![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
I trace an account of social work—and sociology—that I believe holds a promise for re-forming the relationship between the two. I develop the argument in two ways. First, taking 1920s Chicago as a case study, I will attempt ‘a history of the present’ to suggest how the relationship between sociology and social work came to be as it is. I will suggest that the practice of some (both familiar and forgotten) people in 1920s and 1930s sociology and social work is best explained as a form of ‘sociological social work’. Second, after tracking this genealogy, I suggest an agenda for sociological social work that consists of straining to enact certain kinds of inter-disciplinary relationships, developing methodological social work practice, hearing occasional sociological frontier conversations and shared theorising. I illustrate how these arguments challenge both sociology and social work and both theory and practice.
Jeg eftersporer udviklingen af socialt arbejde—og sociologi—da jeg tror, at dette kan medvirke til at gendanne forholdet mellem de to områder. Jeg udvikler argumenterne på to måder. Først tager jeg 1920'ernes Chicago som et casestudie, hvor jeg med en ‘history of the present’—tilgang undersøger, hvordan forholdet mellem sociologi og socialt arbejde udviklede sig, som det gjorde. Jeg foreslår, at (både velkendt og glemt) praksis blandt personer i 1920'erne og 1930'ernes sociologi og socialt arbejde bedst kan forklares som en form for” sociologisk socialt arbejde”. For det andet, efter at have eftersporet denne genealogi, foreslår jeg en dagsorden for sociologisk socialt arbejde, der består af bestræbelser på tværfaglige relationer; at udvikle metoder i det sociale arbejdes praksis; at lytte til de sociologiske grænseområder; og at dele teoretisering. Jeg illustrerer, hvordan disse argumenter udfordrer både sociologi og socialt arbejde, både teori og praksis.
Notes on contributor
Ian Shaw has a social work qualification and graduated in sociology. He is Chair of the European Social Work Research Association. He is currently researching a history of the British Journal of Social Work (with Hannah Jobling), a systematic review of practitioner research in social care, research networks in social work (both with Neil Lunt) and the history of sociology and social work at Chicago and in the UK. Doing Qualitative Research in Social Work (Sage, 2014) was written with Sally Holland. His next books are Social Work and Science for Columbia University Press, and a co-edited ‘Major Work’ for Sage on Social Work Research.
Archives
Department of Sociology. Interviews with Graduate Students of the 1920s and 1930s. University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.
Ernest Burgess papers. University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center.
Stuart Alfred Queen Papers. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Notes
4. The references are to Robert Frost's poem ‘In Broken Images’, contrasting those who think in ‘broken’ and ‘sharp’ images.
5. Her papers are held in the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota and the Simmons College Library. http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/xml/sw0133.xml.
6. A transcript of a later-life interview with her also can be found in the NASW archives (Note iii).
7. She is using ‘student’ in the wider sense of anyone who is studying, including researchers and social workers.
8. There is an interesting interview with Herbert Blumer pertinent to this point in the Special Collections Department of Sociology Interviews.
9. The actual relationship between research methods employed in the Graduate School of Social Service Administration and the Sociology Department are complex. A case can be made, for example, that Edith Abbott's rhetoric of best scientific practice was some way from her own research practice (cf. Abbott, Citation1931 with Abbott, Citation1936). Abbott was hugely influenced by her experience of auditing Beatrice Webb's LSE lectures around 1906/7, and subsequently treated Webb's work in an almost iconic way.
10. On Robinson see http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/people/robinson-virginia-pollard/.
11. It is interesting that more recent critiques of Richmond have been on the grounds that she advocated an individualising medical model. Robinson is not the only contemporary to view matters differently. Young makes the same connection, although appreciatively (Young, Citation1935), when she draws on both Burgess and Richmond saying that they are ‘perhaps complementary’ (p. 106).
12. I am quoting at this point from correspondence from Maria Appel Nissen. It was a disjunction that even Stuart Queen came close to falling back on. Later in his career, he wrote, ‘Perhaps what happened was something like this: from my study of Sociology I was helped to ask significant questions; while my social work practice helped me to relate the formal works on Sociology to the live experience of real people’ (Stuart Alfred Queen. Papers [Box 1, Folder 1], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library).
13. This distinction is developed in Parton and Kirk (Citation2010).
14. This point and the previous quotation are from a letter to the final issue of the journal Case Conference in 1969. I have begun to develop the implications of Timms' work in Shaw (Citation2014).