ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the fruitfulness for the study of social work values of a historical approach which focuses on controversies. It offers a brief description of some of the main arguments in three major controversies in social work. The main purpose is to point to the illumination to be obtained from the study of these – and other controversies — of two crucial aspects of social work values: their form and their substantive content. The fierceness of the controversy abated by the end of the 1950s, though work of a specifically and acknowledged Functionalist orientation continued to be produced, when a functionalised view was enlarged to characterise social work as a whole rather than simply social casework. As in the case of the controversies considered, some of the terminology used by the Functionalists or the Diagnostics may appear primarily of historical interest.
