ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a basic problem in the history of social work, or, rather, the basic problem that the history of social work has posed to theorists of occupations and professions. It illustrates that problem by listing some of the people present at the National Conference of Charities and Correction (NCCC) in 1884 in Louisville, Kentucky. The state civil service classification of social worker was largely occupied by people without credentials, certainly without master's-level credentials. The game in Parsonian functionalism was to set forth a list of functions, then to go looking in the social world to see the institutions carrying out those functions. Social work was about boundaries: boundaries between institutions, boundaries between professions. Psychiatric social work was clearly one of the foundation fields of social work, yet it had been contested with the psychiatrists and psychologists in the child guidance clinics from their first beginnings.
