Lessons from Social Work’s History for a Tumultuous Era
Abstract
For more than a century, political-economic, demographic, and ideological forces have shaped US social work. Torn between social justice and status enhancement, the profession vacillated between advocating for social reform and seeking elite support. Ongoing contradictions between empowerment and expertise, social change and social control, and collaboration with and coercion of constituents reflect this tension. During the past 4 decades, neoliberalism, antiwelfare perspectives, and hyperpartisan politics transformed social work practice and its research and knowledge base. The 2016 election rocked the profession and produced significant changes for the people with whom we work and the nature of social work. New social movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and global action over climate change and gun violence have also posed new challenges. Social workers must now reexamine long-standing assumptions about practice and evidence; their relationship to power, place, and context; and their role in shaping the future of US society.
The Importance of History in an Alternate-Facts Culture
Although the current environment possesses several unique features, it is not the first era in which social workers have confronted fundamental, existential challenges. During the Red Scare following World War I, the Great Depression, the McCarthy period following World War II, and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, powerful political and economic forces and ideologically diverse intellectual and social movements called into question the basic premises of social welfare and the practices they spawned.
The articles in this special issue of Social Service Review address a number of issues of contemporary relevance. These include the impact of economic, demographic, and cultural changes on social work practice and research; the relationship of organized social welfare to marginalized populations; the influence of social and intellectual movements; the role of power and place in shaping the nature and scope of practice; and ongoing tensions between the profession’s commitment to social reform and its desire to enhance its professional status. The journal received approximately three dozen submissions in response to the call for papers. After undergoing an initial screening to determine the potential suitability of manuscripts for the special issue, the editors sent approximately two-thirds of the manuscripts to reviewers for their assessment. The final selection of articles reflects these assessments and the judgment of the editors. Space limitations and publication timetables also influenced decisions about which articles to include. Several worthy submissions could not be included as a result.
The analyses contained in these articles seek to spur dialogue about the relationship of social work’s history to current and future developments. They appear at a time when declining attention to social work history in most educational programs (Reisch 2014) mirrors the lack of historical consciousness in US society. This ahistorical trend produces a cultural preference for the preservation of historical myths, misleading assumptions about the causes and consequences of current problems, and the perpetuation of simplistic and often false master narratives to explain complex contemporary phenomena. Combined with growing distrust of scientific evidence, elite opinions, and traditional institutions in general (including the academy), the absence of a historical perspective provided fertile soil for the emergence of what some have called our present “alternate facts” environment (Cooke 2018; Gutsche 2018). This special issue is a modest attempt to correct for these tendencies, at least within the social welfare field.
Much of the lost history of US social welfare involves the collective failure to acknowledge the contributions of important individuals, groups, and ideas to the development of social policy and social work practice. For the most part, these overlooked contributions came from socially or politically marginalized populations, including people of color, radicals, and those whose ideas challenged the conventional wisdom. As the articles in this issue point out, the missing pieces of social work history also include insufficient attention to the long-term effects of colonization on indigenous peoples and of cultural hegemony on racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants. In addition, the articles reinforce the role that the power and subjectivity elites have exerted over organizational relationships in the social welfare field; the focus of social work research, knowledge, and practice; and the criteria used to evaluate the effectiveness of social programs and modes of intervention. Several of the articles ask readers to look at social work’s relationship to its environment through a different conceptual lens.
The presentism of many social work students and younger faculty is another consequence of the profession’s insufficient attention to its history. Among the former, this tendency toward anachronism appears in the application of twenty-first-century standards to the behavior and vocabulary of nineteenth- and twentieth-century actors. This lack of historical contextualization creates, in turn, an absence of nuance in students’ consideration of current issues. As tempting as it is, the tendency to view issues in dichotomous, either/or terms is ill suited to the complex environment of contemporary practice. It also inhibits the development of critical and constructive dialogue and the formation of crosscutting coalitions that could help overcome the growing divisions in US society.
Among younger scholars, the lack of a historical perspective takes another form. They often present ideas first expressed decades ago as new insights or repackage them into the latest intellectual boxes with scant recognition of their origins. Pouring old wine into new bottles may be an appealing marketing device, but it reinforces the trend to regard new developments in isolation from their historical roots.
Yet, as William Faulkner (1919) wrote, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” This special issue represents an attempt to reinforce the idea expressed by the British historian E. P. Thompson (1971) that history is the “discipline of context.” It includes articles that reflect on the implications of social work’s history for the present context and suggests specific lessons that practitioners, scholars, and students today could derive from an examination of this history.
Recurring Themes
In their examination of multiple issues of contemporary relevance, the articles in this issue display a remarkable concurrence. Five interrelated themes stand out. One is the evolving role of knowledge and research and their relationship to social work’s aspirations for professional status. A second theme is how the changing nature of interorganizational and intersectoral relationships in the social welfare field reflected the transformation of US society as a whole. A third theme is the inquiry into whose contributions to social work’s intellectual, philosophical, and theoretical development the profession acknowledges or ignores and with what consequences. A fourth theme is how concepts of place, space, and power continue to influence social work practice and the relationship of social workers to the populations with whom we work and society as a whole. Finally, the articles address, explicitly and implicitly, the cumulative effects of these historical trends on practice and policy with marginalized populations.
The Role of Social Work Knowledge and Research
For more than a century, since Abraham Flexner (1915) declared that social work lacked the independent scientific basis of a profession, social workers have linked the attainment of occupational status and elite support with the development of creditable research skills and outcomes. During the past three decades, this motivation led to the formation of the Society for Social Work and Research, greater emphasis on quantitative methodology in doctoral programs, the elevation of evidence-based practice and intervention research, and, most recently, the proclamation of the “Grand Challenges for Social Work” (American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare n.d.). In her article, “Reexamining Epistemological Debates in Social Work through American Pragmatism,” Kathryn R. Berringer (2019) points out that the premise of the Grand Challenges is that “social work has matured from a set of family and community practices to an evidence-based profession, relying on systemic data, though with continuing commitment to human decency and social justice” (Sherraden et al. 2015, 3; quoted in Berringer 2019, 609; see also Brekke 2012). Proponents of this perspective assert that the expansion of social work’s knowledge base through cutting-edge, innovative science is the best way to preserve its historic, value-driven mission. As certain critics of this approach in the United States and other nations aver, two unintended consequences of this futuristic framework are the privileging of certain research methods above others and the not-so-subtle denigration of historical inquiry as practiced by other contemporary social work scholars.
Berringer argues that historical research serves a purpose beyond providing support for its long-standing ethical commitments. An examination of the history of ideas in social work and their influence on epistemological developments in the field can inform our current understanding of the profession’s embrace of the scientific imperative. Another potential advantage of this inquiry is the expansion of US social work’s perspective beyond national boundaries to counteract its increasingly insular tendencies.
What is, perhaps, the most interesting conclusion Berringer derives from her investigation of the impact of American pragmatism concerns its potential for strengthening the connection between research and practice—an outcome compatible with the goals of the Grand Challenges. In other words, she argues that historical research on social work’s philosophical roots can contribute to its current knowledge base and the fulfillment of its long-standing ethical commitments. Berringer asserts that understanding the influence of pragmatism can help bridge the persistent gap between research and practice and solve what Shaw (2016) referred to as the “knowledge-transfer” program. The articles by Brown (2019) and Nadel (2019) also address this issue. This increased understanding of social work’s past could also diffuse internecine political arguments about which forms of knowledge and knowledge production are legitimate.
In her contribution, “The Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–1908: Divergent Paths to Change,” Meryl Nadel (2019) makes a complementary assertion. Like Berringer, she underscores the importance of the context in which developments in social work knowledge production and practice occurred and assesses the impact of these developments on the environments in which they took place. Nadel also points out how the participants in the Pittsburgh Survey used multiple research methods, such as ethnography and community-based field research, to advance a particular social purpose, as did contemporary social work proponents of pragmatism such as Jane Addams. Nadel also highlights the surveyors’ employment of multiple forms of dissemination to diverse audiences. Their approach to the dispersion of research findings influenced the popular education strategies employed during the New Deal and, to some extent, the role social media plays today in the dissemination of social work’s findings.
By adopting what social work scholars now term a “social determinants” lens, the survey challenged prevailing assumptions about the nature of poverty, working conditions, and issues affecting children. The Visiting Teacher Movement, as described by Jessica Charles and Susan Stone (2019) in “Revisiting the Visiting Teacher: Relearning the Lessons of the Whole-Child Approach,” was similarly invested in a social determinants perspective. In Nadel’s (2019) words, the Pittsburgh Survey was “the first and archetypal example of a comprehensive project to understand an entire city and engender reform” (678). It emphasized a preventive rather than ameliorative approach to policy development and a focus on the role of the environment, rather than moral or character flaws, as a factor in issues like poverty. The survey subsequently influenced social workers and key funders, such as the Russell Sage Foundation, to link research to the promotion of “social action, social intervention, and social reform” (683). As Matthew Bakko (2019) points out in “Protecting and Expanding Control: Philanthropy’s Negotiation of Welfare System Change during the War on Poverty,” this approach to research contrasted substantially with the system-maintenance orientation of the United Foundation of Detroit. It also reflected, albeit without acknowledgment, the influence of pragmatism, the settlement house movement’s focus on the community context of practice, and the emphasis of the Charity Organization Societies on investigation.
A related theme discussed in several contributions to this issue concerns the response of powerful stakeholders to the results of research. For example, Nadel (2019) points out that Pittsburgh’s elites largely maintained preexisting prejudices about the populations affected by the city’s social and economic conditions, in a manner similar to the implicit biases political elites maintain today. Reformers’ need to compromise with these sentiments also reflects the ever-present pressure social workers experience to accommodate powerful leaders in the corporate and political worlds and the risks involved in promoting widespread social change.
In addition, the Pittsburgh Survey provides an example of the growing application of rationalist thinking to the US economic and political system and, as Maoz Brown (2019) points out in “Constructing Accountability: The Development and Delegation of Outcome Evaluation in American Social Work,” on the administration of social service organizations. As Nadel (2019) explains, the contrast between the work of the Pittsburgh Survey and the proponents of provider-driven outcome evaluation demonstrates the persistent tensions between what Gorz (1967) refers to as reformist and nonreformist reform. The participation of both mainstream Progressives and socialists, such as Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Crystal Eastman (Reisch and Andrews 2002), in the Pittsburgh Survey and the response by elites to some of its more radical conclusions demonstrate the structural constraints on reform efforts produced by community power dynamics. In ways remarkably similar to current policy debates, the different responses to the data the Pittsburgh Survey uncovered also underscore the ongoing conflict between those who view change through an individual lens and those who adopt a structural analysis. These responses also reflect the conflict between insider and outsider perspectives on environmental conditions and the gap between idealistic goals and the absence of strategies to achieve them. Virtually all the articles in this issue highlight these persistent tensions.
In analyzing a special study implemented by the United Foundation of Detroit during the War on Poverty, Bakko (2019) reveals how its leaders sought to avoid upsetting local white community members and corporate elites who feared the study’s outcomes would support the increasingly radical goals of the city’s African American community. They did this in two ways: by ensuring corporate dominance of the study committee’s membership and by privileging the committee’s value judgments over the objective findings of the survey. A similar pattern emerged at the time in other federated funding systems around the United States, altering the funds’ long-standing allocation processes and promoting the use of managerial techniques in its member agencies. As Nadel (2019) describes in her study of the Pittsburgh Survey, this shift reveals how in both eras increased government involvement in social welfare prompted elites to prioritize the charitable sector’s continued control over community-based efforts to address problems of racial and class inequality. As Lester Salamon’s (2015) research indicates, during the past half century the ensuing marketization of nonprofits led social service organizations to treat clients as individualized consumers, increased interorganizational competition for resources, and contributed to the use of business management practices derived from the corporate sector in the administration of these agencies.
Brown (2019) takes a somewhat different perspective in discussing how these forces influenced practice at the mezzo and micro levels. Through a constructivist analysis of social work history, Brown revises our understanding of the origins and purposes of provider-driven outcome evaluation (POE). Instead of viewing it as a product of a “performance measurement era” beginning in the 1990s, Brown situates POE’s emergence in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of the US social welfare system. He argues that the evolution of POE changed the stakes for outcome evaluation from the advancement of the profession’s collective legitimacy in the eyes of elite supporters and the public to the success of individual organizations. His analysis regards POE as a means of expressing contextually based assumptions about how organizations achieve outcomes.
According to Brown, neoliberalism altered the focus of social work intervention research: what was formerly an attempt to identify replicable practices that could be widely disseminated became an emphasis on the effects of specific organizations on programmatic outcomes. As a result, POE now focuses on “the competitive performance of separate organizations, regardless of their professional affiliations. Accordingly, modern POE portrays client outcomes as the results of individual organizational activity rather than as the effects of transferable professional method” (Brown 2019, 715). It is not certain that all proponents of contemporary intervention research, particularly those promoting the Grand Challenges, would agree with this assertion.
Brown agrees, however, with other authors in the special issue about the connection between the transformation of social work research and its aspirations for higher professional status. He links the evolution of POE to this goal by demonstrating the shift over the past century from evaluation that assessed the alleviation of material deprivation (which is easier to measure through quantitative means) to desired psychological and behavioral outcomes that are more qualitative and subjective in nature and, therefore, more difficult to assess. The behavioral goals of welfare reform are a prime example of this phenomenon (Soss, Ford, and Schram 2011).
Brown argues that social workers struggled to obtain the benefit of scientific legitimacy while avoiding the risk of relying exclusively on research developed by other disciplines, as Flexner pointed out in 1915. The embrace of quantification by the field appeared to solve this problem by conflating program evaluation and measurement. Yet the desired outcomes of emerging programs proved more difficult to measure. To maintain a precarious balance between scientific and status goals, the profession shifted the locus of research on client outcomes to the agencies that provided services rather than external evaluators. Consequently, in a phenomenon similar to the one observed by Nadel (2019), observers soon equated POE, the methodological ancestor of contemporary intervention research, with social work research as a whole. This has produced significant problems for today’s social service providers, who often lack the time, resources, and expertise to conduct such research effectively and efficiently.
In “Social Work, Place, and Power: Applying Heterotopian Principles to the Social Topology of Social Work,” G. Allen Ratliff (2019) points out another gap in social work’s theoretical foundation: insufficient attention to social topology—that is, the relationship among power, space, and place. Using Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia as a framework, Ratliff discusses the role of space and place in the construction of social welfare systems, and how place more than personal qualities or cultural traditions affects the quality of life for both individuals and communities, particularly marginalized populations. The ways in which a society constructs place creates and reinforces the processes of social exclusion, unequal resource and power distribution, and differential behavioral expectations. From this perspective, social welfare is a collection of heterotopias with physical, social, and symbolic significance that serve as mechanisms for social control and the maintenance of the status quo.
According to Foucault, heterotopias evince six different characteristics. First, they are universal, as the expansion of social welfare during the past century reveals. Second, within this universal framework, institutions revise their spatial arrangements in response to societal changes. Ratliff cites changes in policies and practices in the areas of income support, mental health care, and child welfare programs to illustrate this point. A third aspect of heterotopias is that they often include within a single space “several sites that are … incompatible” (Foucault 1986, quoted in Ratliff 2019, 659). The prevalence of social workers within so-called host institutions (e.g., hospitals, prisons, and schools) that have different goals and underlying assumptions reflects this tendency, as does the use of home visits by social workers as a locus of child welfare practice.
The emphasis on the temporality of social services illustrates Foucault’s fourth heterotopic principle—namely, that space and time coexist within heterotopias. The Functional School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania, which identified the importance of agency and time in the construction of a service relationship, was the first to recognize this connection (Dore 1990). Today, although the contributions of the Functional School have faded from the profession’s memory, both the design of social work interventions (e.g., time-limited therapy) and the structure of social policies (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) reflect the importance of time in a variety of ways. As Ratliff (2019) writes: “All social work programs have some component of time, whether it is the length of time in service, the time of day that programs operate, or age as an eligibility criteria” (662).
Foucault’s fifth principle is particularly apt in today’s environment: entry into heterotopias is restricted. On the one hand, access is limited through eligibility requirements (e.g., passing a means test or possessing health insurance), and, on the other, it is compulsory for those subject to state-sponsored coercion. The location, physical construction, and hours of operation of a service also enhance or restrict access to certain populations. Finally, heterotopias function as a means to isolate and stigmatize individuals deemed deviant or undesirable by the dominant culture even as the institutions created by that culture purport to provide them with essential services.
Ironically, two major traditions in the history of US social work, the settlement house movement and the Charity Organization Societies (COS), both exacerbated the spatial trends in mainstream society via the different ways they incorporated an environmental emphasis into practice. The evolution of social work, as a result, reflected the broader trends within US society toward specialization of function in both the public and private sectors and the preference for using institutions as the sites of service delivery. Ratliff points out that this spatially focused trend underscored the social distinction and physical separation between people who received services (for whatever reason) and the general population, and required the former group to adapt to behavioral and cultural norms as a precondition for the receipt of benefits. Consequently, although social work’s literature emphasizes the role of place in constructing interventions, with a few notable exceptions it largely ignores how power and place define the function of the structures in which these interventions occur.
Ratliff argues that the profession must pay more attention to how the physical context of practice, not merely the policies and regulations that determine its goals and boundaries, affects the power that social workers possess as street-level bureaucrats. Citing Kemp (2010, 2011), he underscores that place and space are dynamic and defined by the relationships within them. Recognizing these components of practice raises the possibility of redefining the nature of place and space to construct a counternarrative of resistance. The goals of such redefinitions would be the reduction of existing inequalities and the elimination of prevailing social hierarchies.
Changing Interorganizational and Intersectoral Relationships in Social Welfare
Brown’s (2019) article indicates that since the 1960s, the increased use of program evaluation has been a corollary of the expansion of government support for social welfare. Yet the use of POE has persisted even during periods of fiscal austerity. Brown highlights Suchman’s (1967) observation that a key objective of POE was “to separate the program itself as a stimulus to change from the staff and organization carrying out the program” (quoted in Brown 2019, 734). In this new “age of accountability” (e.g., Briar 1973), researchers were discouraged by the finding that casework was ineffective, a conclusion that prompted a professional response akin to that following Abraham Flexner’s speech at the 1915 National Conference of Charities and Corrections. A major consequence of this response, reflected in the social work literature of the day, was the separation of social programs from their staff based on the perspective that agencies were merely the administrative vehicles in which transferable interventions occurred (Reisch and Ephross 1983).
The next several decades saw widespread “public use of the private sector” (Smith 1975) and changes in the nature of philanthropy, which resulted from shifts in the goals of United Funds that Bakko (2019) describes and from the so-called tax reform of the 1980s. These changes increased existing concerns about organizational accountability. During this period, the current split between those who implement services and those who evaluate their outcomes emerged. At the same time, the spread of neoliberal rationales produced the “marketization of welfare” (Salamon 2015) that transformed long-standing patterns of inter- and intrasectoral relationships. As a result, program evaluation became another means for service providers to compete over scarce resources, rather than an incentive for interorganizational collaboration.
One indirect consequence of these developments was a decline in social work’s leadership in the systems the profession had created and directed. Another was the industrialization of social service work (Fabricant and Burghardt 1992) that resulted from the transformation of distinct forms of intervention into a generic concept of social work treatment. A third was the growing division of labor between researchers and practitioners and the organizations in which they worked. This exacerbated chronic, so-called town-gown tensions between universities and the community agencies they served and on which they depended for political support and field placements. In response, some social work leaders attempted to recenter practice experience through the introduction of the concept of the “clinical scientist,” which harked back to the earlier efforts of pragmatists to link research and practice and make them more participatory and democratic. Ironically, however, both practitioners and researchers, particularly those in academic settings, largely resisted this effort.
The transformation of social welfare that occurred during the 1960s, prompted by civil unrest and the War on Poverty, produced significant changes in organizational relations within the nonprofit sector and between the nonprofit sector and government. Bakko’s (2019) study finds that the response of the United Foundation in Detroit to dramatic changes in the region’s social and political environment was not atypical. Throughout the United States, federated funding systems and, later, philanthropic foundations used a range of managerial tools to impose greater control over resource distribution and the focus of service provision in the nonprofit sector.
In combination with shifts in public policy during the 1960s and 1970s, this altered the power dynamics within the so-called independent sector and transformed relationships between funders, public and private, and nonprofit service organizations. The primary clients of United Funds, for example, became corporate and individual donors rather than member agencies or the people they sought to help. They shifted toward service-based funding governed by a subjective priority system, rationalized by the use of purportedly objective assessment methods to determine community service needs. At the same time, the expansion of government contracting to nonprofits “created a mutual reliance among these sectors in delivering welfare services, grew the numbers of nonprofits, and altered nonprofit structures, goals, and operations to gear them toward professionalized direct service” (Bakko 2019, 769). Although many community organizations criticized these changes, fiscal pressures resulting from periodic government cutbacks from the 1970s to the present and the absence of viable resource alternatives compelled nonprofit organizations to adopt market mechanisms internally to survive in the new, hypercompetitive funding environment.
Several articles in this issue describe how the response to similar environmental developments during the Progressive Era was quite different, as reflected by the narratives of the Visiting Teachers Movement (VTM), the Pittsburgh Survey, and the settlement house movement. In contrast to today’s increased competition occurring under the guise of (largely compulsory) collaboration, social service providers of that time focused on interprofessional and interorganizational cooperation, emphasized inter- and intragroup communication, and promoted a more democratic vision of social services through a combination of strategies. Both settlement house residents and participants in the VTM resisted elite pressures to specialize, in sharp contrast to the approach of the COS and the growing field of psychiatric social work, especially in the child welfare arena.
As Charles and Stone’s (2019) article reveals, the VTM sought to overcome emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries and to bridge the gap between children’s school and family lives through a combination of services and advocacy, as did their counterparts in the settlement house movement. This constituted a direct challenge to the educational establishment that promoted a one-size-fits-all model that would prepare students for the roles society expected them to fill. Both the settlement movement progressives who played key roles in the Pittsburgh Survey and the visiting teachers developed new ways to disseminate their ideas and acquire political support. They also saw a major part of their role as to rewrite prevailing narratives about the origins of critical social issues, the people they affected, and the goals of policies and programs designed to address them. In this regard, they reflected the influence of pragmatism, especially the ideas of John Dewey, and bore striking resemblance to other progressive social movements of the period, such as public health (Reisch 2012).
A common trait of virtually all reform-minded groups in the social welfare field of the early twentieth century was their effort to develop powerful connections to other professional organizations and funders. Where they differed was in their pursuit of professional status through definition of their specific contributions to social reform and through the acquisition of educational and legal credentials. The VTM and COS succeeded in this endeavor, whereas the settlement house movement struggled to define its unique “service commodity” (Wenocur and Reisch 1989).
The drive to enhance their professional status ultimately led participants in the VTM (and other branches of social work) to retreat from social reform and political practice and move toward individually focused, more scientific and psychiatrically based practice during the mid-twentieth century, when the environment became less receptive, even hostile to social change (Reisch and Andrews 2002). Charles and Stone (2019) assert that the history of school social work since that time reveals an ongoing and unresolved tension between treating individual pathology through behavioral health interventions and community-focused practice, recently exemplified by the community schools movement.
Social Work With Marginalized Populations
The articles in this special issue demonstrate that although social workers in various fields of practice shared the goals of social reform and social change, and were sympathetic to the conditions of the people with whom they worked and whose lives they studied, they largely did not abandon the assimilationist perspective of the dominant culture. For example, much like the efforts of even the most supposedly progressive settlement house workers, the VTM focused on cultural assimilation as the solution to immigrants’ problems, despite the movement’s use of democratic rhetoric. This enabled the visiting teachers to maintain professional dominance in the design and delivery of services.
The articles by Deborah Thibeault and Michael S. Spencer (2019), “The Indian Adoption Project and the Profession of Social Work,” and Charles and Stone illustrate how in different eras, under the banner of benevolence, the underlying assimilationist assumptions of social workers produced damaging, if unintended, consequences for marginalized individuals and families. Just as many American Indian families consented to the removal of their children in response to the promise that doing so would give their children a better life (though such consent must be seen as to some extent coerced), members of the VTM used the poverty and cultural differences of immigrant children to rationalize removal from their families. These authors argue in different ways and with different levels of intensity that the overarching goal of the government, often abetted by social workers and social work organizations in both the public and private sectors, was to compel these children, intentionally or not, to adopt the standards of colonizers or social superiors.
This subjective view of human needs and what constituted “doing good” (Gaylin et al. 1978) influenced US social policy and practice throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examples range from the Children’s Aid Society’s use of so-called orphan trains, to the Indian Schools created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to so-called welfare reform in the 1990s. In each of these cases, political and cultural obstacles prevented, weakened, or misdirected the change-oriented goals of activists and reform-minded researchers. This was and continues to be particularly true when racial, ethnic, or religious differences between service providers and service recipients exist. As Thibeault and Spencer (2019) demonstrate, and as other authors have similarly asserted, social workers have been reluctant to confront the issues of institutional racism and cultural hegemony and have rarely taken action that matches the profession’s sweeping rhetorical statements.
Social work’s response to the challenges faced by marginalized populations frequently reflected a seemingly intractable cultural divide that separated social workers from the people with whom they worked. In nearly every area of social work practice, the goals and consequences of proposed and implemented reforms both reaffirmed and perpetuated a class- and race-based hierarchy from which the reformers benefited (Iglehart and Becerra 2011). To a considerable extent, this contradiction between stated intentions and practice consequences persists today, particularly in the profession’s relationship with low-income and immigrant families and people of color.
The VTM reformers, like other social workers then and now, combined a paternalistic approach with recognition that the urgent social issues of their era required creative policy and programmatic responses. The responses they proposed were strikingly similar to those produced by settlement house workers and social workers in the public health and child welfare fields. In fact, there was considerable overlap among these areas of the emerging social work profession.
Similar to the effects of economic globalization during the past 4 decades, the transformation of the US economy a century ago altered virtually all aspects of the social welfare system and influenced the direction of social reform. It tended to strengthen existing institutions and sustain the ideologies and cultural values that rationalized them. Under these circumstances, it was a challenge for social workers, such as those in the Visiting Teacher, child-saving, and settlement house movements, to resist these trends and redirect the social service system toward empowerment-oriented goals (Simon 1994).
Sometimes, however, unrecognized contradictions in their work produced unintended and unfortunate consequences. For example, although the VTM sought to connect students’ home and school lives to promote the healthy development of the whole child, the use of home visitations often led visiting teachers and other authorities to blame the home environment for students’ problems. This increased the opportunity and justification for the state to control the lives of the people the VTM was committed to serve. We can observe a similar phenomenon in interventions by settlement house workers and COS friendly visitors, however benevolent their original intentions (Margolin 1997; Park and Kemp 2006; Park 2019). In addition, the goals of the VTM, like those of social workers in the child-saving movement, ultimately produced policies, such as compulsory education laws and welfare reform, whose uneven, often arbitrary enforcement provided another means to control, coerce, and punish marginalized populations (Soss et al. 2011).
The Philosophical and Theoretical Foundation of Social Work
One of the main consequences of social work’s current approach to its history is the separation of the field’s diverse branches from each other in its dominant narratives. In addition, there is a lack of attention to the various philosophical and theoretical influences on its development. For example, with a few notable exceptions (Elshtain 2002; Knight 2005), most histories of social work omit any discussion of how intellectual pursuits shaped the work of celebrated pioneers like Jane Addams, and how diverse strands of philosophy and social science theory influence current practice (Lewis 1983; Reamer 1993, 1994). Berringer (2019) points out how this historiographical and thematic isolation has reinforced mainstream views of the profession’s development and how descriptions of social work’s past have largely ignored the contributions of key individuals or groups, particularly those from marginalized segments of society.
Among the social work pioneers whom Berringer, quoting Reuland (2015), identifies as “ghostly presences” (Berringer 2019, 626) is Jessie Taft, one of the founders of the Functional School of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, which competed for professional dominance in the 1930s and 1940s with its so-called diagnostic rival at the New York School (now the Columbia University School of Social Work). Taft’s spectral presence within accounts of the profession’s history not only obscures her efforts to integrate pragmatism into social work theory and practice; it also overlooks the influence of the Functional School itself. Its unacknowledged contributions include the emphasis on the role of the organizational context and the concept of time in the development of the practice relationship and the importance of the will—what we now term “individual agency” or “empowerment” (Dore 1990).
Another serious omission in social work historiography is the contribution of W. E. B. DuBois, particularly his groundbreaking works The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996) and The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1989). Although DuBois was influenced by William James, his mentor at Harvard University, Berringer shows how he went beyond James’s focus on the individual to develop a perspective that emphasized the structural and the contextual. This led him to develop a theory of race and racism in the United States that has clear implications for contemporary social work practice, politics, education, and research through a synthesis of his ideas with twenty-first-century efforts to promote critical consciousness, apply an intersectional perspective, and emphasize the use of praxis. Recognizing the role played by scholars of color such as DuBois would also expand current historical inquiry to include the overlooked contributions of other African American social reformers and thinkers, such as Thyra Edwards, whom DuBois and other proponents of pragmatism influenced (Carlton-LaNey 1999, 2001).
Berringer (2019) argues that “engagement with pragmatist thought and the intersecting histories of Progressive Era pragmatists and social reformers can effectively address persistent epistemological and practical concerns in the field of social work” (610). For example, pragmatism emphasized the centrality of experience and context in knowledge creation, the impermanence of all knowledge, the unity of thought and action, the value of recognizing diverse ways of knowing, the vital role of human relationships, and the value of experimentalism and participatory democracy in both research and practice. Pragmatism, in her view, raises important questions about the underlying assumptions of the Grand Challenges and, as Brown discusses, the current emphasis on measurable outcomes of practice interventions instead of democratic, participatory processes. It also stresses the universal nature of human potential and, similar to Martha Nussbaum’s (2011) arguments, supports policies that enable people to achieve their capabilities.
Another central tenet of pragmatism present in contemporary social work theory and practice is the fundamentally social nature of the self, a revolutionary idea introduced by George Herbert Mead. Mead (2015) maintained that the development of the self requires individuals to reflect upon and interpret the behavior of others. This perspective is the basis of cultural competence, cultural humility, and meaning making in practice with both diverse individuals and groups. Ironically, given their place of honor in social work history, these ideas appeared in both the democratic perspective of settlement house workers and the person-in-environment approach developed by Mary Richmond, yet most histories largely ignore the influence of the notion of the social self on the practices of these movements.
Similar to proponents of pragmatism, the participants in the VTM understood their work as having a combined role for theory and practice—an approach Charles and Stone (2019) term “praxis.” Applying methods similar to those later proposed by Freire (1970), the visiting teachers complemented their work with children and families with advocacy on behalf of structural changes, while attempting to build transformational theory that would overturn the nation’s alienating educational systems. Like many of their social work contemporaries, members of the VTM integrated principles derived from pragmatism into their practice. These concepts included experimentalism, the importance of relationships, the key role of the environment, and the need to bridge the gaps between various aspects of people’s lives. In ways remarkably similar to the expansion of the COS, the settlement house movement, and the United Fund movement, the ideas of the VTM spread through a combination of deliberate efforts at dissemination and as an outgrowth of similar, independent initiatives.
Conclusion: Implications of Social Work’s History for the Contemporary Environment
Today, the rights of people of color, indigenous peoples, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, women, and low-income Americans are under constant and growing threat. To fulfill our stated ethical obligations, social workers in all fields of practice and organizational settings will need to take concerted and strategic action. As the articles in this special issue illustrate, a more in-depth, critical understanding of the profession’s history can assist us in recognizing and responding to the structural, racial, political, and ideological dynamics shaping current practice and policy realities. This concluding section briefly addresses the implications of history for change-oriented social work practice, the research and knowledge development required to engage in such practice, and the role of social work education in preparing the next generation of practitioners.
Social Work Practice and Social Change
Charles and Stone (2019) pose three questions regarding the VTM that we could apply to all the subjects covered by the contributions to this issue. To paraphrase, the questions are as follows: First, what lessons from this history raise challenges for the profession in this particular historical moment? Second, based on these lessons, how should we revise the goals and methods of our current practice, research, and education? And third, how can the profession expand its current horizons to meet the increasingly complex problems of the future? The evolution of the VTM and its relationship to the social and political context reflect striking parallels to current social work practice, not merely in or with schools, but regarding such issues as the immigration and refugee crisis.
As numerous scholars, including Specht and Courtney (1994), have pointed out for decades, and as recent studies by the National Association of Social Workers (2017, 2019) confirm, social work practice now largely focuses on interventions with individuals and families, primarily in child welfare or behavioral health settings. Fewer practitioners engage in community-building efforts, policy advocacy, or organizing for social change. There has even been a marked decline in the number of social workers in leadership roles as administrators or policy makers.
Charles and Stone’s analysis of the VTM thus raises important questions for the profession as a whole: Are our current organizational structures sufficient to meet the challenges we face in the practice environment? Can we fulfill our democratic mission in ways that are both innovative and responsive to people’s day-to-day challenges? Is the current one-size-fits-all model of practice, segmented by method, field, or population, best suited to address people’s needs and aspirations in an increasingly diverse society? How can we develop a knowledge base that respects different ways of viewing and acting within the world without producing an assortment of fragmented practice frameworks? How should we define the desired outcomes of policies and services and determine whether we have achieved them?
Regarding the last question, Brown (2019) emphasizes the importance of recognizing both the time required for a specific change to occur and the degree of change sought. Like the analyses of Berringer and Ratliff, Brown points out the key role of relationships in shaping human service outcomes and the dynamic nature of the context in which these relationships take shape. In slightly different ways, these authors, along with Charles and Stone, stress the importance of process and flexibility in assessing outcomes and balancing the satisfaction of people’s basic needs with the psychosocial changes interventions produce in service consumers in measuring the attainment of policy and practice goals. This would require (1) a shift away from short-term measurement frameworks that frequently characterize judgments in both the private and public sectors and (2) a significant adjustment in our understanding of the role of social welfare in society—that is, we require a new conception that integrates the need for sustained, structural change, not just personal transformation.
Social Work Research and Knowledge Development
The shift from an individually focused to a structural analysis also has serious implications for the goals of social work research and knowledge development. It would require the profession to resolve the ongoing tension between the demand for rigorous methodologies in the evaluation of organizationally specific interventions and the need to develop effective interventions that transcend particular spatial contexts. On a practice level, it raises the question of how to address what Brown (2019) refers to as the “deep-rooted conflict between scientific aspirations and organizational constraints that have continually dogged human service professionals” (744). Berringer (2019) suggests that the answer may lie in a return to the experimentalism that pragmatists like Jane Addams and her political descendants during the New Deal embraced. This approach would seek to inform practice with highly contextualized knowledge that is “bounded in time, place, and person” (Rein and White 1981; quoted in Berringer 2019, 621) that would combine respect for the scientific method and recognition of the importance of democratic participation in the design, implementation, and evaluation of research.
Several of the contributors to this issue suggest that questions of social work knowledge are never purely abstract formulations. They have significant real-world consequences that stretch today beyond national boundaries. Berringer (2019) asserts that establishing a community of inquiry rather than restricting the pursuit of knowledge narrowly to academic researchers would reaffirm social work’s values of reflexivity while maintaining high research standards and professional ethics. By creating a reciprocal relationship between knowledge and practice, it would also disrupt the current tendency to privilege certain forms of research over others. Pragmatism involves many of the same critiques of grand narratives and objectivism that postmodern scholars endorse, but within certain epistemological, ethical, and political limits.
Brown’s article adds a practical dimension to this issue. He argues that a persistent trend in social work history “is the seemingly perennial overestimation of service agency capacity for outcome evaluation” (Brown 2019, 746). Echoing Reid and Zettergren (1999), he suggests that “conceptions of accountability should be broadened to reflect the idea of appropriate practice … and not simply be demonstrations of client change or the effectiveness of whatever interventions happen to be used” (quoted in Brown 2019, 747). This change would place more emphasis on the process of service delivery and the role of practitioners and service recipients in evaluating the effectiveness of service outcomes, particularly those that have been traditionally difficult to measure.
Social Work Practice and Power
In the current climate of fiscal austerity, growing inequality, and increased demonization of many of the people with whom we work, the role of power in social work practice has never been more important. The articles by Nadel, Thibeault and Spencer, Bakko, and Charles and Stone all describe events, from the Progressive Era through the 1960s and into the twenty-first century, in which the unequal distribution of political, economic, and cultural power affected the course of social work’s development. Despite the expansion of social welfare and the growth of the social work profession during the past century, this imbalance still exists.
Ratliff (2019) maintains that the use of an analytic lens based on the concept of heterotopias can help explicate how power imbalances operate in the social services and provide the basis for the development of emancipatory forms of practice. Citing Sousa and colleagues (2019), he draws attention to the relationship between space and institutional and interpersonal violence, and of the role that a theoretical explanation of place might play in fostering collaboration and reducing long-standing structural inequities (Bronstein 2003). This approach recognizes the inherently political nature of social work and its potential to formulate both antioppressive narratives and strategies of resistance (Dominelli 2002; Reisch 2013).
Ratliff’s approach also provides the basis for asking a series of provocative, essential questions about the functions of social policy and social work practice in contemporary society. These include inquiries about how we justify the intervention models we employ, the stated and unstated goals of social work programs and how they might change over time, the effects of the location (place and space) in which services are provided, the role of time in the creation of policies and services, the processes of exclusion and inclusion used to determine who receives services, and how agency-based services interact with the spatial contexts in which they exist. Addressing these questions, Ratliff asserts, would help illuminate the complex power dynamics that influence all aspects of social work practice, enable practitioners to use this power more effectively, and thereby help the profession achieve its historic mission.
Bakko (2019) points out a specific manifestation of the power dynamics that shape the environment of contemporary practice: the role of funding. He cites a recent report that connects the spread of market-oriented management in the human services with decreased professional and organizational autonomy, a decline in social work advocacy, and the denial of services to people who are unable to pay for services or face particularly challenging problems. His discussion of the role of boundaries in the social welfare field, which complements the arguments presented by Ratliff, provides useful insights that can assist social workers in negotiating the increasingly complex fiscal context.
Bakko (2019) asserts that increased focus on the development of more equitable, transparent, and participatory relationships among stakeholders in all aspects of the social services, including decisions about resource allocation, can facilitate the emergence of more responsive and adequately financed programs. (Berringer and several other contributors to this issue also emphasize this point.) This underscores the need for social workers to promote changes in the nature of philanthropy at the community level through the application of collective impact models.
Social Work Education
Lastly, the articles in this special issue contain some valuable suggestions for revising or expanding the boundaries of social work education. Berringer and Ratliff propose additions to social work’s philosophical and theoretical foundations: the rediscovery of pragmatism (Berringer) and the introduction of social topology (Ratliff). Berringer argues that pragmatism could enhance contemporary social work education and practice in several ways: It could improve the quality of practice research and practice-focused teaching. It could stimulate a productive dialogue about the nature and use of knowledge and research. It could revitalize the philosophical and theoretical basis of social work and reinvigorate the intellectual quality of current scholarship. It could resolve persistent tensions between humanistic philosophy and science and help social workers develop a philosophy compatible with the scientific method. Lastly, citing Hothersall (2015, 2017), she argues that the integration of pragmatism could enable the profession to achieve its ethical and epistemological goals through a more inclusive approach to research and practice in both classroom and field settings. Ratliff makes a similar assertion about the potential impact of social topology.
The contributors to this issue also emphasize the importance of filling gaps in the knowledge of aspiring social workers in ways that would have a direct effect on their practice. For example, Thibeault and Spencer (2019) maintain that the large cohort of social work students entering the child welfare field should understand the content and context of major policies such as the Indian Child Welfare Act and recent court decisions that have significantly altered its application. In combination with the immigration and social welfare policies of the Trump administration, these judicial rulings have altered the policy discourse on issues affecting all racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in the United States.
In the current environment, the acquisition of cultural competence and cultural humility is a necessary but insufficient step for the development of effective practice skills and ethical professional behavior. To understand the anger of the African American community toward the police; the fear in the Muslim, immigrant, and refugee communities created by the policies of the Trump administration; the motivations behind the #MeToo movement; and the despair among indigenous peoples, social workers need to expand our knowledge of the historical forces that have marginalized and stigmatized these populations. Perhaps the profession needs to publish something analogous to the “1619 Project” recently launched by the New York Times and make it required reading for all students and faculty. This publication could complement the work in progress under the auspices of the Grand Challenges and, unlike that initiative, demonstrate the interconnectedness of past, present, and future issues. As Charles and Stone (2019) suggest, the transmission of specialized knowledge to our students through innovative models of social work education may be as much a political project as a practical necessity. In the final analysis, social workers need to recognize, as James Baldwin (1985) wrote, that “history does not refer merely, or even principally to the past… . We carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways. It is literally present in all that we do.”
Michael Reisch is professor emeritus in the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland. He has written extensively on the history and philosophy of social welfare and social work, and on contemporary policy and practice issues. A forthcoming book is Social Work Ethics in a Changing Society.
References
American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. n.d. “The Grand Challenges for Social Work.” Accessed September 10, 2019. http://grandchallengesforsocialwork.org/grand-challenges-initiative/about/ .Bakko, Matthew. 2019. “Protecting and Expanding Control: A Philanthropy’s Negotiation of Welfare System Change during the War on Poverty.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 764–803. Baldwin, James. 1985. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985. New York: St. Martin’s. Berringer, Kathryn R. 2019. “Re-examining Epistemological Debates in Social Work through American Pragmatism.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 608–39. Brekke, John S. 2012. “Shaping a Science of Social Work.” Research on Social Work Practice 22 (5): 455–64. Briar, Scott. 1973. “The Age of Accountability.” Social Work 18 (1): 2–114. Bronstein, Laura R. 2003. “A Model for Interdisciplinary Collaboration.” Social Work 48 (3): 297–306. Brown, Maoz. 2019. “Constructing Accountability: The Development and Delegation of Outcome Evaluation in American Social Work.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 712–63. Carlton-LaNey, Iris. 1999. “African American Social Work Pioneers’ Response to Need.” Social Work 44 (4): 311–21. ———. 2001. African American Leadership: An Empowerment Tradition in Social Welfare History. Washington, DC: NASW. Charles, Jessica, and Susan Stone. 2019. “Revisiting the Visiting Teacher: Relearning the Lessons of the Whole-Child Approach.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 833–61. Cooke, Nicole A. 2018. Fake News and Alternate Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era. Chicago: ALA. Deborah, Thibeault, and Michael S. Spencer. 2019. “The Indian Adoption Project and the Profession of Social Work.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 804–32. Dominelli, Lena. 2002. Anti-Oppressive Social Work Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dore, Martha M. 1990. “Functional Theory: Its History and Influence on Contemporary Social Work Practice.” Social Service Review 64 (3): 358–74. DuBois, W. E. B. (1899) 1996. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. (1903) 1989. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 2002. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books. Fabricant, Michael B., and Steve Burghardt. 1992. The Welfare State Crisis and the Transformation of Social Service Work. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Faulkner, William. 1919. Requiem for a Nun. London: Chatto and Windus. Flexner, Abraham. 1915. “Is Social Work a Profession?” 576–90 in Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections. Chicago: Hildmann. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias.” Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury. Gaylin, Willard, Steven Marcus, David J. Rothman, and Ira Glasser. 1978. Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence. New York: Pantheon. Gorz, André. 1967. Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, translated by Martin A. Nicolaus and Victoria Ortiz. Boston: Beacon. Gutsche, Robert E., Jr., ed. 2018. The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy. New York: Routledge. Hothersall, Steve J. 2015. “Epistemology and Social Work: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice through Philosophical Pragmatism.” Social Work and Social Sciences Review 18 (3): 1–35. ———. 2017. “‘Everyday Knowledge’: A Mixed-Methods Study Using Factor Analysis and Narrative Approaches to Explore Social Workers’ Knowledge.” Social Work and Social Sciences Review 19 (2): 33–64. Iglehart, Alfreda P., and Rosina M. Becerra. 2011. Social Services and the Ethnic Community: History and Analysis. 2nd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Kemp, Susan P. 2010. “Place Matters: Toward a Rejuvenated Theory of Environment for Direct Social Work Practice.” 114–45 in Reshaping Theory in Contemporary Social Work: Toward a Critical Pluralism in Clinical Practice, edited by William Borden. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2011. “Recentring Environment in Social Work Practice: Necessity, Opportunity, Challenge.” British Journal of Social Work 41 (6): 1198–1210. Knight, Louise W. 2005. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Harold. 1983. The Intellectual Base of Social Work Practice: Tools for Thought in a Helping Profession. New York: Haworth. Margolin, Leslie. 1997. Under the Cover of Kindness: The Invention of Social Work. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mead, George Herbert. 2015. Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nadel, Meryl. 2019. “The Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–1908: Divergent Paths to Change.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 678–711. National Association of Social Workers. 2017. “Profile of the Social Work Workforce: Report to the Council on Social Work Education and the National Workforce Initiative Steering Committee.” National Association of Social Workers, Washington, DC. ———. 2019. “From Social Work Education to Social Work Practice: Results of the Survey of 2018 Social Work Graduates: Report to the Council on Social Work Education and the National Workforce Initiative Steering Committee.” National Association of Social Workers, Washington, DC. Nussbaum, Martha. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Park, Yoosun. 2019. Facilitating Injustice: The Complicity of Social Workers in the Forced Removal and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941–1946. New York: Oxford University Press. Park, Yoosun, and Susan P. Kemp. 2006. “‘Little Alien Colonies’: Representations of Immigrants and Their Neighborhoods in Social Work Discourse, 1875–1924.” Social Service Review 80 (4): 705–34. Ratliff, G. Allen. 2019. “Social Work, Place, and Power: Applying Heterotopian Principles to the Social Topology of Social Work.” Social Service Review 93 (4): 640–77. Reamer, Frederic G. 1993. The Philosophical Foundations of Social Work. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1994. The Foundations of Social Work Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Reid, William J., and Pamela Zettergren. 1999. “A Perspective on Empirical Practice.” 41–62 in Evaluation and Social Work Practice, edited by Ian Shaw and Joyce Lishman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rein, Martin, and Sheldon H. White. 1981. “Knowledge for Practice.” Social Service Review 55 (1): 1–41. Reisch, Michael. 2012. “The Challenges of Health Care Reform for Hospital Social Work in the U.S.” Social Work in Health Care 51 (10): 873–93. ———. 2013. “Social Work Education and the Neoliberal Challenge: The U.S. Response to Increasing Global Inequality.” Social Work Education 32 (6): 715–33. ———. 2014. “The End of Social Welfare History: Implications for Social Work Education.” Paper presented at the Annual Program Meeting of the Council on Social Work Education, Tampa, FL. Reisch, Michael, and Janice Andrews. 2002. The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States. New York: Routledge. Reisch, Michael, and Paul H. Ephross. 1983. “Social Workers and Social Agencies: Images of Which Reality?” Social Casework 64 (7): 394–405. Reuland, John. 2015. “The Social Worker’s License: Reconstructing Social Selves in the Work of Jessie Taft and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Modernism/Modernity 22 (1): 1–22. Salamon, Lester M. 2015. The Resilient Sector Revisited: The New Challenge to Nonprofit America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Shaw, Ian. 2016. Social Work Science. New York: Columbia University Press. Sherraden, Michael, Richard P. Barth, John Brekke, Mark W. Fraser, Ron Manderscheid, and Deborah K. Padgett. 2015. “Social Is Fundamental: Introduction and Context for Grand Challenges for Social Work.” Working Paper no. 1. Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative. St. Louis, MO: American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. Simon, Barbara Levy. 1994. The Empowerment Tradition in American Social Work: A History. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Bruce L. R. 1975. The New Political Economy: The Public Use of the Private Sector. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Soss, Joe, Richard C. Ford, and Sanford F. Schram. 2011. Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sousa, Cindy A., Susan P. Kemp, and Mona El-Zuhairi. 2019. “Place as a Social Determinant of Health: Narratives of Trauma and Homeland among Palestinian Women.” British Journal of Social Work 49 (4): 963–82. Specht, Harry, and Mark E. Courtney. 1994. Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned Its Mission. New York: Free Press. Suchman, Edward A. 1967. Evaluative Research: Principles and Practice in Public Service & Social Action Programs. New York: Russell Sage. Thompson, E. P. 1971. “Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context.” Midland History 3:41–55. Wenocur, Stanley, and Michael Reisch. 1989. From Charity to Enterprise: The Development of American Social Work in a Market Economy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.