An Approach to the Human Group in Social Work Practice

Abstract

In this article, written in 1973, the author finds evidence in the literature of an unclear commitment to the social work frame of reference in social work with groups. A conceptual scheme is used to contrast approaches of six different professional disciplines and to distinguish what may represent the special nature of the social work profession’s approach to group work.

KEYWORDS:

• social work with groups
• group work
• conceptual frameworks

Notes

1. Homans (1950) makes an important distinction in the use of the organismic analogue. The group may be viewed as organismic in quality but not an organism in that a part separated from the group can live while a part separated for example from the body as an organism cannot (pp. 87–88). An organismic quality in a whole means that change in any one part or loss of the part affects the whole and other parts, but each part brings its own primary life supports which though modified, hopefully by growth and self-realization, he takes away with him when the living experience in the group is ended. Perhaps a more suitable analogue can be found, but most certainly mechanism does not offer the allusions required for this kind of interrelatedness. Piaget’s (1970) concept of structure as “system in transformation” seems to express the dynamic of this point of view

2. I note the caution of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) that “General systems theory may end up in meaningless analogies. This danger indeed exists. For example, it is a widespread idea to look at the state or the nation as an organism on a superordinate level. Such a theory, however, would constitute the foundation for a totalitarian state, within which the human individual appears like an insignificant cell in an organism or an unimportant worker in a beehive” (p. 35).

3. If the small group as a social unit does exist in social organization, in the functioning of society and of the individual in society, the means by which to relate to it, as a social worker, must be defined in terms of the nature of the unit, not reductionally, in conceptualizations for working with an individual or community. This is a gross over-simplification of the concept of generalist or unitary practice. The profession should be wary of such a pitfall in its effort to identify the nature and method of its foundation practice, and in dealing with the breadth of its multiple functionality.

4. The compatibility of this approach with the theories of growth and process of Otto Rank should be noted. Essentially his stance was one which identified and affirmed the living process, rational and irrational, responsible and creative. His view of humans, as “beyond psychology,” as “participants in the eternal drama of life,” and as “human beings who require no interpreter,” is akin to the ideological underpinning of this approach to the small group (Taft, 1958, p. 296).