Understanding Your Social Agency

Armand Lauffer

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781452239460
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Trabajo social

Provides readers with an array of lenses for looking at a social agency from the outside in, and from the inside out

This highly accessible text takes into account the organizational dynamics that readers are likely to have experienced and provides them with the conceptual tools for reassessing their understanding and considering how to act on their new insights. Renowned scholar Armand Lauffer shows readers how to apply organizational theories to challenges they confront at work, and to uncover other challenges they may not yet be aware of.

PART I

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Context, Concepts, and Challenges

CHAPTER 1

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Where Your Agency Came From and Where It’s Going

LEARNING ABOUT YOUR SOCIAL AGENCY

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We begin this chapter with some definitions, and then move on to review the historical contexts—from colonial times to the present—within which social agencies developed. Next, we identify many of the internal and external challenges agencies face in conducting their operations and sustaining themselves. In tandem with Chapter 2, which focuses on the application of organizational theories, Chapter 1 provides a foundation for Understanding Your Social Agency.

Social Agencies—What They Are and What They Do

Social agencies are formal organizations whose primary business is the provision of social services that contribute to social well-being of clients.¹ Direct services are intended to provide assistance to and empower clients and client systems to cope more effectively with the social conditions that affect their well-being. Indirect services are focused on managing direct services, or on changing those social conditions.

Agency clients are usually individuals, families, and groups. The term client systems is often used to refer to organizations, interorganizational alliances, and communities that receive agency services.² Social agencies are formal organizations with relatively stable structures, clear boundaries, and standardized rules. They can be distinguished from informal organizations such as social networks and friendship circles. Informal organizations often complement the work of social agencies, and may be enlisted by them in service provision.

Some Terms and Their Equivalencies

Nonprofit social agencies were initially referred to as voluntary, private, or independent to designate their auspices. The term nonprofit is shared with many educational, scientific, and service organizations that are tax exempt and can offer tax advantages to donors of charitable gifts.

Public social agencies are government departments that provide social services.

For-profit (proprietary) social agencies are privately owned or corporate businesses that offer publicly mandated social services, generally for a fee.

The term human service organization is sometimes used in lieu of social agency as well as for other organizations that provide a range of social and complementary services (e.g., recreation or health).

Although, today, most American social agencies are nonprofits, others operate under government (public) auspices or are proprietary (for-profit) businesses. Nonprofits generate income from such sources as charitable gifts and grants, contracts, fees, and third-party payments. Public agencies receive their income primarily through fees and government funding.

Proprietary agencies generate much of their income through fees and other payments from users and third parties (like Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance agencies). This mix of public and private is very American.

The creation of social agencies under voluntary auspices in Colonial America long preceded the development of local, state, or national governments in what became the United States. In contrast to European nations, where most social services were initiated and continue to be provided by the state, many of our social agencies were established through voluntary initiatives.

Chapter Contents

In the next section of this chapter, we explore the social, political, and economic contexts within which American social agencies developed. You may be surprised about how much a bit of history can reveal about your own agency’s current purposes and practices. We conclude by addressing the challenges that many agencies face today, including greater demand for services and increased competition for resources.

Topics covered include

• The beginnings—volunteering and voluntarism
• The Progressive Era—activism and professionalism
• Midcentury—the New Deal, War on Poverty, and Great Society
• Welfare reform
• Agency performance and accountability
• Governance and trust
• Voluntarism, social capital, and civil society
• The limits of philanthropy and the challenge of resource procurement

You’ll find all these issues revisited in subsequent chapters. Jot down any questions you have as you read Chapter 1. Then look for the answers as you continue your reading.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL AGENCIES IN THE UNITED STATES

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Voluntarism and Social Agencies

What began in colonial times as a response to poverty and want, observed historian Daniel Boorstin, has emerged as a “national belief in the profound importance to society of individual and collaborative initiative” in addressing social need.³ This belief is a response to the needs of the general public and to those specific ethnic and faith-based communities.⁴ It is expressed in service to those with insufficient resources to overcome poverty, dislocation, health, and other problems.

Early Beginnings: Compassion and Stigmatization

A Frenchman Visits America Differences between Europe and America were first noted by French philosopher and observer Alexis de Tocqueville. What he found, on a tour of the United States between 1831 and 1832, was a culturally sanctioned and institutionalized process by which Americans initiated pro-social projects. In France, de Tocqueville noted, the government took responsibility for building museums and funding religious congregations. In America, he wrote, the initiative comes from the banding together of people in association and for common purpose.

Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions continually form associations . . . religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. [They] make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes. In this manner they found hospitals, prisons and schools … to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling through which they come to comprehend who they are as individuals and as collectivities.⁵

These patterns were born in an immigrant and frontier society. With minimal external governmental or church authority, early American settlers perceived themselves to be both self-reliant and willing to trust that neighbors, co-religionists, and others, with whom they shared common interests, would be available to help when need arose—a perception that has become an accepted part of American social mythology.

From Compassion to Stigmatization The coincidence of compassion and common need led to the development of grassroots and other shared endeavors. What had begun as informal acts of mutual aid in villages and small communities was, over time, converted into more institutionalized programs of social services.⁶ In some settings, this change was accompanied by a shift in perception in which the less fortunate were no longer seen as victims of circumstances. Instead, they were often objectified and stigmatized, defined as morally inferior and responsible for their own circumstances.

From Stigmatization to Control In the early days of nationhood, dependent and destitute populations were often clustered into almshouses, debtors’ prisons, orphanages, homes for wayward children, and asylums for the insane. Where such institutions were unavailable, out-of-favor populations were often forced into less desirable parts of towns and cities.

In the mid- and late-1800s, social reformers expanded the numbers of institutions to accommodate need. In the case of children’s programs, in particular, they attempted to promote the goal of character building rather than warehousing. Nevertheless, most institutions continued to treat stigmatized groups harshly. What their managers defined as an expression of caring⁷ was, in practice, a policy of isolation and control.

The most isolated were people of color. Native Americans were relegated to isolated Indian reservations. Even those “Indians” who lived in cities rarely qualified for local social services.⁸ African Americans were denied access to many services available to whites, long after Emancipation. Designated quarters were set aside for the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who helped build the railroads and run the salmon canneries in Alaska. When their work ended, many were forcibly returned to their countries of origin.

From Control to Professionalization The mass immigrations and internal migrations of the late-19th century were accompanied by a parallel process of industrialization and urbanization. Most immigrants were ill prepared by experience, skill, or culture to work in factory settings. In respon...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Chapter Exercises
• Prologue Mary Parker Follett: A Social Work and Management Pioneer
• Introduction and Acknowledgments—Being in Control: How to Read and Use This Book
• PART I CONTEXT, CONCEPTS, AND CHALLENGES
• PART II UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE AT WORK
• PART III UNDERSTANDING PROCESSES, PROGRAMS, AND OPERATIONS
• Epilogue
• Index
• About the Author