ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a framework for the design and description of social work programs. This framework differs from others chiefly in that interpersonal helping activity is made the center of management planning; budget, organization, personnel, and information systems are all designed to support that activity. Careful design and implementation of programs can provide social work with a viable mechanism of accountability to society. Social work has suffered unfairly from a combination of its exalted goals, soft technology, and difficult target groups. With a better codified and widely used program design technology appropriate to social work, we can be accountable for reasonable progress through human technologies, with clients who represent major social underinvestment.
