Exploring cultural tensions in cross-cultural social work practice.

Yan, Miu Chung

Many social work scholars and researchers have reported cultural tensions, which indicates that social workers are neither living in harmony with cultures nor living culturally free (for example, Goldberg, 2000). However, the systematic study of cultural tension, particularly in cross-cultural social work literature, is scant. In particular, little is known from the practitioners' perspective about how they experience cultural tensions as an integral part of their daily practice. As part of a grounded theory study on how social workers interact with their own cultures in a cross-cultural practice environment, this article reports, from the experience of 30 culturally diverse frontline social workers, what kinds of cultural tensions they encounter in their daily work, and how they experience them. As found in this study, social workers' experience of cultural tension may also be intimately influenced by their racial and ethnic identity.

CULTURAL TENSION IN SOCIAL WORK LITERATURE: A BRIEF SUMMARY

Culture, as a set of values and beliefs, has become a constitutive component of effective social work practice in a multicultural reality (Lure, 1999; Yan, 2008). As inspired by cultural studies, social work literature has gradually recognized the multicultural nature of individuals; each person not only carries many sets of culture, but also is situated in different social locations, the culture of which may not be coherent to the cultures that she or he carries (Park, 2005; Yan, 2005; Yan & Wong, 2005). Instead, tension between cultures may be an everyday experience of many social workers. In the following paragraphs, I summarize four distinctive tensions related to culture in the social work literature.

First, because social work is a Western construct, many values of social work are conditioned by the profession's historical roots in an Anglo-American culture (for example, Hugman, 1996; Midgley, 1981). It is clear that most social work literature, theories, and skills were developed under these cultural and historical conditions. For instance, after having reviewed a collection of codes of ethics from various countries, Banks (1995) noted that the social work profession tends to emphasize that clients are autonomous individuals with intrinsic worth (Bowpitt, 2000), and have "consciousness, reason, will and freedom of choice and action" (Biehal & Sainsbury, 1991, p. 249). Because of these emphases, most codes of ethics accept "respect for the individual person as a self determining being" as the foremost ethical principle of social work (Banks, 1995, p. 27). These liberal humanistic values are believed to be incompatible with many cultures that emphasize collectivism (Midgley, 1981).

The nature of Western social work values that have been transmitted through social work literature and education would inevitably lead to tension with the culture of practitioners who are from non-Western countries. Conflicts and dilemmas between professional and ethnic cultures are even more likely to occur during training. The nature of Western social work culture may impose tremendous pressure on students coming from non-Western cultures (Ryan, 1981). Haj-Yahia (1997) documented the case of Arabic students who have difficulty in adapting to Western social work cultural values. Huang's (1978) own experience as a Chinese social work student in the United States illustrates how blind the social work culture can be to non-Western cultures.

Second, sociologists have noticed conflicts between organizational and professional cultures (Johnson, 1972; Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1965). Although organizational culture has become a major topic in the management science (Schein, 1984, 1986), in social work administration literature, organizational culture has received little attention. Organizational culture, manifested through different types of artifacts, rituals, textual to physical, has an integrative function (Schein, 1991). However, it is also argued that organizational culture is a means of control (Alvesson, 1993). Because social service organizations always exist within a certain social environment (Mulroy, 2004; Schmid, 2004), through various linkages, including funding policies, laws, and other forms of social ideology, the missions and policies of most social service organizations are connected to the dominant culture (Smith, 1984; Yan, 2003).

For instance, Landau's (1999) study shows that when making ethical decisions, social workers have to balance their views with organizational demands that are responses to the greater society. The prevalence of neo-liberalism in the past few decades has led to the emergence of managed care (Aldgate et al., 2007; Strom-Gottfried, 1997). The professional service of social work has come to be measured by outcome. Standardization dominates the mood of most social service organizations. The autonomy of professional social workers, which is a significant feature of a professional culture, is shrinking, particularly in child welfare organizations. They are increasingly subject to the control of the organizational culture in child welfare organizations (Holosko, 2006), which is manifested through monitoring by electronic devices (Parada, 1998) and additional textual requirements (de Montigny, 1995). The requirement of standardization in most social service organizations also diminishes their cultural sensitivity. In turn, through bureaucratic and standard procedures, they may further suppress the workers' own ethno-culture (Fong & Gibbs, 1995).

Third, the cultural values of social work itself are often at odds with the values of other professionals with whom social workers interact. This is particularly critical to the social work profession, the professional status of which is always in doubt, even within the professional community (Gibelman, 1999; Haynes &White, 1999; Toren, 1969; Wenocur & Reisch, 1989). Many social workers working in secondary settings, such as hospitals and schools, have to struggle with an organizational culture that may favor the primary professionals of the setting, such as medical practitioners in hospitals (Bloor & Dawson, 1994; Huntington, 1981; Meyerson, 1991; Yip, 2004). Nevertheless, Bloor and Dawson's (1994) study of a home-care service showed that with support from professional associations, and practices such as collegial decision making and peer regulation, "professional culture [of social work] is rarely replaced or totally absorbed into the wider organizational culture" (p. 287). Instead, some sociologists of organization (for example, Fine, 1984) suggested that all professional groups negotiate with others to maintain their status and so modify the organizational culture, as in the case of a nursing home reported by Meyers (2006) in which the social work profession has transformed a medicalized practice into a person-oriented care service. Negotiation among all professional groups working in a team also helps to define the practice identity of the social work profession, for instance, in a hospice care unit in England (Payne, 2004).

Fourth, in a cross-cultural social work setting the tensions between the cultural values of the social work profession and those of non-Western cultures are usually manifested in direct practice with clients from non-Western cultures. The nature of social work knowledge categorizes human growth and development as normal or deviant and develops treatment techniques according to Western models. These categorizations and techniques often can be ethnocentric and culturally blind (Huang, 1978), and may cause difficulties in direct practice. For instance, as a social worker in an Arabic community, Al-Krenawl (1999) experienced a struggle between two sets of values--from his Arabic culture that disallows abortion and from his professional culture that emphasizes self-determination--when helping an unmarried woman to give birth in an Arabic community. It is not rare to see the dilemma between professional cultural values and the client's culture during the intervention process. The social worker's professional culture may contradict the cultural values of clients who are from non-Western cultures and, in turn, hinder the effectiveness of the intervention process (for example, Cabaniss, Oquendo, & Singer, 1994).

Cultural tension is also caused by the ethnocultural differences between social workers and their ethno-culturally different clients. However, most literature on cross-cultural social work tends to focus on the experience of the dominant "Euro-American" social workers and their cultural minority clients (Yan & Lam, 2000). The experience of the cultural minority social worker is not known. Social scientists have commented that culture is almost synonymously equivalent to ethnicity and race (Hall, 1996; Wright, 1998).The cultural tension between a social worker and his or her client is also complicated by the conflation of the concepts of culture, ethnicity, and race in the social work literature (Park, 2005). As Yan (2008) discovers, very often these three concepts are also used interchangeably by frontline social workers in their daily cross-cultural practice. Such conflation intentionally or unintentionally minimizes the racial tension of cross-cultural social work practice. As Nybell and Gray (2004) reported, the dynamic of social work practice in a racialized organizational context is beyond the explanation of cultural competence. Yet, literature and studies on cultural tension faced by cultural and visible minority social workers are scant.

In brief, although literature on cultural tension in social work is not uncommon, empirical information is scant. Meanwhile, information of cultural tension tends to focus only on one of these four possible areas. Conceptually, a coherent framework for understanding cultural tension in cross-cultural social work practice is missing. As part of a grounded theory study on how social workers interact with their own cultures when they work with clients from a different culture, deliberate efforts were made, both empirically and conceptually, to understand, from frontline practitioners' perspective, what kinds of cultural tensions they face in their daily practice.

THE STUDY

The findings reported here are part of a study that explored how social workers and their cultures interact when working with clients from different cultures (Yan, 2002). To report all findings of the study is beyond the scope of this article. The study was conducted in 2002 at a multicultural city in Ontario, Canada, where, in 2001, out of the 2.4 million people residing in this city, 1 million were visible minorities. Grounded theory was used in this study because of its emerging nature that allows the researcher not only to discover and describe, but also to explain the actual social process. Technical references were largely drawn from the original text The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), with supplements from various sources (Glaser, 1978; Sandelowski, Holditcy-Davis, & Harris, 1992; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Ground theory study came with a unique sampling strategy, namely, theoretical sampling. The theoretical sampling method is, as Glaser and Strauss (1967) originally described, an "ongoing joint collection and analysis of data associated with the generation of theory" (p. 49), and "this process of data collection is controlled [sic] by the emerging theory" (p. 45). Following the theoretical sampling strategies, I recruited 30 frontline social workers through three different rounds by a snowball sampling strategy--mainly referrals from various sources. In each round, to test the emerging theory, different variables--particularly ethno-racial background, field of practice, and gender--were used as criteria to recruit participants. The demographic summaries, mainly gender (reflected by their names), field of practice, and self-identified ethnic or racial identity, of the participants, by stages, are presented in Table 1.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, which are central to grounded theory (Creswell, 1998). A question guide was used for the first round of interviews. However, in the second and third rounds, the questions were asked in a more contingent manner. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. The data were organized and analyzed with the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, NVivo. The constant comparison method was used to analyze the data from coding, pattern development, and theory building in this study. Constant comparison is more than just an analysis strategy. It is also the essence of the grounded theory approach, through which diversity--similarities and differences--are sorted into categories and dimensions (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In this study, because of the programmed variations in sampling focus, comparisons were made not only between different interviews, but also between data collected in different stages.

FINDINGS

Unlike many other qualitative research methods that generate descriptive themes and patterns of a social phenomenon, grounded theory aims at generating substantive theory that offers substantive explanation of basic social processes by discovering not only the patterns, but also their interrelationship (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).To explain how social workers interact with their own cultures, I developed a conceptual analysis (see Figure 1) of the patterns of cultural tensions among the cultures of worker, client, organization, and the social work profession that these participants encounter.

Cultural Tension: Type 1

The first type of tension is tensions between the cultures of social work clients and the cultures of the dominant society and of the organization from which they seek help. The dominant social values of Canadian society, particularly norms that regulate people's behaviors and expectations, are an influential factor in social work practice. For instance, many participants observed that among all the norms, being independent and self-responsible are important cultural norms of Canadian society that may lead to cultural tension in their work. The socio-organizational cultures, which are very often manifested through the social workers, cause at least two subtypes of tension.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Type 1-A Tension: Client's Culture versus Dominant Culture. This type of tension is manifested when the social workers representing the socio-organizational cultures work with clients whose cultures are different from the organizational and social cultures. The dominant culture is always expressed through laws. Social workers very often are expected to and authorized to enforce the laws, which determine their mandate. As reported by most child protection participants, they always struggle between the differing understandings of child abuse between the law and their ethnic minority clients. For instance, Linda, a veteran child protection worker, reported the following:

 I listen to them and try to understand them. Of course, some
 believe they can hit children. I have to report to Children's Aid
 [a child protection agency]. I will not compromise with that. So, I
 think especially for those child welfare cases. Let's say when the
 child is being abused, physically or something like that. I told
 them this is Canada. I'm authorized by them. I have to report the
 case or if I know anything, I have to report the case. So, that's
 not value free.

Other than laws, socially accepted norms are also sources of tension. As reported by Cathy, a participant who works in a rehabilitation center, the preference of helping disable people to move out of family home is a "cultural clash." She criticized that there is a certain socially acceptable understanding of the autonomy of being an adult with a disability in our society, which is not necessarily accepted by clients with disabilities who believe in interdependence. She said, "that is a very different value system that values autonomy and independence; it defines both things differently." In sum, the social norms and laws are part of the dominant culture in which social workers practice. One way or another, these norms and laws provide social workers with the authoritative reference of how to understand their client's problems and behaviors.

Type 1-B Tension: Client's Culture versus Organizational Culture. This is cultural tension that happens in an organizational level. The symbolic condition of organizations can be understood as institutional culture, which defines the mandate of the organization, provides guidance regulating the practice of its members, and imposes expectations on its clients. The mission statement is perhaps the most important symbolic condition through which the concerted efforts of people working in the organization are coordinated.

 The task and duties are different, obviously, but the end goal in
 terms of meeting our mission statement is the same for all of our
 staff members here. We are basically working towards the same
 mission statement and that mission statement talks about helping
 foreign-trained people to get back into the wider community through
 skins training or language development and so on. So you know,
 those kinds of things were all working on different parts of the
 puzzle so to speak, but when you put them together, then we achieve
 the goal. (Paul, an employment counselor in a community
 organization)

The institutional culture also guides the practice of its social work employees.

 I represent, as a social worker, the institution's culture in many
 ways. If I'm working in an emergency department and a six-year-old
 child comes with a trauma and is bleeding and morn doesn't want
 child to get what blood product, then the institution's culture is
 that I need to look at that child's right to live or die. (Quincy,
 a hospital social worker)

Through its employees, an organization also imposes its cultural expectation on its clients who are expected to accept the organization's ways of doing things. Most organizations that provide social work services, more or less, also endorse the professional culture. For instance, as suggested by Yvonne, a participant who works in a child mental health center, social work organization tends to create a kind of "therapeutic space," a hybrid of organizational and professional cultures. She defined the therapeutic space as a kind of treatment culture:

 Accessing therapy is very much about accepting the therapeutic
 space as it is imposed on you, which is you again, coming to a
 building, waiting in the waiting room, coming into a room and being
 able to talk about your innermost problems and family dynamics.

The treatment culture of many social work organizations also causes tensions with the client's culture, particularly in situations in which clients are expected to be institutionalized, even though the client's culture values the family staying together.

 I think in terms of their [client's] culture, they did place
 different priority on values than the treatment culture
 [organizational] .The treatment culture clearly had to deal with
 the presenting problems. The family's priority in culture was being
 together as a family. So, there was a conflict right away that we
 had to have this child removed from this culture. So there is a
 tension there between cultures. (Robert, a mental health worker)

Meanwhile, organizations' policies and procedures are generally designed to govern and regulate the activities of the organization. They tend to be less flexible to prevent too many contingencies that may cause chaos. As help-seekers in an organization, the clients bring their own cultural expectation into the help-seeking process. Struggling to achieve a compromise between clients' culture and organizational requirements, workers may run into constant tensions. For instance,

 Well, I think there are certain latitudes that are within it.
 Otherwise, this is a big system. It can't work. It is going to be
 in chaos. You have to have some kinds of ways of work here.... So
 that you can educate them [clients] to a certain point, but the
 other culture group has to bend a little too. [Client] has to learn
 a little bit about this one in order to make it work easier.
 Otherwise, you are in conflict. You're constantly in conflict with
 everybody you meet. (Doris, a hospital social worker)

Cultural Tension: Type 2

The second type of cultural tension is the direct clashes between cultures of social workers and the dominant and organizational cultures, and the culture of their clients. Social workers from minority cultures are particularly the center of these kinds of tensions.

Type 2-A Tension: Worker's Culture versus Dominant Culture. There is tension between the cultural minority worker's own culture and the dominant culture. Socially, many minority participants believe that the Canadian culture demands ways of doing things that differ from what they learned from their own culture.

 I know in some aspects I am very Canadian in life, like my
 relationship. But in every way I am Iranian. I think sometimes in
 this [Canadian] culture, you have too much distance from each
 other. My culture is not like that. I can help a guy or a kid or a
 woman in a blink of eyes in my apartment because he/she needs help.
 Our distance, our hierarchy, because I work in the mainstream and
 my placement's in a mainstream agency and what's happening here, I
 feel the distance, I feel I am distant from my colleagues. In our
 culture, we don't have that. (Olga, an Iranian-Canadian social
 worker in a family service center)

The cultural values of the workers may clash with the dominant culture in terms of the understanding of the helping process. To social workers from a culture that places more emphasis on collectivism and interdependency, individualistic values cause tensions in their work.

 In fact, social work is a white-oriented cultural thing because it
 has a highly individualized focus, micro social work. They are
 focusing on any individual reaching to the system, to the
 environment, to the family as a system, the social agency as a
 system, family care system. You will change. Whereas we will see the
 whole world differently back at home.... So it was a totally
 different aspect. I have absolutely had no solution to it. (Helen,
 a South Asian worker in a community agency)

Type 2-B Tension: Organizational Culture versus Worker's Culture. This type of cultural tension is an extension of the one between the worker and the dominant culture. The individualistic values of the dominant culture also filter into most organizations' mandates. For instance, participants, who come from cultures that treasure family care, have experienced tensions with the organizational culture that tends to encourage the family to place its elderly members in institutions. For instance, Ellen, a Chilean-Canadian hospital social work worker, reported the following:

 One of the cultural things that many cultures share is to take care
 of the elderly in the home. Somehow it works out that the family
 participates together. That was one of my cultural values that I
 came with ... clashing with the work that I was doing because here
 I found that it's a norm [at the hospital] to look at long-term
 care for somebody who is not able to manage at home.

In brief, these four types of cultural tensions are more or less related to the socio-organizational cultures, within the parameter of which social work is practiced. However, to most participants, particularly those from the minority cultural background, the most important cultural tensions that they experience are those caused by the differences and similarities between their clients' culture and their own culture.

Type 2-C Tension: Worker's Culture versus Client's Culture. As this study shows, the cultural tensions caused by cultural similarities and differences between workers and their clients may be the most complicated and critical tensions that social workers, particularly those from the ethnic minority background, have to encounter in their daffy practice. These tensions are manifested in various ways that have both positive and negative effects on participants' practice.

Being Different

The differences between workers and their clients in terms of their culture are multifaceted because of the worker's multiple identities. For instance, when dealing with a family, members of which decided not to take care of their elderly family members, Quincy, a South Asian hospital worker, said,

 I do believe children have certain responsibilities to take care of
 their parents. And that's probably coming from my background. Got a
 bit expectations. And so, directly or indirectly, I make a point at
 least by giving them options that they have certain
 responsibilities and they may, some way or other they might feel
 guilty, but then we will support them.

In several occasions, many female participants also expressed their uneasiness when encountering client's paternalistic culture. For instance,

 Being a female from here, one of the things it gets in the way is
 that women in a number of cultures are not the decision makers,
 where in some cultures, the men are. (Cathy)

Perhaps, to all social workers who belong to a cultural or visible minority group, discrimination, as a form of cultural tension, is the major struggle resulting from being different. Discrimination is a daily experience to many ethnic minority workers. The discrimination coming from the clients, however, is more critical to most ethnic minority participants because they do not want to be seen as incompetent. Very often, despite their professional role, ethnic minority workers are challenged by their white clients who have a subtle social power over the ethnic minority workers. For instance, Ursula, a mental health worker in a child mental health center, reported:

 There is a bit of discrimination at where the social workers from;
 clients' perspective is white so basically they would question your
 background, your accent, when did you come, how did you come. I
 guess it will give them permission to ask you the questions that
 are personal because I guess they speak from the position that
 probably this is who we are [the dominant group] and this is we are
 here [the dominant society], you [an immigrant] are kind of came
 here. Sometimes they would not even talk about it but kind of
 irritating. They would say something like "How come you became a
 therapist?"

The discriminatory behaviors and attitudes of their clients can make the workers feel miserable, disempowered, and even disheartened. A critical example was provided by Paul, a black child protection worker, who was yelled at in front of his colleagues by a white mother to put down her baby. He said,

 I felt miserable. I felt humiliated. I felt ... I mean I can't
 describe it. I can't describe it because it came ... It was so
 sudden. I wasn't expecting that. It came really really as a shock.
 Yeah for this morn to say that she doesn't want a black man to be
 holding a white baby.

Very often, these racial and cultural tensions cause ethnic minority workers to question their own competence. For instance, being South Asian affects Quincy's confidence in promotion and private practice.

 I was invited [to apply for a promotion] by other colleagues or
 other doctors who are mainstream in a particular area where we have
 more different types of people. I refused because thinking that
 being a person of color I may not have been accepted.

The extreme form of discrimination in a social work setting may be the rejection of service from ethnic minority workers. All visible minority workers in this study had the experience of being rejected by a client who generally comes from the dominant culture. The excuse used to reject the service of a visible minority worker is always subtle. Very often, the white clients would argue that the cultural or visible minority worker will not be able to understand them or they do not understand the worker's accent.

Because discrimination is part of their personal and work lives, many ethnic minority workers are very conscious of being different. For instance,

 Within the situation, with the English-speaking people, I am always
 ... I am always ... on guard.... Yeah, because at any moment can
 happen something that is racist. (Barry, a Latino worker working
 with spouse abusers)

Being the Same

Being the same, in a narrow definition, means that workers and clients share the same background or experience. Being the same can be beneficial to the cross-cultural social work process. By referring to the same cultural values and life experience, workers can have an added perspective empathetically in understanding and building effective working relationships with their clients. Belonging to the same cultural group is definitely an asset for workers to understand their clients. Shared culture and experiences are a unique set of resources through which workers can understand and help their clients better. The shared cultural background helps the worker to understand the client in a culturally unique manner that people from another culture may not have. It is like a special bond between workers and their clients that generates a special mutual understanding. Paul, a black child protection worker shared his experience of working with black families;

 I think black families, they already accept you as a brother. They
 see you as part of them. They open up easily to you. And let you do
 whatever you do, whatever help you have.

Nonetheless, being the same can lead to some cultural tensions that may put extra burdens on the worker. Clients coming from the same community may have unreasonable expectations of the worker. In some cases, clients even resist working with workers from the same culture. As Ursula, an Iranian, observed, very often clients will single out the workers and have different expectation of workers who have the same cultural background as theirs.

 Like I had a [Iranian] client who would invite me to go to her home
 or she would come in hug me and kiss me. This is the way it works
 in Iran, and she would come and hug me and kiss me. And then she
 would say, "You know, you have to come to my place" If I say no,
 she would really get upset. "Why not?" But if she works with
 another social worker here, then so basically, it won't be the
 expectation.... If I want to put someone in this, they get
 offended. How come you changed? You just came here, how come you
 change. So, it is very hard sometimes for me to deal with the
 client from my cultural background.

This expectation generates some false hopes, particularly in those settings in which social workers represent certain authority, such as in the child protection setting. For instance, Wendy, a South Asian, made this observation:

 Yes. But I must say that I do struggle with the Indian families
 that I deal with where they use corporal punishment and we have to
 apprehend the child. They try to, in a way they think I will be
 more lenient with them because I do come from the same
 background.... I think that is where the culture is coming into
 conflict because they want me to understand what they are doing and
 even though I understand I still tell them it is not acceptable. I
 wouldn't give them any leeway because they are Indians or whatever.

 That is the hard part. Yes. I think usually people who I work with
 of the same culture, it can go two ways. Either they want me to be
 very lenient with them or they could be nontrusting, I would say. I
 wouldn't say they are envious but, sort of, they feel that I am
 betraying the culture because I am advocating the laws of here and
 trying to impose that on them, which is totally against their
 belief. So whatever. In a way, they look at me as a traitor, as a
 betrayal. And so, we cannot have a good relationship.

Wendy's observation is important to our understanding of the cultural tension of being the same with our clients. Social workers having the same cultural background as their clients also confuses the professional boundary between the worker and the client, which is important in professional practice. Such confusion also leads to rejection of services from clients of the same culture, particularly in some small immigrant communities. People know each other well so they do not want to have a worker from their culture to help them. Kate, a South Asian community worker, observed this reluctance in her own community;

 I think a lot of people from South Asia who do the same thing
 [rejecting worker from their own community]. Clients don't want
 their community to know their issues so therefore, it should not be
 someone [the worker] from their culture. If it is different person,
 it's okay. There is a lot of advice going around that we will
 disclose or we gossip about our own people

Kate's observation also indicates that some clients may feel that a worker from their own community may not be as good as a mainstream worker. Therefore, they prefer to work with a mainstream worker. With his experience as a Chinese child protection worker, Norm has the same observation:

 I can recall that some Chinese clients they may not like to work
 with Chinese because they think that Chinese social workers may not
 be able to advocate as much, or as aggressive, as those people who
 are non-Chinese.

Countertransference is another possible tension of being the same. The workers' emotional reaction may be triggered when they have a similar life experience as did their clients. This emotional reaction may cause workers' countertransference, which may hamper their helping capability.

 And honestly I think I have more struggle working with minorities
 than with the white people in general too.... Countertransference.
 I think that's one of the big factors. I think probably the office
 culture, the countertransference, my own insecurity. The
 transference from the clients too. They don't trust the system....
 But my countertransference with the clients who don't believe in
 the system. I think the countertransference should be the biggest
 one. (Linda, a child mental health therapist)

In summary, being culturally the same or different leads to various dynamics between the workers and their clients. These dynamics may be positive or negative to the intervention. One thing for sure is that social workers have to deal with these tensions while they are working with their clients who are culturally different from them. As many participants suggested, how they handle these tensions is critical to their being seen and perceived as competent worker.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

These findings have at least indicated three major issues that are worth the social work profession's consideration. First, as summarized in Figure 1, cultural tensions in social work practice are multifaceted; however, social workers are always the center of these tensions. Social workers are acculturated to the values and culture of the social work profession and are also employees of public service organizations. As these findings show, because of their embodied socio-organizational and professional cultural baggage, social workers are hardly culturally neutral. By following policies, procedures, and laws, however hard social workers try to maintain their impartiality, they may inevitably induce these cultural expectations to their clients. Perhaps as Hartman (1993) contended, the social work professional is indeed political.

Second, this study also fills the gap of information of the cross-cultural experience of visible minority social workers. The findings of this study show that visible minority social workers encounter a very different type of cultural tension. Almost all ethnic minority social workers in this study reported that they have been rejected by their clients, particularly those coming from the dominant culture. Among all the Caucasian participants, only two Chileans, who are first-generation immigrants, reported being rejected because of their accent. Ethnic minority social workers, despite their authority as professionals and employees of public service organizations, cannot escape racism, prejudice, or discrimination when working with clients from the dominant culture. Compared with their white counterparts, ethnic minority workers tend to walk along an extra-fine line between their personal and professional life domains. Instead of framing their clients' rejection as racist, the participants in this study tended to understand this as a competence issue. In turn, most ethnic minority participants of this study therefore reported that they always tried to work extra hard to prove their professional competence. Indeed, caught between client's racist behavior and their professional helping role, ethnic minority workers seem unprepared to deal with this dilemma.

Third, cultural tensions require a high level of sensitivity of social workers to reflect on their own cultural positions. Therefore, it is not surprising that cultural awareness becomes a key requirement for social work practitioners. Yet, the conventional discussion of cultural awareness based on the Schon's (1987) paradigm, which focuses on how social workers reflect on their own cultural baggage as introspective and retrospective process, is inadequate (Ixer, 1999; Kondrat, 1999; Miehls & Moffatt, 2000). The socio-organizational context, in which social workers, their clients, and their intervention are located, requires, as Kondrat (1999) contends, a critical reflexivity. To be critically reflexive, self-aware and reflective practitioners should not limit their reflection only in their own personal culture; instead, they must take a macro perspective to achieve a "deepening awareness" of their own cultural selves within broader social, political, historical, and organizational cultural contexts. Yan and Wong (2005) further argued that the critical reflexivity must be grounded in a dialogical process through which understanding of the cultural self is possible.

In sum, the three issues indicated in the findings have significant implications for the social work profession. First, intentionally or unintentionally, social workers are positioned to be agents of cultural acculturation (Park 2005). As a profession that upholds social justice, reflective practitioners also need to be socially and politically conscious. Therefore, while educating our clients in the dominant culture, we must also be critical to the dominant socio-organizational cultures that we represent. Advancing from reflection to critical reflexivity, social work practitioners must be critical to their own socio-organizational position. Critical thinking, a basic quality of self-aware and reflective social workers, needs to be included as a criterion to assess the competence of cross-cultural social work practice. Second, we must recognize the different experience of visible minority social workers. Not well documented in the social work literature is how ethnic minority social workers are prepared to deal with cultural tensions that are caused by their racial and cultural differences. In view of the growing number of visible minority social workers in this field, we need to question the underlying Euro-American-centric assumption of our "culturally and racially" appropriate curriculums. Special training to prepare visible minority workers in dealing with not only racist behaviors from clients, but also their own anxiety of confronting racist behaviors against them is needed. Perhaps a critical examination of racial dynamics and their effects on visible minority students in the classroom and on the university campus is a good starting point to engage visible minority students to face the possible challenges in their future professional roles .Third, sociologists and psychologists have been trying to resolve the issue of cultural coherence (DiMaggio, 1997). Despite the long-term concern of culture in social work practice, the social work profession has rarely paid any attention to issues related to cultural coherence and cultural tension. To be culturally sensitive, social workers should extend their cultural assessment from individual--both their clients' and their own--cultures to socio-organizational cultures. Instead of focusing only on how individuals' cultures may affect the cause of the problem and the coping capability of the individuals, we should better articulate how other cultures, including those of our organizations and of the society at large, may influence our clients, as well as how various forms of cultural tension may affect our intervention process. Meanwhile, to fill the empirical gaps, more research is needed to help the profession to better understand the dynamics of cultural interaction.

CONCLUSION

The lived experiences of the 30 frontline social workers have vividly demonstrated that cultural tensions are part of their daily practice. These tensions are multifaceted and caused by similarities and differences, at least among the cultures of social workers, their clients, social service organizations, and the dominant culture. To learn from these findings, the social work profession may need to review its own Euro-American assumption of cultural competence and better prepare its practitioners with critical thinking to reflexively understand our cultures, and to prepare our ethnic minority students to deal with cultural tensions caused not only by cultural differences, but also by racial difference. Theoretical articulation with empirical evidence is needed for the social work profession to better handle the issues of cultural tension.

Original manuscript received November 6, 2006

Final revision received August 31, 2007

Accepted November 29, 2007

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Table 1: Demographic Details of Participants

Name Field of Practice Self-identified Ethnicity

 Round One

Ada Hospital Jewish-Canadian, white
Betty Rehabilitation institution Ukrainian-Canadian, white
Cathy Children rehabilitation Caucasian, English
 institution Quebecquor, white
Doris Hospital Canadian with a German
 origin, white
Eva Mental health institution Caucasian from Newfoundland,
 white
Fiona Hospital Jewish Canadian, white

 Round Two

Gina Youth rehabilitation African Canadian, Caribbean
 institution black
Helen Community agency Sri Lankan Tamil
Irene Child protection Chinese Canadian
John Employment service Jamaican
Kate Settlement service South Asian Canadian
Linda Child mental health Chinese-Canadian
Quincy Hospital Indian
Norm Privatized rehabilitative Chinese Canadian
 service
Olga Family service Iranian-Canadian
Paul Child protection Black

 Round Three

Robert Children group home White with a Scottish origin
Sam Settlement service White with a Scottish origin
Tom Child protection Spanish speaking immigrant
Ursula Mental health Christian Iranian
Victor Senior home and child White (Anglo-Saxon origin)
 protection
Wendy Child protection Indian
Xena Community health Iranian Canadian
Yvonne Mental disability Italian Canadian
Zoe Community children mental Portuguese Canadian
 health
Amy Day program for women with Portuguese Canadian
 trauma
Barry Men committed violence Latino American
 against women
Carmen Community health Caribbean
Donna Children rehabilitation Italian
 residential
Ellen Hospital Chilean-Canadian