Both movements were imported from Great Britain and supplemented the efforts of religious groups and other associations, as well local and state governments in dealing with the problems of urbanization and industrialization.
Social work was a response to many urban problems such as mass poverty, disease, illiteracy, starvation, and mental health challenges.īoth the Charities Organization Society and the Settlement House Movement were responses to these problems. As Garvin and Cox ( 2001) note, industrialization led to the factory system, with its need for large numbers of concentrated workers, and subsequently created mass immigration, urbanization, and a host of consequent problems. Social work, in the United States, is largely a product of the same industrial revolution that created the welfare state and industrial society. Since the social order changes over time, practice created at one point in time may no longer be appropriate in the future. Midgley (1981) correctly notes that practice created in one social order is often inappropriate for work in another social order.
Over time, the base forces that create practice and create the context for practice, change. Social work practice is created within a political, social, cultural and economic matrix that shapes the assumptions of practice, the problems that practice must deal with and the preferred outcomes of practice. The context of practice includes the agency setting, the policy framework and the large social system in which practice takes place. We must consider both social work practice per se (the knowledge base, practice theories and techniques) and the context for social work practice. Much of what is important about the history of the profession is the history of social work practice. It is impossible to overstate the centrality or the importance of social work practice to the profession of social work. Social work practice is the primary means of achieving the profession's ends. It continues today still pursuing that quest, perhaps with some occasional deviations of direction from the original spirit. Social work is a profession that began its life as a call to help the poor, the destitute and the disenfranchised of a rapidly changing social order.
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