ABSTRACT
Taking a different tack, a social work scholar trying to forecast the future focused on other themes and their manifestations: professional values, the role of organizations, funding sources, social work education, research, and the development of practice theory. During the Cold War period, forces well beyond the reach and control of our profession set the tone and direction of national policy and limited the options of the profession and its schools. In the Cold War period the ideologists who shaped social policy rejected the view that government has a moral responsibility to meet people's basic sustenance needs. Interference in the lives of citizens by government could only be justified on paternalistic grounds, and such paternalism was the proper province of nongovernment services. Both the social problems and the social work institution approach anticipate concerns of the profession by projecting from the present.
