A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

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.

THE PROPOSED DEFINITION
Diversity in social work may today be more conspicuous than likeness
but under the diversity essential likeness can still be traced. Despite
all appearances to the contrary it has its own department of human
affairs and its universal common interest inherited from charity and
to this department of human affairs, to the service of this interest,
it brings a method adopted from science.
The department of human affairs in which social work operates is