Social work

Social Work according to the National Association of Social Workers is: "The professional activity of helping individuals, groups or communities enhance or restore their capacity for social functioning and creating societal conditions favorable to this goal."

The Roads Not Taken

In the early years of the 20th century, and to a lesser extent throughout its history, social work has included a wide variety of proposals and suggestions for alternative development pathways. For example, Simon Patten, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who coined the term spelled out a socio-economic vision of social work as activity of cultural and spiritual uplift facilitating the transition from an economy of scarcity and pain to one of surplus and pleasure, which he saw as the "New Basis of Civilization". Also, at the time, Jane Addams, leader of the national Settlement House movement, articulated a largely civil, nonprofessional vision built around neighborhoods, integration of immigrants into American life and civic engagement.

Professional social service

Instead of any of these alternatives, much of social work in the U.S. has consistently followed the path laid out by Mary Richmond with strong influences from the followers of Sigmund Freud of a social profession, dedicated to "retail reform" using a "medical model" to "treat" individual "cases" in quaisi-medical terms (e.g., diagnosis and treatment) and extensive labeling of "client" conditions as a pre-cursor of action. Although minority voices reminiscent of Patten, Addams, and others have always been present in social work and new ones periodically surface, most of social work activity in the U.S. follows closely the "psycho-social" model first articulated by Miss Richmond.