An ecology of moral infrastructure: Canadian social work ethics, 1940–2024

Abstract Social work is held to be unified by a stable, coherent value base across time and jurisdiction. Drawing on articulation theory and infrastructure studies, this paper provides the first systematic historical analysis of eight Canadian Association of Social Workers codes (1940–2024) as assembled within an ecology of moral infrastructure. Frequency analysis and multiple correspondence analysis identify three configurationally distinct moral grammars across three historical periods. Justice entered the codes in 1983 within an administrative risk configuration, not in opposition to it. The 2024 code's past‐harms temporal orientation and decolonial justice grammar produce three incompatible justice grammars with no mechanism to resolve them. The apparent coherence of ethical commitments across time is theorised as homogeneous ethical time, a produced effect of the ecology whose breakdown registers individually but is ecological in origin. The findings suggest that code revision requires attending to the ecology as a whole, not the normative domain alone.