A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

It is indeed possible that along the lines of prevention social work is developing a function which is positive in the same sense as hygiene is positive in the field of medicine and that social work will, to that extent, independently “plant good” as well as “eradicate evil.” But it is also possible, and in the light of past developments more probable, that any constructive phase of social work which proves permanent should come to be looked on as a routine purveyance and no longer considered social work. This we have already seen to have happened in the case of free education and many other things.

The conference has thus confirmed and filled out the elementary features of social work which it inherits from charity, voluntary benefaction and response to need. What does it have to say of the qualifying features that have transformed charity into social work—the emergence of the individual as the only and sufficient nexus for its services and the adoption of scientific guidance?

The first of these has already been touched on in relation to the first section. Throughout the second the discussion all bears on the prevention of delinquency or the care of delinquents. There is not much discussion of pure justice, the burden of the argument is all that we should “approach every individual prisoner with conscientious determination to give him the best service of which we are capable, realizing that his future is largely in our hands.”[48] A public defender is asked for “in order that every person accused, no matter how poor, may have a full and fair trial.”[49] And for sentenced prisoners social work asks something more than mere detention, “we used to look upon them, in the stage of repression, en masse. * * * Instead of committing a man to a particular institution he is now committed to the custody of a board of control * * * to be examined * * * to determine just where he will fit into school or industry. The man will be assigned by his board, to the particular prison to which he is best suited for mental and physical treatment.”[50] “If a child who is mentally sound comes into court with a mind bent on the commission of some offence he should be sent to a special school having for its purpose the education of such children. Let the great departments of psychology and sociology of our colleges and universities devise a course of instruction and education that will reclaim a juvenile delinquent who is mentally and physically sound”[51] and “we should extend the methods developed in the Children’s Courts to apply to all ages, wiping out our arbitrary age line by improving the treatment of the older groups.”[52]

It is in this section that there appears at its plainest the paradox that the questions purely dependent on what we call personality are questions of social relationship and all genuinely social questions are questions of personal life. A public policy is justified in terms of personal benefit but interest is claimed for personal difficulties on the ground that they illuminate public issues.

The third division is one that speaks quite unequivocally concerning the nature of social work, for there is an old and kindly profession already established in this field and social work must justify its own entrance there. All of the subjects in this health section are of interest to the doctor as well as the social worker, but for the doctor they throw light on the causes and cures of disease, for the social worker they are a point of departure for active work to establish better standards of living. Nineteen of the papers presented deal specifically with that subject. Five more deal with the co-ordination of various health agencies—a task in social engineering. One speaker, himself a physician, reports no less than ten agencies united in efforts to improve a city’s health. Only four of these (the board of health, the hospital, the tuberculosis society and the medical profession) were permanently concerned with health. The other six, the schools, the park department, the city statistics department, the industries, insurance companies and churches were enlisted, as the context shows, as so many agents establishing connections with the individual beneficiaries of the campaign. The work of choosing them and enlisting their co-operation demanded a knowledge of social not of physiological conditions.

In the next section, that devoted to public agencies and institutions, the conspicuous fact is that social work does not forget that public care is for private people. It hardly seems necessary to quote from all the sections even in pursuit of this most elusive of the characteristics of social work. One more citation will be enough. “We social workers have our contribution to make to that ultimate attainment of democracy which must be wrought out, not in uniformity but in diversity, not only in the right of man to individual freedom but in his ability to enter into that right.”[53]

The extension of the sense of public responsibility, the realization that reform must come in all the interlocking activities of a highly organized business, political and social life has tempted some people to think that the days of social work are numbered or to seek out for it some highly specialized or recondite function. But if we are right in ascribing to it this function of challenging all forms of service to reach and satisfy individual needs it may be more important in the future than in the past. Wholesale and collectivist methods call for constant adaptation of general means to particular cases and the more we give of government service the more we may need of social work. The more varied our health service, the more flexible and extensible our educational opportunities, the more occasions there will be for adjustment. 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.

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. From what has already been said it will be evident that there is no reason to think that social work which has been so prolific of criticism of our established institutions and a pioneer in experiment should cease to exercise this function, which is as infinite in possibilities as the life of man itself, or even that it will cease to work along lines of inquiry or of group work. That little word “social” opens up the possibilities of all the permutations and combinations in human consciousness. The conference at least hints that social work knows it.

And what of the method by which social work is to be conducted. Is it, as the tentative definition said, suggested by the social sciences? There is not a great deal of explicit reference to social science, but the concepts of economics, social psychology and sociology are constantly in evidence and even political science has its say in an “engineering” conception of the state, in definitions of democracy and in criteria of progress. The almost complete disappearance of the question of relative responsibility of the individual and society which morality and philosophy have debated in so many forms testifies to assimilation of the sociological concept of social life as an integration of individual lives rather than an aggregation and of the individual life as no digit but an incident “* * * time moves swiftly in the social field and the special knowledge of today easily becomes the common knowledge of tomorrow.”[54] And after all that has been said in the preceding pages of the obvious effects of a scientific method and scientific attitude in making social work what the conference shows it to be it scarcely remains to prove or even argue the confirmation, the reinforcement, the expansion of the last qualification of social work.

Nine round-table conferences and five committee reports, in addition to the papers presenting concrete programs and reports of local experiments testify to the careful checking up of method. The constant references to programs, standards and experience, to records and the search for causes, the emphasis on prevention and the patient, objective, therapeutic attitude of the social worker all testify to the conquest of the field by science. But the completeness and significance of that conquest are plainest in the ever-present, implicit but unmistakable assumption that all the undertakings discussed are parts of a systematically coordinated campaign based upon continuing observation of cause and effect.