To Thine Own Ethics Code Be True

Important lessons on ethics come to us these days from an unlikely source--the accounting profession. In recent months, newspapers have been filled with stories and pictures of thousands of workers leaving their offices carrying the contents of their desks in the wake of the collapse of a major accounting firm connected to the Enron scandal. Analyses reveal that the demise of this major professional corporation resulted from the simple-albeit persistent and systematic--failure to adhere to ethical guidelines and practices developed and honored for decades in this firm. Failure to attend to an ethical code resulted in the break down of a professional corporation. How this happened provides a cautionary tale for social work. Established and emerging theories of professions remind us that ethics and ethical codes play a central role in the definition and development of professions (Marsh, 2000). Professions as social institutions have an increasingly important role in organizing and exercising control over expert knowledge, skills, and values (Abbott, 1988). When we consider what we know about professions generally, we understand that they are characterized by a familiar set of elements that include a national professional association, university-based educational programs, licensing laws, and, most important for our discussion, a formal code of ethics. As a profession, social work put in place these elements early in the 20th century (Wilensky, 1964). In addition to recognizing the basic elements that characterize professions, we know that professions are dynamic in their development (Abbott). Professions are defined by the tasks they accomplish--that is, the problems they solve, as well as the knowledge, skills, and values they bring to bear to solve those problems. Furthermore, they develop in relation to other professions in an organizational context in which ongoing claims are made about the content and organization of the work. These claims ultimately determine the work of specific professions and the autonomy with which the work is carried Out. One powerful set of claims or challenges in professions derives from expansions or shifts in their knowledge, skill, and value base. Examples of shifts in knowledge, skills, and values that have influenced the development of social work can be readily identified. In another discussion I have described ways in which expanded knowledge has extended the reach of the social work profession (Marsh, 2000). For example, the development and application of knowledge about single-case research methodology in the 1970s provided practitioners and researcher--practitioners the means for greater accountability and more effective contributions to research and knowledge development. Similarly, shifts in its skill base have influenced social work practice. Here, the development of specific community-based approaches to service provision, such as assertive community treatment for people with a chronic mental illness, has relocated social work practice with these clients from the hospital and the office to the community. Shifts in values also affect practice. For example, the codification of professional values in the NASW Code of Ethics in relation to the conduct of research has served to structure, legitimize, and support research and knowledge development activities in social work. The claims-making process goes both ways: influencing both expansions and restrictions in domains of practice. Social work has lost ground in areas when other professions have applied expanded knowledge, skills, or values to claim areas of expertise once under the sole purview of social work. For example, social work's once-solid hold on discharge planning activities has been lost to nurses in the health care arena as criminology specialists in the criminal justice area have assumed probation-related tasks. Thus, social work, like all professions, is dynamic in its development, and its professional boundaries are constantly contested. …