Mullaly & Keating (1991) suggest three schools of radical thought corresponding to three versions of socialist analysis; social democracy, eurocommunist, and revolutionary Marxism.
More recently writers such as Stephen A. Webb, Iain Ferguson, Susan White, Lena Dominelli, Paul Michael-Garrett, and Stan Houston have further developed the paradigm by incorporating inter-disciplinary ideas from contemporary political philosophy, anthropology and social theory.
These include the ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci and Jürgen Habermas.
[1] While critical social work has a strong commitment to structural change, it does not discount the role of agency, albeit a constrained form of potential.
Critical analysis in social work looks at competing forces such as the capitalist economic system, the welfare state as all affecting individual choices.
Therefore, according to the critical theory, the aim of social work is to emancipate people from oppression and allow a critique of the ideology of "operativity", State law and governance.