Social Work At The Millennium: Critical Reflections on the Future of the Profession - Softcover

9781416576921: Social Work At The Millennium: Critical Reflections on the Future of the Profession

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416576924 ISBN 13: 9781416576921

Verlag: Free Press, 2007

For the last century, social workers have attended to those in need and sought to improve the social and economic conditions of the disadvantaged. At the dawn of a new century the country's leading social work practitioners and educators have come together in one stellar volume to assess the successes and failures of the field in its first hundred years. They lay out the road social work must take to face the challenges ahead.

Along with two chapters by the editors, June Gary Hopps and Robert Morris, Social Work at the Millennium includes ten chapters from an exceptionally strong group of contributors, offering a range of interpretations of the future of social work.

By looking with a critical eye at the past century and at the present day, the authors come to varying conclusions that will stir debate within the field for years to come. But all agree that social workers need a place at the policy drafting tables as well as in the human services triage rooms, and that much work needs to be done to ensure that this happens. Social Work at the Millennium presents the top voices of the social work field as they begin to craft the future of the profession, and issues a challenge to social workers, students, scholars, and policy makers to continue the discussion to shape a better future for the profession and the people it serves.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

June Gary Hopps is the Dean of the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College.

Auszug. � Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Social Work: A Contextual Profession

June Gary Hopps

Introduction

The turning of a century invariably draws commentators to a review of the past and speculation about the future. The impetus is heightened by the new millennium and -- for social workers -- observance of our centennial as a profession.

Although social work has had a long history of concerns (for example, child welfare, poverty, and family relations), it has not developed sufficient theoretical and empirical foundations and skills to address social ills comprehensively in an effort to impact and ameliorate problems. The profession must be attuned to its context of time, place, and public awareness if it is to be effective.

Precisely because of this contextual immediacy, we cannot simply invoke history for solutions to contemporary problems. Yet as noted so often, not to learn from the mis-steps and omissions of the past is to ensure their recycling. The centenary's Janus moment provides an opportunity to compare and contrast our circumstances with those of our founders, to note the benchmarks of progress and, most important, to take a candid look not only at the gaps and needs that invite rededicated action, but also at the radical changes in our world that demand major rethinking.

At first glance, the scope and complexity of conditions at the end of the nineteenth century, which convinced the reform-minded that traditional approaches were inadequate and that the times called for a new, interlocking set of insights and skills, bear uncanny similarities to our own.

The settlement house founders, family visitors, union organizers, "muckrakers" and community workers who formed the nascent social work community attacked the negatives in each scenario, exposed injustices, and advocated for those in need. They also wrote knowledgeably and movingly on social structures and types of responses that could ease or prevent recurrence of the suffering and waste they confronted daily. Much of this century's progress was rooted in their efforts. Yet merely to list the topics, let alone the more specific housing, health, job, and education issues entwined with them, reflects our own experience all too clearly and raises fundamental questions.

Does the continuity or repetition of these problems a century apart indicate that they are, together with the underlying attitudes and triggers associated with them, simply intrinsic to human nature and impervious to remediation? Have reform movements themselves failed to assess the full dimension of the problems? Is their apparent intractability a function of successful efforts to eviscerate reform? (It does not require conspiracy theory to recognize that vested interests play off less powerful groups against each other to maintain or strengthen the status quo and retain power for particular in-groups.) Can research throw further light on historical patterns?

Again it is our primary task to focus on what makes today's apparent d�j� vu different from the previous incarnations. Does the growth in scale, as well as the rapidity of change, engender a difference in degree so great as to be a difference in kind? What aspects and dimensions of seemingly perennial threats to social balance and well-being can we approach in innovative and more sustainable ways? Reexamining some of the "common" themes a century apart clarifies the challenges to American society as we have known it, as it is changing, and as social work itself must change to be an effective agent of change.

With the end of the 1800s, not only cities but small towns were confronting shifts from a preeminently Anglo-Saxon population to polyglot ones; from a rural outlook to all the implications of a new age of industry, an unprecedented source of energy in electricity and new modes of transportation in the automobile and soon the plane. The twentieth century was also the first to bring world wars. A slower agricultural economy gave way to excitement, uncertainty, and a frenzied pace, to time lines and stop watches. Capitalism and industrial expansion were powerful forces affecting community as well as individual life. The parallels are striking as we prepare for the dawning of the twenty-first century and the impact of electronic technologies, a global village and marketplace, and unprecedented expansion of wealth for some juxtaposed with increasingly inescapable poverty for others.

The Paradox of Prosperity and Inequality

One of the underlying phenomena common to both eras is the country's ambivalence about wealth and inequality. American society expressed from its founding a contempt for excessive luxury, for the abuses of wealth and degrading treatment of the poor that characterized the European monarchies. The pioneer and entrepreneurial spirit would create a new median of productivity and comfort that would preclude the extremes common to the Old World, but this self-image was compromised in the Gilded Age. At the present time, we have apparent economic and job growth, coupled with the lowest inflation in forty years. At the same time there is the troubling reality that those at the low end of the economic spectrum are not connected to or benefiting from society's general prosperity.

In the course of the twentieth century the country flirted with progressivism, was impacted by World War I, the boom of the Roaring Twenties and economic chaos of the 1930s, enacted Social Security and other legislation as a hedge against financial insecurity, and rebuilt the economy during and after World War II, only to "discover" real poverty in the 1960s.

Again, the important distinction is that this poverty still persists even in the face of unprecedented growth, and there seem to be no programs helping those below the poverty line achieve greater incomes and a better quality of life. While highly educated entrepreneurs, managers, and stock holders are enjoying good fortune, the "faces at the bottom of the well" are experiencing manifestly poor fortune. The problem is compounded by a lack of nontechnological employment opportunities, the inability of certain groups to find and hold jobs, and the absence of bargaining power due to poor education and low status. Not coincidentally, a deliberate policy approach has championed laissez-faire economics as evidenced by deregulation of many industries (airlines, trucking, telecommunication, railroads), union busting, wholesale reliance on imported manufactured goods, growing disregard for the need for and importance of safety nets, erosion of the value of wages, and devaluation of the quality of child care and care providers.

It also cannot be denied that part of the poverty problem is caused by the long-term effects of racial discrimination, still experienced by many, especially the traditional U.S. minorities identified by dark skin: African Americans, American Indians, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans. Reflecting on abandoned ninteenth century reconstruction initiatives to improve the lot of former slaves, W. E. B. DuBois noted in The Souls of Black Folk that "the problem of the 20th century, is the problem of the color line..."

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the Color-line..."

The consequences of three centuries of discrimination still impact many lives, manifest, for example, by the fact that the number of African American males who were in college in 1995 (556,000) was almost matched by the number in prison (511,000). The ripple effect is visible in the family life of millions of children who are increasingly trapped at a level of poverty that isolates them from opportunity because of an absent, unemployed, or even incarcerated father. Communities and institutions are hard pressed to provide the moral foundations that young people are expected to get through...

��ber diesen Titel� kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag: Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN 10: 1416576924
ISBN 13: 9781416576921
Einband: Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten: 336
Herausgeber: Hopps June Gary
Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verf�gbar
Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande