A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

qualities of charity. In the first place the services of social work
are still a gift. Sometimes they are provided by the state in close
association with the obligatory work of some routine state department,
but in such cases the tasks of social workers will be found to differ
from those of the other employees in the department in being not only
highly extensible and almost infinitely variable but in some degree
supererogatory--as in the case of the follow-up work of the workmen’s
compensation office.
In the second place the presence of a need, though less evident among
the forms of social work than in the case of primitive charity, is
always discernible. Social work often seems to aspire to knowledge
rather than accomplishment, as when making investigations or surveys or
when any form of ministration is accompanied by so much solicitation
of information as to raise the question of which is product and which
by-product. But its activities will always on inspection be found to
claim connection with the discovery and removal of some form of human
ill. Social work itself naturally points to immediate purposes, small
definitive tasks like the formulation of a standard distribution of
expenses in the budget of a family at subsistence level. To conclude
that these are its ultimate objects would be as serious a mistake as
to imagine that the medical profession would rest satisfied with a
set of dependable prognoses. And these investigations do not exploit
the fields of prosperity. They consistently maintain a preoccupation
with untoward conditions and a sense of stewardship. Before all social
work, as surely as before charity, a Samaritan purpose floats like a
will-o-the-wisp, an inconstant and shifting but ever discernible guide,
sometimes at several removes from the work in hand but always its
ultimate sanction.
Social work then, incorporates, while it modifies, charity, and we find
ourselves ready to discuss the second part of our question--what is the
nature of these modifications which have produced social work?

FOOTNOTES:
[6] New York Charities Directory, A Reference Book of Social Service,
published by the Charity Organization Society of New York, 28th
edition, 1919.
[7] Social Service Directory of Philadelphia, 1919, corrected for 1920.
Pub. by Municipal Court.
[8] New Century Dictionary.
[9] Webster’s New International.
[10] New Century Dictionary.
[11] See Lallemand, Léon Histoire de la Charité. 4 Vols. Alphonse
Picard et Fils, Paris. Vol. I, 1902; Vol. II. 1903; Vol. III, 1906;
Vol. IV, 1910, and Queen, Stuart Alfred; Social Work in the Light of
History, J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia and London.
[12] Lallemand, Vol. IV, p. 21.
[13] B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy. Preface, pp. 8
and 9.
[14] Ibid., p. 103 e. s., and Philanthropy and the State, p. 222.
[15] History of English Philanthropy, p. 20.
[16] Ibid., p. 70.
[17] See also Charities for Feb., 1898. Report of the Association for