A Textbook of Social Work

Brian Sheldon, Geraldine Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135282608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Where did professional social work originate from? How effective are social work interpretations in the lives of vulnerable people?

A Textbook of Social Work provides a comprehensive discussion of social work practice and its evidence-base. It strikes a balance between the need for social workers to understand the social, economic, cultural, psychological and interpersonal factors which give rise to clients' problems, and the need for them to know how best to respond with practical measures.

Divided into three parts: the text covers the history and of social work as a movement and profession in the first, and social work methods and approaches in the second. The final part looks at the major specialisms, including, among others, chapters on:

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• Children and families

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• Youth Offenders and substance misusers

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• Social work and mental health

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• Disabled people

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• Older People

Providing a comprehensive guide to conceptual and methodological issues in social work and containing plentiful case studies and examples, this book is an essential read for social work students, as well as a valuable resource for practitioners and academics.

Part I
The history of social work as a discipline and the intellectual sources on which it has drawn

1
A brief history of social work

Those who know no history are often condemned to re-live it.

Karl Marx, paraphrasing Hegel

This chapter aims to give the reader (particularly if a student) a sense of the town plan equivalent of ‘you are here’. Because, contrary to common opinion, or what Larkin (1974) observed in another context, social work did not begin ‘in 1963 between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. This was just the period when the legislature began to take an interest. We go back much further in fact. We bubbled up from a thick, nineteenth-century, socio-political soup and shall need to give this a quick stir if we are to get a better look at the main ingredients. However, before we do, let us address the a priori question of what social work is for.

The scope of professional social work

Social work’s disciplinary territory is the poor, troubled, abused or discriminated against, neglected, frail and elderly, mentally ill, learning-disabled, addicted, delinquent, or otherwise socially marginalized up-against-it citizen in his or her social circumstances. This is a dauntingly broad remit, particularly since some of these circumstances line up together on the fruit machine of life. Thus, as we write, we have students on placement trying to help psychiatric patients to survive in a community which does not always ‘care’; helping to rehabilitate frail elderly people following discharge from hospital when once they would have found themselves on a conveyor belt from medical treatment to nursing home, premature dependency, and eventually death (see Royal Commission on Ageing; Godfrey et al., 2000; Lomax and Ellis, 2002). We have students working to prevent, or to arrange the admission of troubled and troubling children to the public care system – which, research tells us, is not exactly a side-effect-free disposal (see Bullock and Little, 1998; DfES, 2006). They support families with autistic children, sit out the uncertainties of kidney transplant vs. continued dialysis roulette with physically ill clients, and are engaged in projects to reduce the effects of juvenile crime on those who commit it and on those who are its victims. They assist with community projects which seek to help people to reclaim their local environments from the depredations of poverty, infrastructure decay, drug dealing and endemic truancy (see Holman, 1999; Jordan, 1995; Pritchard, 2001). The point is that they are all doing social work. Indeed, a full treatment of the scope of this profession, and of this movement, would fill at least a further 500 pages. So much so that it sometimes seems that unless problems fall exclusively under the duties of the army or the fire service, then social workers are expected to do something – whatever that might be.

We have chosen to use the term ‘client’ throughout this book since we think it better defines the ethical relationship which should exist between would-be helpers and might-be helped. Therefore, respectively, it confers more rights and requires more obligations than ‘customer’ or ‘service user’. While the latter terms might just serve for recipients of practical support, social work has a broader scope and so we must be careful with our choice of words. For example, are people who have to be compulsorily admitted to psychiatric units ‘using a service’? Are parents whose children have to be removed from them for reasons of safety in any meaningful sense ‘service users’ or ‘carers’?

Social work as a field of study

The sheer range of social and personal problems for which we have acquired some responsibility has led to the development of a discipline which has always been forced to borrow heavily, and, it must be admitted, on occasion recklessly, from adjacent fields. Thus, in addition to courses on social work methods and client groups, most training courses now contain contributions from psychology (in its developmental, social, abnormal and community forms); from law, sociology, political science, philosophy, social history, gender studies, social administration, social policy, research methodology, and so forth. Indeed, a long-standing challenge for social work students has been to go to the university library and to try to find there books on something not plausibly relevant to their future tasks.

Such an embarrassment of intellectual riches, though often celebrated as a deserved benefit of admirable openness to all ideas and experience, does have its burdens (see Macdonald and Sheldon, 1998; Sheldon, 1978). This said, there is growing support from scientific commentators (e.g. Dennett, 1991; Wilson, 1998) for the idea of considered eclecticism, i.e. ‘borrowing freely from various sources’ (Oxford English Dictionary) and collaboration – ‘the rub’ is in the italicized word. These proponents hold that many of the best breakthroughs in understanding now come from groups of researchers willing to hop over disciplinary fences in order to meet the neighbours. All very admirable, but one must also consider the tendency it encourages in less-than-settled disciplines such as ours, to flit between and to take up or drop ideas according to current fashion or the congeniality of propositions or findings, rather than taking the longer but safer route of checking out the robustness of ideas before committing to them and, remember, using their prescriptions on vulnerable people:

Social scientists, like medical scientists, have a vast store of factual information and an arsenal of sophisticated statistical techniques for its analysis. They are intellectually capable. Many of their leading thinkers will tell you, if asked, that all is well, that the disciplines are on track – sort of, more or less. Still, it is obvious to even casual inspection that the efforts of social scientists are snarled by disunity and a failure of vision. And the reasons for the confusion are becoming increasingly clear. Social scientists by and large spurn the idea of the hierarchical ordering of knowledge that unites and drives the natural sciences. Split into independent cadres, they stress precision in words within their speciality, but seldom speak the same technical language from one speciality to the next. A great many even enjoy the resulting overall atmosphere of chaos, mistaking it for creative ferment.

(Wilson, 1998: 201)

Francis Bacon (1605), the good stepfather of science, addressed the epistemological difficulties alluded to above rather accurately when he declared that: ‘What is known depends upon how it is known’. Here are the complementary views of Thomas Kuhn (an eminent philosopher of science), who takes an example from eighteenth-century physical optics to examine how ideas and propositions are either strengthened or become mired. His conclusions, though from another field and from a long time ago, may yet seem uncomfortably familiar:

Being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ or explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools at it was to nature.

(Kuhn, 1970: 13)

This issue of ‘what shall count as evidence?’ remains the largest single obstacle to the cumulative development (distinct from mere change or fashion) in our discipline.

The point we are trying to make is that, given their remit, social workers need to be quite clever if they are to be good at their jobs. They need to be knowledgeable about studies of the nature and causes of personal and social problems and conversant with the growing body of research on what appears to ameliorate these – research being simply the screened, codified and organized experience of those doing similar work elsewhere, ‘recipes’ if you like. However, in three large-scale studies of what UK social workers think about their training, and what they know as a result of it (see Marsh and Tresiliotis, 1996; Sheldon and Chilvers, 2000; Sheldon et al., 2005), two themes stand out: (1) the near-complete mental compartmentalization of research, theory and practice; (2) a dire lack of knowledge about the findings of studies of social work effectiveness and of how such research should be appraised (see Chapter 3). The introduction of degree-level entry to social work might provide an opportunity to remedy these matters, but as yet ‘the jury is out’ on this.

The impulse to help

Let us concentrate now on the strange, apparently Darwinism-defying phenomenon of the widespread human tendency to try to help others less fortunate, and to do so in an organized, socially cooperative way. Here is a good early answer to the conundrum:

Those who dwell preponderantly upon the selfish aspect of human nature and flout as sentimentalism the altruistic conception of it, make their chief error in failing to see that our self itself is altruistic. The improvement of Society does not call for an essential change in human nature, but, chiefly, for a larger and higher application of its familiar impulses.

(Cooley, 1909: 1)

This desire to try to do some good is an aspiration almost always put forward shamefacedly by candidates being grilled as to why they want a place on a social work course. Their trepidation seems to be induced (1) by anxieties about being branded a ‘do-gooder’: a term of abuse reserved by tabloid journalists for those who have the temerity to try to assist others in practical, face-to-face ways rather than dispensing ad hoc policy prescriptions from air-conditioned offices in Wapping; and (2) by their knowledge of the ‘good intentions/road to hell’ side-effects which do indeed exist in our field.

Yet, despite such booing from the touchline by critics, which sometimes makes this moral impulse seem like an eccentric idea, it is deeply rooted in all cultures. Indeed, not even the vilest conditions that man can devise can completely suppress acts of befriending and mercy. Not the industrialized horrors of the Nazi death camps (see Frankl, 1963; Bonhoffer, 1967; Levi, 1987) nor the paranoidal cruelty of the Gulag Archipelago (see Solzhenitsyn, 1974). Its origins may even lie in our genes, for, apart from being the most aggressive species on the planet, we are also, unthinking ants aside, the most socially cooperative. In us, evolution seems to have favoured ancestors inclined to spare a little food, comfort or shelter for those less well equipped for raw competition, or even to sacrifice themselves for the common good. Chimpanzees in the trees do it, even barely conscious bees do it because such behaviour cuts down on dangerous fights and on the need for constant, preoccupying vigilance (see Audrey, 1966). Here are the views of a famous neo-Darwinist biologist on the matter:

We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrinations. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.

(Dawkins, 1976: 215)

Religious influences

Many of the great voluntary and charitable movements were founded on religious principles: the Catholic Church and its societies; Barnardo’s; the NSPCC; the Salvation Army; the Probation Service; the diocesan Children’s Societies, and so forth.

Charity (meaning love, benevolence and goodwill towards others) is a common tenet of all the world’s great faiths, and the improbable beauty of the idea is reflected in the prose urging it upon us.

Although I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand a...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• About the authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The history of social work as a discipline and the intellectual sources on which it has drawn
• Part II Social work methods, including assessment procedures
• Part III Client groups: common problems and what helps
• Bibliography
• Index