Social Work and the agency of the social worker

Abstract

This article develops a conceptual perspective of how the society of risk, in the context of disorganized capitalism and modernity, revises the thinking and activity of Social Work and the consequences of this revision for the agency of a social worker. The agency of a social worker is understood as a capacity of a reflective subject who, in the act of participating in social regulation of the Welfare-State, can analyze the strategic direction that is undertaken, using the theory of emancipation as criteria. The theory of emancipation allows reconsidering the construction of citizenship based on social regulation of the State, which is a dialectic process that has immanent limitations and possibilities for human emancipation. Here is where the creative potential of agency is inscribed. Never a given, it is built among countless intersubjective factors of an economic, political and cultural nature.