Acknowledgments
I am indebted throughout this essay to conversations with community agencies in parts of South and East Asia, and especially to Dr Mark Hardy at the University of York, UK.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The conditional clause is necessary. The term ‘practice research’ has been deployed in a different way in the USA, to refer to research that is centrally concerned with social work practice (e.g. Thyer, Citation1989).
2. This has not been the same in every profession. The extensive literature a generation ago on kindred work in the field of education was often sharply dubious of its merits (c.f. Atkinson & Delamont, Citation1993; Burgess, Citation1980; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, Citation1990; Hammersley, Citation1993).
3. I paraphrase, edit, and also draw from subsequent correspondence.
4. I have written at length about these ways of thinking in Shaw (Citation2016b).
6. In 1942 Los Alamos was chosen by the U.S. government as the location for the Atomic Research Laboratory, then known as the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear-fission, or atomic, bomb.
7. Interviewed for Times Higher Education, 22 July 2010.
8. I have written fairly extensively elsewhere about the forgotten heritage of sociological social work in the USA, through figures such as Stuart Queen, Robert Burgess, Clifford Shaw, Pauline Young, Erle Fiske Young and perhaps pre-eminently Ada Sheffield (e.g. Shaw, Citation2014, Citation2015, Citation2016a; Shaw & Lau, Citation2019, Citation2019). It was Erle Fiske Young’s work, for example, that Park thought ‘destined to change fundamentally our whole concept of case histories’ (Park, Citation1924, p. 263). Until at least 1930, his colleague, Ernest Burgess, was even more committed to an active kinship between social work and sociology through a ‘practical sociology’ (Burgess, Citation1916, p. 492; c.f.; Burgess, Citation1923, Citation1927, Citation1928).
9. In the University of Chicago archives there is a fascinating, apparently unread, typescript autobiography by Queen of his academic life. I have drawn in this elsewhere (Shaw, Citation2015).
11. Martin Davies was addressing comparable questions in his text, The Essential Social Worker (Davies, Citation1994), in his defence of social work having a ‘maintenance’ function.
12. An idea that also undergirds present arguments regarding reparations for the heritage of slavery.
Thyer, B. (1989). First principles of practice research. British Journal of Social Work, 19(1), 309–323. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/19.4.309 Atkinson, P., & Delamont, S. (1993). Bread and dreams or bread and circuses? A critique of case study research in evaluation. In M. Hammersley (Ed.), Controversies in the classroom. Open University Press. Burgess, R. (1980). Some fieldwork problems in teacher-based research. British Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/0141192800060205 Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (1990). Research on teaching and teacher research: The issues that divide. Educational Researcher, 19(2), 2–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/1176596 Hammersley, M. (1993). On the teacher as researcher. Educational Action Research, 1(3), 425–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965079930010308 Shaw, I. (2016b). Social work science. Columbia University Press. Shaw, I. (2014). Sociological social work: A cartoon. European Journal of Social Work, 17(5), 754–770. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691457.2014.932274 Shaw, I. (2015). Sociological social workers: A history of the present? Nordic Journal of Social Work Research, 5(sup1), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2015.1036908 Shaw, I. (2016a). Case work: Re-forming the relationship between sociology and social work. Qualitative Research, 16(1), 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794114567497 Shaw, I., & Lau, D. (2019). Ada Eliot Sheffield: Sociological inquiry in social work. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M. Hardy, & H. Williams (Eds.), Research methods foundations: An encyclopaedia. Sage Publications. Shaw, I., & Lau, D. (2019). Ada Eliot Sheffield: Sociological inquiry in social work. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, M. Hardy, & H. Williams (Eds.), Research methods foundations: An encyclopaedia. Sage Publications. Park, R. E. (1924). The significance of social research in social service. Journal of Applied Sociology, 8:5(May–June), 263–267. Burgess, E. W. (1916). The social survey: A field for constructive service by departments of sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 21(4), 492–500. https://doi.org/10.1086/212524 Burgess, E. W. (1923). The interdependency of sociology and social work. Journal of Social Forces, 1(4), 366–370. https://doi.org/10.2307/3004940 Burgess, E. W. (1927, October). The contribution of sociology to family social work. The Family, 8(6), 191–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/104438942700800605 Burgess, E. W. (1928). What social case records should contain to be useful for sociological interpretation. Social Forces, 6(4), 524–532. https://doi.org/10.2307/3004329 Shaw, I. (2015). Sociological social workers: A history of the present? Nordic Journal of Social Work Research, 5(sup1), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2015.1036908 Davies, M. (1994). The Essential social Worker. Routledge.
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