Surviving hegemony through resistance and identity articulation among outreaching social workers

An understanding of outreaching social work in Hong Kong is viable through an analysis of discourses constructed and experienced by social workers. The discourses address hegemony by the government and consent, resistance, and identity arising from social workers. These discourses were the focus of the present study, which relied on repeated in-depth interviews with 20 practitioners in the outreaching social work field. The results give insight in three main ways: they unfold the discourses of hegemony and consent in terms of effectiveness, accountability, and social control; they address the discourses of resistance in terms of incompatibility, social defense, and others; and they examine professional identity in terms of respect for self-determination, relationship building, youth development, and unionization. All the discourses and identities emerged from a process of international spillover. Moreover, the study found that social workers realized that the hegemonic crisis triggered identity development because of the need to preserve the profession. The study implies that the social work profession has high levels of commitment and internationalization, both of which help proliferate the profession. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.