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Abstract
A search of two major social work databases suggests that contemporary published social work research in the English language may have had very little to say about the engagement of social work and urban life. The focus of this paper is on the illumination that an early historical episode throws on the nature and implications of the affinity of social work research and urban life. Frederick Thrasher's iconic 1920s study of Chicago gangs enables us to illustrate three general claims. First, it paints a probably unwitting picture of a community of civic and scholarly enterprise marked by mutual reciprocity and a sense of shared endeavour even if not agreed standpoints. Second, The Gang affords a record of urban research practice. Finally Thrasher's work, along with other sociological research in Chicago during the 1920s, included a welfare and interventionist mission. I draw conclusions regarding social work theorizing of urban life, the relationship between social work and sociology, and the possible implications for professional training in social work.
Notes
2. My search was limited to titles of papers that included ‘urban’ or ‘city’ in the title and were submitted to the panel assessing social policy, social work and criminology. The publications were, of course, all by academics in British universities.
3. The search terms were of papers that included ‘urban’ AND ‘social work’ somewhere in the database details. This yielded 212 hits. However, on reviewing each hit only 13 were included as relevant. There may be some omissions. For example, the interesting paper by Martin (2007) did not surface.
4. See Wikipedia for a representative statement on mega-cities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity.
5. The inverted commas signal that the category of ‘social work’ is not unambiguous. Cf Shaw (2009) for a developed argument about the significance of this.
10. Ernest Burgess wrote a retrospective on sociological research methods in Citation1945. Platt (1996) has some invaluable analysis, as does Lee (Citation2004).
11. Liberated from my edition!
12. His style has quite some similarity to Howard Williamson's Milltown Boys Revisited( Citation2004).
13. But he sounds a different note on this when, in what seems to be part of a revision for the 1936 edition, he has a long footnote on the growth of organized crime in Chicago and elsewhere, where he concludes that the crime problem ‘has become very grave during the past few years’ (p. 533). It was in 1931 that Al Capone had been convicted of tax evasion.
14. Funding is obviously important here. Though I do not know how The Gang was funded, he gives a synopsis of a large subsequent study funded with a $37.5m grant. This is a huge grant. Taking the consumer price index (a conservative measure) it would be almost $500m at 2009 values (see http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/).
15. I have examined Shaw and Burgess’ work in detail in Shaw (2009).
16. Note he does NOT set this up as casework v community-based intervention, but criticizes both.
17. See Note 6 above.
18. Burgess had much to say about case records in similar analytic vein. See CitationShaw (2009) for an analysis of this neglected material.
19. For good examples related to the sex trade, urban technologies and disability see Allen and Milner (Citation2003), CitationSanders (2004) and Ellison and Burrows (Citation2007).
20. See also her brief article available at: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/qualiti/QualitativeResearcher/QR_Issue10_Jun09.pdf.