ABSTRACT
Social work as a profession has ‘come of age’ in recent years. It is now a registered profession in the UK with an Honours degree as its minimum qualification and statutory requirements in place for continuing professional development beyond qualification. Social work has also developed exponentially at both graduate and postgraduate levels throughout the world over the last 20 years, with increasing numbers of countries requiring (at least) degree-level entry and professional registration. The growth in accreditation, unsurprisingly, has been matched by a corresponding expansion in the social work literature. Social work students today are faced with a raft of reading lists, publications and web resources which they are expected to read and understand. In consequence, what they often do is turn to textbooks which provide an overview of the subject. These books may contain little original thinking, and instead summarise existing ideas and knowledge, some more successfully than others. What they cannot do, however, is allow students to read seminal texts first-hand. This reader, in contrast, invites students and practitioners to do just that: to read key source material (or, more accurately, extracts of this) for themselves, so that they can make up their own minds and draw their own conclusions about the usefulness or otherwise of these texts. A brief commentary will, I hope, enable readers to locate the texts in their wider contexts. But the primary objective of this reader is that key authors and texts should be able to speak for themselves.
