Invited Article Recognising the face of the other: Difference, identity and community Walter A. Lorenz. Recognising the face of the other: Differ- ence, identity and community Social work’s role in creating social solidarity requires an engagement with identity politics through careful negotiation of the boundary between the private and the public spheres and hence ensuring a balance between personal freedom to define one’s specific identity and the public entitlement to belong to a political community as citizens. Current political and cultural trends, reflected also in social policies, impact severely on that boundary maintenance task inasmuch as privatisation encroaches on formerly public domains while simultaneously details of private concerns receive public attention through their commercialisation by the new media. It is suggested that social work’s political role be asserted more explicitly in terms of the application of the Global Agenda which needs to penetrate to the level of person-to-person interaction. Walter A. Lorenz Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Key words: social work, social politics, identity politics, priva- tisation, public sphere, Global Agenda Walter A. Lorenz, Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, Franz-Innerhofer-Platz 8 – Piazzetta Franz Innerhofer, I-39100 Bozen-Bolzano, Italy E-mail: Walter.Lorenz@unibz.it Accepted for publication 23 January 2013 The personal encounter with the other as a stranger, whose life circumstances and identities are very differ- ent from ours and who in some form or other is on a quest for recognition and in search of belonging, is the core business of social work. The types of relationships that ensue from these encounters are not kinship or friendship-type relationships, but formal-professional ones that carry a social mandate. This is why we as social workers need to ensure that they become social relationships. Constructing these ‘social’ bonds in modern societies where they are no longer ‘naturally’ given is a key task of all industrial societies where complex, formal relations prevail. The social profes- sions play a central role in this project. But ‘the social’ today has become a most puzzling, a most contested and a most elusive concept. As a consequence, forming a sense of identity and of belonging has become an exercise fraught with uncertainties. The following reflections are therefore an attempt to search for the preconditions for a social existence and for the role of social work in grounding the modern self. Professional social work relationships are based on the principle to meet ‘the others’ as persons ‘in their own rights’ and in this sense allows them to be ‘other’, not as separate, unreachable or cut-off, but as involved in distinct sets of social relationships characterised by processes of inclusion and exclusion. ‘The other’ in the form of the other person, the other culture, the other political viewpoint or the other structural pre- conditions is not simply there, but ‘the otherness’ is the product of diverse meanings. That there is a high degree of strangeness in ‘the other’ is confusing in the age of globalisation where images of other cultures seem so ubiquitous and so immediately available. We realise today more clearly than in the past decades that globalisation by no means brings cultural, political and social harmonisation or even unification; on the con- trary, in having become so tightly interwoven eco- nomically and so well connected electronically, we are at a complete loss as to how to structure and make sense of the complexity and disjointedness that con- front us. Nearness and distance give no structural cues any longer. This confusion and the resulting uncertain- ties have profound implications for the practice of social work. I do not propose for a moment that social workers can impose a binding structure and unite the world. But social work, in all its different versions, is placed at the fault lines of society and can therefore act as a kind of seismograph that registers the tensions and tectonic shifts that happen at the deep structure of society, so that social workers are in a position to make cross reference between those manifold obser- vations and experiences that make up the process of identity development. What is more, we are not dis- tanced, objectifying observers of those processes; we are implicated in them, so that by looking at what is happening to ourselves we can reach out for meanings in these internal and external events and target our contribution accordingly. DOI: 10.1111/ijsw.12027 Int J Soc Welfare 2013: 22: 279–286 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE ISSN 1369-6866 Int J Soc Welfare 2013: 22: 279–286 © 2013 The Author(s). International Journal of Social Welfare © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare 279