Between ideals and reality. Critical reflections on basic training in Italian social work in the light of the results of research involving a group of municipal social workers

Is the Italian social work today capable of developing its own cultural and scientific knowledge? What conditions influence this internal production process within the professional community of social workers? These questions are the focus of a reflection conducted with a group of 70 social workers from the municipal social services. More than twenty years after the inclusion of social work within university education, the discussion on the ability of this discipline to produce original scientific knowledge is intense in Italian social work. Caught between an operation increasingly guided by bureaucratic models and an increasingly complex social reality, social work must find a way to produce knowledge through reflective processes that often find little space in the institutions in which social workers operate.