A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

by Alice S. Cheyney

THE INTEREST IN CAUSES

An interest in the causes of disaster is responsible for the development of those forms of social work which do not retain the immediate serviceableness of charity proper. It has developed as part of the already described attempt to systematize philanthropic service and also on an independent line of its own. “In practically all departments of the work of prevention” write the Webbs, “in the campaign against degeneration and in favor of promotion of better breeding; in the campaign against the ruin of adolescence, the creation of unemployment and the demoralization of the unemployed—we are always being stopped by the need for further experience and additional research. We know enough now to know how extremely important it is to increase our knowledge.”[25]

This need of more knowledge after every step before the next can be taken, this constant challenge offered by our uncharted social life has caused the development of an interest in observation and investigation independent of any direct errands of mercy. Many known abuses exist which are sure to claim their victims from time to time and a certain amount of social work takes the form of an independent crusade against such abuses. This type of social work often embarks on a search for causes of trouble which proves endless and indistinguishable from the search for knowledge. A great deal of social work is now of this sort—the studies of the Russell Sage Foundation and the lesser local foundations for research and prevention, the original “Pittsburgh Survey” and all those that have followed it, the careful neighborhood studies of the settlements from the “Hull House Maps and Papers” on and the intensive group studies, studies, comparative statistics and stock takings of uncounted miscellaneous agencies. Inquiry bids fair to be as common in social work as ever alms was in charity.[26]

THE EXTENSION OF THE PHILANTHROPIC INTEREST

The extension of a philanthropic interest into new fields, the third result of scientific thoroughness and system has, bewildered us and occasioned most of the inquiry as to what social work may be. Today in the administrative departments of Federal and State governments, in the churches, the courts, the schools, the hospitals there is work being done which has a double allegiance. On the one hand it is responsible to government, religion, law, education or public health, as the case may be, and on the other it is all alike responsible to social work.

The persons who engage in this work are as much social workers as those in any traditionally philanthropic field and have simply followed persons whom they are trying to help into situations which philanthropy did not formerly consider to be its business. Philanthropy has long taken an interest in jails and reform schools, it has only quite recently followed into court anyone still unconvicted. This it does in the case of children and is beginning to do for some classes of adults. The social worker of the adult court is the probation officer, a representative of voluntary chivalry toward the defendant, standing in the very stronghold of implacable justice. The contrast between the points of view of criminal law and social work is clearly put by a judge in describing the function of the juvenile court. “The inquiry (in the juvenile court) is not to determine whether the child is a criminal or not, but to determine its status in relationship to its need of the care and protection of the state. Being adjudged in need of such special care the state assumes its guardianship and oversight, always for the welfare of the child. The aims and methods of the courts which administer our criminal laws proceed upon an entirely different theory. Our penal laws are enacted for the purpose of promoting the happiness and well-being of society at large, and any who violate them are termed criminals and outlawed as unfit units of society. The penalty provided for under these laws is imposed with the end in view of deterring the offender from again violating his obligation to the body politic and also of deterring others who might be like-minded.”[27]

In some other fields the introduction of the social worker simply adds a new sort of service to what is already given. The obligations of both the doctor and the medical social worker are to the welfare of the patient, but their work is complementary. Often the social worker has responsibilities no less than the doctor’s but her diagnosis is of a situation and its possible interference with the curative process the doctor prescribes. She must discover and change working conditions or personal habits that tend to defeat the doctor’s efforts. It is not a mere accident that this became the task of a social worker. It is not because it was no medical job and the charitably inclined were available for it. It is because of a certain characteristic of social work which is a direct result of the single minded address to the service of need—namely, a tendency to look upon people from no point of view but that of interest in their needs, of whatever sort those needs may be. This habit of taking a synthetic view of their lives, if such an expression is permissible, gives exactly what was needed to complement the special and limited services of the doctor.

The same is true in the case of the social worker in the schools.[28] It is not because there is no other obvious title to give her that the school visitor is called a social worker but because her responsibility is not to the standards demanded by the school system nor to any subject of instruction but to the child himself and the need of the child in any capacity in which that need may occur. She must satisfy the need or put him in contact with others who will. The same is true of social workers employed to give suitable distribution to the benevolence of churches or who investigate for government departments or administer government services. There is abundant evidence that this concern for the individual as such is what is everywhere expected of the social worker. It is a paradox of this modern development of philanthropy that scientific method should have led away from generalization and formula and to a separation of the individual from the category and the predicament. One can pick up a “Survey” of any date and read of the social workers reviewing all sorts of data for light on the nature of individual lives. They study official records of vagrancy and extract from them information about vagrants.[29] They attempt to give relevance to Americanization work by studying the specific backgrounds of diverse foreign groups.[30]

Miss Addams writes of the settlement that “the social injury of the meanest man not only becomes its concern, but by virtue of its very locality, it has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of the social injury.” This is in a certain sense true of other forms of social work as well. Because of their interest in individual lives, and their constant response to the challenge in every sort of insufficiency and adversity they transcend the ordinary barriers of social provincialism and come to know everywhere those who bear the brunt of the social injury. The social worker seems always to be speaking for someone who has not managed as well as possible for himself, or for whom life has arranged badly, or who is not old enough or strong enough to be his own guardian. He often looks like a fool rushing in where angels might well fear to tread, but we must concede that he is doing for someone in an apparently untenable position things that only the self-sufficing can do for themselves. This synthesis of the interest of all social work in “personal” predicaments is indicated in the word “social,” for our social relations are simply our relations as persons. But it seems to need further exposition because the word social has been used loosely and no longer carries clear-cut implications. A lawyer speaking to the 1919 convention defines “individual” interests as “the claims which the human being makes simply because he is a human being. For example, the claims to be secure in his reputation and honor, in his social existence, to be secure in his belief and opinion, his spiritual existence, to be secure in his domestic relations, in his expanded individual existence and to be secure in his substance, his economic existence.”[31] It will be noted that, in the attempt to define these individual interests even a superlatively able lawyer could come no nearer to legal precision than to say “for example.” The concept is one which social work itself continues to alter, fill out and expand with every breath it draws and is not the less significant because it is elusive. As social work becomes more systematic with an almost technical practice, more dissociated from the specific act of relief and more widely and variously allied with the practices of other callings this personal, this “social” interest, becomes increasingly important as one of its distinguishing features.

We may recapitulate the effects of the extension of a charitable interest into new fields. The charitable interest working along scientific lines has produced what we know as social work and social work continues to manifest that interest as its characteristic feature in all the widely scattered fields to which human needs have called it. It is, first, everywhere engaged in the gratuitous extension of benefits. That is to say, it performs services which, while they may be officially sanctioned, are discretionary and adjustable, and are not considered established rights in any but the most broadly construed humanitarian sense. Secondly, it is concerned with negative conditions; not the successes but the failures interest it, not the promising people but the difficult people, not the leaders but the under-dogs. And thirdly, as social work begins to operate in close association with many other services, we see, what was always implicit in charity but now first stands out in sharp relief, a prime interest in the personal needs of individual beneficiaries. This puts social work in a new relation to public affairs for it not only stands by to gather up the human wreckage of bad management but it brings to formalized administration a constant and well-posted challenge to meet individual requirements.