ABSTRACT
It might be useful at this juncture just to indicate briefly what theoretically might be the connexions between the somewhat modish practice of community work and the older but perhaps now more contested and less popular practice of social casework. They may appear to be totally antithetical: community work is concerned with the development, encouragement and maintenance of a particular quality and dimension of social experience, the nature of which has been the subject matter of this essay; casework on the other hand may appear to be more concerned with face to face contact with a particular client with a personal problem. One is rooted in a social and indeed political dimension; the other is a radically individualistic activity, as any examination of casework principles shows (see Plant, 1970). Even so, to regard them in this way as fundamentally opposed is incorrect. In order to show this some reference will have to be made to a crucial argument in Plant (1970). It was argued in that book that in the usual conventional characterisation of the aims of social casework a dual emphasis may be discerned: on the one hand there is certainly the individualistic commitment to the facilitation of the development of the capacities and powers of the individual client but on the other hand there is also stress upon his harmonious integration into his social environment. This point may be seen if attention is paid to the various definitions of social casework quoted in the earlier volume. At the very beginning of the modern casework tradition Mary Richmond (1930, p. 477) writes that social casework is involved with ‘those problems which develop the personality through adjustment effected individual by individual between men and society’, and in more modern times we can still see this concern with the self-realisation of the individual through his social environment. The famous definition provided by Swithun Bowers may well illustrate this (1950, p. 127): ‘Casework is an art in which the knowledge of the science of human relationships and skill in relationship are used to mobilise capacities in the individual and resources in the community appropriate for better adjustment’. Again Corgiat, an Italian theorist, provided a similar perspective (Plant, 1970, p. 52): ‘Social service aims to orientate the individual with reference to his own task in daily life and his relationships with members of his family and community.’ The aim of casework it thus seems, is by the use of various therapeutic techniques, to help the client to achieve adequate social functioning, to make him an integrated member of his social group or groups, to try to enable the client to participate freely, actively and with self-direction in his social roles and to realise his own capacities and powers within these roles and functions. But isn’t this, from a different perspective, precisely the aim of community work, particularly if community is interpreted in a functional way as has been argued in the course of this book as satisfying the criteria of a liberal community? The community worker’s aim is to develop and maintain community experience, and this is among other things as we have seen, a sense of integration, free participation and a sense of membership. And it is in much the same terms that the social caseworker sees the solution to the problems in social functioning which beset her clients. No doubt there are differences in emphasis: the community worker stressing the social dimension of
individual problems; the caseworker, the individualistic perspective, but it would be a fundamental mistake to regard these as alternative approaches to the pressing and urgent social problems which we all face.
