From Social Work to Human Services

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. ********** 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. …