Book Review of, The New Politics of Social Work. By Mel Gray and Stephen A. Webb (Editors). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

In early 2015 several faculty and PhD students at our school, interested in pushing social work to challenge structures that cause social injustice, read and discussed The New Politics of Social Work edited by Gray and Webb (2013). Five of us contributed to this review of the book and, as in our discussions, contributors may disagree on certain points therein.

The book aims to “devise a ‘new politics’ for social work in the belief that [the field] bears a public responsibility to confront injustice while seeking justice for all” (p. 3). Facing a political–economic landscape dominated by neoliberalism and austerity in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Commonwealth countries—a landscape likely familiar to U.S. social workers—the editors call for a “reactivation of older radical traditions in social work” (p. 8) while advocating a new politics capable of imagining “alternative ways of thinking about political life, social relations between professionals and citizen clients, and justifications for militant opposition” (p. 11). Notably, they call for a turn away from postmodernism and identity politics and the adoption of a politics that envisions “a new future for social work beyond capitalism and its neoliberal economic rationality, austerity measures, and managerial control” (p. 11). ....