Social Work Or Not Social Work — Is That Really The Question? A Reply to Thea Brown and Janet Taylor on Social Workers in Local Government

Abstract

Brown and Taylor's implicit assumption in this issue of Australian Social Work, that Social Work is a discreet category of occupational activities, of which Local Government Community Work may or may not be a part, is challenged in this reply. Each requires practitioners to use certain knowledge, skills and attitudes which clearly have much in common but Community Work is not a subset of social work, rather social workers are a subset of community workers, especially in the Local Government context.

This paper argues that community work is based on values which may be seen to conflict with the dominant mode of bureaucratic professional-client relations and with the current movement towards ‘corporate management’. The essentially political nature of all social welfare jobs, and not just Local Government community work demands that students be exposed to political, economic and administrative analysis if these are to be relevant to their future needs.