What is Professional Social Work?

Abstract

The argument in this book is that social work is a three-way discourse; every bit of practice, all practice ideas, all social work agency organisation and all welfare policy is a rubbing up of three views of social work against each other. I argue that this discourse plays out the struggle about the claim: these three views are different ways of dealing with the claim. Figure 1.1 shows them at the corners of a triangle; the triangle represents the discourse between them, a field of debate that covers all social work. When I first described these three views, in the first edition of this book, I used complex names for them, but more recently, people have used simpler terms, so in this edition, I concentrate on the simpler terms, and give the complex names in this figure for reference. The important differences between these views of social work connect with different political views about how welfare should be provided.

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