Perspective Analysis: McKnight's Careless Society and the Strengths-Based Approach to Social Work

John McKnights 1995 The Careless Society is widely used in social work programs. Although it offers instructive reading, it also presents a one-sided view of service provision. This article seeks to provide balance and perspective to McKnight's assertions and may be useful as a companion paper for courses using the book. In The Careless Society McKnight (1995) discussed and criticized service delivery systems vis-a-vis community. McKnight argued that service industries seek to perpetuate themselves rather than help their clients. Furthermore, he argued that the very existence of these services undermines people's sense of community and connectedness by supplanting personal and informal supports and relationships. McKnight (1995) specifically wrote of the professionalization of the medical, human services, and criminal justice "industries." A recurring theme is that professionals define the problem, provide the services to address the problem, and are the only ones who can decide when the problem is resolved. He stated that "the client as a person has been a residual category in the process" (p. 19). The client is simply an object, not an active participant. McKnight's focus is on the service industry in general and its focus on providers rather than clients. The assembly-line delivery of social services by large government bureaucracies, however, seems to exemplify everything that McKnight feels is wrong with service delivery. Bureaucracies contain layers of management that thoroughly distance the policymakers from those providing services and those receiving them. In addition to relegating the client to a mere recipient of services rather than an active participant in the service process, the product being delivered is not having a positive effect on the larger problems that drive the clients' needs. Despite recent welfare reform efforts and employment initiatives, most welfare provisions remain handouts to individuals. For example, clients get money every month to pay rent. Landlords generally do not live in the same community as their tenants, and few landlords who rent to poor people do more than the minimum they are required to do by law; the continuing presence of lead paint demonstrates this sad reality. So, welfare provides money for poor people to pay rent to live in poor neighborhoods. Homes and communities deteriorate, transportation and child care that would facilitate employment efforts remain largely unavailable, and the cycle perpetuates. Poverty is treated as an individual problem, but when entire communities live in poverty, the issue clearly goes beyond any individual shortcomings. Government bureaucracies, however, continue to focus on individuals and rigidly constrained provision of minimal services. Because those services do not address the actual problem, the need for the services grows, as does the need for the bureaucracy. McKnight is not alone in his concerns that the service industry serves itself and its members to the detriment of its ostensible clientele. Soupcoff (2003) wrote a scathing commentary on The Careless Society in which he stated: "Never have so few individuals with so many good intentions created so much misery for so many people whom they wanted to help." He wrote of "the obvious bitter fruits of the liberal-left do-gooders' all-knowing beneficence" being "ever-more destructive 'cures' for various real and imagined social injustices through the years." Soupcoff concluded that for today's caring classes, it's their perceived sensitivity to the plight of the disadvantaged, and their support of efforts to "help" the needy, that makes them feel superior to the rest of society.... [I]t's the caring classes who are society's true elite, because they "care" more.... In their minds, it's not the results of their helping initiatives that count (most of which are disastrous). It's their enlightened values and words. …