A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

Secondly, in making a great deal of elective work interchangeable among the special courses and requiring certain prerequisites for all courses alike they all recognize a close relation between the various branches of social work.

Thirdly, they show that the work they prepare for is not “social” in the merely vague sense of having a public interest. It is social in the specific sense of dealing with people in their relations to other people. Its prerequisite is not physiology, the science of that part of man which can develop in isolation, but psychology, the science of intelligence which develops only in contact with other intelligences. We can see this in the contrast between the training given in a medical school and that given in a school for social workers. The former teaches a great deal about man’s physical make-up and its hazards but very little about his mental make-up: while the latter may teach enough of sanitary practice to understand a doctor’s directions, almost always teaches something of mental life and always a great deal about social settings and the available means of improving them. This “social” interest is constant throughout the schools. The courses in industry, for example, do not teach efficiency engineering or price fixing but personnel management and other matters presumably ministering directly to the well being of the workers. These schools do not equip for the advancement of any particular science. Philosophy and art of any sort enter them only as casual visitors. They teach in the name of no single creed and formulate no specific purpose. Despite their enormous array of topics their interest remains essentially personal.

Fourthly, the schools are more or less consciously training crusaders. The word “problem” is in frequent use. It is freely applied to difficulties not outstandingly problematical and its use in place of any harsher or less hopeful word indicates the notion of arming rescuers with a solution. The word “standard” with its implication of something attainable but not always attained, “prevention,” “service,” “welfare,” “relief,” “correction,” “treatment,” appear thickly scattered among the subject titles and one is surely justified in inferring that to make changes for the better is not to be for the social worker as for most men a rare bright spot in the routine of labor, but his very stock-in-trade and justification for existence.

Lastly, the requirement of a certain amount of study of the social sciences followed by methodical training in special lines, together with supervised practice work after the manner of a technical school, testifies to the important parts played in the preparation of social workers by both scientific method and the lore of the social sciences.

Beyond this it does not seem safe to generalise. These five conclusions about social work indicated by the school catalogues suggest that it is an alliance of distinct but closely related callings furthering “social” welfare in a quite specific sense. Secondly, they imply that the social worker is a rescuer and champion equipped for his tilt from the armory of the social sciences. Does not this come to about the same thing as is described in our tentative definition, a group of activities looked upon as so many phases of a single undertaking because they all attempt to extend benefits in response to a need; are all concerned with social relationships; and all avail themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods.

The schools then, like the conference, confirm the tentative definition but do not expand it by the addition of any new terms. It is possible that social work as a whole has no more common features. But it is, of course, also possible that other features could be found if we had some fresh clue to them. The present study, having put all its leading questions must again content itself with adding to the already accepted terms of the definition such further implications as the curricula suggest—and again we find these implications to come from the use of science for philanthropic purposes.

The courses most commonly “required” for all students in the schools are those treating the social sciences. What do these offer to the incipient social worker? The courses in sociology—especially those which thirteen of the schools offer in the history of certain institutions or in race comparisons—give perspective. They show institutions changing in form and function. They show ideas of right changing as the institutions change, temporary institutions conditioning our lives even in the matters a layman supposes instinctive. They force a student to look outside the setting of custom and creed into which, like every other man, he has been born. They show him the provincialism of sweeping judgments pronounced on the basis of sectional, sectarian or class standards. They teach him in a professional capacity (if in no other) to recognize varieties of good. Yet all the while they are making possible a simpler and more objectified conception of individuality than it is easy for the uninstructed to entertain. We look with something very like amusement on the animistic and anthropomorphic views of natural phenomena entertained by primitive men and yet we are only just beginning to realize that the subjective interpretations and moral judgments with which we have so long been satisfied in respect to humanity are equally arbitrary and deductive and that man also is, up to a certain point a natural phenomenon to be inductively considered. In such perspective praise and blame become to many issues irrelevant and we begin soberly to reckon the possibilities of education in the compass of individual lifetimes.

Psychology, after sociology the science most frequently taught in the schools, pushes further the process sociology began. It shows that our most intimate convictions are not axiomatic. It shows the thought that is our very selves to be half the creation of others, and makes the question of individual blameworthiness a merely practical one of what forces are to be reckoned with in a given situation.

The third of the general sciences taught is statistics, the language of collective fact. By discovering norms it shows danger lines. It tells what food and what air and what income are necessary to support life in an average individual and what degree of development is usual in a child of a given age and what degree of intelligence suffices to keep people out of trouble without the protection of a guardian. It gives the charitably inclined hard facts with which to face the indifferent and firm ground to stand on in demanding reform. At first sight it looks like a means to intolerable regimentation but rightly used it is a charter of freedom. Given a knowledge of the margin of safety we can make a concerted attack on substandard conditions while allowing indefinite variation above the danger line and the mere nonconformist need not be dreaded or attacked for simple nonconformity.

Thus may courses in social science give to many a raw recruit of social work grounds for acting with the tolerance, the respect for individuals, the single and unaccusing eye on present and future possibilities which their elders and maybe betters had (when they had them at all) as the rare and not to be commanded gifts of sheer humanity and wisdom.