ABSTRACT
Human Service Organizations and Moral Work I have proposed elsewhere (Hasenfeld 1992) that human service orga nizations, especially those that aim to change human behavior, engage in moral work. That is, every action taken on behalf of clients not only represents some form of concrete service, such as counseling a family or determining eligibility for welfare, but also confers a moral judgment about their social worth, the causation of their predicament, and the desired outcome. This is because work on people who are themselves imbued with values cannot be value neutral. Andrew Abbott (1988) points out that the typifications of clients via diagnoses, treatments, and inferences of causality are socially constructed categories reflecting the jurisdictional claims of the particular helping profession. Yet, these cate gories are inherently moral because, as technically neutral as they may seem, they publicly confer a moral status to clients, they proride moral
justifications for the actions caregivers take, and clients internalize them as a reflection of their own self-identity and valuation. Moreover, as I will suggest later, these typification schemes reflect and represent broader moral conceptions sanctioned by the state, by the professions, and by other authoritative bodies that give rise to these organizations and legiti mate their practices. For example, the decision of whether a single poor mother qualifies for public assistance is not merely a technical question of assessing her needs in relation to the resources available to her. It is also a moral assessment of her “deservingness,” including a judgment about her commitment to the work ethic and to family values (Handler and Hasenfeld 1991).
