A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

This study is an analysis of the nature and functions, not the performance of social work. It must, however, consider a general objection to the nature and quality of the social workers’ services which so often passes for an objection to social work itself.

This vague distrust of social work which we have just been considering, this dislike of it as something sentimental or undemocratic, is really a dislike of these incidentals which social work has a perfect right to disclaim if it can. It is a moral and aesthetic repulsion, an aversion for the sort of thing which social work sometimes seems to be.

It is social case work that is most open not only to misunderstanding but to abuse. In it social work is especially liable to the defects of its qualities. People who take for granted the social work that is done in connection with the courts, the schools, institutions dealing with defectives and in many other connections without troubling to consider what it is they are accepting and even relying upon, will, because of what they think social case work to be, pour scorn upon “uplifters” and social workers generally.

The social case workers’ professional contribution to a situation consists in doing whatever she does in conscious relation to a general situation, in the ease of her contacts and the range of her resources.[65] There is no limit to the knowledge of a situation which it may be useful for her to have. A speaker addressing the first students in the New York School of Philanthropy is on record as referring to “investigation” as a necessary evil which must be bravely faced and telling them they must always make it plain that “the person in distress has asked you to help him and that you mean to help him, to help his soul and not only to feed his miserable body, and that you cannot help him unless you do know all about him.”[66] Of course that is to give an ell when an inch is asked for—and an ell of very different stuff. The statement was made twenty-five years ago and is not given here as typical either of this time or that, but as an instance of the sort of thing which is said and passed on and resented, all in good faith. Obviously the more the case worker knows, provided she can understand it, the better she can do her work. But because of the very real requirement to employ trained workers and the rapid expansion of the profession young people are employed as fast as the schools will grind them out. And when social work lets loose on difficult situations people disqualified for dealing with them by their youth or inexperience or native incapacity or all three it must expect its reputation to suffer. But, taken at the best, there is great presumption in the attempt of one mortal life to analyze and prescribe for the totality of another. A too nice matching up of the inferential motive with the act to be accounted for, a too meticulous testing for the qualities presumed necessary for a certain degree of self direction, entail a veritable invasion of one life by another. It is hard for the analytical to remember that any explanation, no matter how true and inclusive, is only one thread drawn from a web. The generalizations which we can make after taking cognizance of a certain number of instances are just as much and as little applicable to any given life as the probability tables of an insurance company. They are illuminating as guides to general expectation but will not closely correspond to any particular case. There cannot be any authoritative, objective determination of the proper elements and relationships of life, and any attempt to arrange for the life of another as a whole is profane. The clearest sighted come often enough into unlit passages of their own destiny where they must grope forward in bewilderment and a kind of awed respect for things which could go unsuspected and yet all along be “nearer to them than breathing, closer than hands and feet.” Who then shall interpret another?

Yet life must be met with a certain hardihood. For the conspicuously defective we know that self direction is impossible, and for the intolerably troublesome we accept coercion, but in the case of the merely dependent there are delicate lines to be drawn. Social work knows perfectly well that it is possible to degenerate into “substituting one neurosis for another.” Hamlet, thrusting on the bewildered courtier the flute which that courtier could not play, spoke for many an inarticulate protestor, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ’sblood do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”[67]

Lincoln is credited with the observation that the Lord never made the man who was good enough to have power over another man and, by its option of giving or withholding benefits, social work undoubtedly holds its beneficiaries very much in its power, not to mention the cases in which it has actual guardianship, legal or otherwise. A German social worker accustomed to the strict German notions of regulation could yet say after a study of American social work, “an individual is never so absolutely at the mercy of an administration as when he is the beneficiary of a relief system.”[68] 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 any wonder that people sometimes shudder at what social workers take upon themselves? But these are only the risks incident to great opportunity. If some social workers run a policy into the ground, if they have neither imagination, reverence or a sense of humor, that is the fault of human nature and not the fault of social work. There are doctors who prescribe for cases they do not understand and fail to save the patients, there are dishonest and even addle-headed lawyers who defeat justice, and there are ministers of religion who are hypocrites, but their existence does not utterly discredit their professions. The quotations from the national conference and elsewhere must have made it clear that this sort of personal imposition and finessing in control are, if nothing else, too poor game to attract the main energies of social work. These have large issues to absorb them and the effect of the scientific methods and scientific knowledge which our definition makes essential is to encourage a robust interest in things clearly knowable and an attitude attentive and curious rather than dictatorial and inquisitive. Social work being the lineal descendant of charity has the family weaknesses and, perhaps even beyond its deserts, the family reputation. But the one question for anyone willing to do it justice is whether these weaknesses are characteristic of its present phase or fading hang-overs from the charity undisciplined by science. The records of past munificence with their evidence of interest in giving as a means of grace for the giver, of indifference regarding the supposed beneficiaries, of wholesale prescriptions of what is proper for “the poor,” of breaking up of families, imposition of uniform labor and total disregard of private claims must be either unknown or forgotten by people who think a decay of neighborly respect and an inclination to regiment the dependent have been produced by the innovations of scientific social work.

So far we have been trying to get at and answer the rather vague charges of those who think social work unworthily employed. Clearer indictments are brought by the three groups who want us to turn from the defeated and let them go under. The least extreme of these simply points out that life unfolds in terms of alternatives and the time, the skill, the substance and interest lavished by social work on the incompetent might have given opportunity to baulked ability. Of course incompetence and ability are relative matters and some forms of social work could make out a case for themselves as engaged on the task these critics would prefer, but it is easy to see the general bearing of this criticism and by our definition social work is committed to the very concern for the disadvantaged with which they charge it. But the definition also stipulated for the use of scientific knowledge and methods and once you have social work and social science playing into one another’s hands you can answer even the baldest utilitarians on their own grounds. 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. These imperative services can be indicated for both groups at once.

This second group are opposed to social work, not as a mere waste of means which might be better employed, but as an actual menace. They think it thwarts the action of the salutary principle of nature by which the “fittest” survive their less “fit” brethren. The tacit assumption behind this view is that if all social work were suspended tomorrow, vigor and capacity would have pre-eminent survival value and the unfit would be eliminated and the race purged of an undesirable inheritance strain.

The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, but in modern life, even where there is no social work, the defeated are not forced clear off the stage with any degree of promptitude. Complete dismissal comes only by the arrow that flieth by noonday or the pestilence that walketh in darkness and our modern versions of these strike the weak and the strong in a ratio which it would be hard to compute. War and industrial accidents take not the worst but the best and some of our most destructive diseases take, fairly indiscriminately, any who are exposed to them or their predisposing conditions. Meanwhile, what is there to extinguish the unfit? Though in a sense defeated they continue to live on and they leave progeny. Even without social work they would not starve or freeze to death in numbers sufficient to have the minutest effect upon the quality of the race.