Social workers’ professional failures are considered inevitable occurrences. However, virtually all research on professional failure management relates to the healthcare field. The scant literature on professional failure does not give much weight to the profound implications of context on professional functioning. This pioneer study illustrates how important it is to consider the context to understand the daily workplace occurrence of social workers’ professional failures. The research traced social workers’ professional failures as perceived by welfare bureaus managers. A phenomenological approach elicited data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty Arab welfare bureaus managers in Israel. Findings indicated that the managers encountered a lot of ‘minor’ individual and collective failures in different dimensions, and understood failure as a transient episode, mostly trivial and understandable. The main criterion for failure was damage attributed to a particular intervention. Responsibility for failure was not usually seen as stemming from the social workers’ faulty professional-ethical considerations, rather it was attributed to factors associated with the establishment: lack of appropriate resources and non-culture-sensitive policies. Managers coped creatively with what they defined as failures, preserving their profession’s inalienable assets with a ‘non-confrontational’ policy while ensuring individual learning from the failure, to prevent future repetition.

中文翻译：

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以色列阿拉伯社会福利局管理者认为社会工作者的专业失败

社会工作者的职业失败被认为是不可避免的事情。然而，几乎所有关于专业失败管理的研究都与医疗保健领域有关。关于职业失败的文献很少，并没有过多重视背景对职业功能的深刻影响。这项开创性的研究表明，考虑背景对于理解日常工作场所中社会工作者职业失败的发生是多么重要。该研究追踪了福利局管理者所认为的社会工作者的职业失败。采用现象学方法从对以色列 20 名阿拉伯福利局经理的半结构化深度访谈中获取数据。调查结果表明，管理者在不同方面遇到了许多“轻微”的个人和集体失败，并将失败理解为短暂的事件，大多是微不足道且可以理解的。失败的主要标准是由于特定干预造成的损害。失败的责任通常不被视为源于社会工作者错误的职业道德考虑，而是归因于与机构相关的因素：缺乏适当的资源和非文化敏感的政策。管理者创造性地应对他们所定义的失败，通过“非对抗性”政策保留其职业不可剥夺的资产，同时确保个人从失败中吸取教训，以防止未来重蹈覆辙。