From social work to human services

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Dec, 2002 by David Stoesz

Social work has forfeited its professional mandate and should be replaced by "human services." In three traditional areas of responsibility--child welfare, public welfare, and mental health--social work has failed to meet its societal obligation. Meanwhile the profession has used postmodern thought to justify a focus on internal constituency groups. A template for professional education in human services is proposed.

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Social work is failing to prepare professionals for the expanding service sector of the post-industrial economy and should be replaced with a more competitive education in "human services." For a variety of reasons, social work has been unable to complete its institutional assignments during the industrial era. The profession is, of course, a product of American culture. Social work's mission, aiding the disadvantaged, often conflicts with a market economy that generates poverty and inequality. The American polity fairly consistently opposes policies that protect people from insecurity, to say nothing of cultural impediments, such as discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled. Yet, such adversity does not fully account for the profession's desultory performance. Other disciplines have flourished in the same environment, and they are increasingly usurping social work's turf, in the process raising fundamental questions about the profession's long-term viability.

Harry Specht and Mark Courtney's (1994) Unfaithful Angels reflects the superficiality of the conventional critique of American social work. Focusing on the split between the increasing number of students who enter professional programs to become clinicians and the dwindling numbers concerned about larger questions of social justice and its consequents, social policy and social programs, the authors observe a paradox: "Social work has suffered from being poorly financed and unloved, and public support has been at a low ebb. But even so, the public remained willing to provide resources to prevent economic dependency" (p. 101). Note that the authors concede general sympathy for one of social work's missions, abating poverty, yet admit the public's ambivalence about the profession. If only those narcissistic clinicians could see the larger picture and change their ways!

Yet, anyone remotely familiar with the travesties of public service would do exactly what legions of younger social workers have done: jump ship. In the mid-1980s, a veteran practitioner observed that "To work in a public agency today is to work in a bureaucratic hell" (Chaiklin, 1985: 7). A decade later, a former welfare client spoke of public welfare in Orwellian terms,

   As long as poor people are prohibited from having a choice--a say in
   deciding which services they need and which providers are most capable of
   satisfying them--the competitive element, if there is one, is entirely in
   the hands of Big Brother. Most of the people in every form of this business
   know this: there is no accountability in the social service field. None
   demanded, none supplied (Funicello, 1993: 252)(original emphasis).

The tragedy is that altruistic young people are vilified for electing private practice, sacrificed on the cross of industrial era social programs and professional education when what is called for is an alternative more consonant with a post-industrial environment. Paralleling its tendency to absolve the individual of responsibility in a hostile environment, social work has attributed its impotence to adverse circumstances, therewith consigning itself to the status of professional victim.

Thesis

Fundamentally, social work is a creature of the industrial era, a complement to the welfare state (Reisch, 2000). Because of this, structural problems plague the profession. Reflecting a bureaucratic milieu that has suffused social work practice, social work education is similarly regimented, characterized by generic components--human behavior and social environment, research, social policy, and practice--that have been standardized in programs across the nation. Mimicking an industrial model of professional preparation, social work education is over-organized, under-whelming in its expectations, and inferior in product. The educational template forged by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) assures that the production of social workers is virtually identical across schools of social work. In this manner the educational bureaucracy assures the credentialing of professional widgets, a mode of professional preparation that is a vestige of industrial production. With rare exception, distinctive schools have failed to emerge; indeed, even though CSWE offered schools freedom from the industrial mode by introducing a new standard on innovation, as of 2001 no schools had exploited this opportunity. For these reasons, social work is conceding traditional areas of the human services to more competitive disciplines, including new fields of human resources, personnel management, even human ecology [formerly home economics] to say nothing of established disciplines, such as business, psychology, public administration, and nursing.