Clinical Social Work's Contribution to a Social Justice Perspective

Social justice is increasingly being seen as the organizing value of social work. For clinical social workers, this conceptualization clarifies and focuses a unique contribution that clinical social work can make to the mental health professions. In this article "clinical social work" is used in this sense to include case management, advocacy, teamwork, mediation, and prevention roles, as well as therapeutic and counseling roles. Clinical social workers engage in supervision, organizational change, directing programs, and community education. They also join with other social workers and their clients in social action (Swenson, 1995). Clinical social work should not be equated with practice based on a medical model, a focus on pathology, "blaming the victim," or social conservatism. Clinical social workers can consider what a social justice perspective means and how it can be enacted in clinical contexts. They can think about work with individuals, families, and groups from a social justice perspective. They can provide leadership in assessing theories, practices, and service delivery arrangements from the point of view of increasing social justice. Defining Social Justice First, the profession must consider what "social justice" is and why it is being considered the organizing value for social work. Furthermore, what is an organizing value? The term comes from Wakefield (1988a, 1988b), who has written one of the most definitive statements about social justice in social work, particularly in regard to clinical social work. He described the "defining function" or primary purpose of a profession as its "organizing value," in the sense in which the organizing value of medicine is curing disease; of education, learning; and of law, legal justice. Traditionally, when social work has tried to define its function, it has emphasized the "person-in-situation" construct. That construct became more conceptually rigorous as systems and ecological theories and theories of attachment, coping, adaptation, and resilience, as well as "two-person psychologies" in psychodynamic thinking developed. So, for instance, we had Gordon's (1969) definition of social work purpose as matching people's coping capacities and the qualities of impinging environments. The person-in-situation conceptualization has always had some difficulties. Social work is not the only profession adopting systems thinking or any of the other theories mentioned, and many professions could be said to improve the goodness of fit between people and environments. In fact, in one way or another, all professions do. Education gives people skills and knowledge to navigate their world more competently and effectively, and law helps people make claims against some unjust environments. Medicine cures people of diseases they have caught from noxious environments, makes environments more healthy, and helps people overcome health challenges that compromise their functioning in various environments. Social justice would seem to be a more convincing organizing value for social work than the person-in-situation construct. But then what does "social justice" mean? Social justice defines a goal to which the person-in-situation construct can be directed, a goal both broader and more specific than "producing growth-inducing and environment-meliorating transactions" (Gordon, 1969, p. 10). Dorothy van Soest (1995), in the Encyclopedia of Social Work, said that there are three components of social justice: legal justice, which is concerned with what a person owes to society; commutative justice, which is concerned with what people owe each other; and distributive justice, which is "what society owes a person" (p. 1811). She said that distributive justice involves decisions about allocating resources and that it is the most important, in the sense that it underlies the other two. Others divide social justice into different components, but distributive justice - social workers' concern - is always one component. …