Social work

“ Whether the immediate object be better housing, better working conditions, better use of leisure, or a long list of other objectives, the main purpose in these different social reforms still is to advance the development of our human kind by improving social relations. Finally, social research with its precious freight of original discovery in all the fields covered by social work, has also the secondary task of assembling known facts in order to reinterpret them for use in social reform, in group work and in case work. ”

“ I know these social work fellows and they are a white-livered lot. And the men they try to deal with respect and understand only one thing—strength.”
“But labor doesn’t work through social workers. It’s a force by itself.” ”

“ Along with this change in expectation goes naturally a change in attitude toward the beneficiaries of social work. “There can be no line of cleavage in the advancement of public sentiment between the development of the general social agencies such as church and school and the more intensive forms which we have come to know as social work.” [41] The old view of society saw many staunch persons standing on their own feet and a few weak brethren or victimized who needed support. ”

“ There is nothing to connect the topics—except children. This synthesis of social work in personality which has been already indicated as the “social” element in social work becomes increasingly evident in any review of the conference. ”

“ The effort to help where help is most needed has been to the social work of our definition a road to prevention of abuses which affect competent and incompetent alike, a means to better understanding and control of our social organization. In social as in other forms of science the normal is often only to be understood after observation of the abnormal. Moreover, the really imperative services of social work are evidently forgotten by these critics as well as by the second group who would say hands off to social work. ”

“ The charge we have just been discussing is the last of the major accusations commonly brought against social work, and the definition we have been using has now been shown to describe a social work that can meet its critics squarely and retain a claim to a function of its own in social economy and a certain character and integrity.
It is one of those human activities which are pursued, as we say, for their own sake. It can be justified on utilitarian grounds but the justification never amounts to more than permission to follow our inclination untroubled. ”

“ Similarly we can ascribe to social work, under whatever system of society it may be conducted, the functions of completing inadequacy, extending benefits and rescuing the individual from the category. In a community where no one was poor or out of work, where abundance of pure food and decent housing were available for all, where wholesome recreation was attainable and attractive, and physical and mental hygiene as much a matter of course as school attendance, the tasks of the social worker would not be what they are now ”

“ And social work is the development of the chance for all of us to participate more abundantly in our common need to live.
"As fast as in you lies, let your civic societies look farther than conserving or planting or beautifying, or even cleaning. ”

“ This ties the hands of social work even in the simple matters in which it might alone do more “preventive work.” But social work cannot alone, in any but a secondary sense, prevent the situations it is called upon to relieve. ”

“ It is the social worker who is the champion of individual rights all down the line from insisting on discrimination among the men referred to en masse as “the criminal” to rescuing orphan children from the uniformity of plaid dresses all of a length. But who shall rescue the beneficiaries of social work? ”

“ Is it inclusive enough to allow social work to claim all its legitimate functions and exclusive enough to rescue it from unreasonable demands? These things can only be tested by trying it out in discussion. It is therefore the purpose of this chapter to attempt such a trial by assuming that social work is no more and no less than the definition indicates and requiring it, on this representation, to run the gauntlet of familiar criticism. ”

“ Any person is a social worker if his work has conscious social purpose, [Pg 83] although his vocation may be any one of the historic forms of human activity. The second conception includes as social workers those who are engaged in so-called preventive work, that is to say, those whose efforts are directed towards social legislation, toward the development of the social point of view in the general public and toward readjustments in social institutions and social habits. ”

“ Additional workshops for the unemployed have been established. Our Social Work for men, women, and children, for the characterless and the outcast, is the largest and oldest organised effort of its kind in the country, and greatly needs help. ”

“ However far apart these two may at present seem it is a patent fact that social work developed from charity and along the route of that development there is hope of enlightenment as to the essential nature of social work. ”

“ As social work becomes more systematic with an almost technical practice, more dissociated from the specific act of relief and more widely and variously allied with the practices of other callings this personal, this “social” interest, becomes increasingly important as one of its distinguishing features. ”

“ The tentative definition of social work which we sought to test and add to by the testimony of conference and school curricula has gained no fresh terms but it has gained in significance and, taken together with all its implications, makes of social work something thoroughly definitive and characteristic. ”

“ But the view implied in this quotation recognizes an interdependence among all the members of society, an interdependence of which the particular predicament of those who happen to be in need of social work is merely an incident.
But the speakers at the conference go still further. “So long as there are human frailties there will be need of social workers. But let us not forget that the larger vision of social work contemplates not charity alone but justice, and all social ills arising from environment are man-made and therefore changeable.” ”

“ Social work while feeling an implicit affinity in its many forms, often seems to suffer from lack of any essential principles or any demonstrable obligation or responsibility, other than those incumbent on the community as a whole. The process of definition offers a means of bringing to light any principles or responsibilities especially pertaining to it. ”

“ But I wish to make it clear, in closing this chapter, that the social worker as a citizen is as much interested in these hopes for radical economic reforms as any one else can be, though she does not regard them as her special business. ”

“ Community Responsibility Finally social workers have come to the conclusion, many of them, that in most cases these are not private problems at all but socio-economic ones for which the social system, through government, is responsible. ”

“ Modern social work is no longer dependent on the appeal to “sympathy” alone. It has a wide range of interest and through its practical application of the various social sciences it associates itself with all our hopes of progress. Expectation not only to mitigate the effects of calamity but to prevent its recurrence gives social work a claim on public attention which charity never had. ”

“ That is the view of modern social work, the frame of mind in which it sets about its work. It talks about what has to be done as a matter of course and is chiefly concerned with the best way of doing it. It is beginning to outgrow “sob stories” even in asking support from an indifferent public—they set too low a standard of toleration and there are some modern social workers who turn from them abashed, as from dallying with an outrage beneath endurance. ”

“ As is the case with any activity that has emerged into professional status and differentiated itself from the kind of activity in which any one of ordinary intelligence might participate, social work must live down a variety of names and conceptions which were common to it in its early and unprofessional forms.” “So we come to the term ‘social work’ for a connotation which at least has implicit implications of a process requiring specialized knowledge and skill sufficient to be called professional.” ”

“ In cross section no obvious, no easily discernible bond appears among these diverse agencies. An eleemosynary purpose, the first suggestion of most laymen, is indignantly repudiated by the modern social worker and can be, in many cases, categorically disproved. All are benevolent, but so also are educational, religious, artistic and other undertakings not commonly considered social work.
It is a standing rule of science that if you can see nothing crosswise you must try squinting lengthwise. ”

“ Social workers also have to do with food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention, but these are incidental to their main work of adjusting differences which arise in the relations between people, e.g., between school authorities and parents and parents and pupils, between family and community. ”

“ We may recapitulate the effects of the extension of a charitable interest into new fields. The charitable interest working along scientific lines has produced what we know as social work and social work continues to manifest that interest as its characteristic feature in all the widely scattered fields to which human needs have called it. It is, first, everywhere engaged in the gratuitous extension of benefits. ”

“ The limits set to any single line of human endeavor working by itself are very narrow, and for social work, as for other things, they are in practice promptly reached. Social work when it stands thus at the end of its powers seems to have betrayed the confidence placed in it. A limiting definition would show that the fault lies not in social work but in unreasonable [Pg 7] expectations. ”

“ Our whole scheme of social work may be regarded, from this standpoint at least, as social politics. But has the social worker, who is the social politician, the same intimate knowledge of his neighborhood that the professional politician possesses? ”

“ Any definition would make it easier for us to agree or explicitly disagree on what we mean by social work.
In the second place while the nature and purpose of a calling are perceived cloudily or not at all it does not manifest the coherence and momentum which inspire constructive work. ”

“ The fact that social work rescues people who fall through the meshes of the school system, people dismissed from clinical treatment only to return to a regimen bound to revive their troubles, that it discovers the round pegs in square holes and the neglected groups and anomalous cases has caused other people to see it as all converging in a liaison work which shall ultimately be all there is left for it to perform and which shall be in essence social case work. ”

“ Yet, unlike other such activities, unlike recreation, art and learning, it does not reach out to life at its happiest and most conscious, its fullest and finest, but seeks, “Rather the [Pg 78] scorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in by the spears.” Social work lifts burdens, fills needs, extends benefits. ”

“ I promise to further social welfare; to promote the idea that prosperity consists essentially in persons and only incidentally in things; to be true to this faith in public and in private, in work and in play ”

“ The criticism of social work which recurs most often and most justly, I think, is that we are not human enough, not big enough people to do social work, that we have not vision, that we get into mechanical and routine methods which spoil the whole adventure. ”

“ Every undertaking has its limitations and when known and understood they constitute no reproach. But the preoccupations and aspirations of social work are such as to tempt its proponents to enlarge on infinite possibilities, forgetting in their enthusiasm to state that these possibilities can only be realized if the ministrations and advices of social work are accepted in many places where it has no enforceable influence. ”

“ In the first group may be classed the view of people who find the world well enough as it is and think that social workers stir up hornets’ nests from sheer meddlesomeness and love of power. As this belief never survives any considerable acquaintance with social work or any but very provincial knowledge of the world it need not be discussed. ”

“ One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore should surely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide understanding, criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as restore the dead bones of the past to a living participation in our lives. ”

“ Such follow-up work as is done by hospitals and by the workmen’s compensation office, the work of the mothers’ assistance fund, of the voluntary experiments in special nutrition classes, vocational guidance, and scholarships for trade school attendance, are only a few examples of the kind of thing social work branches into as established agencies extend their own responsibilities. ”

“ My present object, however, is to set out some elementary—and when stated fairly obvious—considerations bearing on social evils and their remedies under present conditions of society, the recollection of which if followed by practical action, would secure greatly increased efficiency in social work. ”