Social Work for Sociologists

Theory and Practice

Kate van Heugten, Anita Gibbs, Kate van Heugten, Anita Gibbs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137392961
• eBook ISBN: 9781137389688
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Social Work for Sociologists introduces important frameworks, concepts, models, and skills from social work that will help sociologists as they plan their human service careers and will prepare them to tackle social problems with practical solutions.

PART I

Key Frameworks, Ethics, and Values

CHAPTER 1

Overview of the Historical and Contextual Development of Sociology and Social Work

Kate van Heugten and Anita Gibbs

Introduction

In this first chapter, we identify the historical roots of ideological divisions between social work and sociology. Not all sociologists and social workers know that their disciplines were once closely linked. This is not surprising because it suited the professionalization projects of each discipline in the twentieth century to construct historical narratives that emphasized their differences rather than their commonalities. Internationally, however, the two disciplines emerged in close association. Within academic institutions, the disciplines often shared departments, although those shared departments became established at different times in different countries—around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, and half a century later in Australia and New Zealand (Crothers 2008; Nash and Munford 2001).

The trajectories of their separation involved disagreements that emerged within academic departments in universities, often within a few decades of the departments’ establishment. The disagreements were focused on relatively dualistic positions that each discipline adopted around two core questions. The first question concerned the place of theory and practice. Academic sociologists adopted a position that the ultimate goal of theorizing was knowledge building, whereas social workers theorized toward the goal of practice. The second major division, which is inextricably linked to the first, involved the place of values, with sociologists tending to argue for value neutrality and social workers arguing that their endeavors should be value-laden.

Divisions also typically occurred along gender lines, to some extent reflecting the stereotypes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which portrayed women as creatures of emotion and expected women to be concerned with domestic affairs, including the care and well-being of families and children. Men were believed to be more appropriately concerned with matters outside the home, including the development of science, because men were believed to be more capable of understanding facts and theoretical ideas. These gender stereotypes led to the preponderance of women in social work and men in sociology.

The divisions between social work and sociology became more entrenched over time. Social workers, looking outward to the community, aligned their interests with community stakeholders. Sociologists sought to firm up their academic standing within institutes of higher learning. Levels of interaction reduced. The disciplines separated physically, occupying different university corridors and teaching separate student cohorts in differently named programs. Disciplinary silos became concretized, preventing the cross-fertilization of ideas, particularly from social work into sociology. Whereas sociology continued to be taught as a core discipline in many social work programs, the reverse was not true. Sociologists failed to gain from the advances made by social workers in developing theories and frameworks for practice and in learning how to negotiate complex value dilemmas.

Despite these divisions, many sociologists and social workers neither conformed to extreme ideological positions nor fitted the caricatures of altruistic, action-oriented social workers or value-free, theoretical sociologists. Many social workers continued to theorize, and at least some sociologists continued to pursue social justice related topics. Debates around the relationships between theory and practice and the possibility of value neutrality were never fully resolved, particularly within sociology. During the 1960s and 1970s, with concerns over civil liberties at a high in the United States and many other countries, there was a reemergence of overt interest in praxis and political action among sociologists. This appeared to converge with the interests of community, work-oriented social workers and radical social workers, the latter of whom sought to transform capitalist societies toward societies with more equitably distributed wealth. Although the radical movements of those mid-twentieth century decades declined from the 1980s onward, sociologists today continue to place themselves on a continuum in relation to the need for the practical applicability of their work. Chapter 9 in this book provides an excellent example of how a university educator encourages students in his sociology research methods class to consider the practical implications and utility of their research.

More recently, from the late 1980s and 1990s, university educators from social work and sociology have come under increased pressure to adopt more market-oriented approaches, as many national governments have disinvested from the funding of social science education and social welfare (Connell 2000; Dominelli 2005; Thorns 2003; van Heugten 2011). Disciplines are expected to produce graduates with a specific set of technocratic skills rather than critical thinkers. Educators and practitioners from both disciplines are searching for ways of working together to resist such pressures and to enhance mutual effectiveness. Joint work occurs around several shared concerns; one of these is the retention of the role of the social critic, which also involves assisting students to develop their capacity for critical social thinking. Another shared concern is employing knowledge from a range of social sciences to better understand and solve complex social problems. Social workers and sociologists who work together on projects have found that each discipline contributes valuable insights. This book itself is a good example of a social work and sociology collaboration.

Historical Connections and Disconnections

Disciplinary and Occupational Beginnings

The study of societies and social structures and the delivery of organized charity can both be traced back to ancient times. The focus of this chapter is, however, narrower. The chapter explores the emergence of sociology and social work in the mid-nineteenth century and the debates that arose between university educators and practitioners from those disciplines and that drove the disciplines down separate pathways.

The idea that society and social structures are able to be studied and understood, and that they might be alterable rather than divinely ordained, can be traced to the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. During this period, which has been called the Enlightenment, there arose increased belief in the power of reason and the possibility of gaining understanding through scientific exploration. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French and American revolutions undermined the idea that hierarchies and social orders were divinely ordained and showed that human actions might impact political and social structures. Industrialization and urbanization, coupled with the rise of market capitalism, highlighted social problems, and demands for solutions to these problems increased (Bannister 2003; Chriss 2002; Connell 2000; Shaw 2008, 2009). It was against this background that social theoreticians developed their thinking throughout the nineteenth century.

As the study of society and social problems began to gain prominence and adherents, like-minded people formed associations. Initially, these associations tended to incorporate people bound by shared interests in the study of social, political, and economic structures and human relationships. An example is the American Social Science Association, established in 1865 (Calhoun 2007). There were no stringent disciplinary boundaries or membership criteria for these early associations.

As theorizing developed, disciplines began to differentiate. The first stand-alone university departments in sociology were established around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth in the United States, England, and Europe. Some early sociological thinkers were clearly driven by theorizing, and those thinkers traced their roots to European social philosophers. Others were concerned with developing theories in order to understand and solve social ills.

Whereas early sociologists held a range of views about the place of social activism, the early development of social work was always closely tied to the study of social ills in order to achieve their amelioration. As previously mentioned, the historical origins of welfare provisions for the poor can be traced to ancient times. Textbooks that draw on more modern Eurocentric accounts of social work’s history point to the codification of English poor laws into the Elizabethan Poor Law in 1601 (Leighninger 2008). The emergence of an occupation that is clearly similar to that of modern social workers is located in even more recent times, during the last half of the nineteenth century. During this time, charity organization societies were established, first in England and next in the United States (Leighninger 2008). These organizations employed workers to manage the distribution of welfare to the poor and to undertake casework and family work in an effort to encourage the poor to achieve self-reliance. This emerging casework orientation eventually came to represent the microlevel branch of social work, concerned with individual psychotherapy and family focused counseling interventions. By the end of the nineteenth century, this branch of social work had closely aligned itself with the new science of psychology, and the branch grew to incorporate roles in a variety of settings, including social-service workers, known as almoners, in hospitals. Mary Richmond from the Baltimore Charities Organization Society, one of the major proponents of the casework methods of assessment and intervention, became recognized as one of two founders of social work (Franklin 1986), along with Jane Addams, who is discussed below.

Alongside charity organization work, a differently oriented movement developed: the settlement movement, out of which the methods of community workers arose. (This description of the two branches of social work will be referred to again in a later section of the chapter, under the heading of radical social work.) The first of the settlements was Toynbee Hall, set up in London’s impoverished East End in 1884 by Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta Barnett. The settlement movement was based on a concept of reciprocal learning. Students from nearby universities lived at Toynbee Hall and interacted with socioeconomically disadvantaged community members, with a view that this interaction would lead to mutual political consciousness raising (Leighninger 2008).

At this time, a woman from a wealthy Illinois family, Jane Addams, had developed an educated interest in social issues but had struggled to identify a practical project that would enable her to pursue that interest. She was inspired by what she read about the work taking place at Toynbee Hall, and she traveled to London to spend time at the settlement. Following her return to America, Addams, together with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, established a settlement in Chicago in 1889: Hull House. They were joined by an expanding group of academically qualified and like-minded people, mostly women (Leighninger 2008). Hull House was the second American settlement, following Stanton Coit’s establishment of the Neighborhood Guild in New York in 1886. Others followed, and by 1910 the movement included over 400 settlement houses across America (Lengermann and Niebrugge 2007).

In 1892, three years after the opening of Hull House, the first department of sociology at an American university was set up at the University of Chicago (Calhoun 2007). We now turn to the story of the men and the women of that department (who were also prominent among the women of Hull House) to seek explanations for the connections and divisions between the disciplines.

Hull House and Sociology at the University of Chicago

Following the principles of Toynbee Hall, Chicago’s Hull House was set in the heart of a new immigrant community. The Chicago immigrants lived surrounded by the sweatshops in which they labored, and the Hull House activists established childcare facilities, social and educational programs, and a labor bureau to support the citizenry (Leighninger 2008).

One of the best-known research projects of Hull House involved the extensive mapping of the sociodemographic features of this impoverished locality. For their methods, the women of Hull House were informed by the earlier work of Charles Booth, who had begun recording the lives of the people of London from 1889, similarly uncovering distressing levels of poverty (Shaw 2009). The Hull House project was published in 1893 as Hull-House Maps and Papers. This publication is considered one of the most important classical works in social mapping, predating by about 20 years any significant adoption of this methodology by sociologists (Levin 2011).

Despite her groundbreaking work, many sociologists have never heard of Jane Addams as a sociologist. Instead, she came to be considered, alongside Mary Richmond, a founding mother of social work, and her leadership was identified with the development of the community work branch of social work. Addams was a pacifist in relation to war and an activist for human rights. In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (Leighninger 2008).

Addams was not the only social activist lecturer based at Hull House. Sophinisba Breckinridge had a degree in sociology, but she also studied mathematics and law and held two doctorates—one in law and one in political science. Edith Abbott had a degree in sociology and a doctorate in political economy. She was knowledgeable in the most sophisticated statistical methods of the time, and she taught those methods at the University of Chicago (Jabour 2012). Yet despite their formidable academic pedigrees, the work of these academic women gradually came to be discounted by the male sociologists at the University of Chicago. This was largely due to the women’s social activism, because although these women collected data via some of the most rigorous methods, they believed that the work should be done in the service of social purposes, and this did not meet the narrow definitions of the academic sociologists. The women came to be known as social workers, a title that they appeared happy to adopt (Shaw 2009).

Divisions in the Department of Sociology at Chicago

From its inception, the University of Chicago’s sociology department admitted women as students, and the women of Hull House taught in the social sciences. The survey methods that had been used in the development of the Hull-House Maps and Paper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Key Frameworks, Ethics, and Values
• Part II. Application of Social Work Frameworks to Practice with Families, Organizations, and Communities
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index