A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

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