ABSTRACT
Until quite recently social work could largely rely, for the beliefs and values informing or directing it, upon the consensus of the wider society or upon the assumptions and standards of other already established professions, such as law and medicine, to whose work the practice of social work sometimes serves in an ancillary role. These be liefs and values were little questioned among social workers themselves, and often left merely implicit. So far as they were expressed at all, they were expressed in terms of some imprecise kind of utilitarianism.
