Toward the Development of an Integral Approach to Social Work

Abstract

The social work profession has often struggled with how to achieve the conceptual unity and coherence sought in theory, practice, policy, and education. This struggle has often included paradigmatic debates that serve to articulate the broader metatheoretical backgrounds and systems (epistemic domains) from which we understand human behavior. Integralism represents an approach that can potentially transcend social work's dialectical dilemma inherent within the debates between modern and postmodern influences. By combining the epistemological insights and value awareness of the various schools of postmodernism with the methodological and conceptual achievements of modernism, and the partial truths and insights of premodernism, a transcendent or integral approach is conceptualized.

Key Words:

• Social work
• paradigms
• epistemology
• history
• integralism