Social Work at the Millennium: Critical Reflections on the Future of the Profession - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0684839466 ISBN 13 : 9780684839462

Editeur : The Free Press, 2000

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Introduction

Robert Morris

The terms social or public welfare (or possibly public well-being) are commonly used to describe a major area of American civic life, although it is seldom dearly defined. Depending on how the term is interpreted, it can be said that perhaps a fifth of the gross national product and a quarter of government budgets consist of payment for an extensive array of services and programs designed to help not only the poor but middle- and low-income working families.

Social work, as a profession, has been identified with the growth of this area of civic life, although responsibilities and roles in it are not easily summarized. Professional social workers have usually had a much broader view of their responsibilities than relieving the poor or helping the troubled and confused. They have sought to address many of the difficult social and economic conditions in modern society that form the environment in which individuals try to shape their lives: poverty, race, discrimination, inequity. These conditions are seen as causing the individual case problems the field is expected to ameliorate or remedy, but their assigned responsibilities and their training seldom go so far as tackling the basic causes of distress.

The gap between aspiration and reality remains a dilemma that continues to be a challenge to professional thinking. As the field celebrates its hundredth birthday and thinks about its future in the next century, the editors had planned a broad synoptic review of past and future, with articles by many surviving editors of the Journal of Social Work whose tenures cover major changes in a turbulent twentieth century. This proved unfeasible because of the death or illness of some editors, and even more by the almost encyclopedic task of reviewing developments in the many kinds of work to which social workers have gravitated. In the end, the editors asked a sample of social work educators and scholars to sum up their thinking.

The result is a stimulating range of viewpoints that represent the dilemmas and internal conflicts and discussions with which the field is slowly assessing (not at all systematically) where it has come to in a hundred years and where it is likely to go in the next hundred years. Although daily tasks are focused on amelioration, the aspirations persist to address the broader issues of social justice and equity.

Hopps, very broadly, and Korr and Brieland, who are more focused on welfare reform and child welfare, consider the field's concern with social justice in a world where public policy wavers between more and fewer public entitlements. They discuss persistence of interest in broad social issues in tandem with narrower definitions of case practices where the social worker is expected to deal with both.

Austin looks to the twenty-first century after examining the past history of the field, stressing that families and children are the focus for social work. While the field needs to devise new approaches to fit the coming century, it still lacks an adequate research foundation upon which to draw evidence to shape them. The approaches developed during the twentieth century were based on social reform movements of the early part of the century, but they have not performed well in the changed conditions of the later years. Thus the need for critical evidence and different concepts in order to introduce more effective means.

Morris reviews the same history from the point of view of strategies used to develop as a profession. He concludes that over time, the field, changed its focus from the individual to the environment, concentrating on the interpersonal services, but without adequate scientific evidence to influence the organizational purposes and structure for practice. In the end, the field missed opportunities to realize its aims and has, for all practical purposes, abandoned the social change (social justice) goal of its origins even though it still espouses them rhetorically.

Rehr and Rosenberg, dealing with health issues, are the most precise in documenting the changes in health care, the achievement of a clear role and function for social work in health services, and for the many remaining problems the field will confront as health services change under the force of technology and economics.

Winters and Gourdine discuss the changing world of public education, especially the variety of family, behavioral, ethnic, and economic conditions that affect the education of children. They discuss the various proposals to expand the public education system to incorporate various social service functions (without specifying social workers as the personnel), including after-school recreation programs, counseling and health services for children, family visits, and more. They argue that social workers, if they are to play a role in education in the future, as they have tried to do, equip themselves for quite different tasks that are conventional, including taking the school out to families and communities. Whether this becomes a teacher or a social work responsibility in a teacher-administered system remains unresolved.

Maluccio presents an approach to a competence-centered perspective for family and child welfare practice that relies on variously formulated human developmental educational theories but makes it clear he believes the field must do better in addressing the external social and economic factors affecting what is actually done. In the end he too stresses that the external factors of public choice and public policy determine what the practice will achieve.

Coulton returns to the persistent challenge faced by communities, and the forces that shape a healthy physical and economic environment for all, with which social workers began their hundred years of evolution.

Iatridis considers the field's position against the backdrop of global shifts in thinking about government and the private sector, or decentralization of federal public influence in welfare. His views reflect a confrontatonal approach between two ideologies -- the state as the-major repository of responsibility for individual and group well-being versus the economic market as the producer of resources with which individuals can satisfy their needs equitably. Indirectly he is critical of concepts as expressed by what most social workers do and their inadequacy in coping with the massive shifts in public thinking between the two opposing views. As with the other contributors, he has no concrete suggestions to bridge the gap.

Tucker is critical of the paradigms for practice, especially in family and child welfare and mental health, on which the field has relied. It lacks a solid core for paradigm development and remains scattered and imprecise in concept. After reviewing the literature he concludes that it has relied on a concept of ecology to find consensus about the individual/environment interaction but has lacked clarity about how social, economic, and political conditions affect both organization and practices and about how social workers can deal with such human affairs in persuasive ways. He offers a crisp view about what a true ecology of social work requires: a clear statement about the different levels or circles of analysis, which move from concept to context to policy and program. The open-ended view of the past that "anything goes" and can justify diversity in practices has proven insufficient. Abstract knowledge is the foundation of an effective profession whose function is publicly recognized. We need to separate successful practices from failed ones as measured by outcomes and not input; empirical experience reports are insufficient. At the end he asks whether social work is ready to decide what "its question is."

Epstein carries the discussion further by a thorough review of all research on outcomes of practice. He concludes that most of the research is not scientifically justified, that its claims of successful practices are not convincing, and that the handful of studies that have tried to pin down the results have found only very weak evidence of success. He argues that this lack of solid, dependable findings has frustrated social work's efforts to be effective or compelling in influencing public policy or in establishing that its work produces desired results.

In sum, the authors, surprisingly, agree on the need for a critical conclusion about where the field has come from and what its challenges are if it is to become an effective factor in achieving the social justice it avows as its aim. The articles are, by turn, pessimistic and optimistic, but in the end they offer paths that will require professional aims and the steps needed to be effective in realizing them in the future. Where the field has concentrated its efforts, as in health care, its base is most secure; in family and child welfare, however, it is often unclear. The field has been least effective in realizing its persistent emphasis on poverty and social justice as central to its practice. In education there is a new opportunity to find its way.

Changes in thinking, in shaping agreement about core knowledge, and in supporting scientifically rooted research are recurrent themes. All these changes remain rooted in the original social work aim of linking individuals in a social context, but to be effective in making the link requires more than general assertions.

The authors, taken together, reveal the achievements and the unrealized high aspirations of social work -- to become the profession able to manage the junction of individuals in their most diverse economic, social, and cultural contexts. It has successively narrowed the reality of the training provided and the areas in which its members play a major role. The aim is still to become the profession addressing current economic and social needs, but it lacks the concrete next steps to begin bridging the gap between high vision and modest capacity.

Copyright © 2000 by June Gary Hopps, and Robert Morris|Chapter 1

Social Work: A Contextual Profession

June Gary Hopps

Introduction

The turning of a century invariably draws commentators to a review of the past and speculation about the future. The impetus is heightened by the new millennium and -- for social workers -- observance of our centennial as a profession.

Although social work has had a long history of concerns (for example, child welfare, poverty, and family relations), it has not developed sufficient theoretical and empirical foundations and skills to address social ills comprehensively in an effort to impact and ameliorate problems. The profession must be attuned to its context of time, place, and public awareness if it is to be effective.

Precisely because of this contextual immediacy, we cannot simply invoke history for solutions to contemporary problems. Yet as noted so often, not to learn from the mis-steps and omissions of the past is to ensure their recycling. The centenary's Janus moment provides an opportunity to compare and contrast our circumstances with those of our founders, to note the benchmarks of progress and, most important, to take a candid look not only at the gaps and needs that invite rededicated action, but also at the radical changes in our world that demand major rethinking.

At first glance, the scope and complexity of conditions at the end of the nineteenth century, which convinced the reform-minded that traditional approaches were inadequate and that the times called for a new, interlocking set of insights and skills, bear uncanny similarities to our own.

The settlement house founders, family visitors, union organizers, "muckrakers" and community workers who formed the nascent social work community attacked the negatives in each scenario, exposed injustices, and advocated for those in need. They also wrote knowledgeably and movingly on social structures and types of responses that could ease or prevent recurrence of the suffering and waste they confronted daily. Much of this century's progress was rooted in their efforts. Yet merely to list the topics, let alone the more specific housing, health, job, and education issues entwined with them, reflects our own experience all too clearly and raises fundamental questions.

Does the continuity or repetition of these problems a century apart indicate that they are, together with the underlying attitudes and triggers associated with them, simply intrinsic to human nature and impervious to remediation? Have reform movements themselves failed to assess the full dimension of the problems? Is their apparent intractability a function of successful efforts to eviscerate reform? (It does not require conspiracy theory to recognize that vested interests play off less powerful groups against each other to maintain or strengthen the status quo and retain power for particular in-groups.) Can research throw further light on historical patterns?

Again it is our primary task to focus on what makes today's apparent déjà vu different from the previous incarnations. Does the growth in scale, as well as the rapidity of change, engender a difference in degree so great as to be a difference in kind? What aspects and dimensions of seemingly perennial threats to social balance and well-being can we approach in innovative and more sustainable ways? Reexamining some of the "common" themes a century apart clarifies the challenges to American society as we have known it, as it is changing, and as social work itself must change to be an effective agent of change.

With the end of the 1800s, not only cities but small towns were confronting shifts from a preeminently Anglo-Saxon population to polyglot ones; from a rural outlook to all the implications of a new age of industry, an unprecedented source of energy in electricity and new modes of transportation in the automobile and soon the plane. The twentieth century was also the first to bring world wars. A slower agricultural economy gave way to excitement, uncertainty, and a frenzied pace, to time lines and stop watches. Capitalism and industrial expansion were powerful forces affecting community as well as individual life. The parallels are striking as we prepare for the dawning of the twenty-first century and the impact of electronic technologies, a global village and marketplace, and unprecedented expansion of wealth for some juxtaposed with increasingly inescapable poverty for others.

The Paradox of Prosperity and Inequality

One of the underlying phenomena common to both eras is the country's ambivalence about wealth and inequality. American society expressed from its founding a contempt for excessive luxury, for the abuses of wealth and degrading treatment of the poor that characterized the European monarchies. The pioneer and entrepreneurial spirit would create a new median of productivity and comfort that would preclude the extremes common to the Old World, but this self-image was compromised in the Gilded Age. At the present time, we have apparent economic and job growth, coupled with the lowest inflation in forty years. At the same time there is the troubling reality that those at the low end of the economic spectrum are not connected to or benefiting from society's general prosperity.

In the course of the twentieth century the country flirted with progressivism, was impacted by World War I, the boom of the Roaring Twenties and economic chaos of the 1930s, enacted Social Security and other legislation as a hedge against financial insecurity, and rebuilt the economy during and after World War II, only t...

Présentation de l'éditeur

For the last century, social workers have attended to those in need and sought to improve the social and economic conditions of the disadvantaged. At the dawn of a new century the country's leading social work practitioners and educators have come together in one stellar volume to assess the successes and failures of the field in its first hundred years. They lay out the road social work must take to face the challenges ahead.

Along with two chapters by the editors, June Gary Hopps and Robert Morris, Social Work at the Millennium includes ten chapters from an exceptionally strong group of contributors, offering a range of interpretations of the future of social work.

By looking with a critical eye at the past century and at the present day, the authors come to varying conclusions that will stir debate within the field for years to come. But all agree that social workers need a place at the policy drafting tables as well as in the human services triage rooms, and that much work needs to be done to ensure that this happens. Social Work at the Millennium presents the top voices of the social work field as they begin to craft the future of the profession, and issues a challenge to social workers, students, scholars, and policy makers to continue the discussion to shape a better future for the profession and the people it serves.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The Free Press
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0684839466
• ISBN 13: 9780684839462
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Éditeur: Hopps June G., Morris Robert
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible