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Sociological social workers: a history of the present?
Ian Shawa,b
aSociology and Social Work, University of Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark; bDepartment of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, York, UK
I argue that there is a submerged cluster of people who, at one or other stage of their careers, took positions in relation to social problems, social work practice, modes of understanding, and research practice that reflected and anticipated – knowingly or not – something we might call a Chicago-enriched sociological social work. They are Harriett Bartlett, Stuart Queen, Ada Sheffield, Erle Fisk Young and Pauline Young. Several of the themes that emerge from a review of their work are today, as then, as much sociology as social work. In closing, I consider three questions. How can we generally explain the presence of this distinctive strand of thinking and practice? Why did it drift into subterranean obscurity? Why should it matter to us? I communicate my sense that the work of these people was premised on a fruitful but never fully realised relationship between ‘sociology’ and ‘social work’. Conjunctions between the largely forgotten heritage of Chicago social work and sociology would allow a less ‘pre-tuned’ discussion of how the respective fields are constituted, and how practitioners of either might pursue their profession.
This study forms part of a larger project about the identity and purpose of social work, the terms of which proceed from the general premise that social work as commonly apprehended in western countries emerged out of the late nineteenth century as part of extensive social, economic, religious, industrial, educational, political and philosophical shifts. These movements were manifested in what from the 1860s were referred to in newly minted and fluid language as the social sciences. In late nineteenth century, Europe and North America, the emerging outlines of what would become social work shared particularly with sociology that, as a distinct way of practice and thought, it ‘came into being in the face of momentous historical changes and from the first was shaped by the experience of those changes’ (Abrams 1982, 3). In that swirl of developments, led perhaps by the process of western industrialisation, ‘Again and again we find the concern for facts and for rationalisation mixed up with a counteracting moral sensibility’ (Abrams 1968, 31). The social conditions and intellectual history of the period are deeply intertwined.
The larger project consists of four questions. First, how should we approach the history of social work? Is social work in its form of the moment a story of enlightenment, a rising from the pit of metaphysics, tradition and authority-led presuppositions – or one of a fall from grace? Or is history not linear at all but perhaps cyclical, or even fragmentary and without any meaning – with ‘hope but no guarantees’ (Denzin 1997, 10)? Or alternatively is the history of social work to be understood through a genealogy of how orders of knowledge come to hold sway, such that history is the story told by the winners?
Second, within this broad concern with a kind of historical strategy, when thinking about social work how should we understand the nature and boundaries of what we think of as professions and disciplines? In what sense if at all is social work distinctive? Chambon has thought about social work in this general way (Chambon 2012) as more generally has Abbott in relation to social work in the USA (Abbott 1995; cf. also Shaw 2007, 2009, 2011a; Höjer and Dellgran 2014).
Third, how has research as a form of practice developed as part of the core and periphery of what in different ways has been regarded as social work? I have begun to explore the virtually uncultivated field of the history of social work research methods and practices (e.g. Shaw 2015). Finally, questions of the identity of social work considered in these ways properly raise ‘so what?’ questions – in what ways might such an exploration be of relevance and value to current social work and sociology?
This article contributes especially to the second and, by implication, the fourth of these questions. In addition, although I do not deal here with the first question (cf. Shaw 2015), the analysis gives little support to an enlightenment history of social work.
An objection
It may help to anticipate a response heard from time to time, especially to the east of the Atlantic. Why should time be devoted to something that by and large is just yet another American tale? For those (and they should not be ignored) who think that USA academic social work is entirely ‘other’, I would respond that the social work flow of ideas, people and practices back and forth between Europe and North America has been influential, but not well understood. To treat it defensively serves social work badly (cf. Shaw 2014, 2015).
But those who are familiar with early USA social work and its relation to sociology may puzzle over the absence of figures such as Mary Richmond, Jane Addams and Edith Abbott from the following pages. Each has significance for understanding the identity and course of social work and, to some extent, sociology. Indeed, in the case in particular of Richmond and Abbott this has probably been underestimated.1 The historiography in relation to Jane Addams is neither clear-cut nor uncomplicated. Her significance in relation to both social work and sociology may have been over-interpreted by those within critical social work practice and feminist sociology. Addams is without doubt important as a cultural (and countercultural) figure, and impossible to ignore if we are to understand, for example, the roots of community organisation, but she may figure less often and less influentially in social work’s history than some may wish, partly, it would seem, by her own choice.2 To my knowledge, none of the people who figure in this article stood in intellectual or practical proximity to these founding social work notables.
With regard to the general stance taken here towards Chicago sociology and social work, Platt observed that there has been a secondary industry around the Chicago School of debunking myths. She observes of her own work in terms that also apply to the work analysed here, that while her article fell into the myth-debunking category, ‘it argues that different accounts may be appropriate to their own terms of reference’ (Platt 1994, 57).
Encountering a puzzle
I have become unsettled regarding conventional accounts of both social work and sociology in the USA and the UK (cf. Shaw 2009, 2014). But rather than pursue that line, I want to focus on the significance of a cluster of people who appeared to reflect a quite different sense of identity. The first hints I heard of their existence were from appreciative remarks made by Ernest Burgess about Ada Sheffield, and from passing references to Pauline Young in the work of Ray Lee (e.g. Lee 2004). My general argument is that there is a submerged cluster of people who, at least at one or other stage of their careers, took positions in relation to social problems, social work practice, modes of understanding, and research practice that reflected and even anticipated – knowingly or not – something we might call a Chicago-enriched sociological social work. The people I have in mind are Harriett Bartlett, Stuart Queen, Ada Sheffield, Erle Fisk Young and Pauline Young. The list is not complete – I could have added Faye and Maurice Karpf. The Chicago sociologists I have in mind, in addition to Burgess and Shaw, are Frederick Thrasher and Walter Reckless.3
One or two reservations are necessary. I am not sure how far they saw their standpoints as presenting consciously taken counter-positions to what was developing around them. Nor do I think they were particularly aware that they occupied common ground with one another. Finally, they did little to sustain or develop their position, and by the time of the USA’s entry into the Second World War little was left to be seen. But the encounter with these people may prove somewhat as follows. We may have been to a wedding – or perhaps more likely a funeral – to discover family relatives of whom we have never or only very vaguely heard. How should one greet them? There is a British TV series, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, in which some well-known figure traces their family tree to discover unexpected and sometimes discomforting ancestors, in the light of whom their sense of who they are is unsettled. Discovering that our family is larger than and somewhat different from what we knew, what if anything ought we to do about it?
I will give brief biographical information about each one. The subsequent majority of the article is given over to suggesting the shared and overlapping themes of their work, asking in doing so if they can be seen as holding coherent frames of reference. ‘Coherent’ in the sense that Foucault speaks of a discourse – as groups of verbal performances that are not linked to one another grammatically (as sentences) or at a logical level (as formally coherent) or even psychologically (for example, as a conscious project) but at the statement level, as a way of speaking (Foucault 2002). In conclusion, I will briefly consider three questions. How can we generally explain the presence of this distinctive strand of thinking and practice? Why did it drift into relative obscurity? I close by hinting at possible ways this history may matter for social work and sociology today.
Biographical sketches
Ada Sheffield, 1869–1943
Ada Sheffield was Boston-based. She worked in the Boston charities field and was Director of a new Mother’s Aid Programme. Her tenure was short-lived; when, in 1914, the city’s first Catholic mayor did not reappoint her. She was Director of the Research Bureau on Social Case Work. She authored two significant books – The Social Case History: Its Construction and Content (1920) and Case Study Possibilities: A Forecast (1922). The latter is a brief but remarkable text that drew appreciative comments from Ernest Burgess. She later (1937) wrote Social Insight in Case Situations. A careful appreciative account of aspects of her contribution to social work theory is given in Kemp, Whittaker, and Tracy (1997). She was sister of the poet T.S. Eliot – Ada Eliot Sheffield was her name. Her brother regarded her as ‘a very exceptional woman’ (Letters Vol. 4). She died in 1943.
Erle Fisk Young, 1888–1953
Erle Young4 was a graduate student in the Chicago Sociology Department in the second and third decades of the last century, and a lecturer in the Graduate School of Social Service Administration coordinating a course in Advanced Social Case Work. He undertook research studies in Sociology of which Robert Park said ‘seem destined to me to change fundamentally our whole conception of case histories’ (Park 1924, 263). He moved to the University of Southern California where he appears to have spent the whole of his life thereafter. He wrote almost entirely in the field of social work, including several editions of The Social Workers’ Dictionary, on ...
