ABSTRACT
Experts in various fields have arrived at a consensus that the present model of industrialized societies is increasingly unsustainable economically, socially and ecologically. Social work in the future should do more than solve social problems. To be successful as a transformation agent under the present conditions, social work and its members must embrace, as part of its humanistic mission, a holistic and systemic understanding of society. Both education and academia must integrate the viewpoint of the preferable socioeconomic model and the skills that enable the voice of social expertise to be used in public. Experts and scholars of social intervention, however, have always had alternatives. The social mandate of social work both as a profession and in academia is meant to look after the maintenance of reasonable social cohesion and to safeguard the overall realization of social citizenship. The socioeconomic future is always uncertain, because it depends so much on the human factor.
