A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

himself a physician, reports no less than ten agencies united in
efforts to improve a city’s health. Only four of these (the board
of health, the hospital, the tuberculosis society and the medical
profession) were permanently concerned with health. The other six,
the schools, the park department, the city statistics department, the
industries, insurance companies and churches were enlisted, as the
context shows, as so many agents establishing connections with the
individual beneficiaries of the campaign. The work of choosing them
and enlisting their co-operation demanded a knowledge of social not of
physiological conditions.
In the next section, that devoted to public agencies and institutions,
the conspicuous fact is that social work does not forget that public
care is for private people. It hardly seems necessary to quote
from all the sections even in pursuit of this most elusive of the
characteristics of social work. One more citation will be enough.
“We social workers have our contribution to make to that ultimate
attainment of democracy which must be wrought out, not in uniformity
but in diversity, not only in the right of man to individual freedom
but in his ability to enter into that right.”[53]
The extension of the sense of public responsibility, the realization
that reform must come in all the interlocking activities of a highly
organized business, political and social life has tempted some people
to think that the days of social work are numbered or to seek out for
it some highly specialized or recondite function. But if we are right
in ascribing to it this function of challenging all forms of service
to reach and satisfy individual needs it may be more important in the
future than in the past. Wholesale and collectivist methods call for
constant adaptation of general means to particular cases and the more
we give of government service the more we may need of social work.
The more varied our health service, the more flexible and extensible
our educational opportunities, the more occasions there will be for
adjustment. Such follow-up work as is done by hospitals and by the
workmen’s compensation office, the work of the mothers’ assistance
fund, of the voluntary experiments in special nutrition classes,
vocational guidance, and scholarships for trade school attendance, are
only a few examples of the kind of thing social work branches into as
established agencies extend their own responsibilities.
The fact that social work rescues people who fall through the meshes
of the school system, people dismissed from clinical treatment only to
return to a regimen bound to revive their troubles, that it discovers
the round pegs in square holes and the neglected groups and anomalous
cases has caused other people to see it as all converging in a liaison
work which shall ultimately be all there is left for it to perform
and which shall be in essence social case work. From what has already