Inclusion and Status Elevation as Aims of Political Social Work: The Relevance of Bootstrapping and Bottom Up Change in Social Innovation

Introduction

Coalescence of multiple groups at local levels enables them to create bottom up change using their own resources without relying on those from more powerful groups, or what strategists may refer to as bootstrapping (Jayawarna, Jones & Macpherson, 2020). The ideas of grassroots social action, bottom up social change, and locality development capture a common focus: social innovation is a product of concerted effort by those seeking a better set of circumstances, particularly when social policy fails to produce such circumstances, or disfavors the progressive change groups seek (Simeon, Butterfield, & Moxley, 2019).

While local, such change can be influential in building awareness of the need to address a serious social issue at higher system levels, and in motivating political elites to make such action a priority of a policy agenda. Without such efforts at local levels, it is easy for political elites to ignore or undermine what is occurring for those who experience negative consequences of social issues. Networking of local efforts undertaken across multiple political divisions can anticipate the scaling of social action pressing for progressive change at higher policy levels (Browne-Marshall, 2025).

Progressive Social Innovation

Progressive social change involves elevating those facing deprivation or disenfranchisement above the threshold of life sustaining and life enhancing resources people require for full participation in civil society. It also addresses the absence of civil society resulting in the exclusion, active repression, and marginalization of those groups whom the greater society deems to be undesirable, redundant, or less than human. Discrimination, oppression, and marginalization often emerge from policies and cultures practicing systematic dehumanization of particular groups.

The purpose of political social work is to advance a progressive agenda of innovation when a society is unwilling or resistant to promoting social development inclusively (Lux, 2009)). By inclusive, I am referring to people's access to and enjoyment of opportunities resulting in a better quality of life for all. The political in social work focuses on confronting and addressing institutional malfunctioning inherent in the oppression of certain groups a society finds undesirable and, as a result of this sentiment, the society engages in human management policies and practices that are oppressive in their negation of the full human development of the members of such groups.

Oppression, and the resulting marginalization of groups and populations, can coalesce action on part of people who may have been reluctant to undertake such action on their own. The coalescence of groups serves as a context for social innovation, since innovation itself likely emerges in contexts in which multiple people think and act together outside of the prevailing problematic frameworks a society offers. The Disability Rights movement is an example of such social innovation, perhaps one of the most powerful civil rights movements in the latter part of the 20th century and one that persists to this day.

A case in point here is founded in HIV/AIDS in which Gay people were the innovators in creating multiple structures for supporting those who became infected and ill as well as functionally impaired by the disease. The Gay community was able to construct innovations in responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis on health efforts the Gay community had formed in the 1970s (Batza, 2018) revealing the importance of concerted effort in the development of local infrastructure for social innovation in the face of societal neglect and hostility.

What is now an international movement cutting across numerous countries codifying in law the substantive rights of Gay people and sexual minorities, and seeking protection for those minorities, likely emerged from grassroots efforts, of common people with uncommon courage coalescing into a force for progressive change (Mixner & Bailey, 2000).

For social work, a common theme in such social innovation involves the elevation of the status of minoritized groups so they can exercise claims for resources, opportunities and even rights that are unavailable to them. Within the United States, this progress (the root of progressive) at a national level is often a product of concerted local action minoritized groups undertake against efforts on part of the greater society to enforce diminished status among those whom the society deprive, disenfranchise, or exclude purposefully.

A Hypothesis Guiding Political Social Work

My hypothesis relevant to political social work is that when oppression and marginalization increase social innovation to counter these negative social forces increases in a corresponding manner. The self-organizing groups experiencing marginalization engage in social innovation catalyzing political action at multiple levels of a society. Supporting a nascent movement are those groups, intentional communities or organizations that foster a movement or that are products of a movement.

My interest extends to those groups or organizations that form as precursors to a full expression of a movement that is progressive in its aims. As precursors these entities possess three emergent aims: (1) protect members from the hostility of the greater society, (2) demonstrate novel ways of engaging in mutual support in unifying a cognitive frame explaining action, and (3) nurture an ideology that counters the grander narrative justifying oppression of the so-called “other.” As these aims emerge from the coalescence of human energy, raw emotion, and considerable virtue, it is difficult for those forces to sustain oppression (Coles, 2001). Oppression is simply not an effective way to control the formation of a counter-narrative inherent in groups seeking liberation or emancipation from the constraints of the society that reacts negatively to these groups. In the short run, in response to oppression, people will likely find safety in group life with the emergence of strategy to confront oppression. Movements can catalyze human energy in countering oppression. Groups can interconnect adopting a common narrative explaining why and how they will resist oppression and the marginalization it produces.

Inclusion and Status Elevation as Outcomes of Political Social Work

Both the Disability Rights and Gay Rights movements reveal a principal aim of political social work founded in status elevation of those people whose status is diminished within a society. Status elevation is a product of progressive change in which groups realize attachments necessary for this elevation, often times involving benefits, opportunities, rights, and the fulfillment of claims previously unavailable to these groups. Most often such status elevation is a product of long haul social action emerging from concentrated, focused, and disciplined local effort (Horton, 1998). The action of these groups, the precursors, set the tone and direction of the movement to elevate the status of individuals who now claim what was out of reach in the past. In this sense, the precursors establish the social innovation that the movement claims as its heritage serving as the basis of a culture of progressive effort.

Inclusion involves the society's acceptance no matter how reluctant of those groups previously excluded. It is up to these groups whether they wish to join the mainstream or remain segregated from the greater society in ways that reinforce their world views. Once people who are otherwise disenfranchised or excluded have access to those resources, benefits, and opportunities available to all, particularly as a function of equity, then inclusion is achievable as a political aim.

Strategies of Political Social Work

Under conditions of oppression, three strategies are relevant to political social work: (1) confronting institutional malfunctioning, (2) creating viable alternative institutions to compensate for institutional malfunctioning, and (3) anticipating a movement to elevate the status and inclusion of participants as a remedy to society's resistance. The first strategy offers an avenue for social workers to pursue a political agenda in their local communities. Interlocking these strategies across local levels not only builds a sustaining capacity for a nascent movement locally but it creates networks that can scale the social innovation they seek.

Networking locality-based social action into a larger scale movement can strengthen political aims, regionally within countries, across an entire country, and among countries advancing an ethos of innovation to change for the better the status of those who experience oppression and the resulting marginalization it likely produces. Status elevation of the so-called “other” (i.e. those who have been excluded or worse, those who have faced bodily harm) in the policies groups seek, and in corresponding changes found in regulatory change, the opening of social institutions to those who have been excluded, and the creation of novel social institutions that are inclusive of those who were once excluded, offers a common framework steering progressive action in political social work.

Advancing Political Social Work as a Discipline

Political social work focuses the profession on the necessity of investing in local efforts to create models for progressive change in anticipation of larger scale social change. Seeking inclusion of those who have been left out of societal opportunities continues as a sound effort of the political within and by the social work profession despite what authoritarian regimes prioritize. Inclusion, however, requires status elevation of those whose status is diminished or even degraded by oppression and marginalization, an aim consistent with the social change efforts of the profession historically imbuing political social work with some importance now and into the foreseeable future as a central discipline of the profession.

References

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