Group work's place in social work: a historical analysis

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Dec, 2001 by Janice Andrews

Gisela Konopka (interview, 1998) like many group workers who were also closely identified with social work, did not object to the merger when it occurred nor did she fight the push for a generalist perspective. She said, "Group work was not a cause for me. The ideas behind group work were my cause" (Konopka, 1998, interview). In retrospect, she feels that group work made a mistake aligning itself formally with social work. At the opening plenary of the first meeting of AASWG in Cleveland in 1979, she declared

   The roots of social work are too closely anchored in authoritarian and
   bureaucratic historical developments. The acceptance of something as
   revolutionary as social group work was too hard for this profession ... As
   a whole, the social work profession wanted its practitioners to be totally
   `in charge!' The power of members was feared (1981,115).

In short, the merger of AAGW into the new, unifying organization, NASW, shifted the focus of group work away from social reform, community building and a more radical group work. Ramey (interview, 1998) believes that "It was not conscious on the part of group workers and I don't know if it was conscious among the other groups, but the merger resulted in the de-radicalization of group work."

The End of Practice Sections in NASW and the Emergence of "Generocide" (Abels & Abels, 1981)

Group workers continued to hold out hope in the merger for the first few years. It soon became apparent that the void left by the end of The Group was not going to be filled by the new journal Social Work. Many group workers felt that group work articles were few and far between and that articles that were published seldom, if ever, cited group workers (Ramey interview, 1998). The loss of The Group was doubly felt because The Survey, published by Paul Kellogg, ceased publication in the early 1950s. "The end of The Survey left a void in the literature that has never been replaced." It represented "the progressive voice, particularly the settlement and thus, group work, voice" (Ramey interview, 1998).

The NASW practice sections remained the hope of group work identity. Yet, in 1962, the NASW Delegate Assembly voted to disband with sections in the name of unification. Ramey (interview1998), who considers this period the biggest crisis in the history of group work, refers to the decision to abandon practice sections as "the telling event" and adds, "It was not an unconscious decision." Group work, with its' small numbers found themselves unable to mount a significant fight to maintain the group work section and thus, their identity. Pernell (interview, 1999) adds that "... we went through [the] problems of being first, a group work section, then becoming a group work commission to being nothing ... [It affected] what [we were] paying attention to and what [we] permit[ed] to happen without a lot of protest."

The end of sections coincided with the decision on the part of NASW to view social work in the most generic sense by underscoring commonalities rather than differences. Separating methods through the various sections was no longer functional for the new generalist push. This resulted in a period in social work which "found many writers as well as group workers seeking to conceptualize social work as a single method" (Garvin, 1997).