide a method aimed at clearing the stagnation of theory and practice of social work, we have published many books in Japanese on social work theory and practice, written in Japanese. In these writings, we presented the direction of the theorization, developing skills, and measurement of the intervention effect from the point of view of social constructionism. However, there were few social workers who understood these discussions in Japan, except for some social workers in the Hiroshima social work research group who were up-to-date with these theories.

The main aim of this particular work is to provide social workers with a method to escape from their theoretical straight jackets and practice bottlenecks. How can the social worker be liberated from their theoretical cages?

The first precondition to escape from the cage is to have a suitable social theory that can be used to assess the structure of the interconnectedness and transformations of the social system. Grand social theory, for example structural-functional social systems theory (Parsons, 1951) is not useful to give the micro level analysis of social life situations where rules of action and recognition arise. What we need is a social theory that has the explanatory power for the fundamental transactional situation in which social systems emerge. We chose CMM (Coordinated Management of Meaning) (Cronen and Pearce, 1985, Cronen, Pearce, and Tomm, 1985, Pearce, 1994, 2007) as the basic theory to analyze the micro, meso, and macro levels of the eco system. On one hand, CMM is a theory to help comprehend the dynamics of the occurrence of the meaning, as well as behavioral rules in transactions. On the other hand, it theorizes the dynamics of the over-determined structure of the social system. A problematic situation is defined as the maladaptive over-determined structure in which a pseudo-solution activity continues according to these rules. These behavioral and meaning construction rules operate as the context to select future new behavior, and the new behavior transforms the old rules. If we can change these problem maintenance rules, we can change the problem amplifying behaviors, and vice versa. As a social system consists of interconnected subsystems of these rules, minimum change of one subsystem expands to changing other systems. Consequently, the equilibrium of the entire problematic eco-system collapses. Moreover, the power of this theory for problem solving is seen in the intervention activities. In the following chapters, a social theory of social work based on this CMM theory is shown.

Although CMMs explanation of meaning construction mechanism is very creative and its logic of explanation is precise, its explanation of behavior rule is much vaguer and imprecise than is the explanation of meaning construction mechanisms. Therefore we refined our act selection theory and added this theory to create a more holistic meaning construction theory. What is wholly original in our approach is a theoretical framework for social work practice which explains speech acts not only from the viewpoint of the receivers meaning construction, but from the point of view of the senders utterance selection. Our approach here also includes a new transformation and measurement theoretical framework. The resulting new theoretical model is a modified version of CMM (MCMM). The method of the problem solution is derived from MCMM theory as discussed below.

The second precondition of the new social work is to have clearly defined an effective problem solving skills set. Our discussion of problem solving skills starts from the definition of the problem. The problem of the client is not considered to be an objective entity. We define the problem as the system of the explanation constructed by the client through a range of transactions. Based on this social constructionist definition of the problem, we adopt client interviewing skills that reconstitute the amplified complaint of the problem according to a time series. Each of the elements in the transaction is changed as a result of the application of this special problem-solving method. These are the systems of mixed skills which consist of the skills of the circular questions and the skills of the solution focused approach. We have abandoned the traditional problem solving method of social work which searches for the invisible ultimate cause of the problem occurrence and tries to remove it. Examples of the use of our techniques are shown in the following chapters.