A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

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.

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. 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.”[42] If the beneficiaries of social work are thus counted scapegoats for us all, being victims of social injustice, then every act of prevention (and we have said that all social work is now at some remove preventive) is for the general safety and no more than a proper self-defence. Social work now resents the smugness that can represent as especially disinterested any service to those who have been paying the penalty of blunders or iniquities for which the prosperous may be equally responsible. It is only justice to them or less and it is sound policy for all. No wonder social work will not stand to be considered charity! It considers its preoccupation with the backwaters of race progress to show no gracious condescension on its part—merely an appreciation of the extent and importance of the backwaters.

But all this shows social work more than ever spontaneous and gratuitous, for it does not work for even a heavenly reward; and it must, unadmonished, stir the community to support the work it sets itself to perform. It is only the old condescension that has gone. The extension of benefits remains, but has become something constructive and collectivistic.

Such a change in attitude toward benefaction would necessarily affect the second criterion of social work proposed in our tentative definition—its incidence in response to need. What is the testimony of the conference on this second criterion? The analysis of subjects dealt with in the first section reads “plans for removing handicaps,” “recreational needs,” “protective schemes,” “standards for child care,” “nature and causes of delinquency,” “providing for children dependent on the public,” “responsibilities to neglected children,” “health needs.” Two subjects, which as given, do not commit themselves on the question of need complete the list. In the second section the persons under consideration are by definition subject to some sort of provision and control. They are delinquents. But that the interest of the social workers is especially in fostering and guarding them is shown by the fact that young people’s need of protection is the subject of six papers, juvenile delinquency of two, runaway and neglected girls of one more, while the rest deal with adjustment of treatment to the needs of older offenders, with probation, parole, education and the form of detention desirable in a given case. The third section deals entirely with standards of living in relation to disease conditions, and with means of extending medical service. The remaining seven sections continue to show need as the occasion of social work, but it is a sublimated sort of need which would be much misrepresented by any classification of the beneficiaries as “needy.” The whole level of interest has passed above and beyond that.

As has been already indicated discussion turns on “programs,” “plans,” “standards,” and it is in a positive and anticipatory vein as by people embarked on a constructive undertaking. The note of initial accomplishment is most clearly struck in the “local community” division with such titles as “The Boy Scout and Community Building,” “Organization of Games and Athletics in Rural Communities,” “Signs of Rural Hope,” etc. But turn to the context and you will read, “The Scout program recognizes the need of the boy for a recreational program for his unused time which at the same time is educational. Scouting also recognizes the need that the man has, etc.”[43] The neglected rural situation, the poverty of interest in some neighborhoods—these are what have drawn social work to undertakings that carry no hint of remedy in the expression given their objects.

In a dynamically conceived society it is hard to say where remedy shades into prevention and prevention into construction. Prevention of disaster not only involves the maintenance of continuously good conditions but the anticipation of wants. If we are not to have juvenile delinquency boys must have some chance for wholesome recreation. If we would avoid bad housing we must arrange betimes a good city plan preserving open spaces where they will be wanted later and developing each type of building in a neighborhood where it need not be soon perverted to a use for which it was not intended and will not be well adapted.

Dr. Simon Patten contended that the present productivity of the world was such as to free mankind from any fear of general dearth and cause all our prospects to be potentially in terms of abundance and not of want, to rescue us from the old “pain economy” of insufficiency and give us a “pleasure economy” on a safe margin of sufficiency. Under these circumstances, he said, “world riches may replace the living sacrifice and become the social contrivance that lowers human costs and we must cease to think that the anguish of the sentient creature is compensated by the development of moral qualities which merely reconcile man to repeating the experience of suffering.”[44] Social work has already ceased to think in that fashion and is working in the spirit of a pleasure economy so that the terminology of need is no longer pre-eminent. “There are times when self-sacrificing zeal is demanded and all honor to those who then devote or lose themselves in service. That is only one side of it. The need of sacrifice is always a reflection on the men or circumstances calling for it.”[45] 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. The battle ground of reform must be on another plain where the initiated see danger but the complaisant still need convincing.

“When once the worst is gone the second best becomes intolerable.” Gray, the historian of English philanthropy, describes the effective philanthropist as the ideal agitator, “It is his to discover those larger ends of common welfare which reach beyond the moral perceptiveness of ordinary men in their ordinary moods. He is, as it were, an explorer in the unmapped world of the ideal life from whence he brings back news of an unreached good, such tidings as sound like travelers’ tales in our ears, but which haunt the mind of men until they seek to verify the story by a practical policy calculated to transform the actual. Only it must be observed that the most daring speculator cannot move very far from his base and the wildest Utopia is determined by the conditions of its year of publication.”[46]

“I hold,” said Dr. Southard to the 1919 conference, “whatever the ideal order, the practical order of work called social work begins with the eradication of evil. It may sound better to sow goodness or to transplant goodness, or even to graft goodness in the eager social world, and beautiful little gardens of Eden or smaller cases of goodness can be shown here and there to the social visitor—nevertheless, I hold, with the prejudice of a physician perhaps, the eradications of evil are more in the first order of our work than disseminations, transplantations, and grafts of goodness. At any rate, if there be anything at all in the millennial hopes and ingrained optimisms of Spencerian evolution, it is plain that by and large we are putting evil behind us and arriving at goodness by a clever technique of successful destruction.”[47] This “eradication of evil” may, as one side of the “technique” of evolution, operate in the terms of any developing organization; but in terms of eradication of evil, not in its own functioning or its subject, but in the conditions of its object it is not common outside of social work. It is not to be found in the business world where all purveyance shuns the applicant most in need of its wares and seeks the one best able to pay. It is not to be found in the law, which tries to hold the scales even to all comers. It is only slightly and intermittently in state-craft which while it is coming more and more to inhibit abuse of the helpless does still, from an age-old sense of security in the alliance with wealth and power, bend its constructive energies to encouragement of the prosperous. It is not even in education, which constantly tends to provide in each school grade teaching suitable for those who will have longest to study and is only importuned by demands from outside to cater in the lower grades to those who must get in them all the education they are ever to have. Social work stands alone in its purely personal championship of the less secure in prosperity. It is in its enormous demands for them that it seems to have turned to purely constructive things.