Origins Of Social Work Research Articles

Bridging the gap between social work and community development: implementing a post-graduate training partnership

ABSTRACT Although, arguably, the origins of social work in the UK have been closely aligned to community development in the past few decades, social work has occupied a bureaucratic landscape focusing primarily on individual risks and needs, leading to both fields drifting further apart. Dismantling of shared values and practices was fueled by layers of government policy and legislation, driven by a neoliberal agenda and public management reforms. However, a horizon of hope emerged when university staff in Social Work and Community Development Departments in Northern Ireland were approached to examine the need to reintroduce community development principles and practices into social work training. This paper aims to trace the development of a post-graduate diploma in community development approaches for professional social workers and analyses research that explores community development as the essence of social work. The programme was developed through a synergistic partnership between university, health trusts and the professional awarding body. Tracking 4 years of programme delivery, the paper highlights the effectiveness of, and learning from, collaboration between the two professions at strategic, technical, and operational levels. We posit here well-learned lessons for future collaborations and make recommendations providing a route map to mainstreaming community development in social work practice.

The Emergence of Social Work Research Between Professionalisation and Nation-Building: A Transnational Case Study

Abstract This study explores the transnational history of social work and, as a case study, examines the movement of social work research between Germany and Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s. This transnational circulation of knowledge and ideas was driven by a group of German-Jewish social workers who migrated to Palestine and helped establish the profession in the new country. Particular attention is paid to early professional schools of social work, which served as hubs for knowledge circulation and laid the academic foundations of social work long before the discipline found its final form. To study this translation process, this article analyses research activities at Alice Salomon’s Academy for Social and Educational Women's Work in Berlin and Siddy Wronsky’s School of Social Services in Jerusalem. Both institutes were influential in establishing the profession in their countries and closely linked the emerging social work training and research. As a transnational research team, we approached and analysed these activities through archival files and documents in Israel and Germany. This analysis is framed by assumptions about the transnational translation of knowledge and, to add context, presents findings on the origins of social work in both countries and its societal embeddedness.

Una revisión del Trabajo Social con migrantes y refugiados. Construyendo nuevas bases teóricas y metodológicas

Intervention with the immigrant and refugee population has been a fundamental component in the origins of social work. In this article we try to show the main contributions from social work to understanding and intervention with migrant and refugee populations, both from the Spanish experience and from other countries. Despite the long tradition of social work in this field and its centrality in caring for migrants and refugees, our discipline continues to have difficulties in articulating sufficiently solid theoretical and methodological proposals.

The professionalization of social work in England

This paper contextualizes current issues regarding the professionalization of social work in England within its historical development. Despite the early origins of social work in England (as in the rest of the United Kingdom) in the mid-nineteenth century, formal regulation and registration of social work professionals is a recent development. A key tension between social work's roles in empowering service users and as an agency of the state, that was evident from its early days, continues to impact contemporary social work practice and is reflected in government imperatives to ‘modernize’ social work and service users' accounts of what they value most from social workers. The paper concludes by proposing that the government's modernizing agenda for social work should not discard that which has stood the test of time, simply because it is not ‘modern.’

Working with creative creatures: towards a Christian paradigm for social work theory, with some practical implications

Summary In a previous article (Bowpitt, 1998), I examined the role of Evangelical Christianity as a neglected feature in the historical origins of social work in Britain, arguing that the secular humanist paradigm that came to dominate the profession for the bulk of the twentieth century goes a long way towards explaining that neglect but that the chal lenging of that dominant paradigm may throw light on the recent revival of interest in the importance of religion to social work. The present article seeks to follow up this historical narrative with a normative consideration of what a Christian theological perspective might imply for social work theory and practice today. It does so in the context of an examination of some traditional philosophical difficulties which social work thinkers have encountered with the relationship between the theoretical and ethical foundations of social work. It then argues for an over-arching theoretical account of human nature as a possible way of overcoming these difficulties, and out lines the main features of a Christian theological anthropology as providing just such an account. It finishes by looking at some implications for a Christian approach to social work practice.