Politicization: autonomy for Social Work? An attempt to reconstruct the Latin American situation

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between politicization and professional autonomy, using as a starting point Bourdieu's notion of "field". Two key issues are analyzed: the first is that according to Bourdieu, the politicization of a discipline is not synonymous with autonomy, an affirmation based on which is analyzed the conditions for an "autonomy producing politicization". The second point is that in the history of Latin American Social Work conditions have been generated for greater autonomy, but they have still not been developed. It maintains that a persisting problem in Social Work is that the knowledge generated inserts the profession in the "social world" (to use Bourdieu's concept) but there is an immediate identification between the social laws and processes (in a broad sense: laws and political, cultural and economic processes) and professional ones. This objective, of a methodological and theoretical nature, must still be attempted.