Race, Place, Space: Meanings of Cultural Competence in Three Child Welfare Agencies

In the social work literature, there is a broad consensus on the need for social services providers to take matters of culture into account. A number of texts and training materials promoting culturally competent practice have emerged during the past two decades (for example, Cross, Bazron, Dennis, & Isaacs, 1989; Devore & Schlesinger, 1996; Green, 1982; Lum, 1999; Orlandi, 1992; Roberts et al., 1990; Sue, 1990). The effort to achieve culturally competent practice has been declared "a journey whose time has come" (Lum, p. 175). Most writings on cultural competence depict the worker as the sojourner who travels across cultural divides. For example, in Lum's (1999) conception, "cultural competency is a process and arrival point for the social worker. The worker achieves cultural competency after developing cultural awareness, mastering knowledge and skills, and implementing an inductive learning methodology" (p. 175). Thus, training and education in cultural competence in social work service delivery has targeted workers, with the goals of broadening self-awareness, enhancing knowledge of the differences that clients bring to the helping encounter, and enriching or adapting the range of intervention strategies on which they draw (Lum; Sue, Arredondo, & McDavis, 1995). Some observers, however, have noted that a focus on the worker's individual growth in knowledge and skill is insufficient without attention to the agency context in which the helping encounters occur (Fong & Gibbs, 1995; Pinderhughes, 1989; Williams, 1997). We have argued elsewhere that describing the cultural dynamics of helping encounters without context obscures the extent to which these interactions are structured not only by the worldviews and past experiences of the workers and clients, but also by the beliefs, values, and attitudes embedded in and produced by policy frameworks, organizational arrangements, and physical settings of social services agencies (Nybell & Gray, 1996). When discussions of helping encounters do not place these interactions in specific contexts, the dynamics of race and culture in the social services agency itself are obscured. "Culture" and "difference" become words applied to the interface between workers and clients and not to processes and constituencies within the agency. It is possible that the limited discussion of organizational context in the cultural competence literature echoes the silences in the daily lives of agency workers. Carol Williams, deputy commissioner of the Children's Bureau, reflected in an article: What seems to happen in a lot of organizations is integration of the staff and a commitment to developing the right staffing complement, but then no one talks about it. The doors are opened, different players are brought to the table, and then there is no discussion about what it means to have different perspectives and different orientations; everything goes underground. (p. 17) Some observers have called for agencies to undertake an organizational development process that parallels the individual journey of the worker toward cultural competence (Basham, Donner, Killough, & Rozas, 1997; Ferguson, 1996; Fong & Gibbs, 1995; Gutierrez & Nagda, 1996; Matthews, 1996; Miley, O'Melia, & DuBois, 1998). Heeding such a call requires that we theorize models of change by which culturally competent organizations develop and maintain their effectiveness. Most authors who have attempted this have drawn, either explicitly or implicitly, on developmental models, which depict the organization as moving through a staged process toward cultural competence. For example, in a frequently cited work, Cross and colleagues (1989) posited a continuum of cultural competence from cultural destructiveness to cultural proficiency along which organizations might be located. At the low end of this continuum, a culturally destructive agency "holds a set of attitudes, practices or policies that promote the superiority of the dominant culture and attempts to eradicate cultures considered different and inferior"; at the midpoint, the culturally open agency has "attitudes, practices and policies that are receptive to the improvement of cultural services through staff hiring practices, cultural sensitivity training and minority board representation"; at the apex, an agency projects "a set of attitudes, practices and policies that are sensitive to diversity and promote cultural relations among diverse groups" (Cross et al. …