A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

THE ANSWER TO ITS CRITICS

At the beginning of this study it was said that a definition of social work was in demand for practical use. We have developed a definition which seems to hold good as far as it goes. We have said that social work includes all voluntary attempts to extend benefits in response to a need, which are concerned with social relationships and which avail themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods. It remains to test whether this is sufficiently descriptive and sufficiently definitive to be of any practical use. 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.

Up to the present time social work has not been the subject of much serious analytical comment. It has been too inchoate for that. But a sort of guerilla warfare of criticism pursues it in private conversation, on public platforms and in the obiter dicta of current literature. The criticisms are of three principal sorts, those which say that what it does is somehow unworthy, those which say it does too much and those which say it does too little; or, more fully stated, those which charge it with an unwholesome interest in wanting to play providence to other people, those which think it is attempting something in defiance of the laws of nature and those which scorn it for tinkering with abuses which should be fallen upon and annihilated.

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. More considerable is the criticism of those who object to social work because they think that to make demands in the interest of other people is patronizing or sentimental or both. They think that the people might possibly ask very different things of life from those which the social worker asks for them; that if the social worker wishes to help them he should confine himself to seconding their motions; that an outsider and mere witness of an abuse who has never felt its weight is not the one to draw up its indictment or to prescribe a remedy. But their objection is not altogether on these grounds. Even when social work makes the same demands as its clients have made for themselves the irreconcilables continue to denounce it for undue interference. Some of them, to be sure, think that while self-respecting people are asking their plain rights in their own name and that of justice social work makes it easy for the community to neglect their demands and yet salve its conscience by supporting such benefactions as it finds convenient. But this last belongs with the next group of criticisms and must be answered along with them. We are for the moment concerned only with the strange but apparently rooted belief that there must be something spurious about a movement in which people are not speaking for themselves.

It is evident that even people who commend social work, often do so patronizingly as though it were something not to be taken very seriously because it is not self-supporting and cannot claim the great, humdrum, unchallengeable sanction of self interest. Moreover people in border-line occupations when referred to as social workers will repudiate the name as though it might discredit their work by taking it out of the busy wholesome world of fair exchanges and putting it in a world of patronage and possible hypocrisy. Men advocating industrial welfare work are commonly not satisfied to claim that it pays for itself and will be no expense to the business that installs it, but assert with an air of rescuing it from suspicion, that it results in a net profit to the man who puts it in and is therefore “not sentiment” but “good business.” Those who, though themselves not originally industrial workers, go into the labor movement, very frequently pour scorn on the social worker while feeling themselves safe from corrupting condescension in a company that is only asking for its own rights.

The element of justice in the charge does not need to be pointed out. Bernard Shaw has warned us against doing unto others as we would have them do unto us for fear they may not like it. But for members of a gregarious species some tolerance of ministration seems unavoidable. Within the labor movement itself those with a margin of time and energy are constantly acting in the interest of those who have none. We all begin life with several years of sheer dependence on the altruism of our elders and if we live long enough come again to some form of dependence. As we look back on the slow mitigation of man’s inhumanity to man there seems at least good ground for putting the burden of proof on those who scorn all benevolent interference. We have already noticed that what passes in one generation for special interest in the fortunes of others seems to a later time plain obligation.

“Almost every law on the statute books,” says a historian, in reference to protective legislation, “was forced upon the legislature by the disconcerting zeal of a few enthusiasts. We marvel at the slight concessions to humanity which satisfied them, we should rather admire the originality which led them to denounce cruel and oppressive conditions which had satisfied the legislature and against which their victims had not always turned.”[61] There is the crux of the matter—the victims will not, cannot always turn. In the palmy days of utilitarianism when the opposition to doing for others was felt with the mighty impact of which the present vague distrust is the last faint ripple fading across the public mind, Mill himself will be found writing that although it can be stated as a general rule “that most persons take a juster and more intelligent view of their own interest, and of the means of promoting it, than can either be prescribed to them by a general enactment of the legislature, or pointed out in the particular case by a public functionary” nevertheless “there is no difficulty in perceiving some very large and conspicuous exceptions to it.”[62] And among these exceptions he proceeds to enumerate protection of persons incapable of judging or acting for themselves whether from defective intelligence or immaturity, and the protection offered by labor legislation and by public charity. Elsewhere he also remarks, “Those who most need to be made wiser and better commonly desire it least, and if they desired it would be incapable of finding the way to it by their own lights.”[63]

It could probably be shown that the great bulk of social work acts in the interest of people unable to speak for themselves or vaguely wanting something they cannot find “the way to by their own lights.” But victimization and helplessness are entirely relative matters and social work is prepared boldly to extend benefits wherever they are wanted.

Science has now laid a broad road and is leading the plodding crowd where the keen feet of Pegasus have always carried the subtle minded, whatever the contemporary creed. “Darwin” writes a popular social psychologist “in the Descent of Man (1871) first enunciated the true doctrine of human motives, and showed how we must proceed, relying chiefly upon the comparative and natural history method, if we would arrive at a fuller understanding of them. * * * Social Psychology has to show how, given the native propensities and capacities of the individual human mind, all the complex mental life of societies is shaped by them and in turn reacts upon the course of their development and operation in the individual. * * * The fundamental problem of social psychology is moralization of the individual by the society into which he is born as a creature in which the non-moral and purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altruistic tendencies.”[64] That is to say the problem which social psychology must solve is the problem of how this moralization is brought about. The significance of such doctrine for social work is in its entire discrediting of any naive individualism and its indication that man being an animal that lives not solitary but in groups some form and degree of interdependence is, for him, in the first order of nature. The interests and inclinations corollary to that interdependence are inescapable for him.

If this is the case objection to the social work we have defined could not be “on principle” but must be to special forms of service on specific grounds of inexpediency or because of the manner or quality of the service. Although it is the manner and quality of service which make the social work of any given time and place what it is they are nevertheless incidentals entirely separable from its nature and principles. Objections are brought on specific grounds of expediency by those who claim that social work does too much and these objections will be considered in their turn. Objection is also made to the manner and quality of the social workers’ services and it is this objection which really animates the charge against the altruism of social work.